Silly SZN Is The Best SZN
After berry season and stone fruit season, of course
Friends and Fellow Dames Nationals, hello and happy weekend! This week’s issue was slightly delayed by a last-minute work thing – a good thing I’ll be able to share w/you all in about a month! – but I couldn’t not share with you the juicy gossip that has been living rent-free in my head all week. Said gossip lit up my family’s group text throughout the week and had us smashing PLAY on several podcasts and YouTube videos the second we knew they were available. Was it news of SAG-AFTRA joining WGA on the picket line? No (though we’ve been following that story pretty avidly).
No, the object of our obsession has been the latest, long-rumored, finally real, and utterly absorbing drama unfolding on this season of Real Housewives Of Super-Fast International Motorsport, aka Formula One’s 2023 Racing Season.
To quote the solidarity icon Mandy Patinkin, let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up! (Actually, I am going to sum up first and then explain for posterity, and for those of you who will relish more soapy details and context.)
Sum Up Bullet Points for those with less interest, which is totally fair:
A Formula 1 driver, Nyck DeVries, who had been driving this year for a back-of-the-pack team called AlphaTauri, was fired this week for underperformance.
The announcement of his departure included the announcement of his replacement, Daniel Ricciardo.
Danny was available to start right away – he’ll be racing at next weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix – because he had lost his seat at McLaren last year, and had been working for AlphaTauri’s big brother team, Red Bull, rejoining the family of teams where his F1 career began.
Everyone feels very bad for Nyck, and thrilled to bits for Danny!
Explanation Extravaganza For My Fellow Very Specific Gossip Sickos
Now, of course, it’s more complex than than the bullet points capture – these are elite athletes in an increasingly popular and very glamorous sport. It’s always been drenched in money and the teams and drivers have always been under a microscope, with every subtle adjustment to the cars subject to as much analysis and commentary as the drivers themselves. The stakes are high, and seem to get higher each season. If you want some top-level background basics, I wrote a little guide to F1 and its fandom on-ramp, Netflix’s series Formula 1: Drive To Survive, for Vulture last year.
Previously, on Formula 1: Danny Ricciardo is charming & has a smile that could light up this whole town & is a true star of the Netflix show bc he’s great on camera, and also he is a first-rate driving boy with nerves of steel, but he gets in his head during the 2022 season, and drives very poorly, leading to his team, McLaren, releasing him early from his contract.
Speculation about his next step drags on for months. Will he take a seat driving for one of the lower-ranked teams? Drive for IndyCar or some other racing series? Take some time away from racing altogether? Nah. His old boss-pal Christian Horner, a Known Hard-Nosed Meanie who is also Mr. Ginger Spice, creates a job for Danny at Red Bull, where he’ll be their “third driver” (is that a thing? It is now!) and do a lot of test driving in their simulator and promo work for the team, for which he seems to have been born (see above, re: smile & how much the camera adores him).
This is significant because of the context in which it happens: by the end of the 2022 season, Red Bull Racing had cemented its Imperial Phase, seemingly unaware of what missteps even are, let alone how one might be so unfortunate as to make one. Their driver Max Verstappen won his second consecutive Drivers Championship, and between that and his teammate Sergio Perez’s own excellent performance that season, the team won the Constructors Championship, too. Red Bull is going to maintain its famously hard-nosed pressure cooker approach to developing drivers and cars (booting, promoting, and demoting drivers as they see fit), but they have some wiggle room to be sweet when it suits them.
So! The 2023 Season opens with Danny at Red Bull in this made-up role, and everyone’s just happy to have him around, because in addition to being a first-rate driver, he’s also a King Of Vibes. Everything continues as expected. Max, who may be an android sent from the future to dominate motorsport forever, just does his thing, winning all but two races so far this year, and Sergio (aka Checo), starts off the season driving like gangbusters, too. Those races Max didn’t win, in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan? Checo won those, and turned in impressive performances until the race in Monaco over Memorial Day weekend, where he finished in a mortifying 16th place. His race-day performance in the four races since have been respectable, but not up to his usual standard.
At this point in the season, Checo seems to have gotten in his own head (do we notice a pattern forming? Just wait!!!) and has been performing very poorly in the qualifying sessions for five of the last six races. His race work is solid, but he’s not making it to the podium consistently, and not racking up as many points. This kind of performance would be perfectly respectable on most other teams, but not at Red Bull.
Meanwhile, at AlphaTauri, which is Red Bull’s junior team and part of its driver development pipeline: the new-to-F1 but please don’t call this 28 year-old man a rookie Nyck De Vries is having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year. It’s often hard for drivers to score points in their first season or two, especially if they’re driving a bad car.
