Yeah. Feel you there.

Nats? But shocked they’re having a hard time. It’s a miracle they didn’t lose 100 games.

Commanders? Something is very wrong if they aren’t in the playoffs.

Depends on my expectations for the season.

Oh, agreed! I mean garbage time in context of postseason dreams and high draft pick hopes. You’re totally spot on.

I’m looking forward to watching next week. Same with NASCAR. Both if time allows, football is back anyways. But still, I really enjoyed it. It’s hard for me to compare the disciplines as they both have incredible challenges - but F1 does a great job.

NASCAR I feel can take a few lessons from F1 on how to do a broadcast. It’s all in the details. It feels to a degree some of those lessons are showing through, which is good. But it’s always good to keep pushing to try to be better. They’re both doing that in their own ways.

As a designer too, the incredible attention to detail the F1 broadcast and Sky Sports puts into how these are broadcasted really was a joy to watch. It looks good, sounds good, lays out the story well. David Croft is absolutely electric on the mic.

That all said, even tho Piastri won somewhat predictably, knowing how razor thin the margin was between he and Norris was really compelling to follow in qualifying. It made for a really interesting to story to track for the race before Norris’s car took a dump.

And yes this is not a true comparison. You can’t completely compare the two but they have shared traits.

The use of different tires is something I’ve played with in Gran Turismo, but didn’t know how it was handled in race life. That’s been fun to learn in this process.

I found it helpful to see how teams were doing in practice, what tires to use, lines to lean into, how the track rides cooler and warmer, dry and damp, dirty and clean air. The good nerdy stuff that I love about racing that NASCAR taught me, but was interesting to see in a different discipline.

What F1 does well is telling the story from start to finish as to what’s going on and why it’s important to the larger picture of the season. Practices and qualifying provide a lot of good stuff for this.

(I do know new smaller cars are incoming. I’m very excited about that and how it can improve racing in tighter tracks. Hope NASCAR does that too.)

Back to F1, a race like Monaco for all its spectacle isn’t always a fun watch when seen by itself. Today in the Netherlands is kinda the same. You won’t get a ton of passing at the front, but you’ll get the good stuff in the middle of the pack.

Practice and qualifying are also not things that are all that fun to watch. Definitely there are folks who enjoy it, that’s great - just isn’t something I’m interested in. The race day itself fills the cup well enough.

For background, in NASCAR it’s not wildly common for the pole sitter to win. certainly can happen but with the length of races so much can happen. That also doesn’t mean the race is all the good but again - they’re long. Lots can happen.

So this weekend was really the first time I decided to watch practices, qualifying, and the race. Just to give it a full try.

My biggest knock on F1 is that the races seem a bit predictable on outcomes. You get the pole, you tend to win depending on the track. I get strategy is in the details, I’m a baseball fan so I understand that big time. I wanted to understand better what I could be missing.

For context: I grew up a huge NASCAR guy, I’ve never been opposed to open wheel racing (F1, IndyCar) and F1 never was easily accessible. Didn’t watch the Netflix show, I just enjoy a good race. So I’ve been slowly getting into it more. Following the last few seasons, catching a race when I can, ect