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Comment by marklubi | Hacker News Reader

It was a terrible article. Can't believe that Road and Track even let it out the door.

It was a bunch of angry ramblings by a self-proclaimed socialist that knows nothing about the sport and hates people for having and spending their money in one of the most expensive sports in the world.

Her take on Red Bull's dominance is superficial at best (no comments on the Mercedes dominance over the past decade, or Red Bull's previous dominance, or when Ferrari was the one to beat).

Verstappen happens to be a phenom. While Red Bull's dominance definitely has some to do with the car (Adrian Newey is a brilliant engineer), Verstappen is walking away from his teammate in the same vehicle.

Does that sort of dominance make some aspects of the race boring? Yeah, but there's so much more to watch and there's tons of action and passing going on throughout the rest of the field. There are some really top-notch racers and teams on track and they're really battling it out.

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I know that F1 gets a lot of flack for the cycle's of team dominance due to large differences in the cars, but it's something that I quite like about the sport. I find it interesting to learn about pull rod vs push rod suspension, how air is routed for cooling the brake ducts, and other tiny bits of the car. The official tech talk videos on the F1 YouTube channel are also great.

Sure, the cars are so wide and long that it's nearly impossible to pass on some courses (i.e. Monaco). Sure, some cars are much faster than others and you know it's very unlikely that a team like Haas will finish on the podium or even in the points. But, with the current financial regulations teams can't just spend $200m more than someone else. And if you look at the lap time differentials, the spread isn't as big as you might think.

There's always NASCAR and IndyCar if you want to watch a more 'fair' motorsport where people are driving much more similar cars. But I think there's totally a place for a sport where teams aren't on as equal of footing and there's more room for engineering creativity.

The problem with F1 currently is the cost cap. No team can afford to make changes to the car to catch Redbull because the cost cap won't allow it.

Who would actually spend that much money though? Mercedes and maybe Ferrari*? Everyone else would just fall further and further behind.

To me this seems like a necessary transition period. Once new engines and regulations come into play, some of the previous engineering work will become less relevant.

Also, some of Red Bulls current dominance is certainly due to Adrian Newey and his experience with ground effect cars.

* quick google search seems to indicate that Ferrari has roughly 1.3B in cash and Mercedes 26B. So not even a team like Ferrari, who's entire raison d'être is racing, can necessarily afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for years on end.

If there wasn't a costcap, no team could afford to make changes to the car to catch Redbull because Redbull would just outspend them. The only exceptions is possibly Mercedes.

IIRC, one of the founding intents of F1 was to _feature_ car tech and differences, and the "founding fathers" were all in on the Constructor's Championship being the premier goal.

But, drama and humans and personality intervened, and now it's all about the drivers.

You read angry ramblings, I read a perplexed, what even is this, honest account of visiting a car theatre, put in the context of the kind of people who stage such a theatre.

Which might be a great article for New Yorker or any number of other periodicals, probably not what the readers of a magazine dedicated to the sport is looking for.

It sounds like it might have been an interesting article for someone outside the fandom - but that's not the kind of article Road and Track would write.

People would be absolutely boggled by how much money is involved in so many aspects of life, and what that entails.

If you make $100k a year, you might pick up a dollar you see on the ground but might ignore a penny - you won't really care about that dollar or spending it.

At Red Bull's $181 million, that dollar is about $1k or more. Just not even considered.

The amount of effort (and money) involved in just producing an F1 car is astounding.

I think The Life of a Bolt video does a really good job of illustrating just how far these teams will go for safety, performance, and reliability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iptAkpqjtMQ

> Verstappen happens to be a phenom.

Max is great (just like Lewis), but it's generally accepted that Red Bull's "secret sauce" is the car, and their engineering team (specifically "aero").

It's a combination of both, the Red Bull has been the most aerodynamically sophisticated car on the grid for a couple of seasons now, but then again I don't think many drivers would have been as successful as Max was last season

> generally accepted that Red Bull's "secret sauce" is the car

Only partially; Newey is a generational talent at what he does but if it were just that, Checo would be way ahead of where he is.

Unless your assertion is that he has a LACK of talent that counteracts the car's advantage?

Max's preference and ability to handle a very pointy front-end allows for more control of the aero across the entire car and is generally regarded as the best (fastest) way to design a car. Checo (as well as many other drivers) do not handle that set up as well. Newey's talent is undeniable, too.

Exactly.

I'd speculate that the article was removed because there is so much wrong with it - things that even I know to be untrue/exaggerated, especially about Ratcliffe - and R&T was threatened with lawsuits.

What parts specifically are untrue/exaggerated? Asking because I am not in the know.

Here's my problem with it.

F1 is a sport for elites + billionaires, but even the racers are all incredibly wealthy/fortunate nepo babies. It's one of the most inaccessible sports in the entire world. It takes an average of $2M+ for a person to enter F1 as a driver.

Imagine if every kid in the US alone had the privilege/fortune to race carts/cars since they were children, growing up immersed in the scene. Now imagine the equivalent of the US basketball or football system, where hundreds of thousands of kids start the sport young and are gradually filtered out all the way up to college and then pro leagues, ensuring the absolute best of the best are ultimately selected.

The F1 candidate pool represents a rounding error in comparison.

Sure, the drivers who make it are great. They started young and they worked hard to get there. But we're fundamentally BARELY penetrating the global potential here. The greatest possible drivers in the world will statistically never enter the sport. They won't even be able to afford a ticket to watch F1 in person.

The reality is that all motorsports are expensive. It's not easy to do karting in the US and work your way into the domestic racing scene. It's going to involve well off parents, parents who sacrifice a huge portion of their time, sponsorship, or some combination of those items. I saw this first hand with someone I went to middle & high school with. He eventually stoped karting because his family couldn't afford it anymore.

There's a small-time racetrack near us (I think, theoretically, it is somehow tied to NASCAR, but no idea) and the drivers are small-town locals, usually funded by a few sponsorships that are clearly not "cost effective" in that there's no way they're getting that much in value back but they do it because it's a son of a friend.

There are types of motorsports that are quite cheap. E.g. folkracing in Sweden has a rule where anyone can buy a competitor's car for $800. This means there is no incentive for spending lots of money on making your car better than the competition. No drivers license is necessary, age limit is 14.

Yes it still requires sacrificing a lot of time and some money, but not worse than many regular sports.

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing!

And yes, always need to be careful about making definitive statements.

I think you're right, and the reason it's unaffordable is maintaining an automobile (even one that you don't race) is fundamentally very expensive both in time and money. Now consider the cost if you're pushing it to the actual breaking point all the time. Even lemons cars (which are supposed to be basically the least expensive way to go racing) are pretty expensive to keep going.

People are trying to address the pipeline problem you've highlighted by scouting talented drivers from simulators, which is great, but ultimately there's a huge cost to racing a physical car/kart/motorcycle compared to basically every other sport.

It’s not like you need to be an elite or billionaire to enjoy watching it. I mean, I can enjoy watching the Blue Angels even though I can’t afford a fighter jet.

I also disagree with the idea that you have to come from immense wealth to be a driver. The lower levels of racing are where you start out prove your talent are karting. I see some racing karts brand new online for about $2k. You’ve got to maybe be middle class or the low end of upper middle class to get into it, and if you’re good then the levels above that basically sponsor you.

It’s not like you have to personally own and operate the cars to drive. Look at Lewis Hamiton’s background and biography for an example.

There are more racing leagues in the world besides F1. I personally enjoy SCCA, rally, and off road more than anything.

> Now imagine the equivalent of the US basketball or football system, where hundreds of thousands of kids start the sport young and are gradually filtered out all the way up to college and then pro leagues, ensuring the absolute best of the best are ultimately selected.

The barriers to these sports are becoming higher and higher, just like there are high barrier costs associated with karting/racing.

The racers are not all "nepo babies". Lewis Hamilton, for example, comes from an ordinary middle class background.

Quick search of about half the grid...

Verstappen, Sainz, Leclerc - fathers raced cars

Alonso - father was amateur kart racer

Norris, Stroll, Perez - wealthy families

Hamilton, Russell - middle-class parents

Like most sports, being born into it helps a lot, as done wealth. But, it's not a guarantee and there are F1 drivers from relatively normal backgrounds.

Yeah, and it's not just the drivers. It's that everything is about money first and foremost in the sport. That seems to be what happens with any sport once it grows big enough.

