Why I love Formula 1 (and why you might like it too)

Formula 1 is one of the worst offenders of Sportswashing, the practice of dictators and human rights abusers to use their money to buy good will in the sports world.

And not just in Russia & Saudi Arabia, F1 is hosted by lot’s of other dictators, human rights abusers countries. Just like FIFA:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/feb/25/uefa-and-fi...

> A Formula 1 race weekend is never boring: even when a specific team or driver is a clear favorite

F1 weekends are frequently extremely boring. They are 3 day long events where you're waiting for moments that last seconds and more than often don't occur. Confirmation bias tends to make people think F1 is an exciting thing, and the owners of the sport would like to keep it that way.

I spent the last decade shooting a photo project on this very thing, that F1 is actually pretty mundane, visiting 25 races in the process: https://www.formulanon.com/ # I'd followed the sport for 20 years prior to that, so had run out of enthusiasm for it, the project kept that interest going for a little while longer.

My favourite parts of F1 are the parts which don't occur anywhere near a track. The ingenious rule bending which goes into trying to get an advantage and the politics when people try to get it banned. Things like the f-duct where a driver used the back of their hand to close a passage which reduced the areodynamics drag of the rear wing because movable surfaces aren't allowed; the two pedal system which allowed differential braking through a corner; or the blown defuser which used the exhaust from the engine to enhance the downforce generated by the defuser.

You missed the golden age of F1 in late 80's and the early 90's. Today's version is like watching a computer simulation where the team with the most money is almost guaranteed to win.

I find Formula 1 boring. I think it is overreglemented. All cars are basically the same, and at the same time there are huge differences between the cars, if that makes sense. Only a few teams have a chance of winning. But the time differences are often fractions of a second. And the teams are nowadays mostly unlikable.

What I'd like to see is a race with more variation, and surprises. The only rules should be something like:

- The car must cost less than, say, $1 million in material

- The plans must be opened to competitors after some time

- You have to take care of the drivers' safety

And then just get from A to B or do the laps by any means necessary. The race courses would change regularly, so you would have to build new cars. One year they would be very curvy, next year they are short and straight so you need better acceleration, another year there are short stretches of rallye, and so on. I think that would lead to some very interesting cars. And it would shift the focus away from the shaving milliseconds aspect that I find so boring with modern sports, back to the exploratory feeling I imagine motorsports used to have.

I used to watch F1 back in 90s until beginning of 00s, it was interesting, there were not that significant differences between cars and you could see actual driving skills and overtaking, over the time it turned into siesta lullaby where overtaking happens at best in the pitstop and that's it, pretty much boring from start to finish and you really need to stay extremely focused to not fall asleep.

What F1 really needs is one monopost for all drivers when only driving skills will make difference and not how much money will someone throw at car R&D.

Later I switched to Moto GP, much more dynamic, you can see multiple changes to positions within few laps and it's about actual skills.

Please correct me if I am wrong and F1 is now dynamic with lot of overtaking since I haven't seen one GP in last 10-15 years.

Btw. do yourself a service and don't watch the new documentary Schumacher, it's just waste of time with NO new information for anyone who watched F1 during Schumacher times.

I prefer Formula E nowdays because of the much tighter competition between the manufacturers. Almost every single team is running its own EV engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%9322_Formula_E_Worl... Also it's streamed for free on Youtube, much easier to follow

The only thing I don't like is the engine "sound". You can watch and hear it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CX8ItCZz04 Not sure something to be "fixed" or not but the engine sound was always a big part of motorsport and it's simply gone in electric car races.

For me also: community. I love the F1 community discussing the off-track banter, the drama, the memes, that has grown immensely since Drive to Survive. Here's a shout-out to www.reddit.com/r/formula1! It has maybe become my favorite subreddit on that site. Professionally moderated with semi-regular appearances of drivers or team representatives for Q&A's as well. Every practice session, qualification, race also gets a live thread so that if you're Forever Alone in this interest, there are friendly people with reactions and jokes over there in those live chats! :)

"New drivers typically also only get a dozen or so races to prove themselves..."

Unless you're a pay driver who's bringing enough money to almost wholly fund the team. Nikita Mazepin is surely one of the most talentless people to ever set foot in an F1 car, but he brought Russian Oligarch money with him so we'd have had to endure him for another season had Russia not invaded Ukraine. I'm genuinely curious to see if Haas can last the season now that they've shown him the door.

