re: Formula 1 2021 Season Thread

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Juan Pablo Montoya needed the jet dryer

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I mean

Point is, every great athlete or team needs an opponent to challenge them... the sport is always better that way

Lauda and Hunt
Prost and Senna
Schumacher and Hakkinen
Mazepin and most turns

The list goes on...

Hell of a drive from both Max and Lewis.

I've been watching various forms of racing since around the time Earnhardt was driving that 1984 car Ricciardo took around the track. That's enough racing "street cred" to cheer for whichever driver I want.

I cheered for Hamilton in the 2012 USGP when he passed Vettel to win the race back when Red Bull and Vettel were dominate. This year I am rooting for Verstappen against the dominate Mercedes team.

Just getting back to the hotel so a couple things from this weekend.

Son of a bitch post race traffic is TERRIBLE! After Billy Joel once we got to the car we were back in 20 minutes. Getting back after the race was about 2.5 hours. I’m still glad we got parking passes over the shuttle I think.

Our seats in turn 12 were fantastic, we considered GA but there’s no way I want to fight bringing a chair and holding a spot and getting there hours before any action started.

Watching in person for the first time was a bit of an experience, almost overloading. Felt like there was always something to see. I still kept an eye on the screen to keep up with the action, problem was the video boards didn’t give near the info(timing intervals, etc) that the same TV broadcast gets so that was a bummer.

The cars weren’t as loud as I expected, and sounded different than I expected, TV coverage also doesn’t do their speed justice as well.

I figured apparel at the track would be high but holy shite, the old t shirts from previous GPs were on sale for $40, the cheapest hat was like $60, the McLaren Gulf hats were $120. I’ll order something online later on.

Overall, fun to experience, we’ve enjoyed the hell out of this trip.

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the McLaren Gulf hats were $120

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They are $40 regular


Everything else you said is dead on.

Had someone negotiating for a 5 year old Merc hat my girl was wearing. Crazy how people get for the merch.

And yeah, if you have a car then parking probably turns out better. We left after Diesel threw down and made it back to the hotel around 8:30.

We almost stuck around for Diesel or Kool but decided to bail to try to get back to maybe grab one last dinner. At 6pm we still hadn’t moved far so the hope to catch a show then breeze out wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Ended up eating a Pinthouse Brewing, good stuff.

And yea I showed my wife all the Gulf stuff online last night for much cheaper, I expected it to be higher but not X3.

Anyone else shocked at how laid back security was? They never even opened out bags either day. The metal detector definitely went off as I went though, never even stopped me.

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What was the crowd split between Red Bull and Mercedes?

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Split between Checo and everyone else.

So awesome to see the Mexican fans going all in for Checo.

Ah, a lot further up 35.

Yeah, security was a joke. Today I brought in everything I wanted to drink. They saw and gave no fricks.

We had no problems with traffic on Fri or Sat. Today we watched a little Shaq and then walked the track from turn 7 down to the start. The elevation going into turn 1 is amazing. We then had to walk back to our lot near turn 11. Thankfully we had waters in the car because we were in gridlock for 1.5 hours just to get out of Parking lot from 6p - 7:30p

Although Merc and RBR dominated as far as fans go, there were plenty of McLaren and Ferrari fans too. Significant drop off after those.