Okay, yes, it took us six weeks to get this podcast done...but was it worth the wait? And were Champions Club tickets worth the price? As we finish playing catch up from our travels abroad, we're finally talking about our trip to Merry Ol' England for the 2023 British GP.
From the exhilarating support races and the unforgettable roar of the crowd, gear up for our take on the highs, lows, and thrilling battles of this year's British GP. We revisit our experiences at the track, interweaved with our usual shallow analysis and new musings on camping, paddock walks and Pimms. And Jen finally got marbles!
From the exhilarating support races and the unforgettable roar of the crowd to the trials of lacking access to real-time data, our journey at Silverstone was far from dull. But as we discuss the latest shake up of the "best of the rest" pecking order, we wonder if perhaps the charm of live viewing may not always be the ultimate F1 experience.
Okay, yes, it took us six weeks to get this podcast done...but was it worth the wait? And were Champions Club tickets worth the price? As we finish playing catch up from our travels abroad, we're finally talking about our trip to Merry Ol' England for the 2023 British GP.
From the exhilarating support races and the unforgettable roar of the crowd, gear up for our take on the highs, lows, and thrilling battles of this year's British GP. We revisit our experiences at the track, interweaved with our usual shallow analysis and new musings on camping, paddock walks and Pimms. And Jen finally got marbles!
From the exhilarating support races and the unforgettable roar of the crowd to the trials of lacking access to real-time data, our journey at Silverstone was far from dull. But as we discuss the latest shake up of the "best of the rest" pecking order, we wonder if perhaps the charm of live viewing may not always be the ultimate F1 experience.
Greetings and welcome to Formula XX, a podcast by two Gen X women talking about Formula One and other motorsports, usually with adult beverages and always with adult words. So if you're underage, easily offended or bothered by the fact it's taken us six weeks to record this podcast for a race that we actually got to see live and in person last month, turn back now because we're going to be a little rusty around the edges. If you're joining us on the regular, you'll know that we are recording this seriously out of order. We've already jumped through the two races that happened after Stillerson and we decided to save the best for last. With me, as always, is the amazing and wonderful Gen Gen. What part of the world are you in and what are you drinking this?
Speaker 2:evening I am still in Vancouver-ish. I am not in my room because my room is basically an empty box that my housemate is currently painting all the holes in the wall we move out. Well, I've moved out. Heather came up and helped me move. I moved out all of my stuff this weekend and a little bit today. I'm staying in the spare bedroom. The actual movers come tomorrow.
Speaker 2:I'm in a very different room that I normally pod in and I'm not sure how the audio is going to be. You guys can all find out just after I edit it what I am drinking. I have my last tiny bit of smoke and oak left, which I don't think is going to get me through. That's from Shelter Point, which is a distillery in Campbell River, which is where I'll be going shortly. I also have some of my Eden Mills whiskey, which was a super special, hard to get thing when Heather and I were in St Andrew's, scotland, which only has a tiny bit left. I'm thinking I'm going to finish both of those two off throughout the course of this podcast. Heather, where in the world are you and what are you drinking?
Speaker 1:Good memories. I am back in Seattle after a quick trip up north, as Jen said, for the weekend. Yeah, so you're on the final leg of your big move. I completed mine more or less not too long before Silverstone. It's been a busy summer, a lot going on, as we've covered in the other recent podcasts which are in sequence after this. We both made the trip. You stayed on for a bit longer and then life has been happening and that means we've been doing a lot of this out of order. It also means that I think, realistically, this will be a bit of a fractured recap race-wise, which ours always are anyway, but I think it's very, very different and amazing, but very different to get to see a race live. I would be curious to hear what your thoughts were A about getting to see a race in Silverstone and be what it is as a fan to watch it trackside versus on TV.
Speaker 2:I really, really loved watching it at Silverstone. One of the nice things about Silverstone when we were there were all the support races. We got to watch F2 and F3 do their practice, their quality, their racing, which I love, watching them in real life. The only drawback that I well, there's a couple drawbacks You're going to watch it from one position. We were fortunate enough to have fantastic viewing area. We were at the Champions Club for F1 Experience. We also had the broadcast going on, but you can only see a part of the track. Whenever the Wi-Fi cut out which happened you lost all commentary of what was going on in other parts of the track. The other thing that was a bit irksome was that we couldn't. We've talked about this in the previous podcast. That actually happened three, six. That happened after was that you couldn't get anything from F1 TV. We couldn't watch any timing, we couldn't listen to any of that stuff that was going on. But overall it was fantastic.
Speaker 2:The atmosphere at Silverstone was incredible. I was a bit worried going in because you hear about some of the races where fans are not kind to each other. Everybody was lovely to each other. Even when we snarked with each other, no one was being bags of dicks, which was great. I'm just chatting to other fans, chatting to people in line, chatting to people in our seating area, just talking to all sorts of other fans, hearing and feeling the crowd roar for any of the hometown boys who they did. The Brits did themselves proud for their hometown race. It was a lot of fun. I'm being able to watch it with two of my oldest and dearest friends was just fantastic. We had a really good time. All things being equal, I'd go back again. I don't know if I'd sit in the seat and squeeze that before it'd have to be a think upon it because they are very, very expensive, but it was great. It had so much fun. Everything was fantastic. What do you think about seeing it in person versus watching it on TV?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would definitely second, the comments about the vibe at the track. No doubt some of that is the fact that we tend to be rooting for at least one of those hometown boys a lot of the time. The energy there in that crowd was just electric. I would say, having been to three races, it's probably not my favorite of the three experiences in general because it's going to be really really hard to sort of top the overall experience that we had in Montreal last year. But I think in terms of just crowd dynamic, this Montreal and Coda this was it Like the just sort of crazy enthusiasm during the race, like the roar of the crowd, how into it the crowd were, was really fun. I absolutely agree.
Speaker 1:As somebody who's just sort of a data nerd, during Kuali, even to some degree during free practice and during the race, not being able to really sit there and have a good way to measure the timing and follow the rest of the action on track is always the hard part. That I would say is the downside to seeing something live is you tend to have a pretty narrow field of view of what's happening. Even if you have a big screen there, it's sometimes challenging to really follow what's happening because there can be a lag. In this case we are talking about a building that is right across from the national pit, so the old original. If you go back 15 years and you're watching a race at Silverstone, it was that old pit lane and so you have the straight coming by that old pit lane, but you do have a pretty long field of view as they're coming past and then down towards cops. So it was a good location. We were definitely spoiled. It was fun for us because we also chose to stay in cabins that were quite nearby the track.
Speaker 2:There's golf courses all around Silverstone and what they do for F1 is you can, depending on what you're willing to do and pay. You can bring your own tent and camp. You can have a regular nylon tent provided for you. You can have a big canvas sort of your glamping tent provided for you. You can have cabins, which are basically garden sheds, but they are fairly well-appointed and you can choose to have some of those with or without electricity, or you can have motor homes.
Speaker 2:So there was three of us. We had the garden shed, which was great. It had opening and closing windows. All the beddings provided their bunk beds. We had a mini fridge we could charge, we had a light in there, we could charge all of our devices and there was a spot for the car to park right next to it. I think that whole set and it was fun. Like it was maybe a mile and a half walk, I think, from our cabin to where we were sitting. It was really cool. It was a really great, fun experience and I think I said I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I could afford it again. It was fantastic, yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought the festival vibe sort of for that whole part of because it's multiple different organizations who are setting up for those different types of housing that Jen was just describing and people have their flags out and you definitely can see who's flying there British boys versus their Dutch boys versus. You know, sometimes that's the fun is just sort of figuring out who people are cheering for and the odd combinations. But again, there's just definite tilt at Silverston towards certain drivers. But for us that was right in our wheelhouse and we had a great time with all of that. I thought the food selection trackside was great. It was relatively easy to get to a variety of things.
