TIL #1: It is Not a Fair World
Welcome to Formula 1
Welcome to The Installation Lap! I’m so happy that you have found your way into the wild, exciting, and frustrating world of Formula 1 - fandom. You are at the start of an exciting journey, and I’m honored that you’ve allowed me to help you on your way to a greater appreciation of this complicated and mad sport.
I have been a passionate Formula 1 fan for over 20 years. In those early days, as the internet was just coming to life, I was principally consuming Formula 1 through F1 Magazine! Perhaps, if the stars and time zones aligned, I could actually watch one or two races per year. Otherwise, being a fan of F1 in America was a lonely existence. There was never a dedicated sabbath with chicken wings and groups of friends coming over to the house to watch the races. The F1 circus never came to town, and the simple pleasure baseball and hockey fans, in particular, get to experience casually saying to a friend, “Hey? Want to go to a game tonight?” and with a short car ride and a hundred bucks (not adjusted for inflation) a couple of friends could be sipping beers and cheering on the local team.
No, to be an F1 fan in America was to have no community to participate in. Meeting another F1 fan in the wild often had the air of two spies exchanging a wink and a secret handshake. That said, one of the greatest things about being an F1 fan was to have a delightful secret with its own language. I shared that with my Dad and my best friend. One of our best memories was waking up early one morning, loading into the car before the sun was up, and making our way from Eastern Connecticut to Boston’s North End. 90mins and four espressos later, we watched Michael Schumacher break Fangio’s record as a gang of centenarian Ferrari fans cheered in Italian around us. Hard to beat memories like that.
To bear witness to this explosion of popularity has been head spinning. For decades the F1 marketing gods have been trying to crack the American market, and after holding Grand Prix on US soil in nearly every decade for the last forty years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, they were often left scratching their heads and wondering what they just spent all that money on.
Finally, as I’m sure you’re aware, some big-time effort by the FIA, the Ross Brawn brain-trust of F1, the American ownership of F1 by Liberty Media, and the huge contribution by our friends at Netflix, who have given Americans the Drive to Survive series, F1 has finally won the great prize it has been longing for - the American imagination.
So again, welcome to the club. I’m so excited for you to sink into the nuances of this strange sport with me, and we can all be adrenalized and perpetually frustrated together.
As I mentioned, this newsletter is for the F1 newcomer. It took some time to sit with my F1 memories and tease out some of those early questions and points of utter bafflement I had as a young F1 fan. F1, due to the massive complexity and expense of the technical side of the sport, does not and cannot operate in the way Americans are used to understanding professional sports. In thinking about how to introduce F1 to Americans, I landed on a starting point that I think will help set a foundation from which we can slowly build an understanding and a nuanced appreciation of this high-speed drama: The first thing you will need to know about F1 as a fan - Formula 1 is not fair.
Perhaps a more generous assertion is that the fairness the rules aspire to impose is not evenly distributed up and down the grid. American sports fans have no doubt seen their share of missed calls, wild injustices, and savage inequalities. To any Detroit Lions fan or baseball fan who loves one of the “poor” teams reading this - you are perfectly poised to quickly understand F1, and I’m sorry for that.
Despite the yearly controversies, American professional sport has made incredible strides, both technologically and on a human level, to try and bring more consistency to the enforcement of the rules. High-speed cameras with super slow-motion replay. 3D graphics and animations that can show us if a tennis ball was actually in or out, no longer relying on some well Samosa’d goon in a lifeguard chair to make the calls from twenty meters away. There are now opportunities for opposing teams to call for plays and sequences to be reviewed if they disagree with a call made on the field. In fact, as Michael Lewis has noted on his excellent podcast “Against The Rules,” the actual quality of refereeing in the NBA, in particular, has never been better. [Note here that the fan’s feelings about the quality of NBA refereeing are getting consistently grimmer even as the overall quality and consistency of calls have improved. The roots of all that are probably better left for someone like Daniel Kahneman to explore.]
The foundation of the often criticized circus that is Formula 1 lies in its uneven distribution of fairness. "On any given Sunday," not every driver has the same chance of winning. Some teams and drivers continuously come out on top (Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton for the last eight or nine years, Red Bull and Max Verstappen currently), while others remain perenially winless (Haas, Williams, et al.). This dearth of wins is a common theme among F1 drivers, as evidenced by the "10 Best Drivers Never to Win a Grand Prix" list on f1i.com. Topping that list is the now-beloved F1 commentator Martin Brundle. He is in good company with current crowd favorites like Lando Norris and Alex Albon. The difference here being that for some of these younger talents, like Lando, at the ripe old age of 23, it is considered just a matter of time before he is able to nab his first win.
