Hello!

My energy has been very low lately. I’ve not been doing a lot lately because of it. Seasonal affective disorder plus chronic fatigue syndrome in the dark months makes Maggie a tired hobbit.

I have been pulled from my winter slumber because I’m annoyed at McLaren for not pitting under the safety car during the Qatar Grand Prix last weekend. Max Verstappen winning the Drivers’ Championship again has become a real prospect and I’ve had enough of that.

This has nothing to do with them being Fair to both drivers, just that it seemed to be an obvious call and it really hurt them. All is not lost, though.

On that note, I’m really happy that Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls have announced their driver line up for 2026 because it gives me some thing else to be annoyed about.

Of course Isack Hadjar is a good driver, but as with the previous occupants of the second RBR seat, he’s doomed to fail. And I think they will until Helmut Marko can be moved aside. Helmut is on the first contract he’s ever had at RBR; it ends at the end of 2026 I think. I think this is to do with the change of management since Dietrich Mateschitz died in 2022.

Can Hadjar hang on til then? That’s only one season away and with Laurent Mekies as team principal I think there’s hope. But. As we’ve seen with Yuki Tsunoda’s erratic form over 2025 there’s only so much Laurent can do.

sigh Anyway. Moving on.

Arvid Lindblad is taking Isack’s seat at Racing Bulls. I know next to nothing about him. He’s been in F2 this year. He finished 6th and I’ve not followed F2 enough to know if this is good or not for his team. It seems to be another rush promotion, but hey, so was Isack and he was pretty good.

The social medias have told me that he is very young—he was born in 2007—and he is making many feel very old. My grey hair already does that so I don’t need the increasingly young rookie drivers for that.

The social medias have also told me that people are already being racist towards him. You see, Arvid is British but doesn’t have a “British” name. Or rather, he’s racing under a British flag, I have no idea about his identity. (Bigots will always find a reason to be bigots.)

Liam Lawson is keeping his seat which is making others angry. I think this is a case of someone who can be aggressive on track being blamed for any incident that happens around him. That isn’t phrased very well, sorry. What I mean is that I think he’s in an exaggerated number of incidents because of his known—but intermittent—aggression.

See also the double standard: Max Verstappen is aggressive = good; Liam Lawson is aggressive = bad. In my opinion, Liam’d do well to get out from under the RBR umbrella as they seem to encourage aggression in their drivers.

I feel better about my podcasting abilities every time I hear him talk, because he says “um” about 20 times in the space of a minute. Just like me. (You can’t see or hear them because I edit them all out.)

Hey, did you know I also have a podcast?

The linky link is here. (Or you can search for Formula Curious on your podcatcher of choice.)

Speaking of aggression, Jos Verstappen said that Lando Norris is overly aggressive and Jos said that McLaren should get Lando to change. Why? Because Lando cut across Max at the start of the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

(I’ll pause here for you to finish laughing.)

But what about Yuki Tsunoda? I’ve not mentioned him yet and we all know Max isn’t going anywhere. It seems RBR have chosen the Alex Albon solution and demoted Yuki straight to the reserve driver role. It also seems that RBR blocked Yuki from pursuing options with other teams, such as Haas. Maybe Honda blocked him as well? Unsure. I’ve heard previously that Honda were loosening their grip on him, allowing Yuki the option of going somewhere not Honda powered. Alas.

I think that’s about all I have to talk about today. I have some housekeeping stuff you can read about below if you want. And if you don’t want to, thanks for being here anyway! :)