Anywhere Out There

so this is actually two questions packed into one, because i think there's two factors to what you're asking: how much the f1 fandom at large likes lando, and how much they rate lando, and i think if you were to plot them both on a line graph they would be quite different trajectories to each other over the years. so to start with the idea of likeability, which is more what i was thinking of with the alphamaxnova post:

first things first lets establish that lando has always been popular. he's always had a very solid, sizeable, loyal audience with considerable buying power & a considerable presence both on social media and irl at races and in other fan spaces. however, there's been a definite trend from 2019 to now where, while his dedicated fans has always been present, the f1 fandom at large if you subtract the lando fandom has definitely soured on him quite dramatically over the years.

when lando started in 2019 he was immediately a fan favourite and everyone's darling. this is mostly due to his own efforts - he was extremely present on social media, making and posting memes of both himself and other drivers, collaborating with f1 influencers like wtf1 and later on tommo, tweeting loads, doing AMAs on reddit and commenting on random posts with his official account, you name it. he was also something new and fresh in f1, being the only solidly gen z driver (george is born february 1998 so hes also technically beyond the 1997 zillenial cusp, but he vibes like he was born in the 1910s so he barely counts), a gamer internet-grown kid with little respect for what was traditional in f1 - and this perfectly coincided with liberty media's big ambitious makeover of the f1 branding, which involved a lot of modernising and catering to younger and more online audiences. AND adding to that mclaren unboxed, which was a new concept at the time and again did so much to reinvent and humanise the way we look at f1 drivers. so by the end of 2019 lando was definitely very highly liked, especially in online fandom circles, which was reflected in him getting over a million instagram followers by the end of the season.

so with that basis established, you get the 2020 pandemic - races are cancelled, everyone is inside, and lando is leading the charge on the streaming phenomenon. he's live on twitch constantly, reacting to fan favourite memes and creators like alphamaxnova1 (speaking of) and simdane, taking part in unofficial online GPs, shaving his head for charity, burning his food, all day every day, which makes his stocks rise even more. the entire f1 fandom at this point is more or less on board, because lando is essentially the audience insert. so in this perfect storm, lando gets a podium in the first race back from lockdown in a genuinely really cool and nailbiting way, and especially because everyone is already happy that f1 is back, it's literally a universal 'everyone liked that' event.

i think on the line graph this (austria 2020, early 2020 in general) would probably be the peak in terms of popularity. the first cracks in lando's likeability appear in portugal 2020, which was i suppose a double whammy if you want to call it that, even though one blow was much harder than the other. so lando races in portimao and gets shunted into for the nth time by lance stroll, and calls him 'cunt' on the radio. then, after this obviously miserable race where he finished out of the points, he's asked his thoughts on hamilton beating schumacher's win record, and he (quite bitterly) says basically fair play to the guy but it seemed fairly easy some of the time, he only had a couple people to overtake because the car is so good, yada yada. this is obviously quite uncharitable & stupid but also imo not unforgiveable - and yet more often than not if you ask especially british fans why they don't lando they'll trace it back to this moment. so he issues a very awkward apology that's phrased like it could be for both stroll and hamilton, and then kind of clarifies in an interview in an even more awkward way that it's mostly for lewis and he doesn't really care about stroll, and just keeps putting his foot in his mouth again and again about it.

