Tuesdays with Tom: Formula One Has Arrived
I tried to find the origin of the quote “chicks dig cars”. The closest thing I could find to an origin point is the movie Batman & Robin. Robin looks at the Batmobile and utters the phrase. I refuse to believe this is the first time that comment was made. Since Karl Benz invented the first car in 1886, I have a strong feeling that many chicks were into fast cars and the men who owned them. Particularly in the United States, the fascination with speed demon vehicles is a longtime staple and something that many who acquire wealth strive to have for themselves. But it’s no longer just ambitious women who dig cars. In the past few years, we have seen a new American revolution rally around the sport of Formula 1 racing. The sport is having a moment unlike any other in its rich history of existence. Formula 1 seems poised to take the leap from the niche, hardcore fans only category of sports into a more mainstream category. So why is it happening now? Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!
I don’t know the first thing about cars. Yes, I can drive one contrary to popular belief. But as far as how they work, I could not be less interested in that process. I’ll probably get ripped off by mechanics in the future when I eventually do buy and drive a car regularly again. I say all of this to be transparent about my ignorance as I try to dive into the world of Formula 1 from a beginner’s point of view. Formula 1 racing began in 1950. The season consists of a series of races known as Grand Prix that take place all over the world. A point system is used for every race throughout the year. One driver is awarded the World Championship at the end of the season and another championship is given to a team’s constructors (more on that in a second). Drivers are required to maintain a valid Super License to race, which sounds made up but is indeed a very real requirement. Today, there are only 20 drivers who are qualified to race in Formula 1. In that sense, your odds of being a Formula 1 driver are fewer than any other professional sport on the planet.
But the drivers are only one part of a Formula 1 team. Each team has anywhere from 300 to over 1,000 people involved behind the scenes of each driver. The de facto coach is the team principal. Their role is to lead the constructors, which is essentially the shorthand term for the people who work on the car. The “formula” component of Formula 1 is the specific set of rules that teams must follow to compete in the sport. These constructors are responsible for creating the cars that are the fastest regulated road course racing cars in the world. These cars can go from 0 to 200 miles an hour in 4 seconds, twice as fast as Indy Car racing. They look nothing like the vehicles in NASCAR and the tracks are far more intricate. The estimated costs for financing a Formula 1 team are around $200 million per year. In short, these Formula 1 teams have NFL-esque costs, involving hundreds of people in the service of creating a single car for a single driver in a very small and competitive field.
Formula 1 is not a poor man’s game. The primary main companies competing in the sport are exorbitantly wealthy and have been manufacturing cars for decades. Movies like Rush and Ford vs. Ferrari have beautifully illustrated just how demanding and precise the sport of Formula 1 can be for everyone involved. Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, Haas and Renault invest this epic sum of money for many reasons, but the biggest one of all is the promise of even more money. When a driver and constructor team wins a World Championship, they don’t receive the prize money. It goes to the team as a whole and those people are paid in salary by the team. For example, Lewis Hamilton makes $65 million a year racing for Mercedes. The teams compete for a prize fund that varies by year, but can total over $1 billion. Each race is important, but it’s about the long term goal. It creates an unusual dynamic from this viewer’s perspective.
Why is a sport that’s been around for over 70 years now suddenly becoming popular in this country? The answer appears to be a documentary series called Drive to Survive. The co-production between Netflix and Formula One debuted in 2018 and covered that season’s World Championship run. The show chronicles the behind the scenes lives of a Formula 1 team and serves as a riveting human interest story about the people in the sport. It soared in viewership during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and they’ve added swaths of new fans as a result. One of them is my friend Jordan. I witnessed him fully invested in a Formula 1 race one morning while we were in Mexico (the broadcast was quite odd there). I asked him why he’s become a fan of the sport. He was one of the many who got invested after watching Drive to Survive and says that he loves the storylines between the various drivers. “There is great competition in the front, middle and back of the grid so even drivers at the 8, 9 and 10 spots are battling it out. And there are some pretty funny drivers and team managers. Lots of villains too.” Indeed, there are millions of people who are rabid fans of the sport’s key figures. The aforementioned Lewis Hamilton has 28 million followers on Instagram. Charles Leclerc, the current leader this season, has 7.3 million. The most controversial driver is defending champion Max Verstappen, but even he has legions of supporters. Quite frankly, being a Formula 1 driver seems like one of the coolest gigs ever with some unbelievable perks. The amount of skill and fearlessness required to race these cars around these complicated tracks is unfathomable for most to imagine.
