The Official F1 2020 silly season *contains speculation*
Discussion
shirt said:
I’m willing to bet that won’t happen. He’s a journeyman, always has been and always will
be
It may not, and he's no Senna, Prost, Schumacher or Hamilton.be
But I'd put him alongside Tambay, Alboreto, Berger, Irvine, Barrichello, Massa etc.
His results point to his machinery, not his ability. Slower drivers have won and scored more points than him.
In my ideal word..
2020 Hulk to Sauber #2 o na 1 year with option. Giovanazzi has had his chance and not done the business, LeClerc, Russell and Norris has shown it can be done. Hulk is then a Ferrari driver
2021 Hulk becomes a solid #2 to LeClerc if Vettel skips town or a quality driver to use as a yardstick if Kimi moves on. Ferrari then bring Mick up to F1 into the 2nd Sauber seat.
2020 Hulk to Sauber #2 o na 1 year with option. Giovanazzi has had his chance and not done the business, LeClerc, Russell and Norris has shown it can be done. Hulk is then a Ferrari driver
2021 Hulk becomes a solid #2 to LeClerc if Vettel skips town or a quality driver to use as a yardstick if Kimi moves on. Ferrari then bring Mick up to F1 into the 2nd Sauber seat.
andburg said:
In my ideal word..
2020 Hulk to Sauber #2 o na 1 year with option. Giovanazzi has had his chance and not done the business, LeClerc, Russell and Norris has shown it can be done. Hulk is then a Ferrari driver
2021 Hulk becomes a solid #2 to LeClerc if Vettel skips town or a quality driver to use as a yardstick if Kimi moves on. Ferrari then bring Mick up to F1 into the 2nd Sauber seat.
Would make a lot of sense if Vettel doesn't leave the party at the end of the year.2020 Hulk to Sauber #2 o na 1 year with option. Giovanazzi has had his chance and not done the business, LeClerc, Russell and Norris has shown it can be done. Hulk is then a Ferrari driver
2021 Hulk becomes a solid #2 to LeClerc if Vettel skips town or a quality driver to use as a yardstick if Kimi moves on. Ferrari then bring Mick up to F1 into the 2nd Sauber seat.
I dont think anyone is suggesting he's a world beater but he's proven and solid, top teams don't want the hassle of 2 drivers that perform so closely they're figthing internally. Hamilton has Bottas, Vettel had Kimi and Webber. Look at his track record
2014 beat Perez 96/59
2015 beaten by Perez 78/92
2016 beaten by Perez 72/101
2017 beat Sainz/Palmer 43/14(8+6)
2018 beat Sainz 69/53
358 VS 319 for 5 seasons of F1 (ignoring racing palmer its near as damnit equal)
Sainz and Perez are both seen in high regard within the paddock and both lead their respective teams.
We're well into 2019 and he's only 3 points behind Danny Ric.
Nothing there says he's not good enough to stay.
2014 beat Perez 96/59
2015 beaten by Perez 78/92
2016 beaten by Perez 72/101
2017 beat Sainz/Palmer 43/14(8+6)
2018 beat Sainz 69/53
358 VS 319 for 5 seasons of F1 (ignoring racing palmer its near as damnit equal)
Sainz and Perez are both seen in high regard within the paddock and both lead their respective teams.
We're well into 2019 and he's only 3 points behind Danny Ric.
Nothing there says he's not good enough to stay.
shirt said:
Can the hulk fans please point me towards the show of form that has resulted in their admiration.
Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
I wouldn't regard myself as a fan of any of the drivers - an interested observer perhaps. Looking at Hulkenburger's stats he compares well to his teammates. Perez strung together better race finishes in '15 and '16, but otherwise he's equal or ahead. Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
I don't think anyone would argue he's a championship contender, but then neither is Bottas. I see him as very similar - a bloody good driver who is exactly the solid dependable number 2 that Ferrari needs alongside Leclerc.
LaurasOtherHalf said:
shirt said:
Can the hulk fans please point me towards the show of form that has resulted in their admiration.
Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
This is where I’m at with him.Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
shirt said:
Can the hulk fans please point me towards the show of form that has resulted in their admiration.
Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
I'll chip in, if I may. I worked with him for two years, quite recently. Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
Two of the drivers I have been fortunate enough to work with have been head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their understanding of the car beneath them and their ability to feed that information back to the engineers: Pedro de la Rosa and Nico Hulkenberg. I've never written so much feedback down as I did with Hulk - you pretty much downloaded him after a run. He's astonishing.
As a driver I rated him very highly. All the engineers I know who raced against him in the junior formulae were convinced they had seen the Second Coming - they pretty much knew they couldn't beat him anywhere because he had no weaknesses. His record before F1 was brilliant. Then, when he arrived in F1, his performances in the Williams, the first time around with Force India and the awful Sauber were amazing. Quite why he was never picked up by a big team in those days baffles me.
He seems to have dropped off the boil a bit recently though. I don't watch F1 these days but I keep roughly in touch with what happened in each race and I wonder what his relationship with his race engineer is like at Renault. He spent many years working with the brilliant Tom McCullough at several teams, firstly as a tester and then driver at Williams, plus Sauber and Force India and I know they had a great relationship (of course in his last stint at FI Tom was Chief Race, but they still spent a lot of time together and discussed everything). If a driver and team aren't on the same wavelength then things can turn quite sour as they don't maximise the whole package but, to the outside world, it just appears that the driver is being beaten by his team mate and that's the worst possible outcome. I don't know much about Renault's trackside engineering department these days but I remember that at the start of 2016 the Haas team took many engineers and staff from Lotus/Renault who were looking for a more, um, stable future than Lotus appeared to have during the latter stages of 2015...
Hulk is a genuine class act in my opinion - and a really nice bloke to boot. It wouldn't surprise me if the reality is more that he's been let down by his current team. As for the choice of Grosjean or Hulk, well you'd have to be absolutely certifiably insane to select the stroppy, sulky, erratic child Big Toilet over a bloke who could have helped give them a bit of direction.
(There, I didn't mention his brilliant performance in the night at Le Mans, where he passed all the other factory cars and drove off into the distance in his first ever night race, once. Oh bugger...)
Edited by Ahonen on Thursday 19th September 10:55
shirt said:
Can the hulk fans please point me towards the show of form that has resulted in their admiration.
Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
He was best of the rest last year. And that's despite having just 5th as his best result - no one's really a fan of him because he doesn't do anything spectacular to cheer. But I can appreciate that the flip side of that is that he gets solid overall results and as rarely underperforms as he does overperform. If I were confident in my car I'd value that.Not taking the piss, I just don’t see it and never have. Also please don’t point to Le Mans as any kind of indicator.
Shocked Grosjean has been retained for 2020, he has had the most 'second chances' of any driver in F1 and I haven't seen enough improvement or consistency from him to merit them. There has to be more to this decision than just pure performance because based on that he should have been out at the end of 2018 never mind 2019.
patmahe said:
Shocked Grosjean has been retained for 2020, he has had the most 'second chances' of any driver in F1 and I haven't seen enough improvement or consistency from him to merit them. There has to be more to this decision than just pure performance because based on that he should have been out at the end of 2018 never mind 2019.
Haas is following the path of Williams and will probably join them in Formula 1.75. It doesn't seem to be a professional team, so many mistakes and strange decisions. Hulkenberg was probably aware of that and raised his financial expectations accordingly.Gassing Station | Formula 1 | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff