Your Formula 1 starter pack

Read, and understand F1:

When the gods decided to do donuts!

The most politically correct and obviously winning strategist

1. Not everyone is a driver racing to win the race. There are 20 drivers and 10 places of points, each point being worth millions in prize money, plus more bargaining chips in all kinds of negotiations — sponsors, drivers, among F1 teams. Plus F1 is broken into two distinct races: the driver’s championship for the top driver and the constructor’s championship for the top team, based on points earned by both (all) the team’s drivers. Three or four drivers may get knocked out in a given race, and the winner gets a trophy — but the remaining drivers, and their teams, are fighting for their careers, and places in the complex F1 pecking order.
2. The cars are comprised of engines, tyres, aerodynamic design, drivers, chassis, support teams, and owners. Oh — and brand. Can’t forget brand equity, eh? Any of these components can adversely affect how a car runs an entire season, let alone a given race.
3. These are the most technologically advanced cars competing in the world. They are driven by the very best drivers in the world, on the most challenging race courses, fighting for the largest amounts of money. Over $2 billion is spent in the 10 F1 teams annual budgets. The big teams have perhaps 1,000 people. F1 is a big, international deal. So there.
4. Everything in F1 is total opera, from the team finances and owners, to the drivers, to sponsors, the weather, and the giant uber-magnums of champagne. It is a mad opera written by the Marquis de Sade, for the court of the Medicis in 15th century Italy. Hold your friends close, and your enemies closer.
5. Remember, Ferrari is grandfathered in to F1. In all of the deals — money, sponsorships, fans, magazine column inches, great dinners, hot super-models, etc. The teams make money, but Ferrari makes more money. Yes, even when Vettel screws up.
6. The engines for all the F1 cars are made by four companies, including three that are also competing race teams — Ferrari, Mercedes, and the French corporation Renault. These big three sell their engines to their own teams and one or two others in the F1 field, each forming kind of “powered by” families. Honda is the fourth engine builder, supporting Red Bull and their stepchild team Toro Rosso. Which engine you use matters, and the customer relationships between teams and engine companies are fractious.
7. The drivers are the superstars of the F1 movie — and they move with the slinky grace of European football players on a couture catwalk during the Transfer Window — -just way too cool for school. Which teams they race for, how they got screwed by other drivers, and with whom they are sleeping are all of fanatic interest. Many of them have one word names like, “Alonso,” “Kimi,” and “Checo.” They all glint with their eyes into the sunset, when talking to the press, like Clint Eastwood used to.
8. Race Qualification is called “Qualie,” in a cute accent, and takes place on Saturday morning, one day before the race. It’s an hour of regulated track time divided into Q1, Q2, and finally Q3. In Q1 all 20 cars try to get one official timed lap time around the course — the top 15 times advance to Q2. Q2 is the same musical chairs, except the top 10 times in Q2 move on to Q3. The final 10 cars run one more time, and everyone’s official Q3 top lap determines their place on the top spots in the 20-car starting grid for the race. The top 10, who’ve make it to Q3 have to start the race on the set of tyres they ran their best time in Q2, for some reason. Everyone else gets to choose from whatever sets of tyres they have in their personal, per race inventory of 13 sets. (Note: Tyres are fundamental in F1, since they wear out in 10–30 laps, and as they degrade, their performance becomes worse: slower, and more skiddish, until the car has to pull in for a pit stop to change tyres — and those pit stops are key moments of an F1 race.)
9. NetFlix has a 10 episode documentary series called “Drive To Survive,” which recounts in 10 forty minute episodes the 2018 F1 season. Even if you have a mate or friend who doesn’t like sports, you and that person will really enjoy this series, start to finish. It’s damn fascinating, filled with the people, drama and absurd humor of F1 today. The series was made by top documentarians and they were given almost uneasy total access to most of the F1 teams. This, more than anything, is your primer to understand F1. You can ignore everything else I said just now and follow this rule and you’ll be just fine. “Drive To Survive” is where the whole thing gets to be like the Medicis.
10. Almost all the people you read or see on the F1 scene — especially Team Principals and Owners — have something they’re trying to sell, and they are each therefore “unreliable narrators” of their own story. One small example: every team will spend almost every race week running down their cars and their prospects for the coming weekend. Blah, blah, blah. Remember, at best Team Principals divulge half-truths they utter in professional marketing code; at worst, it’s all bullshit.