The regulations in F1 do a decent job of covering the more straightforward infractions, such as improper grid positioning or a jumped race start, but many calls in the sport rely on humans interpreting the rules and sporting regulations under high-pressure conditions as cars are racing upwards of 200mph. It’s not an easy job, and on the whole, I would say they do a decent job of making a lot of correct and fairly judged calls. These calls, such as determining who owned the corner when a crash happened or how quickly or lethargically a driver being lapped responded to blue flags, can be questionable in their fairness. The rules say a car being lapped has three corners to get out of the way. For the aggrieved driver behind, even one corner feels like three, and then they get on the radio…The early laps of races are often more lenient, with marshals allowing drivers to race hard and take chances, but the same actions later in the race could result in investigations and penalties.
The root of the unfairness in F1 is its dependence on money. The sport has always been the playground of the wealthy, with the richest teams, drivers, and families being the ones that generally, but not always, come out on top on race day. This is because, for most of F1’s history, money equaled lap time. The recent implementation (2022) of new rules and regulations has attempted to level the playing field with, among other things, F1’s first cost cap, but as of now, the top teams remain Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull, with Red Bull prodigy Max Verstappen winning the first three races of the 2023 season. The rich, in F1 and in life, seem to get richer continually.
The current era of F1, the Turbo-Hybrid era, was previously plagued by a dependence on aerodynamic efficiency, which made it difficult for cars to follow each other closely without losing speed and grip. However, thanks to the efforts of Ross Brawn and others, the cars now rely more on ground effects and generate aerodynamic grip from the bottom of the car rather than the top surfaces, allowing for closer racing. Despite this, the top teams still lead the field, with Aston Martin (formerly Racing Point, formerly Force India, formerly Spyker, formerly, formerly…we’ll get more into this in subsequent columns) making a rare leap to potentially having the second or third fastest car on the grid. This is one of the biggest stories of the year precisely because it doesn’t happen that often.
In the recent Australian Grand Prix, the inconsistent application of red flags (intended to halt the race and return all cars to the pit lane) reared its ugly head again, leading to significant issues. Red flags are deployed when track conditions become unsafe due to debris, weather, or other factors, allowing officials to address the problem. This safety measure is common across all categories of motorsport.
However, in Australia, the red flags came into conflict with the primary objective of Formula 1 drivers: maximizing results. The red flags inadvertently raised the stakes in the race, boxing drivers into seizing a single opportunity to change their entire afternoon. This situation is a perfect recipe for accidents, which is precisely what transpired.
The conundrum of red flag deployment has persisted for several seasons, and finding blanket solutions is challenging in F1, given the sport's situational nature. Regardless, you can count on an ill-timed red flag jeopardizing the success of a favorite team or driver during the course of a season.
How do F1 fans deal with this unfairness? Beer, mostly. It also forces you to cheer for relative success. Former F1 driver turned Indy Car racer Roman Grosjean expressed this perfectly in 2016 when driving for the brand new American team, Haas. They were new, and they had relatively little money, and in the 2016 Australian Grand Prix that year, Grosjean finished 6th. He exclaimed over the radio, “Guys, listen to me. This is a WIN for us! This is a WIN! Unbelievable!” I went back to watch the original message, and I teared up - again. Roman was so excited; his engineer on the radio was ecstatic. That joy, the joy of a good day at the track, even in P6, is joy nonetheless, and F1 fans celebrate whenever and wherever they can find glory. We celebrate wins and championships, to be sure. But we also celebrate the smaller victories happening on race day. They don’t always grab the headlines, but when one of your favorite small teams toiling at the back of the grid season after season snags a few sickly sweet points, you celebrate like mad. F1 glory is still and will forever be F1 glory, and trust me, dear reader; you are going to get to experience the rush of months of frustration and bad luck somehow manifesting into a points finish. As the old saying goes, in F1, points make prizes, and even a single point in F1 can be enough to save a driver’s career or a racing team’s entire existence. Welcome to the circus.
