Hammer Time

If you didn’t hear, Max Verstappen is having a baby (with his partner Kelly Piquet, daughter of Nelson) which is apt because ever since Max won the championship he has gone back to acting like a toddler.

His childishness was on full display this weekend. It all started with the early Qatar press conference whereby George Russell told the media that Max basically said he was going to put George on his head and into the wall after leaving the steward’s room last week.

Max was mad about getting a penalty for impeding George during qualifying. I don’t know if this anger carried over in the Abu Dhabi race, but if so, it looks like Verstappen channeled his unhappiness right into the backside of Oscar Piastri at the race start.

When he got a 10 second penalty mid-race, Max wondered if he could ask the stewards for 20 seconds and then called them a bunch of “stupid idiots”. You didn’t have to be smart to see that Oscar was ahead at the turn and that Verstappen was just doing what he always does which is basically whatever he wants.

The biggest risk with Verstappen being a four-time champion is everyone is afraid to tell him what to do, even when it’s good for the sport. He probably shouldn’t be able to insult the governing body mid-race over the radio, but it does look like he’s gonna get away with it.

Also interesting is that though Toto Wolf supported George Russell during his press conference with his presence, he didn’t say a damn thing about Max, instead taking the opportunity to refer to Christian “Whiny Spice” Horner as a yapping “terrier”.

This is because Toto is probably hoping to have Max join Mercedes in the future and doesn’t want to upset the little Dutch boy before that. Here’s hoping that Kimi Antonelli is the second coming of Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen never gets that shot at the Silver Arrows.

Speaking of Lewis, obviously this was his last weekend at Merc, and seven championships later there were doughnuts after the race, tearful goodbyes with Bono who for the last time, told Lewis “It’s Hammer Time!”.

All Lewis did was drive from the back of the grid to a fourth-place finish, aptly passing Russell on the last lap just to say, bro, it’s your team next year, but don’t forget it’s always been mine before that.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that Lewis is joining Ferrari next year. I’m already waiting for the red Hamilton merch to drop, but before I do that, I flew the Lewis Merc flag outside my home one more time this last weekend to say goodbye.

I do still have mixed feelings that Hamilton’s gain comes at Carlos Sainz’s expense. All Carlos has done (in every single team he’s been on) is beat his teammate, including Lando and Charles head-to-head, and his reward is to get bumped.

Yes, Charles was Ferrari’s academy driver since he was a kid. And yeah, Lando is Zak Brown’s adopted son, but what happened to taking the best in the end? Isn’t that what F1 is about?

Of course not, see exhibit A: Lance Stroll.

That being said, father and son, Brown and Norris, did finally pull off the impossible bringing McLaren a constructors’ championship for 2024 and that’s pretty damn cool.

My hot take is 2024 was Lando’s best chance to win the drivers’ championship, because next year Piastri is absolutely taking the gloves off. Lando’s also gonna have to fend of Charles, Lewis, Alonso (in a Newey engineered car), Verstappen, and Russell at a minimum in 2025.

He probably won’t have to fight off Checo because it does feel like Yuki Tsunoda might get a shot at the big team during an off-season test. When Bottas spun Perez on the opening lap, that felt like the final nail in the coffin. Although Checo has more lives than all the cats combined, so one never knows.

Speaking of Bottas, as many of you know, he was my first love in F1 (technically it was Nigel Mansell but that was as a kid before I really knew anything about F1). I liked Lewis, but I wanted nothing more than for the Finn to take it to Hamilton every week so the racing would be interesting. That’s how I became president of the Porridge Posse.

Bottas’ Q3 appearance was brilliant, and I was hopeful he’d score points in his last race, but it was not to be. It’s apt though that Bottas is done this weekend, because also so am I.

I have found so much joy writing for you the last three seasons. Some of you may know this, but a lot of you don’t, that I’ve long been a semi-professional food writer here in Chicago. But, because of COVID, etc., in March of 2022, I hadn’t written a word for almost two years. I’d been writing for almost 20 years before that. I missed it dearly. But, also I was broken down by the pandemic and all the things that came with that including the dying of traditional media. I thought I was done as a writer.

But then I started this little newsletter. No one expected me to write about motorsport. It was fairly easy to just write for the love of the game. And I did. And thousands of you joined. Some of you paid for subscriptions.

This did something extraordinary. It gave me my confidence back as a writer. I started another newsletter called The Hunger (thehunger.substack.com) a few months later. I wrote both newsletters simultaneously for the last two and half years.

Extraordinarily, the Hunger has become one of the last thriving places for food journalism in Chicago. I’m hopeful, with current growth, that in another year or two I can just focus on it full time.

None of that would have happened however without the support you all gave me here at F1 Fanatic. In addition to The Hunger, I also have a full-time job and a family, and all that good stuff. There just isn’t as much time as I’d like, so right now it is time to hang up my overalls here at F1 Fanatic.

What’s extraordinary, even though I didn’t plan it, is that my last post is actually my 100^th and so the end here does feel a bit like destiny. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s the “end end”, but I know I won’t be writing regularly about F1 here in 2025. Or if I do, it’ll be one offs when the feeling strikes and time allows. (I’ve paused subscription payments and renewals so no one gets charged)

I think if I shift over to being a full-time food writer with The Hunger in a couple of years I might return to this F1 writing project because I’ll have more time. So, I won’t say goodbye, but I will say thank you. Thank you so much for reading each week and giving me the encouragement that led to finding my voice again. If for some reason you don’t hear from me again, I hope each of you has a champion’s drive for the remainder of your lives.