#livid arson

If you haven't seen, Audi just posted an edit of Gabi and Nico on main and captioned it "Every bromance needs a name. We call this one: GABICO 👀". It was full of touchy moments and silly little looks, just Gabi and Nico goofing around together. A few weeks ago, they made an ad with Hyatt where Nico reserved a hotel suite for Gabi and left him roses, chocolate, and a teddy bear with a name tag that said Nico. In the ad, Gabi tackles the bear on the bed, sends a photo to Nico, and the final shot is him feeding the bear, then curling closer to it, as Nico looks at the photo on his phone and grins.

I've been giving Audi the benefit of the doubt up until that ad. They've liked some suspect comments about Gabico dating, age gap yaoi, husbands, etc., posted some weird stuff too, but I assumed (to cope) that it was them just really playing up the drivers as friends dynamic. I'm not giving them that benefit of the doubt anymore. Those two recent videos were meant to be read as romantic, and Audi have clearly interacted with the Gabico fan space if they're ramping up the commercialisation of these two, posting more moments of them together, literally *using the word Gabico on main*. Audi very clearly know that Gabico are a ship.

I say this once again as a queer person: THIS IS NOT GOOD. I haven't seen anyone call Audi out on this yet, so I'm writing this Tumblr essay because... gotta yap. F1 is filled to the brim with toxic straight culture- grid girls were only taken out of the sport in recent years, for example. I wrote a literal research paper on this and part of my findings were that heterosexual culture has been used for profit in F1 at the expense of those being sexualised. I say this to prove to you that F1 is not above glamorising and profiting off sexualised culture. As such, as the RPF space has grown in recent years, teams like Audi have seen how shipping their drivers have led them to profit.

Audi are using Gabico as a media tool to sell merch and profit off all of us queer F1 fans who crave representation in the sport. Gabi has a girlfriend and Nico has a wife, they're clearly not a gay couple, and yet Audi is marketing them like they are. Now people are buying Audi merch like never before and Audi fans are popping up everywhere. Audi has found success because it commercialised Gabico and used the queer F1 fan demographic as the target audience.

THIS IS QUEERBAITING. Like, BY DEFINITION. Gabi and Nico are not a queer couple, and they're both in heterosexual relationships (I don't know if they're both straight and I won't assume but for the purpose of this thesis I'm saying they're both in heterosexual relationships). Audi use their relationship to appeal to the queer audience and imply that they're a couple while retaining some degree of deniability. Meanwhile, old straight men in suits are making money off of us believing the relationship is real.

I'm not saying Gabi and Nico don't have a genuine relationship because there does certainly seem to be a great degree of chemistry there, but I mean that Audi are 100% aware of what they're doing. Speaking as a graphic designer, marketing is a very, very intentional process. Every piece released is thought over to consider its implications, emotions, feelings invoked in the consumer, and particularly the best way to get the consumer to buy The Next Shiny Thing. You see a poster with a driver posing next to a tube of toothpaste saying Franco Colapinto Uses Colgate, somebody spent hours working on that analysing every way to make that poster as effective as possible in selling their toothpaste. Marketing is slaved over more than people realise, and especially as queer culture grows and spreads in the modern era, teams are entirely aware of the implications of their marketing because that's their job.

I'm not saying stop shipping Gabico, you have the right to ship whatever you like, and it's so important to spread queer culture in a homophobic world. We really do crave representation, and projecting headcanons onto drivers is a relatively valid form of doing so if it doesn't harm anyone and we keep it in the fandom space. What I AM saying is to stop interacting with content from teams that make you question if the team is soft launching their driver. Posts that say Lestappen on main kind of night, or it's called Gabico 👀, or posters reading LAWBLAD. These teams are profiting and succeeding because we interact with these posts, showing them that it's okay to queerbaiting their drivers to make them popular to a new demographic. Keep writing your fanfiction and making your fanart, that's fine, but don't let these teams gain any clout off queerbaiting. It only adds to the overall marginalisation of the queer community when teams act queer like it's a quirky little trait that makes them a cute fun team. Being queer isn't a game or a choice or a quirk, it's an identity, and it only acts to harm the queer community when these teams make it their niche.