For all the 15 birbs I’ve sent out up to now, most people said thank you, some people said that’s pretty, four of them made a birb related joke (Sam himself, Toni, Jake H, and Robin for his own birb because I gave him a robin), two pairs of them commented on each other’s birbs (Jake D and Norman, Ollie R and Sacha). Some asked me why (Edo), some asked me really (Ollie R, because I said he has the facial expression of a potoo), some asked me “is it for me” (Nick in Shanghai).
But only one told me “wow this is crochet”.
Only one told me “oh sorry I don’t have it with me now, my girlfriend stole it yesterday” (London 2023) / “of course I remember, it’s now in my living room” (Shanghai 2024) / “I like your last bird too” (London 2024).
And only one told me EVERY TIME “how long does it take you to do this, it must be so difficult”.
This person was, is, and will always be the person I support, not only for how good he drives and how resilient he can be, but also for the appreciation he holds to everyone.
“Thank you so much for everything, and see you again.” — Mitch Evans, 2024
I've been reading through your blog and honestly formula e sounds goated. Any recs on how to get more into it?
uhm, I don't really know to be honest, these days. I was sort of bemoaning this in the gc but there's not a lot of content to get people into it; there's stuff on Formula E's own website but it follows the races fairly specifically, tends not to have eg: feature-style interviews to get to know drivers and stuff. The Race has consistent FE coverage from the paddock but it tends towards being political-within-the-sport, which is extremely interesting but doesn't really give you a favourite driver to root for or whatever.
the FE youtube channel has some documentaries, including a feature-length film made by Hollywood. I am in said film a genuinely mystifying amount but it also is a good profile of a bunch of the drivers, most of whom are still in the series. Unplugged (again, I am in the first series more than is in any way necessary, sorry) also has a lot more behind-the-scenes driver profiling and digging into the championship a little bit DTS-style.*
one thing to be warned about is that old races have the commentator Jack Nicholls on them, who was fired for sexual misconduct.
other than that there is influencer content around races (and the FUCKING EVO Sessions which were a horrible idea where youtubers without anything like enough training drove full-whack race cars aaargh why) and a few bits of social but I don't know if I just can't find/don't see anything more in-depth or it literally doesn't exist.
I guess under the cut here is a run down of who's in the current season? I barely fucking know anymore tbh.
sooooooo by drivers and teams in roughly the order I remember they exist
Nissan
It's the team that used to be Renault e.Dams, who dominated the early years of FE. Jean-Paul Driot (RIP, genuinely brilliant bloke who gave so many drivers chances no one else would) was at the helm until his untimely death from cancer in 2019 and as the team was passed across the uneasy Renault-Nissan alliance. Alex Albon was signed to and nearly raced for them in the 2019-2020 season (or 'Season 6' as per Formula E's tendency to make it sound like a reality series) but got phoned by Helmut Marko literally on the morning of testing and his seat was eventually stepped into by-
Oliver Rowland - current reigning champion
The most salt-of-the-earth driver ever, a wholesome Northern english lad who has also worked incredibly hard to help drivers up the junior ladders. Used to run his own karting team. Very good driver. Loves a sausage roll. if you want to get into some deep lore when he was in junior series and having to work as a karting mechanic to afford groceries in between races he became chalk-and-cheese friends with billionaire oligarch's son Sergey Sirotkin which somehow seemed to make them both better anyway most important thing is Ollie is great, good to root for. girldad if you care about that sort of thing.
Norman Nato
I will be honest I am not sure why Norman Nato is on this team instead of Sam Bird (the third driver) given their relative achievements but I guess that is how contracts work while the McLaren FE team (RIP) was imploding. anyway, nice lad who's friends with the Leclercs if you care about that sort of thing. It's pronounced natto. (He is a perfectly talented driver he just isn't Sam Bird)
DS Penske
the DS brand is kind of an FE OG in that it's been hanging around since Season 2 (when manufacturers could make their own powertrains) and for the fraught and awful and legitimately bad but also ROMANTIC and COMPELLING Sam Bird/Jean-Eric Vergne pairing at Virgin. lmao imagine that there used to be a Virgin team and they put those two on it. anyway. DS are now departing FE at the end of this season which is not that surprising given a) DS is a baffling boutique brand that barely makes cars, b) it is part of Stellantis which has 23094598 uncomfortably alligned brands of which at least two are in FE at any given time, c) it is hard to quantify what any brand gets out of being in Formula E. but anyway. Penske is the same family as the one that owns IndyCar buuuuuut this is Jay Penske, not Roger. I never in person saw Jay Penske remove his sunglasses and it's really scary he keeps showing up on broadcast without them, like the demon headmaster or some other reference no one under the age of 40 and not forced through the British schooling system would get. they have been uncomfortably alligned (Penske used to be called Dragon and was uhm. bad. DS used to be Techeetah and was very good.) since Gen3 started. oh, btw, they are on the third gen of FE cars which means they're now genuinely powerful race cars not the early funny stuff which I would still argue was excellent even and maybe especially when the drivers had to jump to another car halfway through the race.