Speaker 2:They've gone completely cashless. Everything has to be paid by card or phone and everybody coming in was a bit leery of that because the year before they had attempted the same thing and the internet wasn't good enough to support it and mostly I don't remember there being too many issues with the internet for being able to pay for stuff and I'd go back and get one of those Cornish pasties again in a heartbeat.
Speaker 1:I'd do a PIMS. Yeah, pour me a PIMS, I'd be totally down for that. We did not go out onto the track for the pit lane melee after the race, but I think once we get through a little more discussion of the actual race itself, it'd be worth circling back around to some of the other things that came with being a champions club. Again, if you're crazy enough to pay the money, there are some other perks that come with that that I think are worth mentioning. The other thing that was unique about the weekend that we were there was it was the first time that the new F1 Brad Pitt movie was filming in situ during a race weekend and was kitted out with their cars and multiple track tours around with filming kits in between.
Speaker 1:They're helicopter going overhead.
Speaker 2:They're helicopter, yeah, so we got to see all those four of you who don't know, they had like F2 cars made to look like F1 cars, and they had two of them just belting around the track in their own sessions, which was fun and interesting to see.
Speaker 1:It was. It was definitely not the normal occasion. There was rumor going on prior to Sunday that actually Brad Pitt, in his car, was going to lead the formation lap around the track, which I would have loved because I was pretty sure it would piss for stappin off, but that isn't actually what happened.
Speaker 2:No, though I did hear from somebody else that those cars were on track at the start of the race so that they could have footage of them being lined up with all the other cars. So they didn't do the formation but they went out on track. I don't know if that's true or not, but I've heard a couple other people talking about it. So but it was, it was a fun weekend. It was also that weekend incredibly, incredibly varied for the weather. Like we went from blistering heat and sun and just like putting sunscreen on every hour or so because we are the whitest women in the world and we would burn to a crisp and a heartbeat, but also sideways rain and ponchos, and like wearing our full rain jackets and rain suits in the same day.
Speaker 2:And you watched F1 is a bit luckier, but you watch those poor bastards in F2 and F3 going around and having just wildly wildly, not even like from session to session, but within their own session or their own races wildly different weather conditions and the wind kept changing direction and intensity as well, and they get completely changed. I think it was the F2 race. It completely changed, Hi Reesie.
Speaker 1:My co-host is going to join us. Briefly, for those of you who don't know, and in honor of the fact that we just learned today, as we are recording this, that the Imola Kitty formula, lino, passed away after 16 years, reesie decided she's going to chime in in honor of dear formula Lino Indeed.
Speaker 1:So, going back to the actual race, saying I will say we were there for the free practice sessions and quality. I don't have a ton of things that have stuck in my mind this many weeks later and I didn't go back and rewatch. I think the big talking point for the weekend was that McLaren rocked up with a big set of upgrades. This, of course, was on the heels of basically 10 races where the car just nope, was not working. They showed up at Silverstone with their updates and a hideous livery and a hideous livery, but it didn't matter because the livery did not slow them down in the least. And suddenly we had a situation where not only were they really looking sharp in free practice, they had no problem putting themselves second, third, in qualifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was quite the roar that went up throughout all of the track when that was going on, mclaren rocking up with all these upgrades and the upgrades worked Right. I mean, the last time McLaren did a big update they went backwards and they've obviously like, really sort of had a long think about what they've done and sorted themselves out and are now going in the right direction. And those cars were hooked up. They were fast, they were agile and they could, they were competitive and they've stayed competitive, which is good for McLaren. They've had a couple of ups and downs in the road and we'll see if this is something that continues to put them up or if they've plateaued. But it was interesting to watch. I mean, piastri just did phenomenal. Norse did as well. They drove the balls off or the tires off that car.
Speaker 1:They both, I think, showed what the potential is. I know I had pretty high hopes for Oscar Piastri coming into the season, not really anticipating at the start of the season that McLaren was struggling quite as much as they were. Norse may drive me bonkers off the track. I certainly think he's an amazing driver and he definitely knocked it out of the park and Silverstone, in my opinion, both in Kuali and then in the race which we'll talk about in a minute. I think the other sort of key talking point at that point was the fact that Checo Perez once again failed to get into Q3.
Speaker 1:The other British drivers George Russell qualified, Lewis Hamilton, which hasn't really been the norm this season. Lewis had a bad Kuali and we were talking right before we started racing. I can't remember if there was anything in particular that was going on. I do know the Mercedes was struggling. They really did not love where they were at with the setup, which has kind of been the norm. Unfortunately, that Mercedes is still just way too variable and I think we did have, as Jen said, just the craziest changing weather. It was definitely. It was like being in a spring climate somewhere here in the Pacific Northwest where you joke that you wait five minutes and it's a whole new weather system.
Speaker 2:Aston Martin also brought a whole series of updates where they said they were going to be on the podium and could even potentially be in first place at Silverstone, and their updates made that car go slower. That was one of their things. Them and McLaren were. We have all the stuff for Silverstone and it did not happen with Aston Martin at all. Alonso did great during the race, holding other cars off from passing him. I would say that's more to do with Alonso's driving than it is to do with the power of that car.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there have been a few theories about that in the week since, up to and including something to do with the flexi wings of the front ring which just keeps coming up, but I don't there hasn't been a lick of actual evidence that that is something that happened. But I would say I've probably seen that in at least four different places in the last two weeks that maybe the FIA cracked down on their front wing and that's part of it. But at the end of the day here point stands they definitely didn't take a leap forward in Silverstone at all and, other than being captain of the DRS train because he definitely does know how to keep cars behind him generally, alonso did an amazing job to get himself up to sixth, because I don't think that car warranted it To use the much-toded Wiley Fox phrase that they call him every time they've entered his name.
Speaker 2:Alonso did the best he could with the shit box he was given for that weekend. One of the other sort of nice things that ended up being a very sad thing was Badas went and put the car and did fairly well in Q2 and then Fawawe go boom. Then he ended up at the bottom of Q2 for the start of the race.
Speaker 1:That was yet another chink in the Alfa Romeo armor. They have struggled, I would say, with the exception of Hungary the following race. They've really just not been able to get themselves out of that badrum quadrant of the grid on a consistent basis, which I don't think does justice to either of those two drivers. I don't know that they're in a position to change that in any significant way for the second half of the season, but I would sure love to see them both at least flirting more consistently with the points, because it has not been happening of late. I don't think either of them warrants being scoreless. I don't even know how many races in a row it is now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think they flatter the car rather than the other way around. That car is just not consistent. I think both those drivers are fairly consistent drivers. There are pluses and minuses for both of them, but yeah, I think if they had a car that was slightly less breakable, then they'd be doing well. Mercedes had a car that didn't porpoise, they'd be doing a lot better too. We can say as much as we want about the cars being better, the teams would be better. It's the way these things go.
Speaker 2:Back to the race Everybody's lined up on the grid, we have the start of the race, mercedes is splitting their tire strategy, george is on softs which needs to be kept in mind for later parts of the race and we go In our first couple of corners of Silverstone. Everything sort of changes. Norris got an incredible launch. In fact, he got such a good launch that he pipped for Stappen and was our new race leader. You could have felt the ground shake with the roar that went up in Silverstone when that happened, when Norris took the lead of the race. It was incredible.
Speaker 1:Yes, people were very enthusiastic and Piaz tri stayed right with them. There was actually a point in that opening lap where Piaz tri was challenging for Stappen as well.
