u/nonokoi

Now that Mercedes themselves have admitted that George's car has been facing a software issue since pretty much the start of the season, which has led to him losing speed on the straights and needing to adapt his driving style, looking back at it, in my opinion, Toto has not handled it in the best possible way.

And I see a lot of parallels with how Toto handled Lewis Hamilton's situation in 2023. Basically, this goes back to that unwritten team principal rule in F1: protect your drivers publicly and handle it privately.

We saw that around 2023, where Toto, whenever Lewis was having bad performances, was more blunt, or even critical, based on some people's interpretations, in his comments to the media about Lewis. And we can pretty much see a similar thing happening this season with George Russell, where Toto has been slightly blunt or critical in his tone and language when talking about George's bad performances in the media.

One of the incidents I can remember is from Silverstone, where I believe George was complaining about the straight-line speed of the car and Toto pretty much came out straight away and undermined it by saying, "No, they're completely fine."

Since I can see some parallels between Lewis and George and how Toto has been handling them, I sort of tried to draw this comparison with Zak Brown in the second half of last season, when Oscar's form dipped drastically. Regardless, Zak was pretty much overwhelmingly positive in his comments about Oscar in public.

I feel like the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for Toto is that maybe he believes experienced drivers and experienced athletes can handle themselves. Because he, of course, knows how to manage drivers. He has been doing it for so many years, and he's doing an absolutely wonderful job doing it with Kimi as of now.

So I think the only reasonable explanation is that he is quite blunt with the experienced drivers because he feels like they know how to manage themselves. But maybe I think that exact thing is what is hurting George's confidence.

Now, this isn't another "what if Kimi" post that I have seen surfacing a lot around this subreddit in recent days. I frankly rate Kimi a lot. My question arises from a recent statement I saw Max make, where he talked about how Yuki, who hasn't even had a chance to drive this 2026 car, jumped into the car, had a few sessions, and instantly became competitive. This is a very similar sentiment echoed by Oscar Piastri as well, if my memory serves me correctly, after the Belgian quali, where he said “It sucks. I can't really say it any other way than that... When you've got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it's a pretty crap way of going racing". And these are just two handpicked statements, but as we all know, pretty much all the drivers have a similar sentiment or have been echoing similar sentiments since the start of the season.

Which basically concludes to the point that driver input is not the most important, variable in the 2026 car. It might be one of the variables, of course, because adaptability also plays into it, as it is a skill set within racing. Other than that, the driver's input as a variable does not really play a very prominent role in the car. That's what it seems like.

So if the 2027-28 rega are set to progressively rebalance the contribution of the internal combustion engine and the electric power, with the ICE gaining more power while the MGU-K's maximum power is reduced.

If this results in driver input playing a more fundamental variable and kimi starts struggling as these changes come into play, would that retrospectively add an asterisk to his 2026 World Championship? if he, of course, goes on to win it.