Incidentally, I believe technically we could have as many as 26 cars on the grid (13 teams), but because even being epically uncompetitive at formula 1 is ruinously expensive, and the fact that only the top 10 teams get any prize money at the end of the season, the grid has been 20 cars for a while.

F1, from an excitement point of view, suffers from the same issue as European footie: unequal budgets. Every team is only really judged against how much resource they brought. Witness Man Utd, everyone is saying what an awful season they're having. They're in 5th place. Watch an F1 race and it's the same, everyone is on a money ladder and are doing well when they're up a little based on where you expect from their budget.

The truly interesting thing about F1 is hidden from sight: engineering. Yes, your driver matters a bit but if you have money you will have a good car as well, which you need to attract a good driver. I guess it's easier to exaggerate the importance of the driver than the dozens of engineers who are doing new things all the time. Quite hard to do a TV show I guess.

There's also the issue that driving is basically a plutocracy. You can't be a driver without huge, huge amounts of money. You _can_ be a driver if you've only got huge amounts of money. Either you have to be unusually good at driving so that someone sponsors you (an even narrower eye of the needle than pro footie), or you have to be unusually wealthy so that mom and dad can sponsor you. Is this a truly global sport? Top drivers seem to come from a small range of countries that either have a motoring tradition or absurd wealth inequality, or just rich countries.

Finally the races seem to happen in all sorts of places that are to motorsports as Qatar is to football.

All of the reasons the author likes F1 also apply to MotoGP motorcycle racing, which I feel is a purer sport with more emphasis on the rider, less margin for error, and more exciting racing.

I'm not much of a Formula 1 fan (although I followed it more or less regularly at times) but I once was at the track when they had a training session and I had goosebumps. Actually, I now have goosebumps thinking about it. So, what was so special? Just the sheer sound of the machines. You hear it kilometers away from the track and once you're there you are totally engrossed by the sounds of the machines - basically vibrating through your body. I'm having trouble to describe it (maybe someone else can do it) but it's definitely a total different experience than watching on TV and I recommend it to anyone to hear for yourself just once.

If you like F1 because of "Drive to Survive", I am sorry but F1 is not at all like that. I have been follower of F1 for more than 20 years now. But not because of only racing. Racing is just 20%. It's more a team game, team politics, engineering, team strategies etc that keeps my interest in F1. If you just follow live racing, I can guarantee you, it's more boring than 5 day cricket test matches. There are lot times a team gonna keep leading for ages. Like mercs for almost 7 years now. But behind doors there are teams who try to do politics to makesure they comeback on top.

I have been watching F1 for >20years and my 2 cents:

Pros: most advanced cares, if you like engineering. the 'best' drivers.

Cons: Lack of wheel to wheel race Some money-driven decisions. Some boring races

Regardless of that, since Liberty Media acquired F1 it is going in a good direction: A bit less rapid cars, more fights It seems to have found its place in the sustainability space.

In terms of Human Rights and so on, you have double-edge situations here, such as visiting S.Arabia and at the same time solid movements of gender equality and others like black liver matters

Is there something similar to F1 but with autonomous cars ?

Just a race between autonomous cars, pitting teams of engineers directly against each other instead of via the human pilot.

I guessed that would involve some pretty different design of the cars, since without the human much of the current designs around safety wouldn't apply. Cars could go faster, slow less, take more risky trajectories.

There's RobotWars, but these always seem (currently) like a weird RC toys competitions.

This is a really good summary. Much like the author I was hooked by Netflix's "Drive to Survive" a few years back, and have since found myself watching every race hence (although I have yet to attend a Grand Prix). In case you're interested in checking it out, the first race of the 2022 season is this weekend and should be broadcast on ESPN in the US.

If you like sports in the service of pushing technology, and you care about the environment, you should be watching Formula E instead.

For a good intro: https://youtu.be/EUyHyk6bq0I

This article failed to mention what seems to me like one of the most important aspects of the competition: team dynamics.

Mercedes is the only team (as far as I know) that says things like "we win as a team and lose as a team", try to hold blame-free retrospectives, open collaboration between various sub-teams, and so on.

Every other team goes for cut-throat competition between individuals. "You have to prove yourself or you're out", mistakes are held against you, and so on.

Guess which team has won the last 8 constructor's championships?

I can't believe people aren't talking more about this.

What about the environmental impact?

Missed out on the fact that it is prohibitively expensive to watch it in the UK