Speaker 2:The fact that they could hold that the whole way through. So it's not like a house that, yes, you can do well in quality, you can do well for the first couple of laps and then it's just eaten its tires and they're fucked and they just fall down the order. Both Norris and Piaz tri put those cars in great positions. They did it in quality and they did it in the race and they kept those positions for the most part and they had some fierce battles to keep those positions. Lewis, however, did not have a good start to the race. He ended up going quite wide and losing positions and going down to, I think, 10th, ninth, ninth.
Speaker 1:And certainly it was interesting. The Mercedes did not fire up those mediums very well. Neither did it for Stappen's Red Bull, for that matter. The vagaries of something track specific. I don't think Lewis got a particularly poor launch. That back in just as often seems to be the case. He did not go where he wanted it to go, so he did tumble down the grid a couple of spots, stabilize that pretty quickly. I mean, it didn't take all that long for him to start making it places again, but not the start that he had hoped for. George, on the other hand, I think, got himself up a spot or two in the initial corner melee and started off on those softs and was immediately on Charle Leclerc's tail where he stayed for a very, very, very long time. That was a good pace for Ferrari in the opening stint. George continually was within well less than a second and just never could find a way past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that says something about. It was like oh, the power of DRS, the power of DRS. Some cars have it, some cars don't, and Mercedes obviously doesn't. So yeah, so George did. He was behind Leclerc for many, many laps. The only reason he went up past Leclerc was not because of an overtake, it was because Leclerc pitted. Hamilton was behind Alonzo, who did a good job, offending him off for a lap or two before he finally pipped him, and the crowd just lost his ever-loving fucking mind. Heather and I watched the race again recently, but in this crowd in the stands you could just hear vibrations. I think it would be even louder when Lewis pipped Alonzo than when Norris got the lead of the race. You can tell who the hometown favorite is deep down for everyone. No problem there, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And kudos to George because as usual there's I feel like there's sort of been a consistent discrepancy between Pirelli's predicted tire strategy and what the bulk of the grid are doing. Maybe, well, certainly the last three races, but I would say probably. If I paid attention and went back, it goes further than that the anticipated tire window on the softs. So Charles went in on, I think, like lap 19 and put on a new pair of hards and he was coming off the mediums. So at that point George's tires were actually about 22 laps old, because they were three lap old tires at the start of the race. So he just keeps going and those softs which were supposed to have gone off around somewhere in the 15 to 17 lap range.
Speaker 1:He was just a little energizer bunny and despite the fact that he'd spent those first 19 laps right on Leclerc's tail, did not have a pace delta at all. In fact he really, really maintained a really good pace all the way until the point where they finally brought him in for a new set of tires. And that really that tire strategy, I will say, although it was affected by what happened out of his control later in the race was one of the best things I've seen Mercedes do for strategy recently because if things hadn't changed beyond their control a little bit later in the race he really would have been in a good spot. I think he had a reasonable shot at fourth and he was not able to get that for safety car, but that was not in any way, shape or form a result of anything he did, because he was right on point.
Speaker 2:He did really well. In lap seven, hulk came in to change his nose from a bargy bargy that he had with the devries which was, incidentally, probably the nail that went into poor Nick's driving coffin.
Speaker 2:And then lap 10, poor Esteban was retired, which was the start of one of the many recent tragic weekends, if you're an Alpine fan so one of the things when you're in sort of our level of where we were with the F1 experience, they have F1 personalities to come and talk to you and if you're at any race where Heather and I are not, it's people like Bodas, and races where Heather and I are, it's like a statistician Jack Villeneuve and Ottmar. So Ottmar came to talk to us and was really hopeful and really happy and really sort of personable and then the race happened and I was like oh what? And then like all the other fallout happened and like I wonder if the pictures that we all got when you're chatting with us is some of the last happy pictures we have of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, George, you know, did a really nice job. I'm trying to think who else was on softs. There were only a couple of other drivers on soft. Pretty much everybody was able to take them longer than anticipated. So where Pirelli really lands on these and how accurate they are on their tire predictions, as I was alluding to earlier, I think it's sort of interesting to watch right now because I'm not convinced they really. I don't think they understand how those tires work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think they understand them is what my takeaway has been after these last few races, because they've just been wrong so many times, so we get to lap 19.
Speaker 2:One of the things we sort of glossed over, which isn't really super important, but that Max has taken the lead by this point. He's complaining about the wind making it hard to drive, which is fair enough.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sorry. Was I supposed to give a shit about Verstappen taking the lead?
Speaker 2:I do need to know that he's in the lead for further on discussion about what's happening. The other thing is Ferrari being fucking Ferrari at this point, where Sykes' engineer comes on the radio and asking you know how's it going, what's up, how about Plan B? And Sykes is like, okay, what's Plan B? The engineer's like, oh, I'll get back to you about that. And you're like well done Ferrari. Well fucking done. Like one assumes that they use the alphabet the same way everybody else does and Plan B would be their second plan.
Speaker 1:I think it's just fine that somebody forgot. I think it's tragic that both the driver and the engineer forgot. I have no problem having some grace for Carlos not knowing. Oh, absolutely, because although I think Carlos is overrated generally speaking as a driver, I do think he's very smart in the car and is usually extremely aware and very good at requiring his team to give him information. He doesn't take anything if they were driving there, but for him to have forgotten, no, but Charles does. You know, it's taken basically a full season and a half of absolute chaos and mayhem for you to get any sort of overt pushback from Charles on the radio, whereas Carlos is just like yeah, no, not doing that thing you just told me to do Like on the regular it's not unusual.
Speaker 2:Like that thing sounds stupid and I'm just going to keep driving. So fuck right off.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to keep driving. When he forgot and the engineers forgot. Yeah, that was a pretty classic Right, you're right. So, yeah, first up and took the lead on lap five. Nobody gives a shit, because everybody knew it was going to happen.
Speaker 1:On the flip side, what I was starting to say a minute ago was lap 19,. We get to this point in the race. Pits are starting to happen. Poor Pierre Gasly has already been behind Alonso at this point, for, I swear to God, it must have been at least 10 laps by the time we get just to lap 19. A few more laps go by. Checo is still down in ninth. I don't even remember where he started and I don't care about. What I can tell you is if you're driving a Red Bull, you should be farther up the grid than ninth after the halfway point of a race like Silverstone, where there are plenty of opportunities to overtake. And yet he was still languishing at that point in the race and I really was surprised that he struggled as much as he did for that first half of the race.
Speaker 2:I'm always surprised when he struggled as much as he does. That car is a fucking rocket ship and for someone who is such a journeyman as Paris is, who's driven so many different types of cars on the grid, it's not like Danny Rick. Danny Rick, I guess he's been for several different teams, but when he got to McLaren that was the first time he'd ever driven an F1 car without a Renault engine. So that was a big sort of learning curve for him, which he failed to learn. But Paris has driven for a multitude of teams for a multitude of different types of cars, and the fact that he can't understand that car, I think, sort of speaks to one how much that car is geared especially towards Max Verstappen.
Speaker 2:But two, also, I think he's in his head so much right now. I think whatever fucking mind games go on over at Red Bull, I think he's in the weeds with them right now and he's overthinking or underthinking or triple guessing or I don't know what's going on with him. But I am not impressed with what's happening and he should definitely be better Just passing, never mind all the fuckups he does in Quali. He should be better at being able to pass with the car that he has. It's ridiculous that it takes him half a race to get through a third of the grid with that car.
