{"id":242382,"date":"2025-07-06T09:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T09:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/242382\/"},"modified":"2025-07-06T09:51:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T09:51:10","slug":"why-people-really-love-f1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/242382\/","title":{"rendered":"Why People Really Love F1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOver the past few months, with the Brad Pitt<\/a> movie F1 approaching and then overtaking <\/a>the box office (it just passed $100 million<\/a> in only its second weekend of release) we longtime fans of the sport have found ourselves trying to explain the appeal to some of our F1-skeptical fellow Americans. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhat is it that makes you so enthused, they ask. Is it the exotic locales? The death-defying speeds? The high-end branding? The machine fetishization?<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of these factors compel a little bit, of course.\u00a0But the real secret to why Formula One fans devour the sport, as we will again when the British Grand Prix at Silverton motors off on Sunday<\/a>, is much sneakier: it\u2019s reality television.<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t mean that in the metaphoric sense of \u201cit has excitement the way reality television has excitement.\u201d Or, \u201cit\u2019s unscripted the way reality television is (pretends to be) unscripted.\u201d I mean that in a far more literal way. All the conventions, all the conceits, that makes us love Real Housewives or Love Is Blind or The Traitors play out on F1\u2019s perpetual multi-screen drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 24 Grand Prixes that happen around the world every few weeks are the new episodes, of course. But the true sizzle happens before and after races, when various drivers and team principals (they\u2019re the coaches) offer provocative disses about other teams, try to sign drivers from other teams, explain why they weren\u2019t trying to send the other teams into a wall at 220 m.p.h. Such out-of-competition drama is the kind of thing that doesn\u2019t happen in other sports \u2014\u00a0 or if it does, it happens as a one-off, not as a regular event and certainly not as a main selling point.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe best analogy I can really come up with is wrestling, with its subplots and subtexts that exist well outside the ring. Of course, all that is plotted out. F1 offers the drama of Gunther and Sami Zayn going at it<\/a>, except no one here is handing out any scripts.<\/p>\n

\n\tConsider the ongoing saga between Christian Horner, team principal at Red Bull, and various other team principals, like Mercedes\u2019 Toto Wolff and McLaren\u2019s Zak Brown.<\/p>\n

\n\tHorner doesn\u2019t much like Brown. You know this because Horner has\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0Brown a \u201cprick.\u201d Wolff doesn\u2019t like Horner, which you know because Wolff\u00a0called him<\/a>\u00a0\u201cpetty and childish\u201d after Horner filed an appeal following the Canadian Grand Prix last month, which itself followed Mercedes driver George Russell trying to bait Red Bull\u2019s Max Verstappen into a suspension-worthy on-course penalty late in the race, which itself followed Verstappen\u00a0allegedly threatening to crash into Russell <\/a>in Qatar last year, which itself followed\u2026 You get the idea. Bayleigh and Tyler from Big Brother\u00a0<\/a>would be proud.<\/p>\n

\n\t(How many F1 fans there are in the U.S. is hard to know, but the number is growing. Some three million people\u00a0watched<\/a>\u00a0last year\u2019s Miami Grand Prix, the most ever Americans who tuned in. Formula One, for what it\u2019s worth,\u00a0counts\u00a0<\/a>45 million Americans in its \u201cfanbase,\u201d and says half of them began tuning in within the last five years. Netflix\u2019s pandemic-era hit\u00a0Drive to Survive\u00a0of course played a big role, but its numbers\u00a0have been dropping<\/a>. The Pitt movie\u00a0aims to turbocharge them<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe drama will continue Sunday, as all-timer Lewis Hamilton<\/a> will try to notch his first GP win since he\u00a0shockingly announced early last season<\/a>\u00a0he was leaving Mercedes for Ferrari \u2014\u00a0 a\u00a0Kristen-sleeping-with-Jax-and-screwing Stassi<\/a>-level betrayal to some. Hamilton has\u00a0won more F1 races<\/a>\u00a0than any driver in history, and won Silverton nine times. But he\u2019s starting fifth and is a decided underdog Sunday. (Hamilton\u2019s drama this season has been with his team principal, whom he sarcastically told to<\/a> \u201ctake a tea break while you\u2019re at it\u201d mid-race when the principal didn\u2019t answer quickly enough on whether he would order teammate Charles LeClerc to let Hamilton pass.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnyone who\u2019s binged\u00a0Drive to Survive\u00a0quickly grasps F1\u2019s Bachelor-y pleasures. The show gleefully accentuates reality-television moments, between and within teams. Watch in season one as Horner (the Tamra <\/a>of the series) fights with leaders of his then-engine supplier Renault. Or in season seven, when McLaren\u2019s Brown asks one of his two drivers<\/a>, the champion Lando Norris, to slow down and let his teammate Oscar Piastri pass so he can win the Hungarian Grand Prix \u2014\u00a0a kind of outrageous request that is like, well I can\u2019t even think of anything else it\u2019s like in other sports. When the Netflix camera does an abrupt zoom-in on Norris as he\u2019s talking to his friend about the controversy afterward you can almost feel the 30 Rock Queen of Jordan<\/a>\u00a0vibes.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the truth is for all the ways Netflix has leaned in to (or, as some have charged,\u00a0contrived<\/a>)\u00a0these moments, producers really were just picking up on what was already there. Formula One has always\u00a0been driven by the pistons of reality television, amazingly many years before the genre was even invented. More than a decade ahead of Kimmi and Alicia\u00a0fighting on Survivor season two<\/a>, the F1 legends Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna were fighting in multiple F1 seasons <\/a>in a way that would make Jeff Probst blush.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe\u2019s behaving like a coward,\u201d Senna would say about Prost. \u201cIt\u2019s become absolutely impossible to work with Ayrton,\u201d Prost would say about Senna.\u00a0(They were actually teammates in the late 1980\u2019s with McLaren, which only seemed to make their rivalry worse.)<\/p>\n

