Scott Mitchell-Malm

I'm going to go with Red Bull purely because I know that the McLaren will have a lot of upgrades on it.

I think the Red Bull will have a lot of interesting stuff on it and therefore that's what I'm most excited to see because even though I haven't seen what the McLaren has, a little part of that kind of intrigue is naturally satisfied by the knowledge that it's coming, whereas Red Bull is just such an unknown.

I want to get there.

I want to see...

how different it is, and then obviously I want to see if it's any good, because Max Verstappen's obviously been centre of attention for how unhappy he is, but Isaac Hajar has taken three races to basically throw the design team at Red Bull under the bus and describe the chassis as terrible in Japan.

So, yeah, I'm very interested to see how that looks.

It's actually reminding me a little bit.

It's a much smaller gap.

But do you remember when the, and who could forget, when everything got interrupted by COVID in 2020, when the season finally started again, I remember Red Bull brought like the, they basically skipped two upgrade packages, didn't they?

And what they ended up starting the season with was the car that they planned to have like

three packages in during 2020 and they got it wrong like so much of it was changed and so little was validated basically in terms of on track that it didn't work as they wanted it to right at the start and that's the danger here you've got um you've got the element of

lots of design and development work has gone in.

The teams will obviously be pretty confident because they'll crucially have the three actual race weekends plus a lot of testing that they'll have to reference it.

So it should all work.

But if anybody is changing their car pretty much front to back, if there are...

borderline conceptual changes in in what they're doing that does have the scope to catch you out especially because it is a brand new rule set and this will be the first time every single team has done a major upgrade within it now i don't think they'll be quite as tricky as the crown defect cars in terms of an upgrade just flat out not working and making the car worse but

But if you've got all the, any time you introduce more than one item, if they don't talk to each other the way that you're expecting to, and the car doesn't work collectively as you expect it to, trying to unpick where it's gone wrong is really difficult.

Adding a sprint weekend to that, even with, as you say, like a 90 minute FP1.

there's massive chance here for someone to step on a banana skin.

Yeah, and the point about people with a lot to do and a lot to improve getting caught out, the other side of that coin almost is the teams that had started brightly and wanted to make hay while the sun was shining, and they've had races taken away from them where they had the edge.