TeamKoolGreen wrote: ↑26 Jun 2024, 21:01
Hammerfist wrote: ↑26 Jun 2024, 19:12
Dunlay wrote: ↑26 Jun 2024, 16:45
Grosjean was fast and erratic too! That takes a driver nowhere. Once a driver creates a bad impression, that's done deal. Look at Yuki now.
My point is and has always been that, nobody can judge if a driver can fight for championship in his first year or not. Definitely not the armchair experts. If a driver has risen through junior ranks and won championships along the way with a top team backing him, there is no reason to believe that driver cannot fight for championship. Not many drivers have had that opportunity other than Lewis. That's because Ron Dennis had no better options as Kimi left McLaren to Ferrari and Montoya had a brain fart midway through 2006. He already had signed Alonso, who was a double champion and due to lack of better options, put Lewis in there which turned out be a gold mine decision. The only other example of such a feat was Marc Marquez. Who knows if George was put in alongside Lewis in 2019, how things would have looked by now. They had winning cars and an impressive rookie alongside a proven champion.
Come on man. Grosjean never showed he had elite talent. He was quick, not fast over a race distance. Actually quite a bit like George. He was outpaced by an older KImi Raikonnen for crying out loud. Hamilton in his disaster year still easily outpaced Button more often than not, and the next season he really embarrassed him. There is just no comparison mate. You think you are being fair but you clearly are not.
"like George"
Hamilton had 33 crashes and incidents in his first 5 years. Which include crashing into parked cars in the pit lane and piling into lap cars and other clumsy stuff.
If anything , Russells 2 or 3 incidents of the last 2 years is just the kind of thing that tends to happen with aggressive young talents. Whether that be Lewis , Max or even a Montoya.
If Russell was keeping his nose clean like Bottas did, there'd be more cause for consern.
where are you getting your numbers from? i cant find any thing on incidents, but if we are talking retirements, LH only had 31 in 342 starts. if we are talking specifically about his first 6 years, a few was reliability DNF's, you would have to go through every one and point out specific drive error / reliability which, Mclaren was rather poor at when LH, Alonso, and JB was driving together ). if we are talking track incidents, its best to share your source, cause 33 Track incidents ( Which include going out off track / over the white line ) is probs a lot lower than GR, is he not on like 27? track incidents this year alone?