\n\tFans of the\u00a02013 Ron Howard <\/a>movie<\/a>\u00a0Rush<\/a>\u00a0know that even this OG square-off was preceded by plenty of backbiting between the playboy Brit James Hunt and the buttoned-up Austrian Niki Lauda a decade earlier who, even more than Senna and Prost, had wildly different personalities and driving styles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt least those drivers shared a grudging respect. A few years ago, when the young Huntian Brit George Russell ran the Laudian Finn Valtteri Bottas off the road at the Imola Grand Prix in a brutal crash, the two drivers came together\u2026 not to check on each other, but for Bottas to give Russell the finger and Russell to smack him on the helmet<\/a>. On-course. Mid-race. This is Real Housewives with motor oil.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike reality television, part of the reason for the combustibility is the fitting of so many egos in a tight space. Literally, with some of the narrow passes on various courses. But also figuratively. All F1 teams have exactly two drivers, which means that there is really only room for one top competitor between the two egos \u2014\u00a0the kind of math that makes for mayhem. Nearly all other sports lack such a dynamic; they\u2019re either team games or lone endeavors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEven structurally, F1 teammates are not really that, as while they compete against all the other teams for an end-of-season team championship known as the \u201cconstructor\u2019s\u201d they\u2019re also competing within the team for podiums and points that count toward the end-of-year \u201cdriver\u2019s championship\u201d and its chance for an athlete to either solidify their seat or attract the attention of another team with a better offer. Two teammates with a common goal but also radically individual incentive structures? Mark Burnett couldn\u2019t script it any better.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s why F1 the movie is such a Hollywood natural it can almost seem crazy it took this long to produce. The film\u2019s battle between Sonny and JP \u2014\u00a0 They\u2019re teammates! They\u2019re rivals! They\u2019re both at different times! They\u2019re both at the same time! \u2014\u00a0 isn\u2019t the kind of thing you even need Jerry Bruckheimer to gin up. It\u2019s already happening at half the Formula One teams as we speak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFans have dissected the movie like a\u00a0pit crew poring over a damaged front wing<\/a>, and there are indeed liberties taken \u2014\u00a0 a 60-year-old ain\u2019t holding their own in many F1 races; these are in-their-prime peak-condition athletes. But if anything, Kosinski and Pitt are\u00a0playing down\u00a0the intramural drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tThinking about the reality-TV appeal of F1, I recalled the cultural critic Laura Miller\u2019s line that <\/a>about The Sopranos. The David Chase show proved, she said, \u201cthat if you add enough violence men will watch a soap.\u201d Only here swap in tire-strategy and screaming speeds for violence (but sometimes also violence<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, many women watch F1 too \u2014\u00a0 according to its chief executive Stefano Domenicali, they compose 40 percent of the current fan base.The truth is most of us, no matter our gender, enjoy witnessing a good personality clash. When it involves spoiled millionaires acting like jackasses, we like it even more. And we straight-up love it when said millionaires are gunning around a track with the abiding possibility of an explosive crash. The only thing better than sashaying away is accelerating down the straight. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past few months, with the Brad Pitt movie F1 approaching and then overtaking the box office…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[15923,4199,66507,707,4200,998,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-242382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-brad-pitt","9":"tag-f1","10":"tag-f1-the-movie","11":"tag-formula-1","12":"tag-formula1","13":"tag-lewis-hamilton","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114805675306398956","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}