#ignis yaps

The art/athletics thesis stems from my experiences as an artist and my belief that that is what it is to be human; to make art. I'm not gonna get too much into all that because it's a personal worldview I wouldn't expect anyone else to share, and also I don't want bitches coming at me with bad faith takes on my deeply held spiritual belief, so you're just gonna have to go "ok" and walk with me for a second here. To be human is to make art. And☝️the definition of art is broad and inexplicable. Like all the shit is the same. With that in mind, I find that the principles and practices learned from art making are applicable to nearly every passionate human endeavor. But specifically in this case: motorsport.

Key amongst those principles and practices (TO ME) are authenticity, humility, and commitment to craft. All things which Max and many other great athletes like him (Marc Marquez! My other fave motorsports guy!) exhibit in spades.

Authenticity in art making (TO ME) is when you are committed to the quality of your own ideas. You're not standing around constantly adjusting your approach based on feedback. You ask for feedback, yes, but you are also capable of deciding what is valuable to you and what's not. Max, by all accounts, has been the same since day one. And when people called him "Mad Max" and "Crashstappen" and bitched about how he was "going to kill someone," he did not change his aggressive driving style- he made them put in extra curbs at COTA and legally define what counted as moving under braking. Remember when GP said the hardest part of his job was "getting under Max's skin," or whatever? Remember that part in one of his documentaries where he's struggling with the f1 videogame because he's lowkey not listening to what his sim drivers are telling him about how you have to drive in that fuckass game? Yea. That's called commitment to one's own vision. Max is never gonna alter his approach just because someone else said so. Even if your idea is good, you had better have reasons you can articulate, and even then he's gonna be skeptical until he tries it himself. An example of this resulting in categorically better art (racing) is Monza 2025, when he INSISTED on running the super skinny crazy wing. The whole team was nervous as hell, Pierre Wache allegedly didn't want to let him do it. Guess what? He ran the fastest race in F1 history. The man knows what he's about, he understands his own abilities, and he is married to his approach. Authenticity.

Humility in art making (TO ME) is defined by an understanding that we're all gonna die and nothing we make matters lmao. Or- it is not your job as an artist to hem and haw and whine about "what if it isn't good," it's your job to suck it the fuck up, and make the thing to the best of your ability. It's not about you and your ego, it's about the art. And it's about the art, not what the art gets you. Notice how Max (and Red Bull by extension) have been on a whole "we're just focused on ourselves" kick since the car started being shit and they started trying to fix it. Yea. That's humility (also authenticity and commitment to the self). By all accounts, they knew the car was gonna be trash from the first day of testing last year, and instead of crashing out and giving up, Max carried on. Went and said, "ok, how can we improve," and kept racing like he always does. There, that is the commitment to the art outside of ego. It doesn't matter if you're not going to get the title, you still push to your limit because that is your job as an artist. You don't do it for the title, you do it for the love of racing first and foremost, otherwise you have lost the plot. And what do you know! It resulted in improvements in the car and arguably the best season of Max's career. Like I said, great art. Also gonna link my peer reviewed tags (thank you @renndistanz 🫶) from this post because they also kinda show what I mean

Finally we have commitment to craft, which is exactly what it sounds like. (TO ME.) Again, we have the art outside of ego thing. If you really want your shit to not be bad, then there is only one way and that is to do the fucking work. Max waking up at 2am to test set up ideas on the sim, insisting on testing the cars for his GT3 team himself, going through the proper steps to get his Nurburgring license, and especially the way he seems to give and encourage feedback- that my friends is commitment to quality. Especially the feedback thing! Him telling his team not to baby his drivers in New Ground is so! Yea! His technical and mechanical understanding of the car as well- like he wasn't born with that, that didn't happen by accident. That happened because he cared enough about the craft to learn its intricacies. And yea, we see what he can do as a result.

