A SILLY LOOK AT F1’s VERY SILLY AND GETTING SILLIER SEASON

You may have noticed I didn't post my review of The Hungarian GP (FYI Verstappen won and Ferrari still haven't taken my previous advice ie: hire a pit strategist who actually turns up to races or at the very least watches them in a pub somewhere, that pretty much sums up the Hungarian GP) .

FIRE IN THE HOLE!

The reason for no review was because about 30 nanoseconds after the checkered flag fell, Fernando Alonso pulled the pin on a grenade, lobbed it into the paddock and walked off to Summer Break, leaving behind his own version of The Spanish Inquisition, -where heads are rolling, denials are flying around, and even just a rumour could effect your professional fate dramatically.

Essentially this has been a bigger shit show than when 'Snoop Dog' rebranded as 'Snoop Lion' and released a reggae album! At least Snoop had the excuse of being stoned off his tits at the time, not all F1 teams and major players can use that excuse.

So what is the wash-up? Well, we don't really have a bloody clue because all the drivers and teams are on Summer Break.

The general story is that thanks to Fernando leaving Alpine without A. Bothering to turn off the lights or B. Actually tell the team he was leaving, one Australian (Mark Webber) appears to have shafted another Australian (Daniel Ricciardo) to promote yet another Australian (Oscar Piastri) to a seat, which is just ‘un-Australian’.

Then, as Fernando sat back to watch the carnage, we had the Alpine social media disaster that essentially went like this:

Alpine:" We are pleased to announce Oscar Piastri will be driving for us in 2023"

Piastri "No I'm not, get stuffed!"

Before we could all get our breath back we then find out Piastri has signed with McLaren, meaning Riccardo has lost his F1 seat, but will walk away with $US21 million, which means he could probably launch a hostile takeover bid of McLaren, own the team, sack everyone and design a car that suits his front-end-grab driving style.

Now, having noted just how well the Alpine/Piastri tweet landed, McLaren's communication strategy for the last two weeks has essentially been Zac Brown telling Andreas Seidl that "If anyone ask's us anything I'm deaf and you can't speak english, got it!"

Cunning yet so far effective.

Meanwhile, not one to take his eye off the drama, Darth Helmut Marko may have just whispered ‘Gasly’ to a few well placed ears simply because he’s a bored Senior Citizen with no bowls competitions on at the moment and just wanted to stir up trouble. So Gasly’s name is also somewhere in the mix…but no one can work out where yet.

The only thing we know for sure out of all of this, is that there is a better chance of Volvo entering F1 as a constructor than Latifi getting the Alpine drive, so count him out. Odds are it will be Danny Ric, but a big question remains - how much did he piss off the most influential people at the team when he walked out on them 18 months ago when they were still Renault? But hey, they are French and the French are a forgiving lot (possibly born out of their history in life, society and a few World Wars, of essentially surrendering at the earliest opportunity).

So the reality is that we will just have to stay tuned, but remember, as King Leonidas of Greece said before the Battle of Thermopylae against the Spartans in 480 BC - “For sure we would like to have handled it better, but competition for seats at the top is hard, and we’ll just focus on getting the best talent for where we see the team going, and what that looks like in the future under the new rules and our continued work to unlock all the potential of this package”.

AND WHAT ARE ALL THE OTHER DRIVERS DOING?

Well, 90% of the drivers are kicking back, getting a tan, and showing the world on social media a minute by minute account of them doing so. Seriously, looking at Lewis, George Russell and Lando's tweets, You can’t help but think that there hasn’t been that many super fit and buffed Englishmen on some far away islands since the Falklands War!

Charles and all his 'close mates' look

a lot like they've formed some sort of yacht based LGBTQ boy band, and more power to them. You go girl!

Carlos Sainz is riding a ‘Back To The Future’ hover/surfboard thing which looks cool. Yuki Tsunoda has been very quiet and probably back in Japan enjoying not being the shortest dude in the room, Valtteri is in the US riding a tractor (check out the pic on twitter, so funny), and the rest are mainly posting photos of their gorgeous girlfriends, in a gorgeous location, wearing gorgeous clothes and just looking totally…well…filthy rich actually.

All in all F1’s 2022 Silly Season is off to a flying start, and to be honest it has Flavio Briatore‘s fingerprints all over it as he is Alonso’s current manager, Webber’s old manager, and he has a long memory and bitter scars from being banned from F1 for the small issues of multiple fraud convictions and the ‘race fixing’ in Singapore 08.

My main hopes from all of this silliness is that Danny Ric is still on the grid in 2023, Oscar Piastri is not cast as the villain, because he really is a ripping kid, and that Fernando just keeps walking around the Paddock like he own’s the place, because he kinda does it seems.

One thing for sure the ‘Drive To Survive’ Netflix's team have t been this happy since Roman Grosjean’s car essentially exploded like a WW2 bomb and better yet, he survived with minor only injuries, so they could show it 236million times in the episode ‘Man on Fire’ without feeling bad.

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