Taylor Barnard
a twink who ruined Sam Bird's career and the man will NOT let you not know about it. Taylor is prodigiously talented for such a young age much like-
Maximilian Gunther
Who now counts as some sort of veteran but was FE's youngest race winner for ages. man has put up with so much including a season at Dragon where he was literally finding out if he would be racing that weekend on the weekend. he is very funny and a total saint.
Jaguar
entered FE in Season 3 with a roar of cringefail. big deal for a manufacturer to be turning up then, even bigger deal for it to be Jaguar who had basically done fuck-all since losing that massive diamond off its F1 car in Monaco that one time. Alex Lynn haunts the narrative [Umbrella by Rihanna voice[ bECAUSE
Mitch Evans
Mahk Wibbah's first and most cursed protegee. Mitch should probably have two championships, at least and is without doubt one of the best drivers in Formula E. has stuck with Jaguar from their cringefail era to near-dominance to cringefailing out of dominance to fumbling to cringeing and failing uh. anyway, super nice fella who is a very cheery kiwi and probably once of the funniest people in motorsport. incredible levels of verbal diarrhea when asked any question.
Antonio Felix Da Costa
used to have a compellingly homoerotic friendship with Robin Frijns but now just quite annoying and transphobic.
actually you know what it's 4am I might have to come back to this.
*a thing I've just remembered from filming that first season - which basically me and Matt Kew got told we were doing and then were like... ok I guess we are. needless to say I was never paid for any of this. anyway, it was all filmed in this very chaotic way where they decided who they were following one weekend and asked us about it on the Friday, before anything had happened. me and Matt agreed, after a few races of both stressing about what on earth we were going to get edited into saying, that we'd just answer completely opposite things to each other. are Stoffel and Nyck friends? one of us says they're the closest drivers on the grid, the other one says they fucking hate each other and communicate exclusively through third parties. we both found out the release date for the series (9 months after we'd been told it would come out weekly after races) via The Race. anyway! all very normal. man I miss Matt he was my best paddock rival.
More of a question for visibility. I honestly believe we need to name and shame certain people in the paddock carrying a “media pass”. Meanwhile, just in case if name and shame is too high risk, could you name a couple of people that are trustworthy both from the perspectives of journalism and just, being a decent human?
(Choose not to use anon since I don’t want to be perceived as one carrying ill will. Again we need name and shame.)
(Also attaching my precious neutered coward ginger man as a thank you gift to Hazel)
omg do not Wash him. what a nice boy.
name and shame is too long a post to write in the 15 minutes before I need to get back downstairs to the bar. so the more positive version it is.
err yes so this is totally off the top of my head but there are actually a fair number of decent journalists out there even in the paddock cohort. Luke Smith is a good man who, even when he was extremely early on in his career, risked it completely to stand up to the bad ones.
I will to my last breath say Dre Harrison deserves a much better position in motorsport and the whole thing should be desperately grateful to have him. he's office-based currently but I hope he'll get back out to paddocks soon.
Giles Richards himself is a genuinely good bloke. he and I had a probably-the-only-time-this-has-ever-happened-in-motorsport encounter where we were having an intense argument about whether it was the feminist thing to do to go to Saudi Arabia because otherwise I was colluding with people not wanting me to or whether this was colluding with the Saudi state anyway.
Ben Hunt is a good guy. I don't think he currently has a paddock job and I'm not sure what he's doing rn. James Elson is definitely a good man and excellent journalist but he was just suddenly let go from Motor Sport and I'm not sure what he's doing right now.
Benjamin Vinel is brilliant and a longstanding friend of mine. I really respect the thoughtful, measured approach.
none of the women I knew who worked in the paddock still are. I'm not convinced there's any women in print media doing anything close to the whole season.
I worked with Keith Collantine at racefans for a very long time and he's another genuinely good person who tries to do good as much as you can when running a motorsport publication.
I'm seeing a lot of discussion about whether the press conference was privately hosted by RB and therefore they were valid in kicking out Giles, but was it actually a privately hosted event or just part of the general media activities? If you know more I'd love to know, cos I can't find a solid answer 😅 (not that I think it changes anything tbh, but I want all the facts!)
