I'd say Smedley - talking on the Red Flags podcast - is completely right in his observation/assessment about he current race engineers trying to 'please' and 'baby' - yes, all of you will start to mention Hockenheim 2010 and the "Felipe baby, stay cool" - their driver too much, like you see for example a lot at McLaren and Ferrari:
“In general, I think in Formula 1 now, there’s too much pussyfooting around.
Like, the way the radio messages go to the driver, I’m like, ****ing grow a pair, man. Just tell him what you need to tell him.”
“You give any narcissistic sociopath an inch and they’ll take a yard, right, so don’t give him that inch to start with. Don’t give him this fact that I’ve got some kind of inferiority complex here and I’m going to tell you something and maybe you’ll do it… No, mate, we’re at work, right? I’m going to tell you something, you do it.
When my boss tells me something, I do it. That’s the way the world works. And if we don’t do that, right, as long as we’re not working for narcissists and sociopaths and they’re telling us to do the wrong things, if we don’t do that in a high-pressure environment like this, the whole thing’s going to get spun off its axis.”
“There’s a lot of this stuff like: should I make a decision? Should I ask this driver to move over or that driver to move him? Will his feelings be hurt? Look, you’re only ever going to get one driver at the end of the race who’s happy, right? You can’t please all of the people all of the time. So just ****ing grow a pair and get on and make the decisions that you need to make.”
“Between Max and GP, they’ve definitely got that relationship right. GP tells him how it is and Max will fire back.
One thing I really like about GP – and again that’s very similar to how I always felt as well – is sometimes the drivers can get slightly sociopathic with their views on the team. These are guys who are staying up until midnight a lot of the nights working for you and getting things right. You’ve heard GP a couple of times, and I’ve definitely said it to my drivers, I think you need to go back in the garage and apologise to the guys because how you’ve been behaving is not very adult, or you haven’t been a very nice person, put in polite terms, so get in there and apologise. GP’s done that with Max, I certainly did it in my time.
During one especially tense race last year, Lambiase told Verstappen he would not be drawn into ‘childish’ exchanges over whether other drivers were complying with the rules. I think the way Gianpiero conducts himself on the radio is probably just a reflection of their real relationship. They’ve got this good relationship, you’ve got a relationship that works, they both rely on each other fully and they both trust each other fully. When you’ve got that, you can talk to each other how you want. You don’t have to have this like, ‘control,’ ‘check,’ ‘ten-four,’ all of this nonsense, right? We are checking, ****ing hurry up then because I’m driving a car at 200 miles an hour.”
Edited by JL14, Yesterday, 22:20.
