You know sometimes, you simply have to commit to having a bad week. For example, I had a bad week this summer (rare, I know, but they exist..) and made the decision early on to stop trying to improve my mood. In retrospect, this was a wise decision, because the rest of that week included a city wide power outage, thousands of dollars in credit card fraud, five hours spent in one gods-forsaken Toronto Pearson International airport, a cancelled flight, a covid scare, a very badly scraped knee, debilitating cramps, a broken washing machine, and a flooded foyer. Like actually. And so that week, I retreated to my couch and sought refuge in the things that brought me comfort, relief, release, escapism. At this point in my life, that just so happens to be watching not romcoms or Mad Men for the eight time, but old Formula 1 races.
Sport fascinates me because of how fake it is. The world may be burning up, or you may be on hold with the bank for hours trying to sort out someone else's screw up, or you might have a stack of dishes piling up in your ignored sink, but suddenly, the thing that matters the most is watching little men on a screen try very hard to lob a ball back and forth across a net, or through a hoop, or in this case, suit up like little spacemen, get in a car, and drive. Where? No where. Just round, and round, and round. A Formula One race (aka Grand Prix) clocks in at over two hours, or a medium length Bollywood movie, and the 2021 season had 22 of them. During the week-that-shall-not-be-named, I watched two, sometimes even three a day. You do the math, and when you do, just don't tell me, because I don't want to know. What I do know is that that week, I methodically worked through every Grand Prix of the 2021 Formula One season (even the four hour race in Spa, during which it rained so hard that they raced for all of one lap before calling the whole thing off), and it all brought me untold amounts of comfort.
To most people who know me, my interest in/concerning obsession with Formula One seems a little incompatible with my personality. But once you understand what it’s really about (namely: nepotism, engineering, money, and melodrama), it really makes perfect sense, once you think about it. There’s only 20 drivers and 10 teams on the grid. Unlike the NBA (too many players in a league) or soccer (too many people in a game), Formula One is small and contained, a perfect pressure cooker. The season is long and slow, sometimes boring, but by the end, you know everyone’s business. There’s a villain (Christian Horner), a good guy (Vettel), the unwitting punchline of every joke (sorry Stroll, to the rest of them it’s because your dad bought you your seat, but to me, it's because you're Canadian), a hero to root for (Daniel Ricciardo and his megawatt smile), everyone has a guy they hate to love (Norris) and a guy they love to hate (Fernando Alonso…when will you give up!)
There's rivalries between teammates, between teams, between team principals, uproar over contracts ending early; every offence is blown out of proportion and everything is twice as funny because everyone is European.
Hollywood's been sleeping on this whole sport in my opinion (there's easily two or three easy Oscar winning biopics in the 2018-2022 seasons alone if you ask me) but not for long, because the sport has exploded in popularity all over the US. This year, two different magazines had Formula One drivers on their covers for their September issue, which is actually still kind of a big deal. Halfway through every season, questions and rumours about driver contracts, buyouts and negotiations fly around the internet. I'm not going to bother explaining it all here, but here's a good explainer of the ongoing real housewives of europe level drama surrounding Formula 2 (yes, there's a Formula 2) darling Oscar Piastri's contract with Alpine on ferventmotorsports.com (yes, there's a ferventmotorsports.com), all while the other Alpine driver, Esteban Ocon won't stop posting about his vacation in Sardinia on Instagram stories. The girls of Selling Sunset got nothing on these boys.
Every Formula 1 race is held in a different city—the current season features Melbourne, Montreal, and for the first time, Miami—and no two racetracks are identical. Races are held almost every weekend, and are a three-day affair. Practice on Friday, qualifying (to set race order) on Saturday, race on Sunday. Some race tracks are more boring and predictable (Monaco and Paul Ricard, let's move on) than others (Monza, Silverstone). Some other tracks (like Jeddah) are particularly nasty, known for their fast straights (a segment of the racetrack that’s, well, straight) and collision-prone turns resulting in races getting red flagged (stopped, usually because of driver injury or too much debris on track). My personal favourite part of every race is the strategy: decisions like when to leave the race track and take a pit stop for fresh tyres, which tyre compounds to pick, depending on stuff like track temperature, circuit design, tyre degradation and weather. Races are won by good drivers and fast cars, but as any Ferrari fan this season (and certainly poor Charles) will tell you, not without a solid, logical, precise race strategy.
Truthfully, though, if you look too closely at Formula 1, you'll see less a sport and more a fuel guzzling extravaganza run by oligarchs and crypto money, "and it always feels as though it’s coming to you live from the French Riviera", as Amanda Mull puts it. Stop arguing about tyre degradation and pit stop strategy and chassis design, and you'll see that it's actually just the teams with the most money that usually win. In the end, F1 races really are all the same. All begin, and all end. Down long straights, around hairpin curves, through the debris and smoke, three drivers always emerge. First, second, third. They stop, they cheer, they jump into the arms of their waiting mechanics, and then do it all over again the next week.
It's late July. I've just finished watching the Sochi Grand Prix. Norris led nearly every lap of the race and was on track to win his first ever Grand Prix at 21. All race long, Hamilton (seven time world championship winner, current goat, etcetera) hunted him down the race track, chipping away at the seconds long gap between them by a few tenths of a second lap after lap. Just three laps before the end of the race, it started to rain. Hamilton's team called him in to pit for wet weather tyres. Norris chose to stay on dry weather tyres. The race ends with Norris falling to seventh after the rain got and he spun out after losing grip. Hamilton won his one hundredth Grand Prix. Norris still hasn't won any.
The Turkish Grand Prix is next. I watch the cars zoom around the racetrack. Outside, my neighbour runs into a waiting Uber. A small thunderstorm starts, then stops. My phone buzzes with messages, a party invite, a funny Tiktok, a voice message from my mom. Day turns into night turns into day. Planets orbit a distant sun. I barely stir. And life continues to trundle on.