CoffeeViolinist

It’s the fact that they’re so shameless about it now too. They’re not even pretending not to know there’s anything wrong. They basically just told Max that they’re going to intentionally leave him out to dry with a shit car, probably the same shit deployment as yesterday, and an engine that’s on the verge of killing itself.

The fact that this useless fucking team has the audacity to ask Max to commit them is so laughable I genuinely might split a lung. They have done NOTHING but betray him over and over all season while doing everything they can to coddle and protect his teammate, and he’s supposed to swear loyalty to them? Where’s the fucking loyalty to him then, huh?

Of course you can make an argument that new regs flatten a need in exceptional drivers skills all together. It's still doesn't mean Max, as one of the most adaptable drivers in my opinion, couldn't crack them.

You're 100 percent right. It's obvious from watching Max's races that, skill-wise, he's still driving at a significantly higher level than the rest of the grid. I would even argue that Max has cracked the regulations, as much as he may hate them. Silverstone was one of the worst tracks we've had in a while in terms of batteryslop (to the point that even the reporters were acknowledging it), and Max still drove the wheels off his car all weekend. This is in spite of Red Bull giving him a terrible deployment map throughout Friday and Saturday, as well as the engine problems he had in quali and the race. I will die on the hill that while Red Bull did not deserve a podium, Max absolutely did. He was able to keep Lewis and George behind him for a significant portion of the race despite both of them being in significantly faster cars. His issues so far this season have stemmed entirely from Red Bull giving him a shit car, one that has on several occasions been even worse than Hadjar's because the experimental setups they insist on making Max run never make anything better.

If anything, this season has actually proven more than ever how incredible Max is. He's driving in regs that significantly limit driver talent, and his car is more often than not either slow as fuck or actively trying to kill him. The RB22 genuinely makes the 2025 Ferrari car look like a rocketship by comparison. And all of this is happening while his team is going out of their way to protect his teammate at Max's expense. Despite that, he's managed to snag two front-row starts (coincidentally, on the two tracks so far where driver ability actually made more of a difference) as well as two podiums, which would have been three if not for RBR fucking up his car yet again. Yes, he's currently only P7 in the championship standings, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if any of the drivers ahead of him were in his situation, most of them would probably have a hard time cracking the top ten.

Will it hurt to lose the GP-Max partnership? Of course. They've been working together for over a decade, and GP is like a mix between a father and an older brother to Max. But it's already coming to an end in the near future anyway, and more importantly, we've reached a point where Max is being actively endangered, more so than he already is by the nature of the sport, that is. Wache won't share things with GP, so GP can't give Max adequate information about the state of his car, and, well, we saw exactly what that can lead to yesterday. At this point, never mind anything to do with his race results. Max has a family that needs him, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if things continue the way they are with Red Bull, it's not a guarantee that he'll make it through the rest of the season still being able to make it home to them. Especially not with tracks like Baku and Singapore still coming up.

At this point it’s not even a question of whether Red Bull can build a competitive car again. They’ve shown over and over again that they couldn’t give less of a fuck about Max if they tried. They force him to test setups that always make his car slower and pretend it’s because he’s “their best sensor” while blatantly ignoring his feedback. Even when he EXPLICITLY says they need to change the car or else there’s no point in racing, they force him to stick with the same setup and then can’t even be bothered to come up with an excuse for why they did it. They don’t stand up for him in the media. The reliability problems always seem to fall on his side of the garage because Hadjar has all the competent staff while Max has been left with scraps, and their incompetency has now caused him to have THREE major crashes caused by mechanical failures. They stole the one real chance he’s had at a win this season by fucking up his strategy. The social media team gassed the hell out of Hadjar’s podium in Monaco (that he didn’t even deserve and in the end didn’t even get to keep, mind you), but Max’s podiums in Canada and Austria barely got a mention by comparison. Even Mekies’ apologies have somehow gotten worse because at least in the beginning, he used to apologize directly to Max over the radio. Now he just does it as a statement to the media. Not to mention it’s all just empty words anyway because nothing ever changes.

And despite all of this, Max has continued to give his all for the team. He drives the wheels off his car every race no matter how big of a shitbox they give him. There’s been something wrong with his car at every single race this year, and only twice has he actually called the team out for the way they’ve handled his race weekends. The only thing he hasn’t done yet is promise to stay with Red Bull next year, but with the way they’ve treated him, why would he? Most of them don’t even act like they care. As annoyed as I’ve been at Isack for how desperate the team has been to protect him, he’s also been one of the only Red Bull people who have actually stood firmly on Max’s side once in a while, but he’s a second-year driver so it’s not as if he’s going to have a lot of influence to change things. As for everyone else? I truly have no words to describe them. Max has given this team far more than they deserve, and they’ve repaid him by betraying his trust over and over.

I genuinely think that Max should just switch to endurance racing full time. Fuck anything to do with F1 at this point. Sure, his luck in GT3 hasn’t exactly been amazing this year either, but at least over there he’s treated like he’s actually wanted.