Rumors
At that same hour, an F1 community overseas.
The season had already begun, and still the foreign boards would not let go of the question of who would sit in the Mercedes seat for 2025.
I've been watching this rumor for weeks.
Stories about contact with Sainz keep surfacing like tabloid scraps, but driver and team both deny them, and other veterans' names are making the rounds too. None of it is going anywhere.
When it's this quiet at this point in the year, it's usually one of two things. It's already decided, or they're looking in a completely different direction.
I think it's the latter. And a pretty young direction, at that.
Two days later, something rather interesting went up on the same board.
I live a short way from the Red Bull Ring.
Two weeks ago, there was engine noise out there all day. No Grand Prix that day. No official test. Nothing on the calendar at all.
I rode my bike out near the circuit in the afternoon and saw a Mercedes truck going in.
Couldn't get a shot of the inside. But from the engine note near the circuit, I'd guess it's a car running an older power unit.
Promote somebody out of the junior program?
Or some other rookie?
Probably one of the drivers over in F2. What do you all think?
Kim Yihyun.
Posts that fixed on that name began to appear.
Let me get this out of the way first. I do not doubt this driver's talent.
His F2 driving this year has been astonishing, and that last overtake in the previous round still drops my jaw no matter how many times I rewind it.
Even so, there are far too many snags if you try to connect him to a Mercedes seat.
First, he is far too much of a rookie. It's his debut F2 season, and he's only done three rounds. He's still seventeen. He turns eighteen next year.
Second, he isn't a Mercedes junior. He doesn't belong to any team's academy.
Third, he's Korean. In the entire history of F1, there has never been a single Korean driver.
But I want to talk about Kim a little differently.
Look at this face.
Isn't this just cheating? He looks like a K-pop idol.
Once the overseas F1 community started putting a certain Korean driver's name on the board, Korea's own F1 community gradually began to say it too.
A Korean might become an F1 driver?
And at Mercedes?
Goddamn. Nothing hits the national-pride button harder than this.
Before long, people split clean down the middle — Kim Yihyun would be an F1 driver, or he wouldn't — and started fighting.
Did you even read the original to the end?
Even overseas, the comments underneath all finished negative.
He isn't a Mercedes junior, his sponsors amount to a handful of shitty little Korean companies, and his résumé is short.
Above all, there is no evidence anywhere that he was the one in the car.
His name came up for the single reason that he's leading F2. The team hasn't confirmed a thing.
Get your hopes up like this and then nothing happens — think for a second about who those arrows land on.
People wouldn't shut up about it, so I got curious and did the math myself.
The Formula 4 (F4) champion title and the Formula Regional European Championship (FRECA) champion title already fill a big chunk, and if he finishes inside the top three in Formula 2 (F2) this year, the requirement is met.
For reference, he's currently P1 in the F2 championship.
Meaning the qualification itself is already basically a non-issue.
The post above said Mercedes won't run him because his career is short. Career and a Super License are different conversations.
That night the gallery went up in flames, split down the middle just like the boards overseas. That a handful of female fans latched on as Kim Yihyun's photos spread was, in the middle of all of it, a very small thing.
And so, a few months later.
Chaos over news that sudden was only to be expected.