I don’t want to talk about feelings. I want to talk about politics. I want to talk about chess.
I know the reasonable thing is to say this is all probably coincidence. Bad optics, bad timing, bad social media planning, the usual incompetence wrapped in a three-pointed star. I know Mercedes does not build cathedrals for every podium and I know a P2 is not supposed to trigger a national holiday. I know! But at some point you have to stop looking at each thing separately, because that is how you miss the shape. Chess is not one move. Politics is not one statement. You look at what keeps happening, where the warmth goes, who keeps getting the soft landing and who keeps getting left there. At some point, you have to look at the board and ask why the man who delivered the result keeps being left standing in the cold while the institution around him pretends temperature is not part of the game.
Because this does not look, to me, like simple neglect anymore. Neglect is lazy. Neglect is accidental. Neglect is forgetting to post the right photo or misreading the emotional weight of a weekend. This feels cleaner than that and that is what makes it worse. It feels like the beginning of a soft eviction. The corporate kind, the kind that happens quietly enough for everyone involved to deny it later. You do not tell the man to leave. You make staying feel worse every week. You make the room colder. You make the applause thinner. You make every achievement feel like something the team has to acknowledge rather than something they are actually proud of.
And that is the part I keep coming back to. If the objective is to move George out, the smartest play is not open hostility. Open hostility gives him a clean enemy and George with a clean enemy is dangerous because suddenly everyone can see the story. The smarter play is to make him feel less central to his own seat. You let him still be there, obviously. You let him still be valued in the vague press conference way. You let everyone say the right things. But the actual feeling of the team starts moving elsewhere. The affection moves elsewhere. The future moves elsewhere. The narrative moves elsewhere. He is still in the room, but somehow the room has already started being decorated for someone else.
And then you put the last few races beside each other and it stops looking like bad optics and starts looking like a board. George gets a podium on his 100th race with Mercedes and somehow the whole thing feels like he showed up to his own party and found out no one had bothered to turn the lights on. I am not asking for fireworks. I am not asking for Toto to fall to his knees in parc fermé and kiss the front wing. I am asking for the bare minimum emotional competence of a team pretending this man still matters to them. Someone should have been there. Someone should have looked happy. Someone should have made that podium feel like it belonged to him too, instead of another result quietly dropped into the wrong narrative. A team acting like the driver who put the car on the podium was not an inconvenient footnote to the weekend’s preferred storyline. Instead the moment felt bizarrely hollow, like George had delivered a result into a room already emotionally reserved for somebody else.
And then there is the content and this is where I need people to stop acting like Mercedes is some fan account posting from bed at 2 a.m. I work for a company that is big locally, but still tiny if you zoom out even a little and even there the marketing is insanely good, very intentional, very aware of what an image says and what a caption does. So please be serious for one second and imagine the scale we are talking about here. Mercedes is a billionaire Formula 1 team attached to one of the biggest car brands in the world. They have PR people, media people, brand people, sponsors, lawyers, approval chains, a whole machine built around image. They are not accidentally making George look like an afterthought because some intern forgot to check the podium photos folder. They know what they are doing when they choose who gets paragraphs, who gets pictures, who gets warmth, who gets framed as the future and who gets treated like an awkward guest at his own result.
One weird post can be careless. A pattern is language and Mercedes knows language. They know how to make a teenager look like destiny. They know how to polish the “boy genius” narrative until everyone starts speaking in prophecy, until the kid becomes less a driver and more a marketing object with a halo. Formula 1 loves that. It loves a chosen one. It loves youth when youth can be sold as inevitability. So no, I do not think it is accidental when George delivers and the story still moves away from him. I think a team this rich, this trained, this obsessed with image, knows exactly where it is pointing the camera.
And Toto Wolff, bitch please. Toto is not some sentimental headmaster accidentally trapped in a billionaire’s body. He is a businessman before he is anyone’s team father. He is a shark with excellent tailoring and a very clean vocabulary for ruthlessness. If Mercedes can sell the next era as the rise of the boy genius, he will sell it. If he can turn Kimi into the emotional centre of the project, he will. If the team can pivot from the messiness of the last few years into a bright, obedient, future-facing myth, they would be insane not to try. And then you add the other rumour sitting in the corner of the room, because of course there is another rumour, because this sport is a little palace full of men leaking things through the walls. If Toto really wants Max, and if Max really has some sort of performance clause that could make the door open, then Toto needs a seat. He needs a vacancy. He needs someone to move. And be serious, he is not going to put Kimi on the bench right when the Kimi narrative is this clean, this shiny, this easy to sell. The teenager, the prodigy, the future, the boy they can package as destiny before he has even had time to become complicated. Why would Toto sacrifice that story when George is right there, older, established, inconvenient, too good to discard cleanly but apparently not sacred enough to protect? If the cleanest version of the team’s future is Max as the monster signing and Kimi as the boy genius, then George becomes the problem not because he failed, but because he is occupying the square they need empty. And Toto is many things, but stupid is not one of them.
