#i’m just going to...not think about the potentiall fallouts in the future until it is a realistic worry

[maranello]

You got most of the Ferrari assessment right! I’ve been watching since the Schumi era and what can be most frustrating as part of the tifosi is knowing that the drivers cannot blame the car. Either you work with what you have, or you outperform the machine. Seb in Red Bull had one of the most stable cars on the grid. The Ferraris rarely have been. The Ferraris were/are beasts, and you had to learn how to tame it. That’s where a lot of the disconnect between Seb and the team, imho, was. And I guess it worked out well enough when he was getting good results on his own — but then a younger, crazier guy signed on and started proving that there’s more you can get out of the car than previously thought. Definitely Ferrari could have handled the Seb affair better, but there was always a precedent to how Ferrari has handled all their affairs with drivers who, in their eyes, have failed them. There is a very good reason why Kimi is held in such high regard by the organization and the tifosi. They sign you to either win championships or help your teammate do so. I think it’s partly why they signed Charles for that length of time. They saw what he could do with a car as bad as the SF1000, and started salivating at the thought of what he could achieve in a car that worked as perfectly as the F2004. But I also think that if his performance starts to dip, or gets overshadowed by his teammate (whether it be Mick or Robert or someone else), chances are, it’s gonna get even messier than the Seb affair. It’s annoying, yes. Toxic, most of the time, hell yeah. But that is Ferrari F1 lore for you (unfortunately). I hope this makes sense. English isn’t my first language and the thoughts are getting scrambled in my brain as I write this

!!! anon, people like you who are f1 veterans and have so much lore and longer term insight/sanity are my favorite people here, and I salute you for it ❤️ and thank you for confirming my tentative Ferrari analysis and providing us lore, you definitely did a great job and it all makes sense to me!!

I suspected that the Ferrari car has been more finicky and harder to really pin down/extract the most out of it without having that mythical “feel” for it? which I do think Charles as a driver seems to have more of with the Ferrari compared to Seb, so it definitely makes a lot of sense that that’s where the disconnect is. and andjdj yeah, you said it far more clearly than I had (instinctual pr??)—that “Ferrari signs you to either win the championship or to help your teammate to do so.” They’ve really always done better when there’s a clear 1-2 internally even if they deny it in the press. Seb and Charles would never had worked long term when Seb is used to being prioritised but Charles was also never going to give anything less than his most from the moment he was signed (or just, in any car he’s been in really). And Ferrari did what it had done, as precedented.

Ahshdhf and you really voiced that fear at the back of my mind of a Charles-Ferrari fallout too that I don’t like to think about much less say out loud 😭😭 I know it’s probably the case if the scenario arises that Charles gets outshined by a teammate at Ferrari, and I absolutely agree that it’s going to be way messier bc Ferrari was all Charles had ever known really and he is so integrated and has such a stubborn drive to win that they would literally have to drag him kicking and screaming out of there. I hope it doesn’t happen because Charles has become so…synonymous with Ferrari to me like the vibe just matches, he is Ferrari, and I desperately hope he has a long, happy, and illustrious career there that either ends in retirement or him walking away of his own accord. I haven’t been following the junior categories that much, but so far, within their juniors, I don’t think there has been quite that comparable of the performances he put in so I don’t expect this to realistically be a solid concern for a few years?

But, who knows, F1 is unpredictable, and it is Ferrari, so I’m sure it will continue to give me far too many emotional rollercoasters to be healthy either ways 💔❤️🤡