Well, fuck. After the cruel summer break in Formula 1, I was dressed and ready for its return at Spa (Belgium) at 6am Friday only to have my driver (Valtteri Bottas) retire when he bottomed out during the first free practice after two whole laps. Grid penalties saw nearly HALF the field starting "from the back." Race day yesterday? Both Lewis Hamilton and Bottas were retired after collisions with other drivers in the first lap; Hamilton was clearly at fault for his, but Bottas was just trying to stay out of the way of the tangle between Latifi and Tsunoda when Latifi slide into him and beached him in one of Spa's new gravel traps. ON HIS FUCKING BIRTHDAY. In my sincerest hopes, with so much of the race left out there and both out of it, Bottas and Hamilton went for a beer together.
Max Verstappen "Verstappen'd" it as usual, storming from P14 (after his grid penalty) to win it all handily. Seriously, they should just give him the P1 trophy at the start of each race so we can watch the actual, more interesting contention in the mid-to-back field. Near the end, the cameras were trained on Verstappen despite him being over 10 seconds ahead of his teammate Perez in P2, like, why are we watching this??
Ferrari "Ferrari'd" it again. Poor Charles LeClerc was on "plan G" last I heard. I spit out my coffee laughing when I heard that. It's not uncommon to hear teams moving to plan B or even C, but "plan G?" How hard have you screwed the pooch when you're on plan G?? A grid penalty saw him starting from the backfield, and despite much speculation that he might be capable of Verstappen-esque charge to the front, found himself caught in a DRS train and struggled to pass in the midfield. In a pathetic attempt to salvage the point for fastest lap, he was pitted on the last lap for a fresh set of soft tyres, and still didn't manage to nab fastest lap. Once the noise at Alpine, McLaren, and Haas quiets down, I think we'll find that Ferrari is actually the loudest team in the room in terms of drama.
New regs to come for sure. Literally no one started where they qualified on Saturday due to grid penalties. As it stands, each driver is allotted 3 internal combustion engines (ICE) per season; upon replacing it the 4th time and every time after that, the driver takes a grid penalty, and with almost half the field taking grid penalties at the halfway mark of the season, clearly 3 is too few. They assign grid penalties to keep the richer teams from replacing their engines every race, so I get it, but the cap is so low, even the poorest teams suffer for it. It's basically saying you can spend up to $3 at Starbucks, anything over $3, and the barista will spit in your coffee. Try spending less than $3 at Starbucks; I think a tall black coffee is like $5.25.
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