Not everyone who loves cars is into Formula 1 though. I asked the biggest car enthusiast I know about Formula 1 and he said that it’s not his preference for top notch racing. According to Ian “The Beast” Bernstein, there are “too many rules” in the sport. “The cars are too big and too safe. People don’t admit it, but they want to see crazy wrecks. I’m a car guy and like seeing different types of engines, only one specific type is allowed.” For now, Ian seems to be in the minority of casual Formula 1 fans. Drive to Survive was renewed for another season recently and Formula 1 is now regularly featured on ESPN and other national broadcast channels in the United States. Most of the big sports podcast companies have Formula 1 content and some have even launched podcasts dedicated to Formula 1 coverage. Perhaps the biggest watershed moment in American Formula 1 fascination was the Miami Grand Prix race a few weeks ago. The race was attended by a gaggle of celebrities and the ultra wealthy elite. Ancedotelly, it felt like a pep rally and invitation for America to jump aboard the Formula 1 bandwagon. As Kevin Clark described it, the event encapsulated everything that Americans seem to love about the sport. “F1 is an American sport because it dovetails so well with what Americans value: superstars, fast cars, bingeable streaming shows, hot people, the ability to change a tire, and drinking outdoors.”
I’m taking this all in from afar, but that sentence sums it up nicely. Unlike many sports where people crave athletes who are relatable and friendly, the central appeal of Formula 1 is that it is inherently not relatable and aggressively elitist. It’s a sport almost exclusively for rich people who watch other rich people compete for an embarrassment of even more riches. Going to a Formula 1 race is a social statement more so than a spectator sport. It’s hard to watch cars zip by you at 200 miles an hour, but it’s easy to look at very attractive and famous people gawking at one another and partying. It’s incredibly fitting that a Netflix series was the catalyst for this newfound craze in a pretty specific and unique sport. We will watch just about anything with compelling drama and watching a Formula 1 race is often quite dramatic. When you add in a memorable cast of characters, it almost feels like Formula 1 fans treat the sport like a recurring TV show.
I have no car in this race, but I’m not totally convinced that Formula 1’s popularity is here to stay. The sport has always had diehard fans, but casual fans are fickle in any sport. I have no doubt that they’ve won over new supporters for years to come, but every professional sport in America outside of the NFL struggles to maintain casual audiences. Formula 1 is smart to lean into the Drive to Survive storylines and for their sake, they are counting on that drawing new eyeballs every year. But this is still a very international sport with an incredibly high price point to attend. In a way, it’s similar to a high profile horse race. Only the exceptionally rich can enjoy it in person. Everyone else? They can choose to watch it on TV or follow it on the Internet. It’s nice to be the cool kid in high school, but once you’re in the real world nobody cares who was popular in high school. The question becomes: will Formula 1 break into the elite club of American professional sports? Or did we just watch it peak in metaphorical high school? Let’s just say, this race is far from over.
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Tom’s Thoughts of the Week
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The Kentucky Derby is America’s shortest major sporting event and a rare thing I’m interested in despite having almost no knowledge or passion for the sport itself. If you missed it a few weeks ago, you missed out on Derby history. The day before the race, a horse named Ethereal Road was scratched from the lineup and replaced by another horse named Rich Strike. Entering at 80-1 odds, Rick Strike had the worst odds of any Derby horse. To say this horse was not on anyone’s radar is a massive understatement. In fact, this horse was so unknown that it was available for sale at the low price of $30,000 as recently as six months ago. But in an astonishing turn of events, Rich Strike stormed from 17th place to first place in the final turn of the Kentucky Derby. In a few seconds, Rich Strike became the longest shot horse to ever win the Kentucky Derby. Anyone who bet even a single dollar on Rich Strike turned a massive profit. It’s a race I won’t soon forget and congratulations to that improbable horse.
The NBA went out of their way to schedule two Game 7 matchups on Sunday with the hopes of a thrilling conclusion to both series. Instead, they got two pretty boring blowouts. The first one arrived when the Boston Celtics reigned hellfire on the Milwaukee Bucks in the second half of their Eastern Conference series. Reserve power forward Grant Williams scored 27 points, including seven 3-point shots made. Considering this guy averaged one 3-pointer a game in a small regular season role, that was quite a shock. The end result is the defending NBA champs were swiftly eliminated after a competitive series. The Celtics will take on the Miami Heat in a series I am dreading. But that was nowhere near the worst loss of the day. In the Western Conference, the underdog Dallas Mavericks held a 30-point lead over the Phoenix Suns on the road. It’s not often you watch an NBA game that’s over in the second quarter, but that’s how badly Dallas demolished Phoenix. At one point, the Mavericks were up by almost 50 points. The Suns were booed off the court at halftime and fans were abandoning their seats in droves by the third quarter. I think this is one of the worst playoff defeats of all time, full stop. The Suns won 64 games this year and this was a rare year where their conference was down competitively. Chris Paul is 38 years old and their title window may have just slammed shut. On the other hand, Luka Doncic is having his first amazing playoff run. He scored 35 points in just 30 minutes, most of them coming in the first half. I didn’t expect Dallas to make it this far, but the way they are playing they have a solid shot against Golden State to make their first finals trip since 2011. Sunday was an ignomonious ending for last year’s two Finals teams.
