Chapter 1

Just the Formula One Facts

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding what Formula One is

Discovering who the most important people in the sport are

Getting a glimpse at a Formula One car

Visiting the Formula One tracks

Understanding the sport’s business side

A calendar of events

Formula One racing is, as its name suggests, the pinnacle of motor racing around the world. Small children don’t dream about growing up to race in lesser series. Above all else, they want to be a winning Formula One driver.

These days, the sport is a truly global circus, and it has never been as popular as it is right now. Almost every race on the calendar is a sell-out, and some events can boast as many as 400,000 fans over a three-day race weekend.

At that same time, F1 has an average of 70 million people tune in to watch each race across a combination of free-to-air television and pay channels. That cumulative TV audience for the full season is around 1.5 billion.

It is this sort of global following that has attracted huge sponsorship, left race promoters queuing up to host grands prix, and television stations around the world falling all over themselves to broadcast it.

Shows like the Drive to Survive series have further brought a new young audience to F1, meaning only the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup come anywhere close matching it in the popularity stakes — and they take place only every four years.

Formula One: A Grand and Global Sport

Part of Formula One’s mass appeal is that it is truly a global sport. Not only do the best drivers from many countries fight for glory on the track, but they also use the best cars and the best engines from around the world.

A case in point: Currently, in 2023, Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc and Spaniard Carlos Sainz drive for the Italian Ferrari team that is run by French team boss Frederic Vasseur.

The global appeal increases further because, every season, the sport travels all over the world to unique tracks, each of which provides different challenges.

Formula One really is like a traveling circus, as the cars, teams, and drivers shoot across the globe. At the end of the 2023 season, F1 had a triple header in the United States (Austin), Mexico and Brazil on consecutive weekends before ending the year with back-to-back races in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi.

Fans come from around the world, too. At any given race, you can find not only local supporters, but also others from around the world who have traveled to the event. A quick look around the grandstands at Formula One events inevitably shows a host of different nation’s flags.

This mass appeal has been the story of the sport since the official Formula One world championship began in 1950. Before then, although Formula One races took place, there was no officially sanctioned fight for the world title.

Drivers and Other Important People

Like most hugely successful sports, Formula One is jammed pack full of superstar names. Just like Lionel Messi in soccer, or Roger Federer in tennis, the big-name drivers in Formula One have millions of fans around the world worshipping their every move and hoping that they can win.

But the drivers aren’t the only big names in Formula One. Many of the team bosses are personalities in themselves. Some — like Red Bull team boss Christian Horner and Mercedes chief Toto Wolff — are almost as well known for their appearances on Netflix and in social media as they are for the great work they’ve done for their teams.

Drivers

The drivers are, without doubt, the central focus for almost everyone in Formula One.

Without the drivers there’d be no racing, and without the great battles, the psychological wars, and the fact that there is always a soap opera following them, there’d be no interest in following each twist and turn of a Formula One racing season.

The best-paid drivers these days earn money that many of us can only dream about, but they definitely work hard for it. They not only have to take massive risks in driving Formula One cars at 200 mph, but they also have to work with their teams to get the last tenths of a second out of the car, deal with the media, and attend promotional events for their sponsors. (You can find detailed information about the life of a Formula One driver in Chapter 7.)

For some drivers, the stress of being a successful Formula One star proves too much; they turn their back on the sport and find something a little bit more relaxing to do. One example of this was Nico Rosberg who was so mentally exhausted after winning the 2016 world championship that he quit on the same day he picked up his title trophy!

For those who can cope with all the pressures and risks — and become the very best by regularly winning races — the rewards can be mighty.

Although the money, attention, and the thrill of driving fast cars are ample rewards for being a good Formula One driver, nothing is better than actually winning. Some aces claim that winning gives them the best rush of excitement they have ever experienced in their lives — but you can make up your own mind by looking at Chapter 11, which explains what happens after a win and how winning a race doesn’t signal the end of the driver’s day.

Team bosses

There’s a saying in Formula One that behind every great driver lies a really great team.

The team makes sure that the drivers have the right machinery running in the right way. Each driver knows that, without their cars, they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere.

After all, drivers would look pretty stupid sitting on the grid with their bum on the track and no car around them.

The leader of each team — whose responsibility it is to pull the resources and personnel together — is the team boss.

There is no single job description that covers every team boss in the pit lane because they all have unique ways of running their teams — and each squad is different anyway. Some bosses like Toto Wolff at Mercedes are shareholders, whereas others like Mike Krack at Aston Martin are employed by the team owners. Although a driver can achieve race victories quickly in the sport, especially if he’s signed to a leading team in his first few years of Formula One, a team boss requires many, many years to turn an outfit into one of the best.

This is a task that requires them to do the following:

• Recruit the best staff: If a team is successful, then it is obvious that the best staff in the pit lane will want to join. Every front-running team in Formula One has the best designers, the best mechanics, and the best engineers. The fight for glory is so intense, though, that staff often move around — tempted by big money offers — and teams often go through phases of incredible success followed by periods of lackluster form after their top staff are recruited elsewhere.
• Have the best facilities: Formula One is about high technology and having the best of everything. Teams must spend millions of dollars on state-of-the-art factories, wind tunnels, simulators, and computer technology. This is why many experts from the aerospace and computer industries have found employment in the sport. Nowadays, entire cars are put together on computer screens and the kind of technology often only used in the aerospace industry is brought into action. Teams can no longer afford the process of trial and error when it comes to building their new car or improving their current one.
• Build a car that can take on the very best in the field: No matter how good your staff is, or how good your equipment, a Formula One team is always judged by the speed of its car. There is so little difference between all the cars in the field that the fight for glory is intense — and that is why teams seek out the tiniest advantages in every area of their car. Rules and regulations can be changed, handing certain teams an advantage, and when new technology is found to improve speed, teams try to keep what they are doing a secret for as long as possible.
• Find a way to pay for all the preceding: This is no easy task. After all, money makes the cars go round! In fact, this is why modern team bosses have to be as good at attracting sponsorship and business backing as they are at running racing cars.

The huge prizes for success in Formula One, which include the prospect of earning millions of dollars in extra sponsorship backing or increased television rights money, mean that team bosses also have to deal with an incredible amount of politics within the sport.

There are often arguments revolving around money, the changing of rules, and even the threat of protests from rival teams if they think you are pushing the boundaries of the rules too much. There are agreements in place to make sure there is no foul play, though, and rulebooks have to be followed (or gotten around) so that Formula One remains an even contest.

To find out more on the responsibilities of team bosses, head to Chapter 6. If you’re interested in the rules teams have to abide by, go to Chapter 4.

The Top Cats: F1 and the FIA

The sport’s leaders are not just those who run the race teams. There are two key figures who have overall control of Formula One. First, there is Stefano Domenicali, who is CEO of the...