imagine the coworker you hate announcing their retirement out of the blue. great! but wait - they then decide to come back because their family bores them. and now they’re back they will. not. shut. the. fuck. up. about you and they act as if everything they say comes with an in depth knowledge of your psyche and personality despite you not being their friend for years. and they hang around the paddock like a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe and god forbid you accidentally glance in their direction because now people will make tiktok edits about you yearning for someone you pay no mind and analyse your automatic bodily functions to the nth degree and attribute every single thing you do or say to being motivated by a man who is nothing more than a fly buzzing around your kitchen to you. this is the hell lewis is living in

at least it’s not verstappen. that’s the only thing i take away.

Im not even a Hamilton fan but someone should stage an intervention for him. Save that man, his legacy is getting murdered by italian incompetence [*]

And everyone in the tags and op using such condescending and infantilizing tone, go fuck yourselves fr…. the concept of “sitting down” the greatest formula one driver ever to talk about ferrari incompetence like he hasn’t watched the team fail since the inception of time.

Remember when they had to threaten max that they would dsq him if he crashed into lewis in ad because he had done it in the three races prior and a lewis dnf would mean he won? And so he didnt crash into lewis and lewis immediately dunked 15 secs on him and they had to find another way to get max the trophy? Yeah..

re: the current environment in sports fandom - i don't think it's just a post-dts thing. i feel it's not just sports, in general everyone has become very reactionary and radicalized and you see that expressed in twt arguments over politics or sports or whatever it is. there's an increase in tribalism too and nobody wants to engage critically with anything or think of even a bit of nuance. and i feel like everything's become performative in a way, your favorite driver or whatever has become less about who appeals to you and more about how it makes you look, if that makes sense? and then with the increased influence of politics and the tribalism associated with it, you get people insisting the nazi drivers aren't so bad and at the same time you've got people trying to cancel the most socially aware ones for not being on the level of your average internet leftist. the goalposts are always moving for all sides and no one is willing to engage with an opinion different from their own even if it is just to learn a different perspective. it's become exhausting and echochamber is the right word, but "toxic circlejerk" fits too. it's making sports communities fucking unbearable to be in.

btw this doesn't just apply to fans of the driver you don't like. i've seen this kind of behavior from lewis fans, oscar fans, charles, lando, whoever, you name it. because at a certain point it stops being about coming together to support your guy, and becomes more about exclusionary behavior and bullying in the name of "fandom." we can joke all we want about sports fandoms being toxic wastelands but it's not actually something to aspire to.

one thing i never understood is how people are treating lewis after everything thats happened. it took michael shumacher FOUR YEARS to turn ferrari into a championship winning team. this is lewis' first year. have grace and have faith. lewis has done it before and he will do it again.

members of the redbull team directly or indirectly inciting abuse towards other drivers is not even fork found in kitchen it’s fork found in the fork store where they only sell forks

and let’s not try and simplify this with “marko is a senile old man who needs to retire” because we all remember what horner and jos did in 2021