GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => General F1 Discussion => Topic started by: Monty on August 22, 2017, 11:57:29 AM
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No surprise here but good to see it confirmed. I guess a large part of the decision will be Vettel insisting that Kimi is retained as number 2 before he signs. I am really hoping that Kimi ignores his number two status and goes out there to take some wins - although history has shown that when a Ferrari number two goes rogue their car suddenly starts to lose power or develop faults!
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Great news...where would we be without Kimi's radio playouts :yahoo:
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Good news indeed! He's certainly earned a race seat.
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Really pleased to hear that. I think Kimi is fine to play a supporting role as long as his own hopes are mathematically done...otherwise, forget about it. He's most likely on his last contract with Ferrari, so what would he have to lose to look only after himself. :yahoo: :yahoo: :yahoo: :yahoo:
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While Kimi certainly has earned a spot at Ferrari, I think that both Kimi and the sport would be better suited with a 'scrappy' team.
Sauber is poised to turn a corner, and a driver with experience and the ability to draw attention might suit them, even if he'd strain their budget.
Haas would be another great fit for Kimi from a sporting point of view.
RBR would be the best fit, he's the driver that most suits Red Bull's approach to sports. Who can't imagine Kimi driving a Red Bull branded snowmobile in the off season? The fact this will never happen is the greatest (non safety related) shame in the modern F1 era.
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I wonder if Vettel will go for a one year extension to give him options for 2019?
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Raikkonen has been awarded this contract essentially because he is the driver who Vettel wanted as his team mate. Vettel increasingly calls the shots at Ferrari, since he is trying to emulate Schumacher. Vettel does not get on well with the majority of the other top drivers, so this outcome was always inevitable.
Raikkonen isn't going to win many, if any, races at Ferrari. He's not fast enough in the races compared to Vettel and lacks the consistency that he used to have in his first decade in Formula 1. I've never been a fan of his either, so I would rather have seen a change, but it was never going to happen.
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I don't believe that for one second. Vettel has a dribble of the power Schumacher had in the team. There was some talk of even dropping Vettel last season. I seriously doubt Vettel has a call on who his teammate is. He's simply not that valuable. Teams have to realize that among the top ten drivers, few really stand out from the rest. The pecking order in the top ten has more to do with the car and a bit of luck than any talent. Ferrari know this and would not cede control of driver choice or any other management to someone like Vettel.
It's abundantly clear that you are not a Kimi fan, and your opinions and assessment of him are biased. I don't share them in any way.
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I don't believe that for one second. Vettel has a dribble of the power Schumacher had in the team. There was some talk of even dropping Vettel last season. I seriously doubt Vettel has a call on who his teammate is. He's simply not that valuable. Teams have to realize that among the top ten drivers, few really stand out from the rest. The pecking order in the top ten has more to do with the car and a bit of luck than any talent. Ferrari know this and would not cede control of driver choice or any other management to someone like Vettel.
In the Schumacher/Ferrari era Schumacher was the face of F1 like no one before or since. Todt/Brawn/Schumacher collaborated on turning F1 into the modern professionally run sport we see today. Schumacher had power because there was literally no one to replace him, but there are literally a dozen racers who probably as good as Vettel if they had the same equipment.
Kimi is definitely winding down his time as a 'top' F1 driver in terms of talent, but he provides character to a sport that is saddled with drivers who are either 'keep it clean, I've got sponsors to think of' or 'I'm a bad ass, and sponsors like me because I break the rules'. Kimi is the throwback to 'give me a car and I'll race, and when that's done, I'll go to a party and have fun'. The sponsors, of course, love that.
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Kimi is the throwback to 'give me a car and I'll race, and when that's done, I'll go to a party and have fun'. The sponsors, of course, love that.
So do a lot of the fans. :yahoo:
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I think Vettel did have a input keeping Kimi for
next year...after that I'm not so sure.
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I think Vettel did have a input keeping Kimi for
next year...after that I'm not so sure.
All I've read about that is pure speculation. Nobody but Kimi, Vettel and Ferrari know the situation, and they aren't saying.
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Kimi is the throwback to 'give me a car and I'll race, and when that's done, I'll go to a party and have fun'. The sponsors, of course, love that.
So do a lot of the fans. :yahoo:
It's almost painful sometimes watching Hamilton and Verstappen try to imitate Kimi. The drivers need to just be themselves. Hamilton lets it slip every once in a while, he really is a wide eyed kid who can't believe his luck, but tries to cover it up by pretending he's too cool for school. Max is dangerously close to being an a-hole for the ages and acts like he's just being honest. He might as well take that one step and embrace it. The sport could use a villain now that Bernie is gone.
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I think Vettel did have a input keeping Kimi for
next year...after that I'm not so sure.
I'm not so sure the Vettel input helped in quite the way we'd all expect Dare.
.My take is that Ferrari was having trouble securing Seb beyond one year, they signed Kimi as insurance putting pressure on Vettel that it was 3 years or nothing.
