#g.asks

the fact is williams, with nothing to lose in the final year of the old regs & everything to gain from finishing as high in the constructors as possible, absolutely necessarily needed to run 2 cars optimised to score the maximum points possible every weekend. they would have liked to seal that p5 well before qatar & alex finishing in the points would have helped the team immensely in securing the millions of pounds hanging in the balance. it would actively jeopardise them to prioritise either driver at the cost of the other.

i'm not the best versed in the technicalities of the sport, but the thing about alex is that he's very good at driving around innate issues in the car & great on his tyres, which serves him well in the race. carlos has a better general handle on his set-up & gets more pace out of the car when it's set up in a way he likes, which serves him well in quali. in the first half of the season, when most of the midfield was still trying to get familiar with the cars, alex was one of the fastest to find a rhythm, which led to consistent phenomenal results, which led to carrying forward great momentum. in the second half, carlos was more familiar with the car & the team & threw absolutely everything at a saturday, which meant overall higher track position which the williams could decently sustain. meanwhile, a combination of bad luck, questionable strategy, terrible team communication & other midfielders getting a better handle on their cars meant alex rarely made it into q3 & on a lot of tracks, that was his shot at points already over.

& my point here is that the way it worked out for alex & carlos in terms of having two pretty distinct and opposite halves of the season has nothing to do with the team prioritising carlos because he scored a podium & everything to do with them having different strengths and struggles crop up at different points. there is no sabotage or conspiracy here because, again, the team gains absolutely nothing by putting down a driver they have locked in for a multi-year contract & have repeatedly evidenced they trust and support fully even when he delivers a miserable weekend. jv believes in alex, alex believes in williams & the team has created an environment for him where he effusively celebrates every win for the team without, i think, feeling particularly threatened about where he stands. it is objectively, in my opinion, better for alex to have a teammate who gives good feedback, who challenges and pushes him, whose engineering instincts he trusts & respects than yet another rookie against whom alex becomes an indeterminate driver. you don't need to believe me on this, alex has said this repeatedly himself.

3am & jenson wakes up to his phone almost vibrating off the nightstand & it's lando, of course it's lando. and jenson remembers being young, remembers winning, the surge-rush of adrenaline sharp as a swing careening towards the sky; remembers, equally, the awful drop in the middle of the night when everything is too much and nothing is enough. he picks up. lando says can you, like, come get me? and jenson says where are you? and lando says i called— i called oscar, but he didn't pick up and jenson says where are you?

SHSJSJ (also there is no need to respond to this!!)