Speaker 1:Agreed, I think when we do our midseason recap in a couple of weeks as if we know we're doing a midseason recap, but I suspect we will I think that's obviously you know, for better or for worse, if you're going to have any sort of a talking point about Red Bull, it unfortunately dwells entirely within that realm of well, how come Max Verstappen's so much better than Jaco Paris? I don't want to waste any time on it tonight, but it really was sort of weird to see, as we were getting to the halfway point. So back in the race, lap 25,.
Speaker 2:At this point Lewis has been behind signs quite a while I have him catching him for like one second at about lap 22.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he turned it up and I remember us sort of thinking, well, had he been tire saving at that point? Maybe he was, because there was certainly a point in that lower 20s that he just put the hammer down. He really was closing and then it kind of faded back and so he was sort of sitting in about the one and a half second range and didn't seem very likely that he was going to overtake at that point. He got it down finally then to under a second and Ferrari went ahead and pitted signs, which made sense Strategically. They weren't going to let him get overtaken on track. That wasn't in Ferrari's strategy plan. So that was the plan B. That was the plan B. Once they remembered what it was. I will give Ferrari props on those first two stops. Both Charles and signs's pit stops were really good, which was nice to see because there were plenty of examples of not great pit stops again in.
Speaker 2:Silverstone See Mercedes, the whole race.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Poor fucking George. Right, I mean lap 29,. George has been on those tires for a century and a half. They're soft. At least 10 laps passed what they were expected to be at that point and he comes in and gets a shit 3.9 second pit stop. Mercedes, fix your shit. You will never be a top tier team if you cannot figure out how to do a competitive pit stop.
Speaker 2:I am willing to come in and do a day worth of training. I will pay or, to be fair, I will use all of my points to come and try out to be like a jack person or like tire off person, tire on person. I don't think I can do the drill gun person thing because my knees are shit and kneeling down on a concrete, even with the pad, seems like an excruciating part. But you know what? I have a decently physical person. I feel like I could help that team out of it.
Speaker 1:I have faith in you. You can do it. I think we could start to go fund me for that thing or a Kickstarter, and get you the cash you need. It really sucked, though. In this case there was a chance that George was going to be able to jump Cheryl. That long pit stop put paid to the reality of that happening. It seemed like maybe he would have come out just behind Cheryl regardless if it had been a regular, and by regular I mean 2.5 or less pit stop. That just then meant that he was behind Cheryl yet again on lap 31. We got, in my opinion, the overtake of the race.
Speaker 2:The past George did on Charles around the outside was a thing of beauty by far the best past we saw, absolutely, and both of them battling it out and trying to keep track position or gain track position. They just were fucking perfect and they didn't touch each other and there was no. Well, this is my piece of the track, so I'm going to push you wide, regardless of whether you know you're there or not, or I'm there or not. I just thought it was really really great race craft from both of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, going back, all harkening back to the first stint when, again, those two were playing footsie with each other. There were a couple of points that I thought Charles was uncharacteristically aggressive in terms of waiting until the last second. But in that second stint and in this situation, both of them were brilliant in terms of being able to be wheel to wheel and, like you said, we don't we don't always get to see that with certain drivers on the grid. So those two, I think, really bonus points to both of them, but I do think George deserved overtake of the race.
Speaker 2:I agree. One of the things too, when Lewis was in that clean air which is how there was, because she watches the timing at the same time she was pointing out to me Lewis is matching for stopping for fastest track times, for lap time speed, like that car in clean air, with whatever magic Lewis was doing to it, was fucking flying along the track.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he definitely. Strategically he needed new tires for reasons shortly after that. But the mediums were dialed in and either because he had really conserved them very well or because the Mercedes is just happier or was at least on that day happier on the mediums. Very nice to see. It's too little, too late. Again, he qualified out of position. He did not have a good quality and he did not have a good start, but he definitely had the pace at this point in the race.
Speaker 2:Then also just around then a whole bunch of people, George included, came in for tires. Leclerc came in on lap 33 for tires and I don't know how he didn't get an unsafe release with what happened with him and Albonne.
Speaker 1:What prompted that flurry? Because we talked about George coming in. George just came in because he needed new tires on lap 29. What happened that prompted that?
Speaker 2:For a while we go, boom, for a while we go boom, not like Ferrari, ferrari, but you know, customer team Ferrari engine go boom. Magdalen caught fire real good. It was quite impressive that, like we could see the smoke at one point from where he was, you know, burning away, and that prompted a whole slew of pit stops of people coming in. Another shitty pit stops for Hamilton.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the virtual safety car came out and, well for sure, charles came in right away. It took a little bit for the leaders to come in. Mostly a full safety car came. It wasn't it was within a lap, but part of it is, I think, because Silverstone is such a long lap. They started with the VSC and it wasn't necessarily clear whether it was going to go to virtual safety car initially. But where the car was and the fact that it was on fire and it wasn't going to not be on fire immediately meant most teams went. Oh haha opportunity.
Speaker 2:Well, and we were at the race, like I'm sure people were at home at the TV why aren't the leaders pitting? Why the fuck aren't the leaders pitting like pit right now? Why are they going?
Speaker 1:Oh well, they both shit the bad.
Speaker 2:Like how have the top four not pitted? This is fucking ridiculous. There might have been some four letter words. Yes, by that point there'd probably been quite a lot of champagne, so they're probably quite allowed possible. Four letter words at that point I wouldn't rule it out. So Leclerc comes in to pit on 33, and how he didn't get a penalty for unsafe release into Albaan is a fucking mystery man Like that was real close.
Speaker 1:If you think that's close, go watch Spa and Pierre Gasly's wildly unsafe release in the sprint race. That didn't get penalized, but that's all other conversation. Norris had a great pit stop a 2.2 second from McLaren to get him out on the hards, the hards for him to get out on the hards, which everybody was like WTF.
Speaker 2:But and you know what, and he was as well. He's like why are we on the hards? We've lost the race, we've lost the position and his engineer, which just was steadfast. It's not the best option, but it's the best option we have. And you know what. Props to the strategist like they called that correctly putting him on hards and having Hamilton come out in medium softs. The assumption was that Lewis is going to pip him right away, like once the restart happened, that the difference in the tires just meant Lewis was going to walk by Norris.
Speaker 1:I mean it's worth pointing out because of the timing of all of this. George had pitted, oscar Piazzari had just pitted. This meant Lewis was sitting in third position at the time of the safety car, which meant our lineup at this point on the restart is Verstappen, norris Hamilton. Verstappen pitted for softs, norris was given the hards, lewis is on the softs, piazzari is on the hards, george at this point is on the media. We finally get the restart after about 127 laps behind the safety car. And then what happened?
Speaker 2:One. When we got the restart of the race, verstappen caught Norris napping. Verstappen launched right away and it was a good second and a half, two seconds before Norris went and he went and it took a bit for those tires to turn on and Lewis was right on his gearbox Like, and the crowd going back and forth you could tell people weren't sure who to cheer for or maybe everyone was just cheering in general about, like when Norris did something, well, everybody roared. When Lewis was like looking like he'd make a pass or make the pass stick, everybody, like everybody, was just we're standing on the edge of our seats, right Like where we were, we had tables and chairs and stuff and we had a wall and we were basically standing on a roof of the building and we were all on the wall and the wall has had metal on it and everybody, everyone was banging on that metal and screaming at the top of our lungs when they came by us, battling yeah it's hard to explain.
Speaker 1:I think that moment towards the end of the race where there was a genuine possibility that Lewis was going to get Lando and to your point, either way, it didn't really matter what the outcome was. Everybody was so freaking, excited and into the race. I'm trying to think if there's been any moment again recognizing fully that the chemistry of being there is different than on TV. But can you think of a moment that we've seen at another race this year that was as exciting as yeah.
