The McLaren radio messages in Belgium are not what you think they were
I've seen a bit of commentary here on Tumblr and even among some motorsport press and influencers who ought to know better that either misunderstand or misinterpret the pair of messages that Oscar and Lando received from their engineers in the pair of times they were near each other on track.
As usual, partisans will point to them and see favoritism in one direction or the other. If Lando fans can look at a situation and see favoritism for Oscar and Oscar fans can look at the same situation and see favoritism for Lando, that ought to be the first clue that no favoritism exists. But despite that, when you're watching a race on TV without broader context, things are not always what they seem.
The tl;dr of the situation is twofold: Oscar did not ignore his race engineer when he was told to not fight Lando passing him, and Lando being told not to yo-yo race with Oscar was not strictly meant to keep him behind Oscar. The reason why is the reason for a lot of things this season: the battery.
Full explanation behind the cut (because this is long).
When Lando had caught up behind Oscar around lap 13, and they were running P5 and P6, Oscar was told on the radio not to make it hard on Lando to pass. This was a reasonable ask: Oscar had damage, and Lando had more pace. Oscar's pace was still quite good, however, and from a strategic standpoint, a straight battle for P5 would have slowed them both down for no net points benefit to the team and been a risk for one or both of them to lose position.
But Oscar re-passed Lando almost immediately. Is that proof that he ignored the request? No. And the message given to Lando the next time they were near each other on track is likely the best evidence for that.
What ended up happening with Oscar passing Lando looked very much like what drivers and commentators have come to refer to as "yo-yo racing," which is a phenomenon of rapid passes and re-passes within a short period of time. What looks rather entertaining on TV can actually be really annoying from a driver's perspective and even from a strategy perspective because of what causes it: battery deployment.
Throughout the season, several drivers have mentioned that their batteries have deployed unexpectedly to give them overtaking speed when they didn't want it. Alternately, a driver who has made an overtake intentionally may have depleted their battery prematurely, causing them to briefly slow and be passed by the other car due to the temporary speed differential. There are a handful of other scenarios involving battery deployment that can also have this result and can have lasting repercussions to the way that the software that controls harvesting and deployment around the circuit will behave on subsequent laps.
So when Lando and Oscar are close on track again later in the race, and Lando receives the message not to engage in yo-yo racing with Oscar, Will said that he would explain later. This tells me that the team had learned something about the previous engagement between them, and Lando likely would have understood the general outlines of this from what his race engineer said.
If I had to make an educated guess, the first exchange between them, which had been initiated on pure racing terms that would make sense under most circumstances, had disrupted the battery deployment learning in the car and may have cost one or both of them as much or more pace in aggregate than if they had properly fought wheel to wheel. (I haven't actually analyzed the data deeply enough to determine if this is actually the case because I'm traveling and don't have time to dig into it in depth, but some past data I have seen in similar situations suggest that this is a plausible hypothesis.)
There are a few other things that the team or Lando's side of the garage might have spotted to make this a reasonable ask, but they all would still go back to something to do with battery deployment, which is something Lando would have understood. The order from the garage wasn't specifically "don't pass Oscar" but rather "don't pass Oscar in a way that's going to screw up either of your battery deployments."
I've also seen some people suggesting that this had to do with making sure they could pit Oscar first, but given the wildly different strategies they were on, I don't think this was the case. Lando's tire strategy was aggressive but also perhaps too reactionary, while Oscar's was more traditional. McLaren have a habit of being too clever by half on their strategy, and it nearly always bites them in the ass. Lando was always going to pit second under this strategy, and if the late VSC or safety car had come along like the team had been counting on, they'd have looked like heroes, and Lando would have stood on the podium. But like with the miscue with the inters in Canada, they based their strategy on a gamble rather than a sure thing. Then things further went south when a technical issue was encountered on the pit stop he eventually had to take at an already non-ideal time.
But again, this isn't favoritism, it's a fumble by a team that has overreacted to or overcorrected for a grid drop in a way that once again suggests that McLaren may be so afraid of losing that they've forgotten how to win. (Qatar 2025 is another good example of this.) The team admits now that double stacking under the VSC where Oscar pitted would have been the better call, as even a too-long stint on mediums would have placed Lando further up in the field.
If you want an example of how another split strategy took a similar risk, and it paid off, however, take a look at Lando's one-stop strategy in Hungary last year. A lot of people howled about how putting Lando on this strategy somehow favored him over Oscar when in reality it was a gamble on something that could have easily backfired on a circuit that typically demands two stops. If the strategy in Belgium this past weekend had paid off and earned Lando a podium, I can practically guarantee people would be demanding to know why Oscar had not been placed on a more aggressive strategy as well.
