🪜 thoughts
Nov. 19th, 2022 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goaltender
i have long wanted to make sense of the pains in fr driver funding and thought to delve into alpine's managerial difficulties but the endless layers really seem so intricate and complex that i don't know where to start myself.... these are just some clippings and observations floating around my head but i really can only bother to "examine" so much. none of it will make sense and i apologize for that
at the end of the day... everything is relative. maybe that's what interests me when it comes to the baseline psychology of it, this point i've been trying to reflect on from everything we've discussed recently (with our lec and msc narrative parallels), like the sheer variance in the constant fact of being pitiable or the conundrum of sporting landscapes and their fandoms and how expectations are fostered differently through opportunity. it's funny almost to feel "bad" for al's wasted karting development when he's still getting a dams drive next year vs. hd giving up single-seaters because he couldn't even afford eff three carlin... of course everything about sports with high monetary barriers is insane to a degree because it forcibly becomes incredibly insular and there's always a step further down the ladder of developmental restriction that you can "acknowledge" so to speak (talent environment mentality nature nurture everything...... but that's way beyond the point of this post). then thinking about hadrien makes me feel insane because it just reminds me of how much of an unintelligible mess alp's junior system is, even though it's not quite as questionable of an environment as the fda is. but everything in sporting is both relative and reactive. or well maybe not, but with oscar being used as the scapegoat he has been by so many figureheads to justify reorganization it does at least spotlight motivations of several junior systems, even if i hesitate to say that the crb proceedings have had as much impact on team operations as some purport (including hd in his assessment of alpine's financial recalcitrance)
something that's interesting to me about the fr motorsport world is that in a way it seems very centralized? you can probably say that about teams and media from other nations because obviously all motorsport is 95% politics and 5% racing but i'm just not as familiar... i think it's very like. there are unique pain points compared to the italian/british scene from only having one french constructor on the grid, zero customer team, the configuration of the ffsa, even the failures of paul ricard as a racing venue, etc. that overall establish an interesting bed of Circumstances. french f4 is cheap, italian isn't, top teams especially aren't, in fewer words you get what you pay for... but of course for all that it is inequitable italian holds the most "prestige" and its exclusivity is sustained by a proximity to the f1 scene through relevant tracks and factory operations, which on a feeder level isn't easily duplicable, hence adac's heaving struggles in grid population. but on the political side, the operational side, how is any of that proximity maintained without the entire cycle being properly oxygenated? there's nothing revelatory in saying that this is the basis of everything but sometimes it's like Damn that really is the basis of everything.
like again, for example, to talk about sharl's funding is to talk about jules and todt is to talk about the french junior scene circa 2007 is to talk about the estepierre family drama and pierre and anthoine's ascension through the ffsa academy and forcibly renault/alpine's tie-ins into the feeder ladder and oscar's contractual drâme and the ripples of "piastrigate" et donc BREF.
i've said before that the only people i've seen be truly mad about oscar are a handful of resentful dr3-loving australians and 80% OF FRENCH ALPINE FANS. which at the time made me feel so incredibly toxic not because (again) i care about how oscar's character is perceived but just because i can't stand to see people lack perspective of complex situations!!! that's what fascinates me so much with french people sometimes... like you can't admit defeat but have a huge ego, wish failures and agonies upon all your enemies but also seem to think yourself benevolent and generous and scorned...? OK. U can see where pg10 gets it from. i kid but also it really is the most hilariously unserious situation wherein normal people will be like yes rossi is systematically dismantling everything cyril ever touched out of sheer incompetent bumbling egotism, or maybe putting two french drivers who notoriously have not gotten along well is maybe not the best look, etc., and these fans will see the situation and be like well it seems that actually zak brown is the problem. but then i realize that in all fairness it's not like the infrastructural failures beyond the fanfare of piastrigate and the talking points of the crb ordeal are easily recognizable...? i don't know. but maybe that's what interests me, how all these little things just build on top of themselves.
i think it's unfair to say that the junior system is entirely broken because it has done some good, on a certain quantifiable level, in providing opportunities to its academy and affiliate drivers, which again is maybe a matter of perspective (is the point of a team academy necessarily to promote everyone to f1... clearly few systems can be as ruthlessly efficient as rbjt. say what you want about marko but he is at the least directly communicative in his expectations), yet still the ladder of ascension remains in pieces, especially considering that the man responsible for so much of the scouting and alternative support was ousted by revolving leadership. worse yet is that the bottlenecks atm are a twin consequence of patriotic exaggeration and miserly indecision. greed and self-misevaluation on every extreme... as an aside it's funny that oco's manager from the gravity days-which both not only supported este through single-seaters until initial merc links but also instigated the ffsa rift that lost him massive federal acknowledgement-has since become embedded in the mercedes system, and is the guy who scouted kimi at 12 and poached him from fda inquiry lol. (not 2 mention hadrien eboullier management... girl no wonder ur ass can't find a seat!!!!!)
