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Comment by cybrjoe | Hacker News Reader

This seems reductionist. There's plenty of other reasons people are F1 fans: the spectacle, the wealth, the prestige. While speed is certainly a draw for a lot of fans, speed can be at odds with the some of these other traits. For instance I took my son to qualifying in Miami, and while we both thoroughly enjoyed it, qualifying is quite short, and not nearly as exciting as watching it on TV. My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.

We ended up kicking around the track for a few hours taking in all the sights and experiences and he enjoyed that a lot more.

I guess my comment is, speed is important, sure, but don't give me a plaintext website either. There's a balance between speed and entertainment value.

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I thought F1 was supposed to look a lot faster in person. The cars going at 300kmph don't look so fast on a screen because the camera stabilisation. Someone who makes drones on YouTube collaborated with RedBull to shoot Max Verstappen with a drone at those speeds. And Max was impressed by the perception of speed from the drone footage compared to regular TV broadcast

Link to YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pEqyr_uT-k

Okay, that was a cool video. It's always cool to see how things go wrong and how the challenge was overcome. That has to be a really cool and fun job.

your eyes/brain stabilize better than any camera/software.

Having attended f1, rally and euro hillclimb races in person, I also thought the F1 in the v8/v10/v12 era indeed looked slower than on TV. I think the reason is they were so scandalously loud that you would expect something visually faster from something that is ripping your ears off even with plugs.

> My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.

That was the exact opposite of my experience with autoracing. Watching on TV with the long tracking/panning shots seem to reduce the effectiveness of the speed. Standing at the track watching the cars fly by and are only there for a split second really brings home how fast they are. "zoom zoom" is about as close as one can get to describing it. There's also just no way to replicate how loud the cars are either. I've seen Fox try where they have moments where the commentators shut the hell up for a minute, they push the mix from the mics around the track, display Vu like meters on screen with some sort of Dolby/surround type of something suggesting it sounds great in that mode. Don't care. Nothing like being there.

> My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.

Depends when you're sitting, but you mostly appreciate it at good corners.

There, you can really feel why F1 is fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ckq7T1Tlg

I'd expect a long lens shooting down a series of S-curves (think: Austin) would exaggerate how fast the cars look, but everything else would seem faster in person. My first F1 race was, indeed, in Austin, and the cars seemed mind-bendingly fast. Even just the sound sent a shiver up my spine as I walked up to the track from a half mile away. But that was in the V10 era; now they're very quiet.

On the other hand, my last F1 race was at Silverstone, and we were at Vale grandstand which is right at pit entry and the final chicane before the front straight. Sitting in a braking zone definitely makes the cars look slow.

Yes! There'll be different key traits for different customers. Like you say for F1, might be speed for some, prestige for others. So perhaps you might need to focus most of your things on both, or some things on prestige and some on speed. Generally there'll be a relatively small set of truly key traits.

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