This is the final part of an 8-part series. Part 7 is here. Click here to read Part 1.

There is a quote from the 1950s that is often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway (and Google says it’s either Barnaby Conrad or Ken Purdy who came up with it): “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

(Pexels / Alex Urezkov)

Discovering the hidden depth of Formula 1 in 2014 made me want to venture a little further, but just diving into a new sport or hobby can easily backfire. I haven’t been able to stick with soccer just yet, for instance. It’s crushing if something doesn’t live up to our expectations. F1 requires a lot of patience. But when it’s good, boy is it good. I believe I came into it at the perfect time.

I had the movie Rush sitting on my PVR forever, and watching that streamer play Forza Motorsport 5 gave me the push I needed to sit down and finally press play. Rush was not so concerned with rules and the procedure of F1. It was about drama and danger—a rockstar version of the sport in the ‘70s. It emphasized the fact that drivers stared down death every time they fired up their engines but that just made it all the more thrilling, all the more sexy. Drivers went to swanky parties in Italian mansions and hung out with supermodels and smoked cigarettes (nowadays drivers train like Olympic athletes… but they still hang out with supermodels in mansions).

Rush tells the real-life story of the brief but intense rivalry between drivers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). While dramatized—they didn’t hate each other that much in real life—it captures the heat of elite competition and why some men are willing to risk their lives to be number one.

I decided to watch F1 seriously soon after. The first race I watched was the 2014 Belgium GP. Watching the lights go out and the cars fly up the iconic incline (two corners which I know now are called Eau Rouge and Raidillon) for the first time is one of those seminal moments for me. No other race start since has captured that same awe that I felt.

But this race would also introduce me to Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, drivers for the Mercedes team. They were both in close contention for the championship at this point in the year, and Hamilton would be forced to retire (from the race) after a collision with Rosberg damaged his car. He radioed in bitterly: “Nico hit me.” Rosberg called it a racing incident.

What followed was two and half years of hard-fought racing and frosty, passive-aggressive cool-down rooms between the two (who usually came in first and second places), shoving each other off tracks, and even crashes that took both of them out of races. What’s so compelling is that there are photos of them from before, as children, go-karting competitively together. They were something like friends for a long time. Then collectively, we got to watch their relationship deteriorate in real time every race weekend. It was a little sad. This wasn’t wrestling, none of it was scripted. It was pure drama.

But it made me fall in love with a sport for the first time in my life.

Part 6 is right here.

Pit stops are the great equalizer in a race. Where anything can happen in something like baseball, Formula 1 is often consistent. Reliable engines remain towards the top of the standings. Drivers that have good results in qualifying often have good results in the race. The crucial moments where viewers’ eyes are glued to the screen are the start, and pit stops. Having a photo finish down the final stretch is rarer than you’d think—the gaps between first and second might be a full minute at times.

(Pexels / Dimitrije Djekanovic)

As a rule, each car must change its tires once during the race, and every visit to the pits takes about twenty to thirty seconds in total. Cars in front of the pack must try to stretch their lead by pushing, completing faster laps so they can safely pit and come out ahead of their competition. If a team is fortunate enough to have both drivers leading the race, the one behind may be ordered to defend, slowing down whoever may be chasing them as battling by its nature takes up more time than driving with no traffic. This also helps their teammate nurse their tires so the team can get at least one guaranteed finish on the podium or within the top ten for points.

An ideal race strategy is a one-stop, satisfying the requirement and having the durability take the driver to the end of the race. Another stop could mean that something has gone wrong for them, a flat spot or a collision that requires a longer pit stop to replace the entire front wing. But some tracks are harder on tires than others, and if other teams are doing two stops or so, strategies are adjusted on the fly. Each team carefully watches what their opponents are doing (and monitors their radio communications) so they can react in kind. In the past, you would have teams order their pit crews to grab their fresh tires and jacks and rush out of the garage with the sole purpose of causing other teams to call their drivers in to pit, but they themselves would stand around for a few minutes holding their equipment before running back inside—a fake-out.

Other tactics you might hear on the broadcast are undercuts and overcuts. An undercut is a manoeuvre where a car pits and, now on fresh tires, can quickly put in faster laps than the car in front of them so when their opponent needs to pit (recognizing the undercut, usually soon after), the overtake can happen when it is in the pits or the pitlane. An overcut is staying out when the car in front pits—on older tires but in cleaner air, pushing hard with the hope of gaining enough ground to comfortably pit and come out ahead of the first car. Overcuts are less popular, and anything you see on screen is almost always an undercut.