This year’s AlphaTauri model is particularly infamous for its bad braking, which, in a sport where speeds routinely exceed 200 mph, is kind of an absolutely vital performance and safety feature. So the car is bad, but Nyck is Not Like The Other Rookies, because he is 28 years old and has won several junior Formula racing series, and turned in a heroic substitute performance in a race last summer when he needed to step in for another driver.1 In addition, the car is bad, but Nyck’s teammate Yuki Tsunoda has managed to score a couple of points and finish pretty consistently within striking distance of the Top 10.
Hopes were high for not-so-young Nyck! And yet, this year’s AlphaTauri has laid him low, and – can you guess what I’m going to say? – he seems to have gotten in his own head about it, which has led to unforced errors and scoring zero points and in the aggregate, it wasn’t something AlphaTauri could tolerate, so he was released from his responsibilities as a driver this week.
As someone who was laid off a few years ago from my then-dream job, that feels terrible! It’s disorienting and infuriating! It’s a grief-worthy loss! I can only imagine how much worse it may feel for Nyck, who has to metabolize this blow while living in the public eye. I hope he can take some time to step away from F1 and figure out what he wants to do next, on his own terms.
Back to fascinating frivolity: guess who took Nyck’s place. Go on, guess! Ding ding ding, it’s Danny Ricciardo! For the very curious among you, there’s a new video up, of an interview between Danny and one of my favorite F1 reporters, Lawrence Barretto, where he reflects on the last year and his journey back to racing for AlphaTauri and Red Bull, where his F1 career began.
Naturally, all of the F1 podcasts I listen to / YouTube channels had giddy, yet thoughtful takes to share. I haven’t been able to listen to them all, but so far my favorites are from Shift-F1, P1, and F1R THE GIRLS. Tiggy, Chessa, and Sarah’s analysis on F1R THE GIRLS is my favorite of this crop, as they go into the most detail in their consideration of this evolving story within the context of F1 as its own little hothouse of an information ecosystem; the way this episode kicks off F1’s silly season after a pretty predictable racing season so far; and the human and storytelling elements of how the announcement unfolded: who knew what and when, the context of the teams being Red Bull and AlphaTauri, and the fact that it’s a Danny story in particular.
The latter is worth revisiting a bit more. In the short-term, this is great content for thoughtful sports coverage (see: Defector) and gossip sites like Lainey Gossip (which hasn’t covered this specific story yet, though they do cover F1 with some regularity, and their recent piece assessing F1’s increasing popularity through the lens of supermodel Emily Ratajowski’s giddy social media posts from her attendance at the Miami Grand Prix in May is well worth a read).
There’s no complete understanding of this story that doesn’t emphasize the role of Danny’s undeniable, bona fide stardom, and this year-long real life arc has the potential to be a riveting, juicy story arc for the next season of Formula 1: Drive to Survive.2
Ever since Danny’s return to Red Bull was announced last year, I’ve been thinking that was a smart choice for a host of reasons, and gee, it sure would be interesting to have been a fly (or high-def steadicam) on the wall in the conversations that led to that choice. Christian Horner is no fool, and maybe he does have a genuine soft spot for Danny, but he is also, not to put too fine a point on it, a shrewd little shark of a bossman who knows that keeping some Ricciardo powder dry would pay off eventually one way or another, while also softening Red Bull’s image just a tad. Win-win-win.
Danny taking Nyck’s place at AlphaTauri also quickly solves one HR problem while not-so-subtly addressing another. Remember Checo? Checo is great, and had been having a good season until he didn’t. He’s going through a rough patch, qualifying at or close to the back of the pack for the last 5 races. His race performance is strong enough that he frequently makes his way up to the Top 10 (much-coveted points are only awarded to drivers finishing in the Top 10), but Red Bull expects excellence at all times. He needs to get it together.
If Danny does well in the season’s remaining 11 races – I would define “doing well” in that garbage car as some low-bar combination of getting to the second round of qualifying more often than not, scoring 5-8 points total, making no more than 3 unforced errors, and/or not crashing out more than twice, plus working well with Yuki – that would put him in a very secure position to win a contract for next year (and beyond?) at AlphaTauri. His presence already reinforces the message to Checo that he can be replaced.
The irony of using one driver who lost his seat due to the yips to remind another driver at a famously ruthless team that he could lose his seat if he doesn’t recover his usual performance standard is not lost on me! It’s entirely possible that being a super-elite athlete in a sport as minutely scrutinized as F1 is…not great for anyone’s mental health! I know the drivers have the option of joining a union, the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, and it seems like now might be a good time for them to consider developing and wielding more solidarity, particularly regarding job security and compensation in the event of a bad season threatening their livelihood. Can’t wait for next weekend’s race!
The driver was my beloved Alex Albon, who was recovering from a life-threateningly bad reaction to the anesthesia used during his appendectomy. He’s fine & enjoying a good season at Williams!
To what degree is the production of a show like Drive to Survive affected by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes? Anyone with more knowledge in this area, the Dames Inbox is open!
Thank you so much for this insight! My favorite Indycar podcast (as that’s my preferred formula of motor sports) talked about it without last names or background and I really appreciate having the details now!