GrizzleBoy wrote: ↑02 Mar 2022, 11:42
Indeed.
I don't understand how in March 2022, you can still have people making such strong arguments about this particular lap 1 incident and being so confident that Lewis as favoured by the stewards.
Rather than the case being that they just couldn't penalise Lewis for leaving the track during an overtaking attempt when his only other option was to park his car and wait for Max to finally turn after his divebomb that he barely kept on track or keep going and crash while Max was parked sideways across the racing line.
IMHO, 2021 has exposed Max for actually having quite poor racing ability.
He's fine when his car is fast enough to zoom past (and even then he'll send you over the kerbs), but when he has to fight in a car that isn't clearly faster, he can barely keep the thing on the road.
I think him winning the title in the fashion that he did in terms of where it will be forever linked with one of the most prolific names ever in the sport being "robbed" of a record setting wdc, might not have such a sting if he had been able to conduct himself better when racing for it.
But when you watch these 2021 races back in history, when all the fanaticism has died down and the orange shirts and F1 polls are not being bombed by an online army, what are you going to see?
Max barging his rival off the road at almost every opportunity in the early races.
Coming a cropper at Silverstone when his rival finally decided to actually put up a fight. (walking away perfectly fine yet crying about being "hospitalised").
Literally hitting Lewis in the head with his car in Monza.
The Maldonado level driving in Saudi, earning a penalty almost every single time he met with Lewis on track, including for telemetry proven brake checking.
The laughable defense in Brazil.
And finally being steamrolled in the final race, where his only chance of victory was if an FIA official quite literally fiddled the race to make it so had could have a chance. Resulting in that official losing their job and an internal FIA investigation.
And to top it off, almost nothing you can point to that shows any great actual racing in 2021. What battles did he have? Does anyone remember off the top of their head any particularly spectacular things he did in 2021?
The entire F1 community is praising Perez's racing skills. Who is even talking about Maxs racing skills unless it's to complain about the lack of them? Even Martin Brundle who seems to call everything Max does "genius" sounded jaded after the Saudi grand prix and said Max needed to "think about his driving standards".
Max has the WDC and he will never show that he cares externally, but unless he's not actually human, he'll always have this hanging over his head unless and until he makes his mark in a more satisfying way for himself and the rest of the F1 fanship.
He does seem to drive like a mix of Magnussen and Moldanado. If the stewards and Masi (which started to apply the rules like we expect after drivers briefed him about their confusion with Brazil T4
) then he would've had a very difficult time securing the points he needed to win some of those races. He might have been banned for a race as well. He's getting closer to it this season.