As some of you know, I made a doctoral-themed trip to the movie theater recently to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. At some point during the film, I had a funny thought imagining how I might explain this movie to someone like my mother. She claims to have seen only two Marvel movies and one of them was the fairly inessential Black Widow (incidentally she also says this is her favorite Marvel movie). This Doctor Strange sequel is basically impossible to explain without recapping a decade’s worth of Marvel content and more specifically, the fairly confusing new multiversal story structure. It is surprising how prevalent multiverse stories are in culture today between Marvel, Rick and Morty and even A24 products like Everything Everywhere All at Once. Even more surprising is that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is much more of an isolated story than the trailers made it seem to be. I had a good time watching it, but I am fully up to speed on the filmed storylines across the MCU. An uninitiated viewer watching this movie would be bombarded with references and teases that mean nothing to them. I am curious to know how much patience the casual moviegoer will have with Marvel entertainment now that they are pretty specifically catering to people who have been committed from the beginning or happen to be super diehard comic book fans. In the meantime, if you do like Marvel stuff, you will likely enjoy this new Doctor Strange and Marvel adventure. But you probably won’t be blown away either.
One of the most memorable commercials of my lifetime is the one for the original iPod. It’s the one with the silhouette people dancing in front of solid colored backgrounds to the 2003 rock jam “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” by Jet (name a more 2003 moment). The white iPod outline was iconic branding and the iPod was a major reason why Apple soared in the 2000s. I even remember the original boast of the iPod being able to hold 10,000 songs. That’s right, 10,000 whole songs! Anyway, that was almost two decades ago and last week, Apple announced that they are discontinuing the iPod. While the iPod has been obsolete for several years, I had a strangely wistful reaction to this news. From 8th grade through college, I seldom went anywhere without an iPod. I had the original bulky one in black before I got the iPod touch for free with the purchase of my Macbook Pro as a freshman. Of course, once I learned I could upload the same music from my iPod onto my phone it became less necessary. But I couldn’t load ALL of my music and therefore the iPod was still in regular use as late as 2015. That’s around the same time that the iPod basically disappeared everywhere except for Matt Meindl’s Honda Civic. But I know I am not alone in having a fantastic experience with the iPod over many years. In fact, I still have my last iPod touch. It sits in my nightstand drawer collecting dust, but every few months I fire it up and marvel at its charmingly outdated interface. The iPod was a gateway to an outdated music marketplace. We used to pay $9.99 to own one album of music on iTunes (also defunct today). Now, you can pay the same price for unlimited monthly streaming access to millions of songs from all over the world. I’ll say this much. If you still have an iPod, hold on to it. I guarantee this will be worth something one day. If we’re learned anything about the music industry, it’s that nostalgia for old technology comes in cycles and there’s a good chance in 20 years, your iPod will be worth a lot of money to someone. In the meantime, I will enjoy it as a time capsule to my youth in more ways than one.
We’re almost two months removed from Will Smith’s infamous slap, but I am afraid we have only just begun feeling the impact of it across the world of comedy. Dave Chappelle was attacked by a fan on stage during a comedy show. The man pathetically failed in his attempt to injure Chappelle, but he was found with a knife on him. Comedians have been very vocal about their concerns towards unruly fans who are using Smith’s slap as inspiration to attack other comics. We haven’t heard from Will Smith since the Oscars and in my opinion, his 10-year ban from the Academy is totally meaningless. But he set an unfortunate precedent with his actions. I’m not afraid to say that people are way too sensitive in 2022. If you are going to a comedy show specifically to be offended, don’t go! Why waste your time and money? Comedians don’t cure cancer, but we need their perspective on things and I want comedians to feel comfortable testing limits in their artistic pursuits. Frankly, it sucks that we have arrived at a point where you can’t critique anything or anyone without risking “cancellation”. And since when is it okay to assault people for having opinions? This is a troubling trend that I don’t think is going away. That’s a fucking shame.