Jon Noble

Williams, we know how close JV and the team is and Toto, and it's a very happy thing there.

Alpine is in the background, new partner and potentially could be.

Mercedes could buy into that team, take a shareholding, have financial interest there.

Then in which case, McLaren's the one that would fall by the wayside.

And this may be why, intriguingly, Zach's talked about we shouldn't allow these AB teams, all these kind of links and cooperation between squads, which I'm sure hasn't gone down very well with Toto.

There was obviously...

mclaren spoke earlier in the year about they weren't mercedes weren't hiding information but that that the lines of communication hadn't been as perhaps open as they'd anticipated so there's all these things going on in the background so i think that that fight if it comes down to a mclaren versus mercedes which guns for the championship but you remember mclaren coming from a long way back because i had terrible start to the year in terms of scoring points and

I think it would be fascinating on track and off it.

I think this is a critical one, not because of any point swing and it's...

George needs to get back into terms.

And if he doesn't, if he finishes second this weekend, points wise, it's finished because there was such a long way to go.

But this is a George Russell track.

He's always gone very, very well here.

Even when the Mercedes hasn't been brilliant, he has found something that made him so strong at this track.

So this is the sort of place where he should be asserting his authority consistently.

over Kimi so I think if this is another weekend where Kimi outpaces George and has a strong weekend and George doesn't then I think that's more indicative of perhaps a change of dynamics at the team in terms of a trend

And the performances we saw last season can't be taken for granted now because either some fundamentals of the car dynamics have changed, the braking's changed or energy management and Kim is just more across it than George is.

Yeah, but I think they can play the game of... I think it'd actually be their preferred scenario if Kimi is getting a lot of points and racking up and going away to play the whole thing down.

So he's still very young, he's going to make mistakes.

Take the pressure off him.