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I don't believe that for one second. Vettel has a dribble of the power Schumacher had in the team. There was some talk of even dropping Vettel last season. I seriously doubt Vettel has a call on who his teammate is. He's simply not that valuable. Teams have to realize that among the top ten drivers, few really stand out from the rest. The pecking order in the top ten has more to do with the car and a bit of luck than any talent. Ferrari know this and would not cede control of driver choice or any other management to someone like Vettel.
I beg to differ. There were stories from credible sources, such as Autosport, that Vettel has been trying to build Ferrari around him, just as Schumacher did. There were doubts raised last year, I agree, but there was never any real likelihood that Vettel would be dropped, as Ferrari knew that they needed to keep one of the top drivers (Vettel is a top driver, even though he's not the best driver by some margin) in Formula 1.
It's abundantly clear that you are not a Kimi fan, and your opinions and assessment of him are biased. I don't share them in any way.
It's true that I have never liked him. I find his lack of respect for the audience, both in terms of his radio outbursts, and his attitude to procedures, such as speaking to the media, appalling. I think that he sets a dreadful example to up and coming drivers and to the fans, and I've never understood why he has such a following. He is completely unwilling to communicate in any meaningful way.
My assessment of him in the car, however, is based on his performances and results. Since he won the title in 2007, a title which he only won because Hamilton and Alonso became so obsessed with beating each other that they forgot all about Raikkonen, and he stole the title by just one point at the last race, Raikkonen has rarely shown any sort of championship winning form. He was breathtakingly fast in the mid 2000s when driving for McLaren. He was at the top of his form then, but I always felt that he demanded too much of this machinery and pushed it too hard for too long in some races, notably the infamous 2005 European Grand Prix, which he lost after his left front tyre and suspension disintegrated after he'd damaged the tyre earlier in the race from pushing too hard.
Raikkonen has never managed to replicate the speed that he had back in the mid 2000s. 2008 was a poor defence of his title and he wasn't really on the pace in 2009 either. This is why he left Formula 1. When he returned with Lotus he was starting to show more of his old form, but not consistently. Since rejoining Ferrari he has been a shadow of himself. He rarely beats Vettel in the races and has very inconsistent pace. All of this is based on facts, not personal bias. The statistics do not lie.
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Mark Twain once famously said "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics".
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It's true that I have never liked him. I find his lack of respect for the audience, both in terms of his radio outbursts, and his attitude to procedures, such as speaking to the media, appalling. I think that he sets a dreadful example to up and coming drivers and to the fans, and I've never understood why he has such a following. He is completely unwilling to communicate in any meaningful way.
That is why we're fans of his though. If you listen any other athlete on the planet, I don't care what sport, they're all saying the same things. "I gave it my all, the team did a great job and (as appropriate) we won/it just didn't work out/opponent got a lucky break. I'm just happy to be able to perform in front of the great fans of (wherever the calendar says)."
Kimi doesn't bother with that. He does his own thing. It's nice to have an athlete who is different. You're right it's rude, and a marginally talented athlete won't get anywhere with that attitude. At the same time, he joined F1 when public radio communication wasn't the norm. Just because the 'kids' need to have someone yammering in their ear the whole race doesn't mean Kimi benefits from it. We've all had those times at work where we are doing quite well, and some one who has no clue comes along to try and 'help'. We're never lucky enough to tell them off like Kimi can.
The unknown element here is how Kimi interacts with his team behind closed doors. If he was pissing people off at Ferrari, there's no need to keep him on. If he wasn't contributing to the development of the cars, a helpful member of the team strategy, why pay for him at all? There's a dozen drivers just as good (if not better) in terms of pure skill. The people who know what counts most in F1 thinks Kimi has 'it'.
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Not only can I tell such people off, but I'm accustomed to it working in a way that Kimi's approach isn't. If I tried telling off foolsplainers in the way Kimi does, they'd get offended, not learn the lesson and carry on messing up. (The colleagues I'm familiar with don't mess up after being told off a bit more politely, but of course every team's people has different preferences).
Obviously, politesse and charging around at 200 mph are not innately compatible (hence the bleep-box gets used early and often in most races), so it's a bit more understandable that Kimi is more blunt... ...but the fact he still has to tell people off for this over a decade after he first brought it to engineers' attention tells me his approach doesn't work. Not for Ferrari, and not for the other teams he's driven for since radio communication was introduced.
Ferrari and Kimi may be happy with one another, but I don't think they're getting the best from one another, and that's one reason why Sebastian tends to do better than Kimi (and why, generally, the 2010s have been difficult for him in F1). I don't approve of his potty-mouthed approach in the car, but he knows how to tell his team to do things in a way that makes them happen. Sebastian does have a dribble of Michael Schumacher's power, but "a dribble" is still considerably more than Kimi's apparent total lack of power in his situation. I get the impression that Kimi is there because they need a filler while waiting for Leclerc to finish developing or an opportunistic "borrowing" of a newly-released top-line driver, not on his own merit.