VS.
the funny thing is that even though charles didn't exactly have lando levels stability growing up i don't think he's ever known what it's like to basically not be the main focus or feel like a PriorityTM, just on the level of familial support and well-timed connections he was privy to. if this were a sharl post perhaps one could talk about the increased pressure of being "the chosen one" and how his brothers both gave up something for his sake, in lorenzo's case for jules first, but it isn't and so it won't be. i just think that it's interesting because when we compare 1016's friendship to how pierre and esteban were during their karting days, it makes it clear that it's just as much a reflection of circumstance as it is character; "sometimes when there are issues on track, this affects [drivers'] friendship off-track [...] but i knew to make the difference with pierre," as if it were simply a matter of personal conviction and not a consequence of h2h financial strife aggravating a childhood rapport in a way that never tangibly manifested for charles growing up. then pierre, in response: "we're both competitive so i don't expect any gifts from charles." in a lot of ways i don't believe pierre's character has changed from his younger self at all.
but anthoine, a grade below. charles, two... one immediately revelatory piece of pierre's karting blog is the entry where he disses esteban's father for getting him disqualified from the bridgestone cup finale in 2007—especially fascinating because it's been commented on by exactly One (1) guy who raced with pierre and esteban but never made it out of karting, hashtag it's all relative, and was basically like "all right mate let's cool it with the slander"—but beyond this relic the blog functions as fascinating insight into many finer points of pgasly's self-propelling entitlement:
this blog wasn't just a diary touched by the rash and self-aggrandizing honesty of a middle school boy—whose longterm but tumultuous friendship with esteban, even with this dig at his father in 2007, was well-documented into 2009; it was initially and ultimately a marketing tool. first post of every season: a preview of his sponsorship packet and calls for further communication. in the comments, kids or parents of karting kids asking for examples of his portfolio so they could reference it in their own search of monetary support. i don't know why the promotional hustle of french juniors is so incredibly... outward-facing so much of the time, but in the larger context of recent fr motorsport performances and federal budget injections the foundations of their childhood rift feel very transparently perceivable.
back to alpine: i think the system is fucked because there are too many entry points but also contingencies, conditions that are exploited and repurposed in the name of narrative control and inefficient efforts toward ill-envisioned ideas of stability ([pokes finger at reflection in the mirror] repeat after me. You Are Not The Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team.) (oscar is procedurally given the academy spot by winning eurocup which punishes vma with the affiliation suspension under the assumption he'd be reinstated with a follow-up success, okay, then oscar's dependence on academy support is overblown in alpine's mishandling of the contract debacle, okay..., not even mentioning that guanyu was pocketing costs on oscar and christian's testing in the first place), because in the end the identity of french motorsport in f1 is stymied by infrastructural fragility. and renault's future vision in f1 doesn't really exist on a tangible level, ultimately, but i digress. otmar is a mouthpiece for rossi who contributes to the rot but isn't necessarily the only pollutant. the relationship with prost really does say enough
what interests me about hadrien's frankness is that in an old interview, a year before and at the end of his first freca season, he talks about how great america seems and how he'd love to make a career there if given the chance. and now, after turning to endurance, there's the part in this latest interview about it—he looked everywhere, not just america but also japan, for another option, a way of continuing. but in reality it only takes One (1) pay driver dropping out of your teammate fund to have an offer dematerialize and shatter your single-seater dreams.
and really the thing is that the decisions are fully justifiable on the academy side! trimming support and going the fda route of self-sufficiency is understandable, because why bother putting more eggs in the basket when you have a motogp nepobaby (and fraudwell) to do the heavy lifting? but also, still... i think the sheer misrepresentation still boggles me a bit, like the audacity to pretend that they invested sooo much into oscar when his primary sponsor was always familial, and he had webber's managerial support for finding sponsors and alpine were getting residual bank out of guanyu anyway, etc., and then they can't even justify the value in a subsidized midfield seat as a stepping stone toward a more complete second push in part because of their preoccupation with image rehabilitation? and THEN THEY BLAME OSCAR FOR IT. i also don't know why people seem so adamant that williams is eager to let any academy driver fill their seat as an intermediary stopgap for the midfield (i suppose misunderstanding claire's work with george or alex's own affiliations) because they actually pay for sar in f2 and have supported osu through the exact route hadrien could have realistically taken. and it's not to say that i think he couldn't have done better in freca to prove himself or that he's some total inevitable talent, but again it's clear that he's enough of a talent that for it to all end before he even gets to the f3 grid, especially after successful testing, feels like a lost opportunity. and maybe lost opportunities are most tangible to us when they are just within the grasp of possibility; we only appreciate the depth of something when it is very nearly at its point of inception. but with all of alpine's miniature faux pas, the lun zho vma pia struggles and their constant affiliate shuffling and the alonso issues cementing a canon of... perhaps not malfeasance, but surely there must be something in the realm of statistical significance here, a Careers Derailed Above Expected if you will, that cannot be solely explained by the crapshoot holistic randomness of a developmental system.
Makes u think
