r/formula1

guys. and to just be myself, because I think I got too hung up on the fact of like, everyone says you have to be like this when you're in F1. If you want to be a champion, you have to act like this. There was a few years where I'm like, does this mean i need to like tell myself the opposite thing in my head? because I'm like, don't go for this move but should I? Do I just commit and if I crash, I crash?"

vid

If there's one story that isn't going to go away anytime soon, it's going to be the question on what Red Bull does with Lawson and Tsolov. Lawson is doing a great job in his own right, but what Tsolov is doing right now is borderline unprescedented. Despite this, I keep on reading comments trying to downplay the accomplishment, so I wanted to address some of them here, and explain why Nikola's season is so special.

He won three races in a row: This is the first time in FIA Formula 2 where any driver on the grid has done this. The last time any driver has accomplished this faet at this sort of level, you have to go back to 2012 GP2 with Davide Valsecchi. Since then, we've seen all sorts of drivers compete in both GP2 and Formula 2, but none of them have gotten three in a row until Tsolov.

He is only one win away from matching the all time record: For reference, Leclerc and Russell hold that record. At the end of Silverstone, Leclerc and Russell had five and four wins respectively. Tsolov currently has six. Breaking the record is more than doable.

"He's simply driving for the best team": Campos have historically never been the best team in Formula 2. They've never won either the drivers nor the constructors championship. That's not to say that there aren't inbalances in how good each F2 team is from season to season, however I think I can say with reasonable certainty that there is not a single season of F2 where the car has been the be all and end all in terms of who wins the season. The driver behind it has always played a part in the championship.

"He's just got a weak teammate": Noel Leon isn't a driver that I expect to make it into F1 anytime soon, but he's still a pretty good driver all things considered. If you just look at his Wikipedia results, I can see why an uninformed person might be unimpressed, but that doesn't take into account that Formula 3 is much more of a team championship than F2 is. Only two, maybe three teams are ever going to compete at the top in F3, and in his first year, Leon left both his teammates in the dust. In his second year, Leon came very close to matching Ugo Ugochukwu, who is currently leading the F3 standings this year.

"This is a weak F2 grid": THAT IS FLAT OUT WRONG. Is it the best F2 grid of all time? No, but very few grids are going to match 2018. In terms of ranking the quality of the drivers, I'd put it in the upper half in terms of quality. You can't tell me that dominating a series with Camara, Dunne, Stenshorne, Beganoic, Herta and Mini isn't impressive.

"Tsolov had to spend three years in F3": He did, but that dismissal doesn't take into account just how little racing experience Tsolov had before making the jump. For reference, Kimi Antonelli skipped F3 entirely before doing a single season in F2 before making it to F1. Despite this, Kimi still completed more junior race than Tsolov has currently.

Possible tinfoil hat, but...

I'm convinced that the TV direction this year has been instructed to minimise showing speed loss from superclipping.

This weekend was case in point. We understood coming into the weekend that these cars would struggle with energy management around the Silverstone circuit. Whilst we saw lots of onboards over the weekend, I don't recall seeing the telemetry overlay on the halo once.

We've also not see any battery graphics to provide context for overtakes. It's clear what when a driver's battery is empty, they essentially become a sitting duck. As a viewer, it's hard to tell if an overtake is great racing, or just because one driver has vastly less power available.