Speaker 1:I can't. No, absolutely not, because 98% of the season is absolute drudgery. I would say that moment of watching Lando and Lewis and of course the dialogue all weekend had been we are seeing the passing of the baton from Lewis Hamilton to Lando Norris. Lewis just isn't the it anymore and Lando is the new it boy because McLaren has had a single fucking race back at the front end of the grid. So of course, let's just, you know, blow smoke up everybody's collective ass when clearly the desire for people to see Lewis do well and Lando do well is magnetic. Certainly in that environment. Would it have played the same in Xandort? No, but it didn't. In their home race it went on for several laps of could they, would they, could he, would he sort of slow down but stayed competitive all the way through that last stint of the race. For Stappen, at this point, of course, had checked out.
Speaker 2:He was, you know, in his own postal code within a couple of laps, but what was going on behind him was just so much more interesting it was infinitely more, and not just with that, like like Lewis and Norris, because I don't remember some of the other battles that were going on during the race because everybody was just so focused. I know it was going on between Lewis and Norris, but there were great battles going all the way down the grid, Like Leclerc pipped Sykes at one point which ended up just like destroying the rest of Sykes' race right. Like when he pipped him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to the point that you felt like he'd taken off the side of the car. Yeah, they didn't touch or anything. So it's falling down the order so quickly that it was kind of flabbergasting because you just thought wait, what? What's happening? Does he have a slow leak? Is he a puncture, or did he pick up some front end plate damage that we missed somewhere along the way, which did not seem to be the case? He just was sort of being passed by everybody.
Speaker 2:Leclerc pipped Sykes. Gasly pipped Stroll and then immediately Gasly and Sykes are in this round robin of trying to pass each other and making an overtake and not making an overtake, and it was friggin awesome. And then poor fucking Gasly, Like he did so well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if you're going to talk about who's had the worst luck this season so far, I'm not sure there's a candidate even remotely in contention for that honor except Pierre Gasly. He's just again and again and I won't say there haven't been times or some of it's his own making, but by and large he did nothing wrong.
Speaker 2:No, Stroll, sort of mugged him and strolled this mug. Yeah, I can tell you, if I was Gasly I'd look long and hard about. You know, if I crossed a grave I shouldn't have, or if there's a curse on me that shouldn't be. And then if I was, then if I was Alpine, I'd look long and hard if Gasly was cursed and if he was bringing a curse to the team as well, because that shit ain't right man. What's going on over there is just fucked up.
Speaker 1:It is. I hope that somebody has hired an exorcist for the F1 summer break, because that team needs one, and we talked about this before. Gasly was hot after that race, like Stroll did get a five second penalty. Gasly was like tough shit, I don't care, I'll see you out in the parking lot, buddy. Like that was mm-mm, he was all over and it was the second or the third time, I have to say, because Gasly went after signs I don't even remember which race several races ago on social media and doubled down on it a time or two and still was like mm-mm and he was not a happy camper. I sometimes wonder how, if they actually let this shit go, if they actually come meet each other outside their little RVs and play games at 21.
Speaker 2:They do some sort of sim racing or sim boxing.
Speaker 1:Right. What do they do to get this out of their system? I hope they don't walk around with a chip right on their shoulders about this shit for three weeks. Let's see Lap 48, we're very close to the end 52 lap race. By the time we got to lap 48, Lewis was not getting past Lando. He was staying there thereabouts, but I think we all kind of knew at this point that that opportunity was in the rear view mirror.
Speaker 2:What we were all hoping for was, on lap 49, lando got the black and white flag, and if he'd exceeded track limits one more time, that would have been a five second penalty.
Speaker 1:It was. Yeah, I mean I was just going to say on lap 48, george got one which was like huh. Well, because they weren't telling us during the race, you didn't see anything about these track limits violations until they brought up hey, it's a black and white flag. So they kind of came a little bit out of left field and were coming out of left field very late in the race. So, like Jen said, you couldn't help but hope, if you were tipping towards the Lewis Hamilton side of the equation, that Lando would just conveniently accidentally move himself off of track limits and give himself a five second penalty. But he didn't.
Speaker 1:Piaz tri, who, again, you can't, I don't think, particularly if you put the context that starts with Silverstone and ends with spa, these last three races I don't think you can overstate how good Piaz tri is doing as a rookie. I think he's been amazing and this race was the one that sort of confirmed for everybody what most people already knew, based on his history in the sport, was he's a very, very solid driver and if you think about where he can be in a year or less, frankly, if that McLaren is as good as it's appeared to be over the last few races. He ought to be on the podium sometime soon.
Speaker 2:I think McLaren's going to have a very interesting problem on its hands in the next. Oh, I'm here for it Six or 10 races, I am here for it For ringing.
Speaker 1:I want to see it. I want to see every minute of it. I am absolutely there for every ounce of that drama.
Speaker 2:I don't think Zach Brown has sort of the ability to manage his drivers that way. Christian Horner, who is, I think, a horrible person and a horrible manager, can definitely manage his drivers.
Speaker 1:He doesn't manage his drivers. I beg to differ he doesn't manage his drivers Giving orders and making somebody say we've heard this. This has been it's ironic tiny, because this has been the narrative in F1 in the media all week long, this entire narrative that's been burning in the background because everybody's bored out of their damn minds. Helmet Marko has made it clear that you know, in Mercedes or Ferrari there are no first drive, but if you're a Red Bull you need that for harmony.
Speaker 1:Harmony. So Horner doesn't have to, he just makes a choice and then everything, everything that that team does is framed around satisfying that choice.
Speaker 2:I agree with that, and I also think that Horner will just absolutely lit in to the driver he needs to scream at for whatever, and I think Total Wolf mostly is pretty good at managing his drivers, but I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think I mentioned this in previous podcasts. Somebody on Tumblr mentioned Zach Brown and his stable of twinks. That's something that I'm never not going to think about, but I also think that means he doesn't manage them, like he has a bunch of these young box coming in, which they all are right. You have to have a certain mindset to be an elite athlete, to be an F1 driver, to risk your life to do this, but he is two really, really talented young drivers who have a lot to show, and I don't know how Lando's going to be with a younger driver who is starting to equal him or, at some point, beat him. I think it's going to be very different than when Sykes did it Like. I think this is going to be a really fascinating team dynamic to see in the next year, year and a half Agreed, and again.
Speaker 1:I'm here for it. So we get into the last lap and there's a little hardgy bargy because of the whole stroll or ghastly. Who's going to end up in tenth, who's going to end up in eleventh? So there were some things that were actually happening down the field. But, frankly, our attention in person in Silverstone a trip we made in large part because of our fandom for a certain driver who, if you've listened to even this episode, you know who that is. We get to the end of the race and Boring McBoringdom happens crosses the line P1. Lando comes in second. Hamilton comes in, I will say, close behind. He was never going to close that gap, but it was still tight. Piastri was 100% closing down. I don't know, and I should have gone back and watched the on boards Either Lewis's tires went off a cliff or he was asleep in the middle sector on the last lap, because Piastri took basically a second out of the Delta between the two of them on the last lap. So Piastri finishes just like a second and change behind Lewis.
Speaker 2:Plymouth is what it is, and shit happens, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was a lot of talk in social media for a few days afterwards about how butthurt George was about the timing on the safety car, and I will say it's one of the few times that I could laugh because, right, that was what people were like.
Speaker 1:Dude, how many times have you benefited from the fucking safety car in the last 18 months? Shut up, right. Just, you're going to semi-loser. And, in fairness, george came around to that too, so it was just one of those. You're never, ever, ever, ever going to be able to give Lewis Hamilton shit from benefiting from a safety car for the rest of his career. Yeah, and he drove a good race. He put himself in that position by driving really well and having amazing pace and not making a mistake.