It's not a press conference at all tbf which I think is part of what's confusing. It's a Thursday media session.
lemme explain the deeply arcane and mad structure of an F1 media weekend. So firstly, media day is now back to Thursday. They sort of tried to move it to Friday, in theory to condense the weekend but it didn't really work and everyone ended up at the track on Thursdays anyway so: that's media day again.
as part of being an F1 team and/or driver there is an obligation to provide some minimum amount of media availability over a weekend. there are some circumstances where teams argue their way out of bits of it - like McLaren excusing their drivers from written media sessions before Abu Dhabi last year - but as a rule there's an expectation that drivers will do:
one 10-15 minute written media session on Thursday
TV pen interviews on Thursday
FIA press conference if called up for it
TV pen interviews following whatever the final session is on Friday
a shorter (maybe 5 mins, sometimes even less, sometimes more) standing written media session
IF sprint race then top 3 must do post-sprint FIA media duties ('podium' interview)
TV pen after qualifying
short, standing written media session post-qualifying
TV spots during race build-up (on the grid, etc)
Top 3 must do FIA media duties (podium interview, press conference)
TV pen post-race
Short written media session post-race, these are often VERY short
This is actually a hell of a lot of media commitment during a weekend where they, y'know, also need to drive their race cars. And that's leaving aside any individual interviews that drivers may have been booked in for - maybe a one-to-one profile interview for a feature or a specific TV spot like eg: Martin Brundle talks through the 'championship mentality' with Lando Norris as a 10 minute feature in race build-up.
So it is a lot. Especially when you then add on fan stage and sponsor duties. If you think most football or hockey players would not be expecting to be interviewed at all over the course of a game, unless they're the captain or have done something exceptional, then yes that looks like a pretty major burden for F1 drivers and why they sometimes look really fucking fed up with media.
Anyway, that aside, the way a written media session works is you get told ahead of time when the driver will be available, by the team PRs and then you go there and find them. On the Thursday that's in hospitality and it's when you get photos of a driver surrounded by 70 phones and recorders and a whole crowd of people crushed around them the other side of the table.
There's no particular order to who gets to ask questions, although occasionally a PR will guide it if there's a lull and sometimes it's pre-agreed who will get the first question. It's all a bit of a willy-waving show of dominance about who does what and who has to 'waste' their question asking the obvious (since you all get the whole session's audio to use) and whatever. But it's meant to be for efficiency, so the driver does 10-15 minutes and then everyone's got some quotes.
If you've got media accreditation (so not VIP or sponsor-backed or something, you must have an FIA media lanyard) then you can get in. The FIA in fact will get a bit lairy if you're not let in or don't get a good enough seat or whatever, assuming you're some old white geezer who's more than a bit entitled.
Sometimes drivers do refuse to have journalists in these sessions. It's usually on the grounds of having recently written something personally offensive about them or having been particularly invasive. It's not usually about a question about the sport asked four months ago.
Anyway I hope that has cleared that up, so: it is a session hosted by Red Bull at their hospitality but which they are expected to do by FOM and which anyone with media accreditation has access to.
FEN: Thought on the actual battle with Antonio on the penultimate lap?
EVA: “I just wanted to stress my bosses a bit! Actually, it was more to protect myself from Dan (Ticktum) behind. Because that’s kind of how I got Dan in the first place. He was trying to stay behind Antonio and I was able to get around the outside of him. It’s like when the peloton races happen, you’re going side by side. If it flows then it protects your position a bit. So, it was more for that to try and to protect position.”
Rii: someone never cursed their boss presumably because they never worked, and it shows
Rii: imagine you receive a request which is fucking stupid to you but “can benefit the team” from your manager, and the request is from your skip
Rii: what’s the first thing you would do?