A bad pit can be devastating as well. Daniel Ricciardo was poised to take the Monaco GP in 2016 after taking pole, led for 32 laps until he came in for a pit stop that his team was not ready for. He sat in his car for 12 seconds, an eternity for a stop, and Hamilton took the lead and ultimately the victory—with its iconic but narrow streets, it’s difficult to overtake anybody in Monaco.

Those are the fundamentals. There is always a rabbit hole to fall down with Formula 1’s rich history, constantly changing tech, and driver drama. Join me in the final part of this series where I wrap it all up and get you to join me in watching the 2024 season of Formula 1.

We’ve established how important it is for Formula 1 drivers to have the greatest amount of control going into corners in part five of this series. Does this always translate to a perfect turn every time?

Nope.

While downforce helps a driver make crazy turns, it also means a loss of grip can be race-altering (or ending) for a driver if the car ends up in a barrier or off into the gravel. That slide—even just a tiny one—might create a flat spot on one or more tires (think a rubber eraser dragged hard across the sidewalk) which then affects everything from speed to car control, effectively forcing its driver to pit. There are videos that show a pitstop that takes all of 1.8 seconds, but that’s if everything goes very, very right—and that’s not counting the precious time it takes to drive through the speed-limited pit lane.

(Pexels / Laura Paredis)

The moment I decided I had graduated from F1-interested to F1-fan was sometime in 2015, when Sebastian Vettel (having left Red Bull for the prestigious Ferrari team) was chasing down a quick Mercedes car. Nico Rosberg, I think. With every lap, he was gaining ground. Until Vettel made a mistake on a corner, brakes locking for just an instant, forcing him to take a wider turn than he wanted to. And that was it. Even though there were still a few laps to go, the chase was over for him. That tiny mistake just undid all of his work and there was no coming back from it. You could feel the fans wearing red around the track slump back in defeat. When I recognized that, it was a neat moment.

There are SO MANY tiny things that add up to form a whole picture in Formula 1. Tire management (or tyres—don’t be confused at the spelling of tires and curbs/kerbs if you stumble upon UK-based Formula 1 outlets) is one of the keys to success in motorsports: wear and tear on the tires must be considered, and even the temperature of the tires is a factor. Warmer tires provide better grip than cold ones. If you’ve seen the start of a Grand Prix, before the formation lap starts, the race engineers and pit crews keep covers over the tires until the last possible second—before the cars fire up their engines—to retain warmth. Then, on the formation lap you might see cars darting left and right, shimmying or wiggling, and that’s one way to generate heat. The drivers also need to warm up their brakes during this lap at the behest of their engineers who feed them telemetry and other relevant race information over the radio all throughout.

Tires in Formula 1 are ordered well in advance from the sport’s official and sole supplier, Pirelli. In previous eras, tires were yet another part that contributed to the battle with competing tire companies like current-day F1’s engine providers. It led to a pretty wild moment in racing history when only 6 cars lined up on the grid in 2005 at the US Grand Prix.

The tires come in different compounds, with softer compounds translating to faster cars and better grip and harder compounds lasting longer, meaning less pit stops—in theory. Track conditions and how hard a driver is on his tires determine how long his set of tires can last, but a car on newer, softer tires will almost always be able to overtake another car on older, harder tires. Teams decide on which sets of tires they will need, and must manage them all weekend, even if it means re-using them in practice sessions and even during the race. There are also variants for when it rains called “slicks” and “wets” with deep grooves, and yes: teams have had to gamble on changing weather and have gotten badly burned by their choices.

And as an official rule, cars must pit and change their tires to a new compound at least once in a race. This makes the timing of a pit stop significant.

Find out more about pit stops, including blunders and mind games that come with them.

Read Part 4 here.

The main difference between F1 and other racing series is the variation between its cars. Each team fields two drivers and two cars, accumulating points (by finishing within the top ten positions) between them for individual World Driver Championships and shared World Constructor Championships—like one big science fair competition, it’s a sport that rewards its nerds for building one hell of a machine.

(Pexels / Adriaan Greyling)

Where other sports fans may be abuzz with additions or subtractions to their teams’ gameday lineups, F1 fans look forward to hearing news and rumours of developments from week to week of a more technological nature: engine or aero upgrades. The engine is the engine, aero refers to all the carbon-fibre pieces surrounding the chassis (and in some eras, bizarre-looking horns placed seemingly at random)… all to shave off tenths of seconds purely from engineering and physics.

