thespiresleeps

[thespiresleeps]

max gender issues is so fascinating to me- like in so many directions like why is his car a boy fr? also idk if you like wag/family discussion but a lottt to unpack there

thank you so much for bringing up this specific question anon, because i was going to fold this into the larger post re: max and gender anxiety, but when i researched this part i came across some stuff that made me go ohhhh i think i need to consider this question on its own. (yes there will be family discussion here!)

in the 2017 interview where max first publicly calls his car male (put together from source and source, i can't find an unbroken version), ted kravitz says that the car was a good girl, she didn't let you down, she didn't miss a beat...

MAX [vehemently]: No! My car is not a girl. It's a guy. I never race a girl. KRAVITZ: That's one thing I never knew about you. MAX: Everybody names the car a girl, and the engine, and stuff—I'm like, no, it's a guy! Why should it be a girl? KRAVITZ: Well, that's something I never knew. But anyway—he didn't let you down. MAX: No. No, he was nice to me. I mean, the last four races he's been nice to me, so that's good. And then at the beginning of the year, he was being a bit of a... [struggling not to swear] difficult person. [smiling] Hit puberty.

there's definitely a fun queer interpretation of this (ride that guy, max!!) but i want to put that away so that we can pay attention to that last part.

first question: yeah, why is max verstappen's car a boy. second question: why is max verstappen's car an adolescent?

(sidebar. you can skip this paragraph if you don't care about the gender of it all—this is all just me giving another reason, besides "the suggestion of adolescence shuts down the suggestion of sex", why i want to put the sexual read aside.) the traditional relationship a male racing driver has with his car is a metaphorically sexual one; i'll get into this at length with photos and media analysis etc in a future post, but, essentially: the driver fucks the car by racing the car, he performs and achieves his manhood through fucking-by-racing the car. the sex metaphor is not an unfiltered or raw (ha ha) piece of dirty talk, it's not about what the driver actually likes or wants from women sexually, it's a conversation with other men that uses the common language of heterosexuality to talk about desire, adrenaline, pleasure, skill, and power. this is the reason the car is a woman (and usually sexually voracious and dirty and slutty, rather than sweet and virginal etc)—it doesn't really matter whether the driver of the car wants to fuck women or not. it's not just that a male driver saying "the car is a hot man who i fuck" would be socially unacceptable to his audience, it's that it would be meaningless in context. (that said, obviously max calling his car a guy has escaped the intended cishet male audience and gotten to us, and we can take lots and lots of homosexual meaning out of it because we are free and sexy and have enormous brains and resistant reads are what make the world interesting. but that's why i'm not using sex to answer the question "what might be going on in max's psychologicals".)

so, if max has a relationship with the car and it's not a sexual one, what kind of relationship is it? let me lay out three different directions we might go.

option 1). the car is an adolescent boy because max, in his own mind, is (still) an adolescent boy. max is the car, they're a single creature, there's no separation between them.

i think this is what the mind first jumps to, and i think "max sees himself in the car, or someone a lot like him" is gonna be a part of most potential interpretations; i don't know what other adolescent boy would come to mind for him as a model, besides old karting teammates or rivals, and that doesn't really seem to be the working relationship he has with the car. (besides which i think seeing drivers as a kind of cyborg-chimera with their cars is pretty intuitive for all of us.)

this makes sense of how immediately and strongly max pushes back on kravitz, and why max spends so much more time on saying my car is not a girl (three and a half sentences) than he does on saying my car is a guy (half a sentence). he seems to care more about saying no to the female aspect than he does about drawing a line under the male aspect. (this is foreshadowing for Future Posts.)

what he means is something closer to i never race [with] a girl, but if we look at it like this, we can imagine him saying i never race [as] a girl. a lot to dig into there, if we want to!

moving to option 2). the car is an adolescent boy because max in his own mind is (still) an adolescent boy; max sees himself as a slightly older male mentor to the car, who he subconsciously thinks of as his younger self. the relationship he's acting out with the car might be something like the relationship between himself and daniel.

maxiel predates me by a while, so i'm going to run through this idea quickly and leave it for the experts. i mainly want to lay down this idea that in max's mind, there might not just be max and the car, or the-car-who-is-max and max-who-is-also-max, but also the-car-who-is-max and max-who-is-someone-else.

in this situation, it would be important for the-car-as-max to be male because 1) max doesn't want to call the-car-as-max a girl, since that would be calling himself girly, and 2) max imagines, for whatever reason*, that if he were daniel, he would want to look after/befriend/mentor a guy rather than a girl.

*lots of potential ways you could run with this. max being 19 years old, it being 2017, the culture at red bull racing, the culture under christian horner, the culture in f1 at large. again, i'll come back to red bull when i talk about max and gender more generally, but i want to move on from this so that i can talk about the last potential male-male relationship that max might use as a framework here.