Rii: how common is it in Big 4 to curse your manager and your skip privately on a daily basis no matter how close you are with them
Rii: I still occasionally curse my ex-boss even if we follow each other on Instagram
Rii: so yeah, Mitch Evans yelling at Alan Cocks in the radio about the decision of holding the position, in normal corporate language
Rii: “I’m fucking finishing this task in 30 minutes and now you change the original output format to something barely making sense to me because another group member says they can benefit from the extra procedures. Hello and fuck off”
Amelia: all I can see is trauma
Rii: yes welcome to Big 4
Rii: Mitch is even a better person than I do because I would fucking curse the group member who raised this stupid fucking idea
Sita has always believed in the principle of equivalent exchange. She is well aware that this does not refer to a purely idealised exchange of equal value; such a thing simply does not exist in reality. Yet within the intricate system of her own world, there must be a reasonable expectation of return for whatever is given. One gives labour and receives money; one gives money and receives goods and services; one gives emotional value and receives emotional value in return. Exchange fear for the sense of relief that follows it; exchange time for the temporary peace that lies beyond it. Compared to her father’s system, this one allows for far greater flexibility: she does not necessarily have to receive material gain, nor does she have to insist on not being at a disadvantage in such exchanges. According to her psychologists, this is the degree of flexibility society demands of women; through compromises in these exchanges, she demonstrates the magnanimity and tolerance expected of a woman during her socialisation. Yet this does not mean she must endure it indefinitely; when the exchange becomes clearly unequal, she can walk away, she can stop, she can give up. Thus, it remains a form of equivalent exchange.
And so, time and again, she chooses to exchange a crocheted bird for an opportunity - or many opportunities. Exchanging for the chance to speak with the racing drivers, exchanging for their genuine reactions, exchanging for their smiles. If one were to calculate the value strictly in terms of equivalence - as her former colleagues might ask, ‘How much do you sell this toy for?’ - then the time value involved might be daunting. But the process of making the birds relaxes her, so she overlooks this. She simply chooses to use the birds as a means of appreciation, to say hello to this group of people in the paddock who are so far removed from her.
Some returned her greeting. Some nodded in acknowledgement. Some said thank you. Some told her a joke, and everyone laughed. These responses fell within the range of her expectations, some higher, some lower, but they all amounted to what she had hoped for.
Until one guy suddenly said, ‘Do you make those crocheted toys yourself? They are so well made; did they take a long time?’
Then he called out to her, ‘I remember you. You’re the bird-maker.’
Perhaps one day she would fly to any corner of the world, like a bird. Perhaps she would fly closer to him, or perhaps she would fly far away. Perhaps, in one in ten thousand chances, she might choose to fly out of this world altogether, because this world constantly imposes a burden she finds too heavy to bear, and because this world expects to mould her into a form she does not know how to cope with. But in his heart, she was the ‘bird-maker’. Of East Asian descent, wearing glasses, black curls tucked beneath the brim of a wide-brimmed hat, she carried a string of cotton drawstring bags. As if by magic, she pulled a crocheted bird from one of the bags and placed it in his hands. He would look forward to it, he would be delighted, he would share the story behind the bird with his friends, and he would complain to her that his girlfriend had snatched the bird away.
If that were the case, she would be quite happy to remain in this world, continuing to be this ‘bird-maker’ - no matter where he was, no matter where she was.
Original in Chinese. Translated with DeepL (https://dee.pl/app)
In the past 10 hours I have been pissed off by the following things:
Someone saying Mitch was scolding Toni in the radio - the broadcast edit did him dirty; the part of him scolding a driver was talking about Nico Müller moving under brake; Alan Cocks subsequently said the team reported this (but this answer was edited out in the broadcast);
Someone saying Mitch was unhappy because he didn’t get favourable treatment - no, he was unhappy because he was explicitly told by the team immediately after reaching P2 that he needed to hold the position. Exact wording.
Someone saying Mitch was angry at Toni not giving the position - WTF he congratulated Toni right after the race before telling Ian he didn’t want to talk further;
Someone saying Mitch wanted to pass Toni but he couldn’t because of Toni’s defence - no Mitch followed the team radio to hold the position; he confirmed in post race that he was mostly to avoid being chased by Dan - this could be seen clearly from some of his lines around apex;
Someone saying Mitch’s contract was negotiated to include a term that he won’t be as a second driver and will not follow team orders - well I can’t explain how I know it but I know THIS IS NOT THE CASE; if any details, he MUST obey team orders when they are issued, this is contracted;
Someone saying Mitch has been getting favourable treatments back in Barclay era - I don’t know what to say but one key criterion of selecting Mitch’s teammate is “able to over-perform Mitch”, this has been clearly the case since Season 4;
I’m so tired I just want to sleep normally without getting more acid reflux from beta blockers.
To summarise with a Chinese saying in my generation - please donate your eyes to blind people if you don’t need them…
Tell me if there is anything I can make to truly turn Mitch Evans’s luck around so I can give it to him before his current contract with Jag expires (although I feel the legal has already drafted a contract in the shared drive)
Tell me if there is anything I can make to truly turn Mitch Evans’s luck around so I can give it to him before his current contract with Jag expires (although I feel the legal has already drafted a contract in the shared drive)