despite this, lando's likeability does continue into 2021. the official f1 fan survey in 2021 ranks him the 2nd most popular driver overall, behind max and ahead of lewis (i actually misremembered this and thought he was third - wild). he was also ranked #1 in the two very important demographics of 16-25s and also women. this is still genuinely crazy to me but also made sense at the time, again because of everything he was doing differently to all the others. however, 2021 was also the year daniel joined mclaren, and when against all odds lando mopped the floor with him (which was going to get worse in 2022). at many points (which i'll discuss more later on) lando's rating as a racer and his likeability are inversely correlated, and this was definitely one of those moments. and this bitterness over lando defying expectations and confusing everyone by confidently overperforming someone who was considered the best wdc-less driver on the grid in 2019 was only exacerbated by lando supposedly 'waving' at daniel as he lapped him in monaco 2021 (he was thanking him for moving out of the way, which he does to everyone), and also the quote about him having 'no sympathy' for daniel as a fellow racer. this quote circulated somewhat when it was first published mid-2021, but got more attention in early 2022 when dts basically portrayed lando as a bit of a villain. so people - especially casual f1 fans who thought daniel was the best funniest most talented guy on earth - start to resent lando. the wobbly unsettled nature of landos likeability at that point was noticeable because lando kept getting into what we called 'landogates' online - meaningless scandals, quotes taken out of context, things interpreted in bad faith, basically people ready and eager to be angry at him for any reason. i'll also mention sochi here, although it definitely belongs more in the second part, because a big part of the online f1 fandom very harshly criticised lando for the tone of voice he used speaking to will, and how he conducted himself on the radio. i think that was the first time i was shocked by how the audience reacted to him & was definitely part of the 'turning point'

so by 2022 lando has heavily tapered his social media use, has been trying at all costs for a while to distance himself from his own memes and previous viral moments, and also the car is a shitbox so Negative Nancy Norris shows up and surprises everyone with his pessimistic, downer attitude (which had always been there - it had just been mostly aimed at himself and muffled by teenage insecurity). and he continues to embarrass and humiliate daniel which again i think counts against him likeability-wise.

and also, post-2021, everyone basically splits between two very separate camps (lewis supporters and max supporters), and lando 1. in the lead-up to the championship says he is rooting for both max and lewis in different interviews 2. posts a photo of him congratulating max right after AD21 which makes lewis fans resent him even more 3. calls lewis an 8 time wdc in april 2023 which also takes care of the max fans. so that's - if we count - daniel fans, lewis fans, and max fans who all have reasons to dislike him. oh, and seb fans, who took an obvious joke very seriously and got upset when lando said seb should 'stick to driving' re: naming all the world champions in that one grill the grid video. and george fans too, because lando in july 2022 said george had changed and become less fun since moving to merc (and had to apologise for those comments too). so by 2023 thats a lot of enemies

so yeah, that's how you get to 2023 when you have a lot more people rooting for him to fail. and then he gets mixed up in championship fights for two (now hopefully three) years in a row, and being at the front is automatically going to make a driver more controversial - it's easy to root for a midfielder when the midfielder isn't threatening whoever you're rooting for for the title, but less so when the cheeky young midfielder becomes a frontrunner and a championship contender and (now) a champion. but i think now post-championship people are turning around to him... again i'll talk about this more in the second part but i think him being an official wdc kind of gives people permission to like him again, and also gives him a kind of legitimacy that people didn't see in him before that

RIGHT. so onto part two... rateability? what do you call it... basically fan perception of how good lando is a driver, rather than just whether they like him

so this has almost the opposite trajectory to the journey of his likeability i outlined above. essentially - before f1, lando was definitely rated highly and had a lot of buzz to him. he had a very very successful career and by 2017 when he was brought into the mclaren development programme, he was on track to win f3 and was also making waves about his simulator times and (later on) fp1 / testing times. however, 2018 was according to him his "worst year so far in racing" and he ended up losing the championship to george and only scoring a single win by the end of it. so by the time he entered f1 as a rookie expectations were still high but he didn't have as much of the buzz as he maybe would have if he'd won f2. his 2019 season also didn't help, because he wasn't like, spectacular - he had some really nice overtakes and a couple good results, specifically a p6 in bahrain (and what would've been a p5 in belgium), but otherwise got decisively outperformed by sainz in the head-to-head (who scored almost double the points). it should also be mentioned that carlos was also not rated as highly as he is today. back then he was seen as a solid midfielder at best, had been beaten in every h2h by hulkenberg the previous year, and only managed to build up a better reputation in that 2019-2020 stint (and especially after people saw how badly ricciardo fared at mclaren, when he'd been seen as an upgrade for the team). so yeah, lando definitely did not have the kind of rookie season charles had at sauber, where he was remarkable despite being in a bad car