So the political question becomes simple: how do you get rid of a man who has not given you a clean sporting excuse to get rid of him? You do not attack the result. You attack the conditions around the result. You make staying feel smaller. You make loyalty feel unrewarded. You let him become lonely in public. You let him walk into rooms without the visible armour of the team. You let moments that should confirm his place instead reveal its fragility. Monaco already had that taste, that strange image of him going to the stewards as if he were representing himself inside a structure that should have been standing around him. That was not explosive. It was worse. It was humiliating in the quiet way institutions humiliate people when they want plausible deniability. Nobody has to abandon you loudly if they can simply fail to appear.
That is why the latest pieces feel so ugly together. The cold podium mood. The strange absence of visible celebration. The recap choices. The emotional overinvestment elsewhere. The technical mistake landing on his side. None of this needs to be an elaborate conspiracy for it to function politically. That is what people misunderstand. Politics is not always a secret room full of villains saying the evil plan out loud. Sometimes politics is a collection of incentives all leaning in the same direction. Sometimes it is a team realising that the cleanest version of its future does not have much use for the loyal son who expected inheritance. Sometimes it is less “we hate him” and more “we need him to understand he is no longer the centre of what we are trying to sell.”
And that, to me, is much colder. Because George has played the game exactly the way a man like George was taught to play it. Polished. Correct. Loyal. Restrained. He has protected the team even when the team did not protect him with the same force. He has done the PR, smiled through the awkwardness, absorbed the criticism, kept his rage elegant enough for people to mistake it for weakness. People call him try-hard because they cannot recognise survival when it comes in a pressed shirt. But that is what he has been doing. Keep your head down. Don’t embarrass the boss. Don’t become difficult. Wait your turn. Be grateful. Be useful. Make yourself impossible to discard through excellence alone. But that only works if the people above you are playing fair. If they are not, then dignity becomes a trap. Loyalty becomes a leash. Professionalism becomes the thing they use to make your pain look manageable.
That is the chess of it. You do not have to take the king while he is still protected. You take the squares around him. You remove the places where he can stand. You make every move feel worse than the last. You let him remain technically alive on the board while making the board itself hostile to him. And then, if he finally moves himself out, he gets taken and everyone gets to act like it was his decision. No blood on the hands. No open betrayal. Just a mature separation, a strategic choice, a driver seeking new opportunities, a team looking toward the future. Beautiful language for a very ugly thing.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe all of this is just a sequence of stupid coincidences arranged by the gods to look like workplace warfare. Maybe Mercedes loves George deeply and simply has the emotional intelligence of a locked filing cabinet. Maybe the car issues, the media choices, the lonely institutional moments, the sudden gravitational pull toward the teenage saviour narrative, all of it, all of it, is nothing. But if this is nothing, it is doing a spectacular impression of a machine trying to make a man leave without ever having to push him in public.
And I think that is what makes me angriest. Not the preference itself. Formula 1 is brutal. Teams choose futures. Men get replaced. Narratives are rewritten before the old ink dries. Fine. That is the sport. The cruelty is in making a loyal driver feel like a guest in the house he helped keep standing. The cruelty is in letting him deliver and still making the result feel like it belongs to someone else’s story. The cruelty is in watching him behave with all that careful, painful dignity while the room around him gets colder and colder and then pretending not to understand why people noticed the frost.
So yes, let’s talk politics. Let’s talk chess. Let’s talk about what it means when a team does not need to say “leave” because it can make staying feel like swallowing glass. Let’s talk about how George Russell, the good son, the polished one, the one who waited and waited and waited, might now be standing in the middle of a board designed to make his next move look voluntary.
And if that is the game, then fuck the game. I hope he sees every piece. I hope he stops mistaking coldness for professionalism. I hope he becomes impossible to politely rearrange. I hope he takes every lonely podium, every thin little caption, every silence dressed as strategy, every attempt to make him smaller inside his own career and turns it into something they cannot crop, soften or hand to someone else. If they are trying to make him leave, I hope he makes them regret needing him gone.
And if he does leave, if he goes somewhere else, then fine. I will buy the colours. I will wear the merch. I will stand there with him even if it is ugly, even if it is humiliating, even if it is, God help me, orange.
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