Bottom line: McLaren does not intentionally advantage one of its drivers over the other. Unintentionally? Sure. But that's racing. If you're looking for shady and nefarious intra-team behavior, please check Mercedes. They seem to have something hinky going on over there.
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As you might know if you follow my agency on Bluesky or Instagram, we officially have new submission guidelines! Here's the tea:
-- We KNOW that writers hated our original rule, "a no from one of us is a no from all of us." AND everyone hated our updated rule, "OK fine, you can query three of us" -- annoying to keep track of, and frankly, nobody listened anyway.
-- We then instituted the Second Chance Inbox, which, while a noble experiment, didn't actually work as well as we had hoped it would. The IDEA was, the S.C.Inbox would somewhat lessen the barrage of queries but ALSO give everyone the chance to get seen by all the agents. (Spoiler: It didn't do either, actually!)
SO THE NEW RULE IS: You can query as many of us as you want to, ONE AT A TIME.
-- That means, please don't query multiple of us simultaneously, you will get a message that forbids it and it won't go through. If Agent A declines your work, you can go to Agent B, and so on.
-- All the agents should respond in a relatively timely manner. If it has been a long time (like, well over 12 weeks) and you are sick of waiting and really just want to move on already and query the next agent, OK, you can do what you like I guess, but you need to withdraw the ms from Agent A first before you will be able to go to Agent B.
-- I would strongly urge you to be judicious with your queries. LOOK AT ALL OUR BIOS and choose the agents who are a) OPEN TO QUERIES, and b) ACTUALLY REP THE KIND OF THING YOU WRITE and seem like they might really be a fit!
PS: I know that some of the agents still had a button clicked on their QM profiles that would send the "sorry, you have already queried somebody at the agency" response; that SHOULD be resolved now. But if you have questions or issues, you can DM me!
I have a question and I’d I’d appreciate it if my followers would reblog this for some extra reach so I can get an answer.
When I’ve bound books in the past I’ve always done my layouts by hand. I’d reduce the printable area of the page to half a page minus a little more so two of them would fit on a sheet of paper in the landscape orientation. Then I’d print them out on one side of a full sheet of paper and cut them down. I’d number each page by hand and then glue stick them to more paper. For a book with 100 pages the sheets would be 1,2 on one side and 100,99 on the other and so on. Then I’d put them on my scanner and copy them one at a time, turning the page over to get the other side.
The issue here is that if you reduce the printed area on a full sheet of paper you have to touch two of the sides. Otherwise when you flip the sheet over they don’t line up in the center.
So my question is this-
Does anyone know of a word processor program with presets for lining up blocks of text that are smaller then a whole page, shuffling the pages into the right order to print them all at once in the 1,2,100,99 arrangement and on both sides of a page?
And if you also bind books; how do you personally handle this type of printing?
Heyyyy, gif-makers who know more than I do about the craft:
...which is probably most of you. Got a question: I do mine in photoshop, and occasionally, when I'm doing a set, one of them will come out "grainy," where the blacks and dark spots look as though they're made up of tiny dots, like a halftone or something. All the others will have come out clear and sharp. The only way I've found around this is to exit the program, shut down photoshop, and restart it, then make that particular gif from scratch. Kinda like it needs a re-set or something. Has anyone run into this issue? I'm on photoshop on the cloud, Version 25.11.0, and I run a macintosh.
Tagging @c-sand because I know she maketh the gifs, and maybe @turnitdownsometimes
But please, anyone who might be able to answer, please do so.
Is there a way to continue your Wayhaven playthrough across platforms? Like starting on your computer and then continuing at the same part on your phone…?
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may i ask a little more of how the posting of multichapter fan fics will work? by staggering did you mean throughout june 21 - july 21?
Hi! At this point we can't really give a specific answer to that, first we need to know exactly how many people sign up and how many of them have multi-chaptered fics.
What we can tell you is that we're planning on having a whole month full of new content, and that we're going to agree with the participants on a schedule that allows every creation to get the attention it deserves.
Keep the questions coming, if you need to ask something there's probably other people wondering about the same stuff, so you're basically providing public service!
I decided to make a new fresh Sims 4 folder but now when I try running the game it says:
"Unable to start: Can't run The Sims 4 with the video card in this system. Please check that the video card meets the minimum specifications and the latest video drivers are installed."
I tried everything from disabling Origin in game, to repairing my sims game, updating graphics card, etc. I even looked around google!Â
Help?
My graphics card is fairly new and ran Sims 4 before this happened.