Speaker 2:Well, apart from the start, but he didn't put a foot out once he went wide. He never put a foot out again.
Speaker 1:He did not, and it's one of those things where this was a classic race. Having looked back at the last three and pretty tight succession over the last few weeks as we're catching up on these podcasts, lewis's pace in that car, considering the car, is never one of the good cars We've been talking about Aston Martin being at the top end of. You've got Red Bull and then somebody Mercedes has never been to somebody. Yeah, it's been Aston Martin, it's been Ferrari, now it's been McLaren. Mercedes has never been the second-ran car this season and there are times where his pace is at par with Verstappens, which is fucking crazy in a car that sucks. So I'm sorry, I think he is flying way under the radar. The pace delta between him and George in this race was another example. When they were both in freeish air, second stint, lewis was still six tenths of a second faster. Yeah, come on, somebody, wake up and get him a good car, because this would be so much more interesting as a season if he had a car that didn't suck.
Speaker 2:The time of recording. It'd be interesting to see, like if he was in one of those Ferraris, because the rumors are that they had a Ferrari and that Fred Fred sorry, fred Visser I had friends and like friends, fernand, and stuck my head in like that's not at all. Nothing to do with that one. Fred Visser and Jean what's His Nuts? Have both come and asked Hamilton to drive for Ferrari and Citisikes and I think Hamilton and Leclerc would be an amazing, interesting pairing to watch.
Speaker 1:I don't know how my two favorite drivers on the same team would probably suck. You know, like I love Charles and I love Lewis, I don't know if I'd love them as teammates. Yeah, but it'd be fun. It'd be fun, it'd be interesting to see.
Speaker 2:It'd be interesting to see what Hamilton could do with that Ferrari. Right, but absolutely I don't think he's going to leave Mercedes. He has too much invested with them, not in terms I shouldn't say not only in terms of development of driving of seven oh I'm sorry, six drivers, championships with that Seven, but also with all the stuff he's doing with Mission 44 and everything that Mercedes is doing in terms of social, economic and racial diversity within their team. I think that is the biggest thing and I don't think he'd get that in Ferrari. He wouldn't.
Speaker 1:And he's already every report in decades that he was like you know what. That's really sweet, but no. And whether he's actually signed a contract with Mercedes which is also being rumored this week or not, he's got loyalty tattooed on himself for a reason Like he considers Mercedes home and family. I think one of the sort of and I'll admit it butt hurtiest things for me in the last couple of weeks has been the fact that McLaren's resurgence you heard it in the post race interviews one of the first things that Lewis always does, in addition to acknowledging the crowd and the energy that the crowd brings, which he does consistently, and thanking his team, which he does consistently, and frequently congratulating his teammate if there's something to talk about, which he generally does pretty consistently, was give kudos to McLaren and talk up Lando.
Speaker 1:Now you will notice, for those of you who are astute listeners to the pod, that is not reciprocated by young Mr Norris at any point. Quite to the contrary. I think Lewis carries that kind of racing loyalty is his DNA. He considers McLaren without question his how he started. How he started. He did not leave because he hated their guts. He left even though he was not having a great time. You know the leap to Mercedes was a big deal, but he's never going to leave.
Speaker 2:Well, nikki Ladder had to come and talk to him personally about coming over Like it wasn't just like a random offer on the table. And here you go, like it was a driver coming to speak with another driver saying I think that this is the way to go, I think this is the development you want and I think that he made obviously he made the right choice, right, but it was a really hard choice for him to make.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's lots of history that it was and it was a leap of faith and it could have gone a very different direction, but it didn't in the point being. You know, he's not going to Ferrari, he's going to race for Mercedes. The only question is how many more years? He's made it very clear all year long that it's not the details of the racing contract, it's not a dollar figure thing. I don't think it's an ambassadorial thing in the sense of he wants to be out there shilling Mercedes for years to come.
Speaker 1:I do think he's trying to position himself, as you said exactly correctly. He wants to make sure that he doesn't leave and all the work that he's done gets pushed under the rug in the same way that the FIA did with we Races 1, right Lip service and t-shirts and the second that we can get away with it. We're going to forbid anybody from talking about those things. We're never, ever going to acknowledge that they happened and we're certainly not going to keep them going moving forward. He's not stupid. He recognizes that the biggest value he can make in his life is this kind of societal change. He has a tiny wedge and a tiny window of time to do it. God fucking bless him for wanting to do that and using that leverage for something constructive. While you watch nearly every other driver on the grid, I absolutely pretend that those kinds of concepts and issues are non-existent. I'm looking at you, danny Rick and Max Verstappen, and Nico Halkenberg and Carlos Sainz.
Speaker 2:Arguably, max Verstappen has a much heavier hammer than Louis does with F1 and Liberty. Yeah, because he's a white guy. Yeah, with Liberty Media, and he's a designated white guy. He's a designated white hope and he's the winningest winner that ever did winnest. At the moment, he's better than any driver that's ever driven.
Speaker 2:Haven't you heard? I have, in fact, despite the fact that Louis is the one still breaking records, but he is not talking about anything. I mean, considering who his quasi-father-in-law is and what his quasi-father-in-law has said and never come back on. Yeah, you're an awful human, here's the thing, even if you are a hardcore racist and you keep that to yourself. Guess what? There's other things that you can talk about. A bunch of them have been shut up about it. Norris doesn't talk about mental health stuff at all anymore, neither does George Russell, and I don't know if that's something that Liberty Media has come down on them and said they're not allowed to talk with and they don't think they have the clout to talk about it anymore, or they're just way more interested in winning than anything else.
Speaker 1:Well, if you think about it, though, that did come out before the season, and I think Louis is the only one who's persevered through it. There was a lot of talk in the preseason, and you know, as we got into those weeks leading up to the first race, that they had effectively censored the drivers and said that they would not be allowed to talk about those sorts of things unless they got special dispensation. You know, we still heard about the fucking nose studs for the first few races of the season, and the thing that is hilarious and just brings it home, particularly in the context of Silverstone, which I recognize as something of an outlier and maybe I would have said, was until I saw him get that pole position in Hungary People are fucking hungry to see Louis do well. Yeah, you know he.
Speaker 1:When he was on the top, it was easy for everybody to hate his guts and the gross toxicity of the Verstappen fandom and the blatant desire for Liberty Media to appoint someone else as the delegated best ever aside. That's not representative of what most people are hungry for at this point. He shows up and people lose their damn minds. We saw it in Miami, we see it. We see it all the time and I just think it's hilarious because he's the only one with the sort of intestinal fortitude and the no, I can do all these things. I can not only rock up and be a good driver and be consistently a good driver and a fashion icon and a game changer for these social issues and be shadowed upon by most of the people in the world, but I have my priorities and you're going to have to conquer the fact that you still need me way more than I need you, and that's where F1 is right now. I know they don't like it.
Speaker 2:Legitimately. For me, the only person on the grid who I think probably has to do is to keep their mouth shut about all of their sort of personal feelings is Joe. He has family in China. China is no fucking joke about saying stuff. He's the only one I can see about not taking any sort of like pride stance, racial stance, any of that stuff Like that's what could happen to his family is super fucked up.
Speaker 2:The rest of them, there's no fucking risk. And tail, especially for for Stappen, alonzo, sykes, leclerc, there's no risk involved with that. They can start and, as I said, fuck it Like no one talks. Like Norris has said earlier, mental health, but also environmental stuff, and he doesn't talk about any of that anymore, I think that a degree.
