#vb tea

From this double serve

Came across this and honestly I could not agree more.

Gotta be honest, I never followed Valtteri’s career that closely, and it was just recently that I learned a thing or two while searching for other sources and articles.

But yes, that tumblr post does have a rather solid point.

I posted this not very long ago, but there are so many differences between George and Valtteri, if we want to keep it on the business discourse, Valtteri was with Toto’s management agency (and still is, I believe?), so Toto basically was his manager and pulled back once Valtteri signed with Mercedes (to avoid conflict of interests).

Meanwhile, while it’s been rumoured (and kinda confirmed by Marko) that George has a 10-yrs contract with Toto, he’s never been part of his management agency.

There are so many layers to this discourse, because Valtteri was indeed always kept on a thread: if I remember correctly, he was only third choice when Nico retired, and was always given one-year contracts, since 2017 up until 2021.

Not only that, but there had been talks of George replacing Valtteri since about 2020, so I guess that really doesn’t help with a driver’s mentality and well-being.

Now, with George we have a very different situation, because yes, his contract with Williams was indeed absolute crap (for him and collaterally for Mercedes- I am about to reblog a post that talks about this) , but he’s also always been locked down by Mercedes in some way.

There are rumours that george’s contract renewal (pre-contract/renewal?) was signed around winter 2022. Plus, George has Daimler backing him.

This makes a clear difference in a driver’s mind.

George has always been a Mercedes junior and went through a program to get an actual Mercedes seat, while Valtteri (while being with Toto and a Williams child💪🏼) was more of a dark horse situation.

If we want to talk about how not exactly a fair TP Toto is, we need to broaden the field, because his impartiality has been present since when he joined Mercedes- so basically since forever.

He’s always been partial to one driver and one driver only, and this, like it or not, brings consequences within a team, particularly when the team has two alpha drivers (and I am not talking about George’s situation only) and you are not capable to handle them fairly and equally.

So Toto ain’t got the time for his own drivers contract talks but he got the time to discuss Alpine’s fifth driver over a two hours “coffee”…