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I don't want to take anything away from Max today, and this isn't a thread that has just come to me, indeed this feeling has been with me for some time. Does anyone else sometimes just get the feeling that sometimes F1 is somehow 'stage managed'? I'm not for one second suggesting that the Merc crash was orchestrated, but that having happened, was it not 'convenient' that Red Bull could grab a win for their new star driver?
As I say, I'm not pinning all this on today's events, I've felt like this for a long time. It's just sometimes things 'happen' and sometimes those things seem to all fall into place, almost as if Bernie has made a phone call to God, or Christian Horner, and 'orchestrated' a GOOD FOR F1 story. It's like every time things are coming to a head over something like overtaking or Merc dominance we suddenly get a strangely enthralling race... I don't know. It's just a feeling, but I just wouldn't be surprised if one day in ten or twenty years time something comes out that Bernie was managing the whole thing.

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Shoot999: "And anyone who puts a Y on the end of his name as a nickname should be punched in the face repeatedly."

Funnily enough, I had a similar thought yesterday. It's remarkable how events seemed to conspire to the result we witnessed. The Mercs take each other out, Red Bull chase the wrong strategy with Ricciardo which moves him out the way and Ferrari do the same with Vettel. It happens at a track where overtaking isn't the easiest, arguably one of the best for Red Bull in terms of defending in that the longest straight is immediately the part of the track their car is best suited to, which ensures Kimi can't ever get close enough to even attempt an overtake. And it all results in an 18-year-old winning his first race for Red Bull. Ultimately, it is nothing more than just coincidence, but could even Bernie himself have written a better script?

p.s. Did you mean to post this in the Games forum?!

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Cheering for: Leclerc, Hulkenberg, Vandoorne
Pick 10 | 1 win, 10 podiums
2017: 6th | 2016: 8th | 2015: 2nd | 2014: 15th | 2013: 17th | 2012: 11th

No I don't know ho it got in the games forum, I looked for this this morning and presumed it had been deleted...

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Shoot999: "And anyone who puts a Y on the end of his name as a nickname should be punched in the face repeatedly."

Two Mercs being arranged to crash - no, I doubt it. Ricciardo ending the race "bitter" after the wrong strategy call when everything was up for grabs, well that's a plausible idea but I wouldn't blame Bernie, I'd point the finger at Uncle Marco with daddy Jos in his ear.

We'll never know until Daniel's autobiography comes out in about 15 years time.


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Me Like - Button, Hamilton, Webber, Rosberg
Over rated, over paid - Räikkönen, Alonso, Vettel. Schumacher
Disappointing - Massa, Kobayashi
I may be wrong about - Alonso

Some of these teams are part of very large corporations and have invested enormous sums of money into the sport in order to showcase their engineering prowess. I highly doubt they would spend all this money just to be part of an orchestrated show. And if it really was orchestrated, Bernie would have intervened to nerf Mercedes' advantage by now and he wouldn't have kept Ferrari uncompetitive for so long.

Ricciardo's strategy made sense at the time as Friday practice had showed that getting 30+ laps out of the medium tyre was going to be difficult. Vettel's makes sense if they wanted to jump Ricciardo and were working on the assumption that Verstappen's strategy wasn't going to work out. They then left Kimi out there on the mediums just in case it did.

Personally I didn't see anything fishy going on. Sure Max was a little fortunate but he's not the first to benefit from that sort of thing.

Bernie did say in the pre race talk on the grid that he was going to put a bomb on the Mercedes!

It's a tempting thought but the Merc crash couldn't possibly have been staged, there's obviously just no way.

But once that had happened could RBR have favoured Max? To be fair before the race we were told 3 stops was meant to be the quickest, and Vettel (who we would expect might be given the optimum strategy if a split were on the cards) also did 3. So I don't think it was a stitch up.

I also don't want to take anything away from Max, for me he's the real deal and deserved the win, no question. But there were four drivers out there who had a good chance of beating him and luck/bad decisions/mistakes/problems took them all out of contention. That's racing, and maybe he'd have beaten them anyway. But it was a bit more Panis/Kovi than his first win should have been, given his talent.

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Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-Epicurus

Just for the sake of clarity..

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Shoot999: "And anyone who puts a Y on the end of his name as a nickname should be punched in the face repeatedly."

I think it was very shortly after the safety car went in that one of the NBC Sports team wondered aloud if those few laps under the safety car could make a two-stop strategy viable there in Barcelona. It doesn't surprise me at all that both Red Bull and Ferrari left their front-running drivers on the preferred strategy and switched the following drivers to an alternate strategy that might come good. I don't think they had very long until the first stops in which to run the simulations that would tell them which strategy was now the better one. Even then, they probably only knew the tire life within a window of laps which only muddied the waters and didn't give a clear choice.

In the end, nothing at all seemed fishy to me about that race. Lucky for Max, unlucky for Daniel. That's the way it goes.

Occasional interesting races happen in otherwise dull seasons, e.g. Canada 2011. The chance of someone not letting something slip is minimal, too many people would have to know to pull off any kind of orchestrated result. Singapore 08 came out despite only really a couple of people needed to know for sure what was happening. The destruction to the reputation of F1 would be in no way worth a tiny bit of extra interest generated by Verstappen winning.