If you haven’t heard of Formula One (F1), it might be safe to say you’re living under a rock (or you don’t give a sh*t about fast cars going vroom vroom, and that’s completely valid too). You only need to look up from whatever study spot you frequent on campus, and you’ll find at least one person in a 50-meter radius wearing a F1 jacket repping either Scuderia Ferrari or Red Bull Racing. Or, on the off-chance you study fully remote, simply flick on Netflix and you’ll see an ad for the newest season of Drive to Survive. Formula One is the highest level of single-seat, open-wheel professional motor racing. F1 cars can accelerate from 0 to 100 kmh in less than three seconds and reach speeds up to 360 kmh (or even more). For the average person, it’s nearly impossible to fathom what these levels of speed would even feel like, physically and mentally. Does it feel like sitting in a mini rocket ship? Or maybe it feels like watching all the Cars movies at 5x speed all at the same time? Considering F1 drivers pull between 4 and 6g’s on the track, that’s even more G-force than most astronauts experience during lift-off. That’s why millions of people around the world watch F1: to get a taste of the adrenaline and excitement that can only be achieved in an F1 car.
To produce one of the fastest cars in the world, you only need about 20 million dollars and a team of over 100 engineers, designers, technicians, and mechanics working together to get the job done; and even then, there’s always another team working just as hard to make a better, faster, more competitive car. Only 20 people in the entire world at any given moment get to experience F1 racing in the driver’s seat. 100% of those 20 people are men, and only one of them is Black (the absolute G.O.A.T, Sir Lewis Hamilton). Diversity has been a long-standing issue in Formula One as a whole. With no female drivers competing in F1 since the 70’s, and hardly any Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) representation, F1 is almost entirely dominated by white males. Sounds like a screaming invitation to infiltrate the white boy’s club if you ask me. What’s encouraging to me, and one of the reasons why I watch F1, is to see the hairline fractures starting to propagate through the paddock as trail blazers like Lewis Hamilton create The Hamilton Commission, as well as powerful women like Susie Wolff, Monisha Kaltenborn, and Hannah Schmitz set examples to change the culture of motorsport.
As a Mechanical Engineering student, the cutting-edge technology that makes F1 cars what they are today is really cool to me. The incredibly complex aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and mechanics that go into making such high speeds possible is a never-ending learning curve that every F1 engineer is constantly trying to stay ahead of. But even if the engineering behind Formula One doesn’t interest you, there is so much drama and thrill in the sport that it is very hard to get bored (unless you’re reigning champion Max Verstappen, in which case winning is just another Sunday).
The aspects of F1 that I find most thrilling are the street circuits like the Monaco Grand Prix, the clinically executed overtakes, the words “DRS enabled”, the late lunges, and the meticulously planned racing strategies that can go to sh*t in milliseconds if even one thing goes wrong. But perhaps even more thrilling than the race itself are the mind games that come into play between the drivers and the teams. Not only is F1 driving incredibly taxing physically (drivers lose around 7lbs of water weight during a race), it’s also a mind f*ck. Team politics, money, and the pressure to perform all hang precariously in the balance along the paddock. The final weeks of the race season, also referred to as “silly season,” can be a juicy game of musical chairs as chaotic speculations spread like wildfire and we find out drivers have switched teams (like Lewis Hamilton announcing his switch to Ferrari for 2025).
As for 2024 season hopes and predictions, I’m expecting Max Verstappen to continue the Red Bull reign with his teammate Sergio Perez, but not without Ferrari drivers Carlos Sainz and Charles LeClerc making Max work for it. Mercedes is trying to stay in the fight for the championship, but I think McLaren might finally make their long-awaited comeback with Lando Norris and new talent Oscar Piastri. Selfishly, I would love to see Daniel Ricciardo crawl back into the points, because I have such a soft spot for the silly Honey Badger and it’s been sad to see him struggle at the bottom for so long. For all the F1 girlies, the podcast F1R THE GIRLS is a great way to stay in the loop on all things F1, and if you want to see some women race (finally!!!) you simply must check out F1 Academy, a new female-only series that aims to help develop and prepare female drivers for even higher levels of motorsport, so that one day, women can finally return to F1, stronger than ever.