Calling Max Chilton fans..
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I was just wondering if there are many fans of Max Chilton on F1 Fanatic. Ever since I first saw him on his F1 debut last year, I’ve really liked him. It has nothing to do with me defending him because of the amount of stick he gets for supposedely being “slow”. His demeanour and personality is incredibly likeable don’t you think? I’m a fan of all drivers. Yes there are a few I will admit to admiring a bit more than others, but for me he’s definately one of them.
In my opinion way too much critisism goes his way. Yes, there could well be a number of drivers who would be on average quicker than him over the course of a season, but some of the comments I’ve seen people make.. It’s almost as if these people think that even they’d do a better job than him, not taking into account the amount of hard work, sacrifice, commitment, dedication and many other things which he (and many other drivers obviously) have gone through.
I sometimes make Chilton jokes myself but I completely agree that he is a likeable guy and a strong driver. People just need “the crasher”, “the slow guy” and other typical characters in F1. Of course, the fact that Chilton was convincingly beaten by Bianchi in the first season didn’t help his reputation but he has been a safe pair of hands and able to make progress. In 2014, Chilton has scored important results for the team, while Bianchi has been making unnecessary mistakes.
I still believe that there are guys, who deserve to be in F1 more than Chilton does but he’s way better than pay drivers in F1 once used to be. Moreover, if Ferrari kept an underperforming Massa at the team for years just because it suited them, you can’t really say anything bad about Marussia just because they desperately need cash and haven’t got the best driver line-up available.
What started as a bit of an in-joke between my girlfriend and I about ironically supporting Max Chilton has slowly transformed into full-blown cult-worshipping.
Praise to the Max.
@insilico Looks like there’s 66 at the moment.
I think the main jist of it comes from the fact that Chilton is the only one on the grid who has not won a junior championship – otherwise the F1 WDC could truly be considered the ‘champion of champions’.
There’s no denying that once you are in F1, there is a huge amount of work required to perform at peak performance – not that Bianchi or Raikkonen seem to mind, as they smoke (and somewhat ride on their natural talent).. Webber is another example of raising your peak performance to compete with the best. There has to be a certain amount of admiration in that of itself. I think Chilton is the closest example to a “what if” scenario, i.e. what people with enough natural talent could achieve if given the perfect preparation to make it to F1 (at least 10 years worth, perhaps 15).
Put it this way.. it was recently shown he had tried rFactor – how fast he was in this could be used to justify the ‘I’m faster than Max’ comments. This would be backed up by Vandoorne and Stanaway, Dillmann etc. being ultra fast in competitive sim-racing, practically unbeatable, as they are in real life. But there is still the factor of ‘not being able to adapt’ to the sims, which is probably true for older guys like Schumacher and Raikkonen (who grew up without playing on computers), but would seem less applicable to Chilton. In fact, he uses a lot of sim work to improve his skills, like Bruno Senna was using Rob Wilson to try and lose that ten year lack of development he had after his uncle’s death.
A ‘world record’ level friend of mine is a team-mate online of someone who has beaten Bottas in karts (there are some truly fast Finns online, just like in real life) – there was also some people here who had done well in karts themselves. This shows that the innate pace is there – but to develop it and use that ability in F1 is another ball game altogether (and usually a very expensive one).
We can give Kudos to Chilton for doing this at the very least – there’s no denying he won Marussia back 13th place at the last race. But his record of ‘finishing every race’ I find slightly annoying – he put Maldonado in the wall at Monaco, also taking out his team-mate in the process, so was very lucky to finish that race at all. It’s like di Resta’s “I beat Vettel in F3”, which only occurred because Vettel was already testing the BMW F1 car and had switched his attentions to the next level (making his F1 debut within the next year, while Paul was moving to DTM).
PS. Massa matching Bottas now shows that the 2nd Ferrari probably was being used as a testbed for new parts, such as the suspension failures Massa repeatedly had at Monaco.
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