Speaker 1:not, I mean I don't want to oversell it, but I think a part of why we subbed said walk away was just sort of institutional fatigue. Sure, not having a competitive car was a grind, I am absolutely sure, for somebody that had had his success and was as competitive and as good a driver as Seb was and had two really good cars, yeah. But you know again, I'm sure not having a great car made it much easier for him to decide to step away and focus on his family. But I also think there was just a sense of like Jesus Christ you know, it's, it's exhausting.
Speaker 1:I don't. I don't know how Lewis does it. I don't. I can't imagine the emotional and mental stamina that it takes to be constantly microaggressions aren't even the right word. There is overt racism that has been thrown at him every year he's been on the track. It got worse and worse in 21. It was marginally better in 22, mostly because it was easy to change the narrative to oh, he's washed, george is beating him, he's washed. So you could do it in an indirect way.
Speaker 2:You could still be a racist motherfucker and say shit about him, but you could frame it like that and pretend that it was OK to do and not say anything about the fact that the reason you were slower was because he had all the experimental shit in his car and all the monitors on his car.
Speaker 1:Yeah, until fucking even helmet Marco, who I'm sure has a dartboard with Lewis Hamilton's face on it somewhere, was like, yeah, the only reason why he's been slower is he's got all the extra shit on his car. You know when even fucking helmet Marco is calling it out. So then you just look at what happened the minute they stopped doing that and how much he dominated his teammate, which he did. Anyway, it doesn't matter, I will focus. However, you alluded to this earlier and I will give the kudos where the kudos are due. That was Lewis Hamilton getting on the podium in Silverstone for the 14th fucking time, a new record in F1 for the most number of podiums at a single race track, which is kind of mind blown. Yeah, it's incredible 14 times he's been on that podium at Silverstone.
Speaker 2:Nuts. So when we were there, we made a decision because we have a friend who has some mobility issues. We made a decision that we weren't going to go to the podium, and I don't actually have regrets about not going to the podium because we were so far away from it we wouldn't have been there. But it also like if I could have like hit a button to transport us from point A to the exact opposite side of the fucking track, to watch that.
Speaker 1:That would have been incredible it would.
Speaker 2:Heather and I are pretty fast walkers and decent runners and we're really good about like clearing the fucking way in front of us, but there was no way we'd have gotten over there. But guys, guys, you know we did get. I got more than three races. I got to collect marbles from the track. I am so excited about my marvel.
Speaker 1:We did get down onto the track. So yes, I don't know that I've carried quite the degree of passion for the marbles that Jen has, but I absolutely was getting some at Silverstone. You better bet your ass. We also got some of the sticker off of the Aramco barrier. Just getting to be on the damn track was so fun, it was so cool.
Speaker 2:So one of the things we haven't talked about, the reason that Heather and I have met each other and had like a base starting point because when we met which we met online before all the cool kids were doing it I lived in Pennsylvania, she lived in Portland and we were X file fans and you had to know coding, you had to know HTML in chat rooms to talk to each other and baby Jen wasn't even legal yet.
Speaker 1:Wasn't an adult.
Speaker 2:He key and one of the things that we went and one of our friends, Sheila, we met the same way. One of the things that we have is a picture that she took of us as we're ripping the X off of the Rolex giant X to put up when I eventually get into my condo, which I will treasure forever. But it was awesome, Like walking the track afterwards taking it. Everybody was so happy. There was none of this.
Speaker 2:I never felt unsafe at Silverstone, I have to say the three races we went to I haven't had any negative experience. There was no fucking orange smoke which would have sent me to the hospital. There's no way I'd survive inhaling that orange smoke, which was great. At no point did I hear any racial slurs or sexist slurs, which I know is not the case for many of the races, and everybody was happy. We didn't see anybody hear about brawls and stuff happening. That didn't happen and we walked the track, we got our marbles, we got some stuff from the barriers and then we sat down and we had some Cornish pasties and some Pims and just sat in the sunset and enjoyed the day and enjoyed the rest of the day and it was fantastic.
Speaker 1:The overall vibe really was amazing and I think the single biggest motivation, the thing that makes me go back, don't go back. Certainly it's a price point that probably isn't achievable for us a second year in a row. But the podium, I will say people didn't boo first happen, it was just silence, it was just sort of us mattering. Lando, second place the crowd went wild, no doubt about it. People were super excited for him and understandably he drove an amazing race. Hands down deserved every bit of adulation he was getting.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Oh, the sound, for Lewis was the sound for Lewis is still going to be the thing. You know that's what you strive for. For Stappens going to get it in Zanvoort. You know, at this point again, if you talk about this in the context of the other two races that came after Silverston, it's interesting that it wasn't as loud in Spa for him, which is arguably one of his home races as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder if that's just dispersal of the crowd. I feel like Spa, it's harder for more that many people to get to the podium just because you know the track is 128 miles long. So I wonder how much of that? Because I think just wildly disproportionately, the crowd at Spa is rooting for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah because it's home race. But you're right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of them and that's Zanvoort. We always know is is just literally the max for Stappen weekend and he has the opportunity to set and beat Vettel's record, which is depressing AF. But there you go. So, unless we get our third quarter, fourth quarter like we bolt over time miracle and somebody manages to sneak one around the outside, maybe become the most popular driver in F1 for a couple of weeks. It was a really amazing opportunity. We did get to do a paddock walk. That's another perk that comes with the Champions Club. So we got a chance to see various incendiary. We saw James Vowles, we saw Brad Pitt Well, I was saving that one, but they're all the chicken packs.
Speaker 1:So we did. No, it's fine we did. We got to see James Vowles. We got to see Mario Isola a software basura, but I'll be honest with you, I didn't realize he was there in real time.
Speaker 2:It was only when I was looking at my pictures we saw we thought Ted Kravitz the second, to late to realize it was Ted Kravitz.
Speaker 1:We did. We saw Ted too late, we saw. We saw Stoffel van Dorn, yeah, we saw Max Mann, yeah, oh, here's the thing, here's how good a friend I am.
Speaker 2:So we talk about our Montreal friends that we made at the race, who we have stayed good enough friends with, that we're all going to Austin with together in October, and we have a couple of neutrals. The rest are all Lewis friends, though the neutrals really lean towards Lewis. And we have this one outlier even his fiance says he's the outlier. Is this Max van? And because, because I love our Max van so much, because he is just an awesome human being, I did take a picture of Max for Stappen and I sent it to him in our WhatsApp group and then I promptly deleted the picture off my phone.
Speaker 1:I get pissed every time, you guys. Usually he will post some stupid ass Max picture one in particular on WhatsApp and then I always find it in my camera. I'm like what the fuck? I'm going to get this thing off my phone. Yeah, so we did see Max, we saw. We saw the background, sort of I don't you know hard to say with role. It looked like they're playing the mechanics in Brad Pitt's movie. We got to see their mock garage.
Speaker 2:We got to actually one of the things I saw really interesting thought was really interesting Like we saw all of how the pits set up.
Speaker 2:So when Heather and I did an equivalent sort of thing in Montreal, they don't have the trucks and the proper pit setup the way they do almost everywhere else in the world, because it's on an island, not just Montreal itself but the race, it's pre existing buildings.