i think what also made people rate lando quite low from the get-go was the lack of career trajectory projected for him. compared to charles who was the big ferrari project, george an eventual shoo-in for mercedes, and alex who was promoted to red bull by the summer break of his rookie season, lando had no obvious prospects. at the time, mclaren was a recovering-midfielder team, clawing back to best of the rest after an embarrassing p9 in the constructors in 2017. it's why people never bet on him being the first champion from his generation of drivers. i think this distinction between likeability and rateability shows up clearly at the end of 2019 - lando wins rookie of the year in the fan vote, but the actual official fia rookie of the year award goes to alex in the end, because he'd had a way more challenging and spectacular year.

2020 goes substantially better for lando - he gets a podium from the get-go, three p5s, two p4s, and is only eight points away from sainz by the end of the year. lore builds a bit around his driving - specifically his quali pace and also "last lap lando", his tendency to have remarkable end-of-race stints (which is actually a tyre management thing - he'd have super long first stints then have a big tyre delta & race pace difference at the end and get a fastest lap or overtake someone or whatever)

that said, with the monza almost-win and winning the race h2h, sainz still takes the dub without much controversy. and remember, carlos's reputation is still not fantastic. so in the weird relational head-to-head game of f1 predictions, the equation goes - well max and hulkenberg both beat sainz, and ricciardo beat both max and hulkenberg, and sainz is better than lando, so there's absolutely no question about whether daniel is going to beat lando

...and then he does. honestly lando's form in early 2021 even ignoring daniel flopping was such a thing to behold. arguably somewhere around the last couple races of 2020, lando basically grows up as a racer - you have to keep in mind he was literally 19 when he started and had rushed through all the single seater series, so he took a little while to find his bearings. and then early 2021... dead wife montage incoming

look at her isnt she the most gorgeous woman on earth... so this is when people start to take notice, for good reason. he had a top-five streak in a midfield car (including AD20), which got broken in spain and then he started a new even longer one. he was p3 in the championship ahead of bottas even multiple races in. he also started to (rightfully) gain a reputation for being good in the wet - the podium in imola, leading q2 in spa before crashing, getting pole in sochi.

ah... sochi. so sochi now is understood as not his fault for the most part. the narrative now goes that lewis was chasing him, the rain started, both lewis and lando wanted to stay out but lewis was called in decisively by the team, while mclaren let lando call the shots & it ended in disaster. but back then, this was considered more or less lando's mistake, and was the first time the bottler allegations were thrown (they will be back...).

so, not to get ahead of myself, here's what actually happened in the span of three races:

- spa: lando was on track to get pole, crashed out of q2 (actually aquaplaned after everyone was already saying it was too unsafe to race but whatever)

- monza: the one fucking race daniel happens to qualify ahead of lando in, he wins. lando is told to stay behind by the team but also probably wouldn't have been able to overtake anyways, because it's monza. although, fwiw, this race was also lando's possibly most memorable ever overtake on leclerc for p2 (it was literally recently featured by the f1 youtube channel as his best overtake, which i don't really agree with but it really stayed in people's minds)

- sochi: he gets pole but loses the position, heartbreak of the century. the bottler lore is born

and then the mclaren just wasn't as good for the rest of 2021. everyone else caught up to them updates-wise, and lando's best result after sochi was p7 in turkey and abu dhabi.