3) the car is an adolescent boy because max in his own mind is (still) an adolescent boy; max sees himself as the car's father. the relationship he's subconsciously acting out in the car is the relationship between himself and jos verstappen.

Those whose love we wanted but could not get, we emulate. It is dangerous but it makes us feel closer, gives us an illusion of the intimacy we never had. It stakes our claim upon that which was rightfully ours but denied. When I was a young man looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, I chose my father's voice. Because there was something sacred in it to me. And when I went looking for something to wear, I put on a factory worker's clothes, because they were my dad's clothes. And all we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers, and my father was my hero. And my greatest foe. One night I had a dream. I'm onstage in full flight, the night is burning, and my dad, long dead, sits quietly in an aisle seat in the audience. Then I'm kneeling next to him in the aisle. And for a moment we both watch the man on fire on stage. And then my dad, who—for years he sat at the kitchen table, unreachable, with what I was too young, I was too stupid, to understand was his depression—I brush his forearm, and I say, "Look, dad. That guy on stage. That's how I see you." (Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run and Springsteen on Broadway)

(if you don't have the context for this, springsteen's father was an abusive alcoholic.)

the-car-as-max is a bit of a... difficult person, the-car-as-max hit puberty and max had to make him behave again. the maybe only perfect car in the history of formula one, the flawless car, the car that never failed, was the only car max ever named.

idt that i'm saying anything that anybody hasn't said before if i say there's a way to read max as being put under pressure to do his father's career over again, to do it right this time, in the way a lot of us are put under pressure to repeat our parents' lives without their mistakes; or that when max is in the car, especially when he's young, his father puts himself into max on purpose. i know a lot of us, when we talk about the pressure we were put under by our parents, start automatically talking in their voices, seeing ourselves through their eyes, saying i or you about them when we mean he—george doing it in the second-to-last paragraph here, for example.

and all we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers, and in this interpretation, the car is max's perfect son, and max is a perfect father to him. max can bring him to his full potential, max can make the-car-as-max into something great that he never could have otherwise been, and the car-as-max gives max-as-his-father all of the success he craves, through his perfection he protects his father from all the failures or humiliations that might haunt him, he gives his father all the glory he so desperately needs, and his father loves him.

so that's why i wanted to consider this question separately. i may circle back to it when talking about max and gender issues, because they're definitely not mutually exclusive ways of thinking about this, but it's something i wanted to unpack on its own first (especially because this has gotten so gd long already lmao.)

thank you again for asking!!!

[thespiresleeps]

keeping a max mentions counter for george. putting it on the wall of shame. taking measurements in mm/d (max mentions/day) (around 0.65 as per now). will only reset count back to 0 when max mentions him back which so far is not happening. strange things are afoot. baku 2 year anniversary soon. lunar eclipse soon. max birthday soon. end of world soon. data suggests [?????????] [screams of agony]

keep updated please. bug status uncer—[insectoid sounds of people-killing and people-eating]

[thespiresleeps]

Monza if George got the medium

[thespiresleeps]

*pat pat*

[thespiresleeps]

EXACTLY!!

We NEED to discuss the faces George has been making when talking about Max this last week... I am disturbed but also awed

[thespiresleeps]

We NEED to discuss the faces George has been making when talking about Max this last week... I am disturbed but also awed

[thespiresleeps]

"...Like in Canada, everything had to be perfectly aligned. Me and Verstappen took the medium tire, we had a great qualifying lap..."

[thespiresleeps]

stretching like a cat (inspo)

[thespiresleeps]

thinking about max also calling nico britney in relation to the princess george stuff

god so true anon it IS time to rewatch the iconic 2021 "name every champion" grill the grid finale

yeah i think max enjoys that kind of humor generally! you can read that all sorts of ways, but if you're so inclined, there could definitely be a juicy gender anxiety there. i am once again asking for the people to sponsor my "pay max verstappen to undergo 30 minutes of psychoanalysis about why his car is a boy" kickstarter

[thespiresleeps]

anyone else feeling really sick all of a sudden

[thespiresleeps]

when you pull up to the bitching and moaning competition and these two are already there

[thespiresleeps]

HISTORY'S FASTEST LAP IN F1

[thespiresleeps]

this has been a Theme lately

[thespiresleeps]

Monza if George got the medium

[thespiresleeps]

This is so funny to me

new reaction image

[thespiresleeps]

mercedes amg petronas racing team you will pay THE BUG WANTED THE MEDIUMSSSS YOU CLOWNS

[thespiresleeps]

someone fast tell me wtf is going on

can we stop quali here this is perfect why do we need q2 and q3