Luke Smith

We'll see.

We spoke to one of the team principals for Racing Bulls, Alan Permain, over the break, and he said that their team was actually even just looking at the calendar and thinking, well, what if Saudi were to be reinstated, for example?

Like, where would it go?

So there's a lot of question marks, but it's definitely something F1 will be keeping a very close eye on because, yeah, it has a big impact, not only on the bottom line and the financial income, but

obviously the world championship as well.

If you're doing a season over 20 versus 22 or 24 races.

yeah it's an interesting comparison definitely i think that going into last year we kind of assumed oh this is going to be norris's season he's got the chance and then all of a sudden oscar breaks through and was absolutely scintillating and i think in the early part of this year it's kind of happening again you've got this what 18 19 year old kid um up against george russell who's always just been waiting for an opportunity to fight for a world championship and uh

has finally got it and all of a sudden he's fighting against this young teammate who has won two of the first three races so it's uh yeah definitely going to be interesting if history does repeat itself mercedes does have some experience with this toto wolf um

obviously was in charge when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg had their great battles in the mid 2010s.

So I think Mercedes know how to manage it.

I do also wonder if they'll maybe look at how McLaren handled the situation last year and take a bit of inspiration from that.

But yeah, it's an interesting dynamic because you've got a sort of like a veteran driver, if I could call George Russell that, versus a guy in his second season.

And it's amazing that Kimi's already been so quick and already on the pace.

So yeah, I think that

If it stays this close through the year, it's going to leave Mercedes, I think, with some quite interesting situations to try and handle.