The drivers, incredibly skilled as they are, will also frequently do things like go on the radio during races and complain about their car to their team, i.e. the persons responsible for said car. Not offer any constructive input, just... complain. Often. On the other hand, that's one of the few times they actually show any emotions or say what they think, with all the media training and endless PR events and making sure the sponsor logo on their hat is clearly in view in interview after interview after interview... Yeah, I'm ranting. But it's all just so incredibly blatantly commercial. Again, like any sport once it grows big enough.

(Another commenter wrote about the interesting technical side of the sport: I agree that there would be so many more interesting stories to tell there: about car development, strategy, manufacturing... but whenever these things are touched upon, it's done in a very shallow way, to prevent people quitting their subscription in horror at having to digest some actual information. Instead we get things like PR events with drivers having to pretend they enjoy whatever ridiculous competition they're put in against their teammate as part of their contractual obligations. It seems there could be so much more there... but perhaps this way is more profitable.)

That all assumes that potential greatness at driving is evenly distributed across the entire human population, which probably isn't the case. Also, why do you care about how "accessible" a sport is - is it not enough for the action to thrill and the emergent stories to give meaningful context to that action?

Parent poster didn’t seem interested it meeting some arbitrary diversity metric, it was that huge amount of potential talent is entirely unknown.

Because the barrier to entry is low, talent filters up better in many other sports. We probably know who the best hockey player in Canada is, but who would be the best dressage rider is a mystery because few kids have access.

This argument just seems like the sports version of Infinite growth - sports will get infinitely better as we lower "barriers to entry" until we have the supposed best version of the game. How do we know that by lowering the barrier to entry we aren't just flooding the sport with less interesting to watch teams? Alternatively, what if the mechanically best version of F1 far less interesting to watch than what we have now?

Not to say we should never fix anything, but I need more convincing that this is a real problem.

The problem with this argument is that it's equivalent to saying to someone in the Olympics that they're just there because of sample and survivor bias, which ignores the intrinsic counterfactual assumption.

Yes, under some counterfactual condition, there are better Olympians, but that imaginary world is not equivalent or meaningful in the real and current one. This is the basic conceit of a lot of critical theories and ideas, they aren't rooted in the real.

F1 is competition of (rules-) lawyers, engineers, and drivers, in that order. The drivers are great marketing, but about as relevant to the sport as jockeys are to horse racing. They make a difference on the margins, but it's what's under them that really counts.

But moreover, so what? Why should the inaccessibility of a sport matter to a spectator's enjoyment?

Many racers, but not all. A schoolmate of mine got pretty far in his racing career after doing well in the local cart circuit. He wasn't dirt poor, but not rich by any standards. It did involve a lot of work by his father, and finding a patron in the country's rally car circuit: Spain had few success in F1, even though there were big names in other motorsports. Good results in lower formulas brought sponsorships. Ultimately get got a seat in a back maker team because of those sponsorships: One of those drivers that pay for their seat. Fernando was apparently pretty good though, so he got into better teams. I hear he has a decent career.

The difference talent detection isn't just about money though, but general interest and how difficult it is to detect the talent. I bet there are a lot of people that could be great at baseball in Europe, but surprisingly, nobody there plays baseball. The best possible soccer players in India are probably not playing soccer either... and the issue in those two isn't money. Starting training early at the right thing is often more crucial than talent outside of, say, basketball and volleyball, and when your father is already in the sport, it's far more likely that you'll try from a young age, get good coaching and access to sponsorships. It's more that than, say Carlos Jr's father being rich because of his continued Rally driving. There's a lot of people that are more than rich enough: they just don't try.

Related aside: the genius of the Soviet school of finding athletes (emulated by others, like DPRK) is that you don't depend upon a kid trying something like Olympic weightlifting and discovering they have an aptitude for it. Instead, you screen & test the entire eligible population and focus people in the right direction early on (then keep them focused with various incentives and counter-incentives, like a nice place to live instead of a communal apartment).

One might have some incredible Olympic rifle shooters or kayakers or weightlifters or what have you, but because those sports are niche in many countries those talents may never surface (so Madeleine's amazing fast-twitch weightlifting nerves/muscles are 'wasted' on volleyball instead). When you really care about medal count, all sports are important, so you want to maximize your chances of finding the right kids to put on the national squads years in the future. It's really smart, but depends upon political/economic structures thankfully not present in other locations.

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