At a glance, the cars all look similar with their front and rear wings. But aside from some shared specifications and limits, the technology under the hood is all different. It can unfortunately lead to lean years in which one team secures every championship and the top two steps of the podium every weekend, until everyone watching becomes sick of hearing God Save the Queen or King during the celebration. (People became sick of hearing the German anthem before then.) If you weren’t aware, the winner of the race gets his national anthem played followed by the anthem of the country his team is based in.

Somebody once explained to me what makes Formula 1 cars stand out from other race cars. Think of the shape and aerodynamic elements needed to get a jet plane up and into the air. An F1 car is the inverse of that—its wings are designed to keep its wheels glued to the track no matter how fast it’s going. Downforce is what allows F1 cars to take those turns at such dangerous, breakneck speeds.

A closer look at the sidepods and bargeboards of an F1 car (these are real terms, I swear) reveals grooves and channels engineered specifically for airflow redirection, and no team has the same design. While this adds to the amount of downforce a car generates, a better designed car attempts to redirect the air in such a way that it doesn’t go right into their own engine’s air intake. You may hear the term clean air and dirty air during a broadcast, and this may best be explained by thinking about a boat moving across a placid lake versus a boat hitting angry waves. You might see one team’s car outperforming everyone and seemingly untouchable when out in front of the pack, but then all of a sudden look unrecognizable the moment it’s caught in another car’s turbulent wake or dirty air, especially around corners.

But an opponent’s slipstream can be used to a driver’s advantage. On every track there are a small number of specific DRS (drag reduction system) zones where, if a driver is within 1 second of someone he is chasing, he may activate a mode that opens up the rear wing of his car which will allow him to pick up even more speed to attempt to overtake.

Well-designed aero is important to an F1 team, and arguably just as important as the power of its engines. But short of body damage or a blown engine, that is a long-term battle that is sometimes decided well in the pre-season. Some teams may even “give up” and start development on next year’s car if they find themselves too far behind.

What has, however, immediate and changing impact on performance from section to section, corner to corner of a track—and is out of the hands of the cars’ designers—are its tires.

Races are won (and sometimes lost) through tire management and pit strategy, but that’s a whole other article. The next article, in fact. Read on.

Check out parts one, two, and three to get more Formula 1 goodness.

Race circuits are unique. They have their own personality and lend themselves to better or worse races. It’s up to the drivers to study each feature of a track, deciding on which gear to take, where they can gain precious seconds, and noting hazardous corners. At the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, there is a so-called Wall of Champions whose namesake came after a number of World Champions lost control and drove into it on separate occasions.

(Pexels / Carlos Santiago)

In the same way that baseball is nerdy, racing is about scouting and knowledge. Most drivers in the sport have been around long enough to know these tracks from beginning to end. There’s a scene in the 2013 movie Rush by Ron Howard, where real-life ‘70s driver James Hunt (played by Chris Hemsworth) runs through a visualization of an upcoming track from memory, hands held up in the air, wrapped around an invisible steering wheel and shift-knob, deft toes and heels pressing down on imagined gas and clutch pedals, all the while reciting the braking points and gears needed to ensure a smooth, quick line.

It’s a practiced routine—the same braking points and gear shifts won’t work for another driver, especially with the way cars may be set up. (Near a turn on a track are white braking markers with the numbers of hundreds of metres until, supposedly, the apex but it’s not precise and drivers say they pick their own braking points by visual reference anyway—a tree or something else they can see out of the corner of their vision.) Once drivers are comfortable with their cars, learning how responsive it is to their controls, it becomes an extension of their bodies.

Struggling F1 teams may be hamstrung by a weak engine, but other times it may be that one or both of their drivers might be having difficulties with their setups with steering and braking, say, if one driver is consistently qualifying high and his teammate is failing to make it out of Q1 (the first stage of the session of timed laps to determine grid position on race day).

There was drama in 2022 when eight-time Grand Prix winner (and fan favourite) Daniel Ricciardo, having jumped ship to McLaren previously, was unable to keep up with his teammate Lando Norris. Both drivers are talented and did well for McLaren in 2021, but for a team looking to be competitive and constantly be getting podium-finishes in 2022, Ricciardo’s lack of results stuck out. The media hounded him and the team after each race and at the conclusion of the season, McLaren terminated his contract early. This was unusual as most teams make seat changes after contracts end.

But in today’s F1, it’s adapt or die. Drive to survive, if you will.

Read more about Formula 1’s heavy focus on technology and what makes it so unique in part five.