“What will happen over the course of the next 66 laps?” “Max Verstappen is the champion of the world!!!” You’ve been hearing about F1 too, right? Cool. Let’s talk about it. “Formula 1 racing…” “into Miami for the first time…” “the hottest ticket in town…” “hooked on Drive to Survive” “Drive to Survive…” “Drive to Survive!” This is a car race at over 200 miles an hour… in cities all over the world…. “Miami Grand Prix!” “Bahrain Grand Prix!” “Here in Monaco…” with insanely famous drivers… “Daniel Riccardo!” “Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion….” and hundred-person teams… racing cars so advanced that they’re practically spaceships… … and so expensive that they had to make a RULE that teams couldn’t spend more than $140 MILLION DOLLARS.
EACH. And it’s only getting bigger. Just look at this: This is from a construction camera at one of two new US tracks. This one’s in Miami. This cost $40 million dollars to build and it hosted nearly a quarter million people over three days. That’s a Super Bowl-worth of people EVERY DAY! And one of them was me… “It’s the first ever Miami Grand Prix, we’re racing in the States… “and it’s lights out and away we go!” “This is the coolest thing I have ever…[incoherent excitement]” I just love F1.
But a lot of people, because of all this hype they’re hearing about it right now for the first time and they’re feeling a little bit… [confused noise?] “I don’t understand!” So let’s get into it. This is “F1, explained for rookies.” What you need to know to keep up with this crazy, expensive sport that everyone’s suddenly obsessed with. “Lewis Hamilton!” “Verstappen…” “He’s done!” But it’s also a look at the bigger question here – the HUGE* question – which is: Why do this? Why pour so much money, so much technological effort into F1 – into entertainment? The answer is in what we get in return. This isn’t just a car race. This is a space program, for the road. “General growth in interest…” “in Formula 1…
” “F1 is becoming much more of a thing here in the States…” “The Monaco Grand Prix!” “The Italian Grand Prix!” “Wins the Bahrain Grand Prix!” If you’re new to F1, you might know its American cousins.
NASCAR has the least family resemblance. Closed cockpits, oval tracks… IndyCar and F1 look more related. They’ve got the spaghetti-looking tracks, open cockpits… But there’s one really important difference between these two.
And it’s the reason F1 specifically is such a big deal. In IndyCar, all the cars use the same frame – or “chassis” – the DW-12. So the competition here is mostly in how you race that car. But in F1, every team has to design and manufacture their own cars. And the best part is that they get to IMPROVE the cars between each race!
Or… not, depending on how they do. So the competition in F1 actually centers around the car itself.
Not just how you race it, but also how you build it – and rebuild it, again and again and again. This is why I love F1. It looks like the sport of daredevils – but much more than that, it’s the sport of nerds.
Each team races two cars. So, two different drivers for the same team.
Each event – or “Grand Prix” – is three days: Practice, Qualifying, Race Day. I watch the races on tv every time they’re on. But this was the first time I ever got to see it in person. “I got to see the car up close!!
That was awesome.” “Now I am inside the Mercedes garage… !!!” Truly, I’ve never had MORE fun at a sporting event…and seen less of what was actually going on. “So right now they’re about to do a practice pit…” Here’s how this works: The order of who does the fastest lap on qualifying day becomes the lineup at the starting line on race day.
Passing isn’t easy, so where you start is a big deal. Depending on where drivers finish, they get different numbers of points. (After 10th place, no points for you.) “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” The drivers’ want to get the most points themselves to win the “Drivers’ Championship” But the teams want to get the most points TOTAL, to win the “Constructors’ Championship.” The two-championship thing makes for funny mismatched incentives sometimes You can hear it on the radio when teams have one strategy, like they want to let drivers pass each other, and drivers get really mad about that…”If he’s quicker, you let him through.” “That’s very unfair. But ok.” But generally, everybody agrees about the big things, which are: Drivers, race your fastest. Teams, make the best car. Alright… here’s the fun part! “LEGO is here! Hey, kids, look!” “Here’s my driver, hello Lewis Hamilton” Think of an F1 car like an airplane upside down.
Both built to move as quickly through the air as possible, right? But where a plane’s wings work to lift it up, these car’s wings work to keep it down. Why? Because winning doesn’t just depend on going fast, it also depends on keeping control. And that requires a firm grip on the ground.
Take a look at the shape of this car. Now watch how air moves across it… See how some goes above the wing, and some squeezes the long way underneath it? This creates a situation where there’s higher pressure above and lower pressure below sucking the car toward the ground. That’s actually happening all over the car, not just on the wings.
We could talk for hours about the design features on this thing, how they shape and use the air Some pull air in through the car to cool it down… You can actually see, there’s a hole there… I think they’re trying to imply that on my Lego model…Some actually let the driver release air – lessening that downward pressure and allowing them to go faster in order to pass, kind of like a Mario boost. You can actually hear this in a race. Listen for “DRS” here…”Charles Leclerc is going to have DRS to try to fight it back!” Taken together, an F1 car is just a SYMPHONY of aerodynamics. I got to see them up close and personal when I was in Miami…”We’re going there!” I ABSOLUTELY did not keep my cool. “I’m trying to be cool, but it’s a real scene here!” You can see teams perfecting these cars over the years, understanding the need for wings and adding them, changing the shape, pushing our understanding of aerodynamics, to shave off just fractions of a second.
Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people work on this, all for ONE TEAM.
So um… how much does this COST? F1 teams don’t really want to share the details here, so there’s a LOT of speculation. But they’re also companies, and some of them have to file their financials somewhere. So, with a little bit of research into various European countries’ reporting requirements… Hold on! Dun-dun-na-nah! Here they are. Annual reports for every F1 team I could find.
Which is actually 8 out of 10, so I’m feeling pretty good about it! “That’s pretty good…” As a fan, this is kind of cool.
Like, look this is Toto Wolff’s signature… What I learned from all this is that running an F1 team costs anywhere from 95 million to 425 million dollars. “Oo that’s a lot of money” But the year after these were filed, F1 instituted a new rule saying the all teams will only be allowed to spend $140 million dollars. So, these reports are going to look a lot different for this next coming year. “Oh good!” Still a lot.
No matter what, F1 teams spend a TON of money. So… what do they make?
These reports show F1 teams make… approximately… nothing. They run surprisingly close to break even. Red Bull, for example, made 230 million in revenue, 229 million in costs…
And they ended up with approximately 1.2 million in profit. This is in pounds, so that’s about 1.5 million dollars. These aren’t the wildly profitable enterprises I was imagining.
So, why do they do it? Well, take a look at this: This is the Ferrari annual report.“Our brand image depends in part on the success of our Formula 1 racing team… the racing team is a key component of our marketing strategy.” It’s advertising. “Advertising!
Advertising…” They use F1 to sell other stuff, whether that’s luxury sports cars or a sports drink. “Red Bull gives you wings!” I mean, as entertainment, F1 is INCREDIBLE. But a lot of people do feel that it’s somewhat… wasteful. “How much does a Formula 1 car cost?” “$400 million!” “Is it worth all that money?” This is bigger than F1. It’s kind of crazy to think about how much work we as a species put into entertaining ourselves. But I think what makes F1 feel particularly acute for some people is the technology element here. All this engineering work and all of this energy being spent on 20 fossil fuel reliant cars makes people wonder sometimes if that energy might be better spent elsewhere.
“Like literally anywhere else.” But F1 is more than just entertainment. It’s better thought of actually as one giant experiment. F1 pushes everything to the extreme. What do you need to create to compete at this level, to keep control at these speeds to keep the driver safe in these conditions? The idea is that the technology they build ends up trickling down to all of us non-race car drivers.
My question was: Is this actually true, or does it just sound good? I wanted to find examples of specific car parts that were developed for F1, and then ended up in my car. But the more research I did, the more complicated it got. People often talk about paddle shifters, for example… but those were actually developed decades before F1.
F1 teams just made them better.
Same for active suspension, anti-lock brakes, traction control. What I found was that F1 was less “trickle-down” and more flywheel. F1 combines technologies that might already exist and pushes them to an extreme, making them better in the process and then inspiring (or literally manufacturing) better tech for all of us. For example, take “thermal efficiency”. The percentage of the energy from combustion that actually makes the car GO, as opposed to being lost as heat.
Most combustion road cars have a thermal efficiency between 20 – 30%. Which means only a third of the energy actually makes the car go! F1 cars can’t refuel during a race, so there’s a very strong incentive for them to be efficient. They’re at about 50% now, thanks to new hybrid engines, gains that have been dragging the rest of the car industry forward.
Or, data collection.
Sensors on F1 cars collect HUGE amounts of information and feed it back to the driver and the team. They didn’t invent a lot of these systems, but they use them in ways that they’ve never been used before. And that’s getting more and more important, as we move potentially toward self-driving cars. This is the real promise of F1, and it all stems from that original requirement to build their own cars. Basically: “We’ll do all this research and development, we’ll create new technologies and also combine all of the cutting-edge tech, and we’ll push it to it’s limits and develop it further and you don’t even need to pay for it!
We’ll race these things against other groups of engineers doing exactly the same thing in this crazy, ‘round the world sport that lots of people really love that is actually at the end of the day the biggest most expensive group project science competition of all time. People debate whether or not we should spend money on lots of our efforts to learn – and yet they consistently push forward both the tech we actually use and our understanding of the world around us.
In this case, it also makes some money and it’s fun to watch. I think once you see the promise of F1, it allows you to think differently about lots of things. We need people working far beyond the edge, pulling forward the limits of what we can do.
The question now is: What do we need to learn next? If F1 pushes forward car innovation… and the future of cars is electric… does F1 need to get more electric too? And if F1 doesn’t go more electric, does it get farther and farther from its original promise over time? Less applicable to the technology we use, more a novelty “oh, let’s go watch the cars that use GAS!” I don’t know.
Now you’re up to speed. You can watch a race, you can enjoy it with your friends, and you can also speculate, like the rest of us, where it’s all going to go. I’ll be watching with you. And I’ll be rooting for my favorite team.
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