Speaker 2:They don't bring their trucks right Like they, and watching how those trucks set up and watching it's like fucking transformers and some sort of magical rift in the time space continuum, how big those trucks turn into, like these three story buildings and they have different facades to them. And we also got to sort of do a walk along between where they make all the chemicals that go like the oils and the lubes and everything that which are all very track and temperature specific that go into the car, which I thought was just absolutely fascinating to see. I do want to give like an awesome fist bump props to Alpine, because pride was over by that point and we're walking and this is nothing they had on their car, this is nothing they talked about, this is nothing you would have known unless you'd walk down there. Alpine sort of lab for all of their stuff, still had all the pride stuff, all the pride flags up and all of the little buttons and posters up in it which, you know, props to fucking Alpine for having that, enjoying it, celebrating.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and it is completely fascinating. One of the things that both Jen and I have, I think, a mutual shared love of is sort of logistics and planning and organizing things and understanding how those operations work. And if you could give me an option to buy a behind the scenes tour? Like, don't get me wrong, a paddock walk is a behind the scenes tour, but only in the sense that you're in a shared space where you clearly have a very limited, a very controlled opportunity to potentially interact with someone somewhere from some team, just depending on the luck of the draw. You're randomly assigned time. You show up. When they tell you to show up, you could see anybody. There were people who got to see Susie Wolf while she was in the paddock. You got to see Toto, people's Southwest, people's South George. None of that happened when we were walking in. That's okay, you get what you get and it's great If you could.
Speaker 1:Let me actually talk to the people who decide how they organize. Which order do those vehicles come in? Which days do they do that? What order do they approach, how they're going to set those buildings up? There were some real practical issues that came up in the conversation with the guy that was giving us our track walk, our sort of tour guide, which is when you think about the practicalities of triple header weekends and the fact that under normal circumstances it's incredibly challenging and exhausting. They have two sets of everything because they have to have one going to the next race and getting set up as an advanced team for the existing race and then having to do that for three races in a row. I will never not look at the calendar that's on this calendar. Frankly, this season, let alone next season. I think that's not dangerous and crazy. There are times where they literally have to have the driver staged so that the drivers drive for X number of hours and then stop and immediately have a driver staged to get in and keep driving it.
Speaker 2:That's there is no pause. They're saying they're flying in drivers to weigh stations to keep the trucks going. Yeah, all of that sort of my job has a lot to do with logistics in real life. And when we went in and out the track or someone had hired the sort of stereotypical London double decker buses that you see that took us from, like, the gathering points to the paddock and back. And when we're on the, I think it was when we were on the one of the buses as overhearing another guy who was not part of our tour because it's just general press teams, everybody's taking these buses back and forth was chatting about.
Speaker 2:So they have a newish person at Silverstone doing all of the physical logistics and they were saying the old person that used to be there and I can't believe the guy was like see how sloppy all these trucks are parks. The old guy never would have done that, Apparently like he had laser eyesight and they all parked like all the big rigs once they're all loaded, all parked within an inch of each other. And I can't remember if it was our tour guide or was another overheard conversation. But they're talking about Monaco and Monaco you have three hours to get in, get out and load everything and that's it, because that's how precise everything has to be logistically to get the teams, all the background stuff, in and out.
Speaker 1:I would love it. I'm serious, I would there. I would drop some hard cash to get a chance to just see somebody walk through the behind the scenes overview of that, that and or the broadcast logistics. I would love to get a chance to be inside the control room where they are literally overviewing all of the cameras, making the decisions. We bitch when they get it wrong. There are times you're seriously. Why are you showing this? I know there was a moment yesterday when we were rewatching the race where we both went, huh, there's literally a key overtake happening off screen. Why aren't we seeing that? That's a production issue, right? Someone's just not making the call in the moment. But I would love to understand how you get 100 cameras around the tracks saying how are you making those calls? That part of things is super fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the tour guide we have was talking about. I can't remember what it is, but it's like a terabyte of data that gets uploaded and downloaded like every couple of seconds to be able to everybody to choose, like this day and age, right, like you can choose to be on the international feed, the F1, the sky feed, you can choose to be following a driver, like all of that, the logistics of all of that, especially being somewhere not that Silverson's backwater, but it's not a huge metropolis either. Right, like what is the actual physical infrastructure that happens that needs to be in place to be encrypted?
Speaker 1:It can't just be like Joe Bob sitting off the side of the track hacking into things. So we literally have, somewhere in that realm of data management, a whole other overlay that has to happen. Plus, the thing we learned in the UK is God damn it and we talked about this in one of the other podcasts but you can't watch anything unless you have a sky license. So we of course, per our earlier conversation, not having gotten to see all of the parts of the race, because we were there live, we're, we want to watch it. We couldn't watch it the entire time. Yeah, we were in the UK. We were in the UK because there's no way to watch F1 TV because it's region blocked. So that was another sort of, so we get to watch it now at our convenience, which is okay to anything else you want to throw into the mix before we wrap that. Oh, I know the other statistic harkening back to that podium the first time that there were two Brits on the podium in 24 years.
Speaker 2:So that was pretty cool. I had a fantastic time. It was a great race. We had some hits and bumps along the way getting there and the rest of the time we were in the UK, but that raise, we had a good time. It was fantastic. The weather was an interesting challenge here and there.
Speaker 2:Overall it was just so much fun and I loved going there with you guys. Like it was just amazing and I got some marbles, the other sort of random things. So we're walking around and I had these boots that I was wearing and the soul sort of wore out of one of the heels and I was like, okay, well, I'll get new boots. And that didn't end up happening for the next three weeks. And as I'm going to leave, I realized that this white rock that I picked up walking around the golf course going into Silverstone was still in the heel of my boots. So my last day in London I ended up with a the teaspoon from the hotel room and peeling out that white rock which I've added to my marbles my collection of random shit from Silverstone.
Speaker 1:Yay If you get the chance in the future. If you couldn't tell, we'd both strongly recommend Silverstone as being, I think, one of the key races to go and watch during the year. I think, regardless of who you cheer for, who you root for, you will have a really, really good time. I think that, unfortunately, is one of the knock on yuck effects is that races have become sort of, let's say, radicalized, but I do think that there are certain races, particularly in the European leg, where you're going to have a not great time if you're cheering for anybody other than one team, one driver specifically Correct, one driver specifically. And Silverstone is not like that. I think you can go and be a fan of any driver on the grid and still have a perfectly enjoyable time, and I would not hesitate to go back.
Speaker 2:There was someone flying a Kimmy Reckinen flag at the campground. So like you do, you, buddy.
Speaker 1:It was insane earlier, like sometimes the one of the fun parts of just sort of watching, like what people chose to decorate with and who's freeclad they were flying and God bless them there was. There was at least some variety. It wasn't all just the English boys, there was plenty of Ferrari fans and a few diehard Dutch fans. So you know you, you learned to sort of broker mental peace with whoever your neighbors are, because you're about two and a half feet away from one another, and other than the smokers. You know, I think we did pretty darn well. We had some pretty good neighbors.
Speaker 2:It was a good time, financial issues not being concerned, I go back. The good news is.
Speaker 1:Silverstone's not going anywhere. If we're very lucky, the driver that we're currently rooting for is not going anywhere in the near term either, so, whoever you're out there cheering for, I hope you get a chance to go see a race live. It's definitely an experience worth having if you haven't already had it. On that note, I think we're wrapping up for this. We might have talked a little longer than we should have, but yeah, I think this is as the editor of her podcast.
Speaker 2:This is our second longest one. I'm currently editing Hungary, which is our longest one by far.
Speaker 1:We're taking so many lessons under, we're not learning lessons is actually the problem. I think we're getting worse at this as we go along, but nevertheless, it's this summer break of 2023. We'll regroup and hope to see everybody on the flip side. We will be back for Zanport.
Speaker 2:And maybe we'll do a Zanport podcast live together because we'll be in the same city that weekend. But we said that multiple times before. That's never come to fruition, not really happened, has it?
Speaker 1:That's okay too. All right, back with beverages and bad words in a couple of weeks. Have a great night, everybody. Bye.