so in 2022, that leaves us... kind of in both a better and worse place than we were before. the lore is accumulating but the lore is conflicting. the bad news is that the car is pretty shit, the good news is that lando continues mogging (im so sorry) daniel. i have the numbers '122 37' printed on the back of my brain, because these were the points lando and daniel finished with, respectively. lando also gets the only midfield podium of the season in imola which is seen as quite impressive in a very top-heavy season, and again establishes himself as a talented wet / changing-conditions driver by getting the monaco fastest lap, and also doing really well in singapore quali + race (i love singapore22 so much such a fun race) (also one of the best mclaren liveries of all time)

...however. there's a catch. because while all of this is going on, mclaren is essentially being subjected to a smear campaign by daniel ricciardo's PR and also just ricciardo fans in general for daring to break his contact and pay him THIRTY MILLION POUNDS to leave mclaren by the end of the year. this was a completely justified move given that daniel was getting worse rather than better and clearly mclaren thought the 30 million loss was worth it to secure piastri (which it was), but at the time it was seen as a travesty, and invited a lot of conspiracy theories. was mclaren sabotaging daniel? did he have a different car? was he really being beaten fair and square by lando, or was there something fishy going on? lando can't possibly be better than daniel point blank (see the lando-carlos-hulkenberg-verstappen-daniel web above)

so when 2023 comes, the audience is essentially waiting with bated breath - IS lando actually that good, or was daniel a freak incident and a coincidence and lando is mid after all, or was it all a conspiracy? except they know that their questions won't be answered just yet, because lando now has a rookie as a teammate. so we have no other comparisons, and also obviously piastri is at a disadvantage for being new. so in 2023 half of the year is spent by both lando and oscar miserable and out of the points, and then the other half - the glorious second half - the car gets good and lando gets seven podiums in thirteen races.

so his stock is up then, right? well... yes and no. obviously the podiums speak in his favour (as does his p5 in mexico which he had to crawl back to from the back of the field - a lot of people didn't have a very favourable opinion of his racecraft before this race, where he literally overtook three quarters of the grid). however, because he has so many podiums with no win, people start bringing up stats about winless drivers, about the record amount of winless podiums, and though theres no visible bottle the atmosphere of bottling is around him if that makes sense.

2024 begins similarly to 2026 - with mclaren kind of in the mix but disappointing compared to how they finished the previous season. the mclaren is solidly the worst of the top 4 teams, but lando gets a sprint pole in the wet in china and also p2 in the race for good measure anyways. and then the upgrade package arrives in miami (much like hungary this year) and lando wins immediately. lando nowins is dead, lando onewin lives on - except it doesn't because lando then wins in zandvoort and singapore and (clinching the wcc beautifully under all that pressure) abu dhabi

and does that finally solidify his reputation as a top driver? lol you'd think. it doesn't, for a couple reasons: first, that he's been having issues with his starts and his pole conversion rate is very poor. even the zandvoort win that was technically won from pole, he did lose out to max at the start. this may have been a mechanical clutch issue, may have been a driver issue, but because lando was already seen as a slightly timid / conservative driver, this flaw stuck to him. and the second reason is that he was no longer compared to piastri (whom he beat in all h2hs by a large margin) but to max verstappen, with whom he was now in a title fight. and like, anyones reputation is gonna take a hit when they're compared to verstappen, because max is kind of good at everything and also because he has aura (again sorry) and his reputation is through the fucking roof (see helmut marko 'he could take pole in a haas' comments)

and so we get to 2025, which you already know, but tldr this is when the qualifying issues start, and norris again has an Obvious Flaw to pick on, and he's losing ground to piastri, and more and more the audience focuses on his mental weakness and whether he's strong and masculine enough to defeat his inner saboteur. the prediction the audience had made all through 2021 and 2022 and 2023 - that lando just needs a decent teammate and then he's gonna get got once and for all and will actually be revealed as mid - is finally coming true. ....and of course lando then sets the lap record in monaco and bounces back, but by this point the audience is so used to actively trying to find flaws and weaknesses that they refuse to believe he could possibly Be That Good. but he was. and he won. the end<3 and now he's a champion forever and ever