Americans love to watch sports like football, basketball, and baseball on T.V., often planning their weekends around certain sporting events, gambling, and virtual leagues like fantasy football. Although all of those are very entertaining, not enough attention is paid to European sports like Formula One (F1) Racing and racing in general.
For those that are unfamiliar with what Formula One is, it is a European racing circuit where arguably the 20 best drivers in the world compete to win the next World Drivers Championship. It differs heavily from Nascar (the American circuit) where there are up to 33 drivers driving at a time in smaller cars. Nascar is also raced on a circular track while Formula One tracks are extremely difficult with high speed corners, straightaways, and difficult chicanes. To understand why the sport is interesting, people need to understand the complexities of it. There are ten teams in Formula One, including Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Visa Cash App, Kick Sauber, Williams, Haas, and Alpine. Each team is operated behind the budget of sponsors and investors and has a certain spending amount for each season. This spending amount is used to pay drivers, develop the team’s car, pay for damages, pay employees, and deal with other various expenses. Because each team has free will to develop their own car (making sure to follow FIA regulations) some cars are quicker than others. The teams who have had the quickest cars and most success over the last five years have been Mercedes and Redbull who have dominated the sport up until this year.
This year, there has been a change at the top, as McLaren, led by the talented driving duo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, has found itself at the top of the constructors championship (team championship). Lando has been in Formula 1 for 6 seasons now and has been regarded as one of the top drivers on the grid. Despite his driving level talent, however, McLaren hasn’t been able to deliver him a fast enough car to compete with those of Mercedes or RedBull. Piastri is in his second season of F1 and is already being valued as one of the best young talents. In 2023, Piastri, along with Norris, had a decent year finishing 4th in the Constructors championship, but in 2024 the duo has completely stepped it up. Norris and Piastri had never won a race in their career until this year in which they both have multiple wins and counting. McLaren also has 14 podiums this year as it looks to solidify the team championship.
Although McLaren is having a career year, Red Bull is finding success like it always does. Max Verstappen, the undoubtedly best Formula 1 driver for the past few years now, has put the team on his back and has Red Bull in second for the team championship. He also is first in the individual championship using his driving skills to make up for a mediocre car. That’s the thing with F1; in order to have success in the sport you have to be a talented driver and have a team that can deliver you a fast car. That was why McLaren found itself in the middle of the pack for the last few years. It had the drivers, but it didn’t have the car to compete with. And when you’re not at the top, it is harder to convince sponsors to invest in your company so that you can have the adequate amount of money to develop a fast race car.
When I went to my first F1 race last October in Austin, Texas, I was amazed by the experience. The cars moved faster than any car I had ever seen before, and the race atmosphere was so vibrant. The crowd was filled with loud cheers, conversations in all kinds of languages and different colors supporting the teams. F1 is truly an international sport, and it is only growing in popularity in America with three U.S races on the calendar (Miami, Austin and Las Vegas). If you want to get into F1 and don’t know where to start, I would recommend watching ‘Drive to Survive’ on Netflix, which is one of the best sports documentaries I have seen and does a fantastic job of capturing this intriguing sport.