yea 4433 is so weird and compelling freak for freak kinda vibe. Like imo these are the two all time modern goats. What happened in 2021 was miraculous and terrible and will never happen again. Max and Lewis currently hold the record for shared podiums, like it is that fucking crazy. These were the tags i put on that post about lewis' cow:

Yea. Fascinating dynamic. They're not like. Familiar with each other (probably due in part to the afformentioned murder attempts- 51g at copse and then max parking his car on lewis' head in monza that one time) but they do seem to share this weird (bizarre tbh!) mutual respect/understanding. And they can have that mutual respect while consistently bringing out the worst in eachother on track lmao. Like if lestappen dances and fucks nasty, max and lewis are like. Idk. A lion and a bear just fucking biting and biting and biting and biting eachother. Gladiators going at it barehanded crazy style. Unstoppable force vs immovable object. Lewis never leaves a gap and max will make space where none exists. Max, in the words of lewis himself, "will take it from you," if you give him so much as an inch. Max is fearless and has alien levels of car control, which incentivizes him to do crazy shit that quite frankly would kill other drivers (the way his car snapped in zandvoort last year, and the fucking mexico '25 start too). Lewis! Will also do crazy shit! Like drive with his brakes literally on fire and exploded like he did in singapore! Not to mention copse! Like lewis doesn't poke at the rules to the extent max does (it's a very high bar) but he still finds ways to get his kicks lmao that man is no angel (said affectionately). So they have this off-track understanding that is like "hello my fellow goat 🤝 " and then, simultaneously, an on-track understanding that is like "[redacted] [redacted] i am going to find out where you live [redacted] ⚔️ kys." Very crunchy. To me. Like, somehow they are both of these images at the same time:

As for my thoughts on lewis in the with love au... the other max lewis thing i find crazy is how they are the only two drivers to ever do 200+ race starts with the same team. The only ones. When lewis was struggling last year max himself said something along the lines of like "it's hard to do it when your second family isn't there with you" and then, about lewis' struggles "it hurts my heart." Like ok. Jytffttff. Crazy. It is slightly different for max i think because he came into his team when he was an actual teenager (fucking wild, never gonna not send me that that happened) and then imprinted on them like a baby duck, but mercedes was still lewis' home in a way that i think few people outside of max can really appreciate.

In the with love au, lewis gets out of the car and looks at the screens where max is bleeding, and him and charles stand there horrified but not surprised. There’s another good ask in my inbox about charles Getting It from the love of racing perspective but for lewis, he Gets It because he knows what it is to love your team enough to do anything for them- and because max is. Mad, obviously. And he will Take it From You. And so of course he would do something like this. And maybe he watches max bleed past the checkered flag and even admires it, a little, you know. And he watches max's car stop. And he watches max's team mobbing the barriers and crying for him. And then suddenly he stops getting it. "Don’t do this to them," he thinks, "why would you fucking do this to them, you didn’t have to do this to them!"

Also yes! Jonathan! In O Desastre, I kinda implied some things here and there but in plain terms, once it's clear what's going on, Red Bull and Ferrari both ask for red flags and get told no. Ferrari asks partly for their own drivers who are still stuck in the runoff at t5 but also! Also for Max! On the Sauber pit wall, Jonathan is one of the first people who looks up and goes "wtf this HAS to be a red, tell Gabriel to expect a red," which is why Gabriel gets that radio message. Unfortunately, there's not much else he can do. He's not at Red Bull anymore. He's just as helpless as anyone else. The kid he first met when he was knee high and walked straight into a plate glass door is bleeding out on the track and he won't stop. He has to watch with everyone else. Afterwards, team principles who meet with FIA people include Laurent (obviously), Toto (because he's obsessed with Max and also George was upset), Fred (because he also likes Max but also his drivers were parked in the runnoff and there could have been more debris on track- not to mention literal blood? So in his opinion, that should have been stopped), but also Jonathan (for no other reason than he loves Max, so now this is his business).

Thinking about Adrian in the Aston garage- don't do this to me. Head in hands. Also yea, all the Red Bull people who've gone other places. Whole house upset 😭