I think we all love Kimi and no one is going to deny him this moment.
Just be prepared that in the background I can promise you things are not going well.
Mercedes decision to not give its customer teams the full race spec engine till the first race weekend, and then still not give them the full software package to run it, despite 11 pre arranged days of testing (of which you could run 9) , to work through technical gremlins that may result in, oh I don’t know, say, cars failing to start races will have raised some eyebrows at the FIA and FOM.
Now whilst this may be understandable from a Mercedes team perspective. Probably not least for those individuals who are answering to the board over why a customer team has taken the constructors championship the last two years and the drivers championship last year. It has lead to some inherent, avoidable and foreseeable problems.
Firstly, Australia one of the Williams’ cars failed to start the race. There are those that say the battery deployment in Oscar’s McLaren lead to his crash and him failing to start the race. However that is two Mercedes powered cars not making it to the grid. One failed to even qualify.
Then China, 3 Mercedes powered cars failed to make the grid.
This is not the look FIA and FOM management wanted for these new regulations. Hence the aforementioned test days. It’s a really bad advertisement for what is marketed as the pinnacle of motorsport.
It also does scream a little of desperation. Mercedes ensuring their team has a substantial head start on their customers, really makes people question, do they not believe their team and drivers can win without this tactic? Which if so, I don’t know who should be MORE insulted. Their drivers, their engineers or the customer teams who wasted time and money going to the tests in the first place!
However, for today they can hide behind Kimi’s first win. But it’s 2 weeks to Japan. And I won’t be shocked if questions start being asked and “discussions” are held. Because let’s be fair. If anything is looking at damaging the market and reputation of FOM’s cash cow, it gets nixed pretty quickly.
Honestly, if you take the McLaren and Max fans out the currently pool of race fans, there is a lot of money to be lost. And with the revenue they are already losing from having to cancel at least two Grand Prix this year. Let’s just say they don’t care about individuals, they care about the zeros on the bank balance.
So let Kimi have his day. But Toto must know he’s in for a rough two weeks. As are the HPP reps at customer factories.
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