F1, Broadly

[Quickly before we begin, Brad Pitt sucks and "allegedly" abused his family.

(Largely perfunctory, but it feels disingenous to myself to not do the perfomrative acknowledgement. I'd like to be less hamfisted here, but I didn't really do much due diligance, nor do I touch on the performances at all. It is also simply that easy to do the bare-ass minimum.)]

Director Joseph Kosinki, alongside Cinematographer Claudio Miranda and likely many returning collaborators from Top Gun : Maverick (and fucking Tron: Legacy?? These guys are so good at movies that suck that also rule) delivered unto me a gift during this, the year of me getting into cars what go fast, with F1: The Movie, which is a movie about F1, the sport, which is a sport about racing F1 cars, which are open-wheeled cars what go fast.

The movie’s fine.

I don’t know exactly what the first domino was here - I’d guess after, like, two years of Dankpod’s car videos and, like, just enough Cool Internet People talking about F1 results and drama, the seeds were planted. This past march, the 2025 season kicked off with a wildly exciting rainy race in Australia, so I jumped in expecting some equally exciting rides across the rest of the year.

The season’s been fine.

The sport’s fine too, while we’re at it.

My glowing endorsements belie my opinion a bit here, because I am like, in it in it. Motorsport has such an aesthetic - I love sponsor plastered liveries, dude, like I think having fucking the Durcell Bronze airboxes on the Williams cars is so delightful. The moment I saw pre-race prep, all the crews crowding the pit lanes running tests and filling tanks and slapping big ‘ol tubes on shit - it’s so mecha coded, they’ve even got bridge teams and rivals built into the system.

The movie gets it, too. Lots of love is given to the pit crew and pit wall, and the insane engineering and research that goes into one of these cars. It really wants to show you how fucking rad everything is, down to the axel.

(And yes, I did have to google what the airbox was called, thanks. I’m not fully in the deep end yet, give it time.)

Everything benefits from the ‘make it all cool af” strategy. From the team that brought you “We strapped real cameras to real fighter jets to show you how sick they are” we’ve now got “That but cars.” The races feel fantastic - they feel in the way a game can give you that specific sensation of motion, of whipping down a track at 200 mph. It's not all that different from the angles and positions of the actual onboard cams you can watch during a race, but combined with the deft hands of a whole team of editors with a different goal than the fast turn around of a replay clip during the downtime of a race. Here, there is no downtime, no procession of pointy cars whose stands have been set in stone from the previous day's lap times. It’s all a terse, precision deluge of fast and cool.

(Also its about an Older White Man who teaches and uplifts a Younger Black Man ((and Two White Women as a bonus.)) It’s basically what I expected, but it still brings down the whole thing. It tries to talk up issues in F1, the lack of women drivers and technicians, the stuffiness of the money and the PR and The Brand, but also its F1™ : The Movie, so it's impossible to be anything other than lip service right from the tap.)

The racing in the movie is not not indicative of a real race, but more like the perfect ideal of an F1 race: edge of your seat affairs, where nothing is decided until the checkered flag waves; deeply tactical affairs where a well made plan can send a team from middle of the pack to a podium finish; and all under the just eye of the FIA, whose rulebook is fair, but flexible, leading to these exciting endless possibilities.

In the real world, races are perfectly rotatable objects. From my layperson’s view, it kinda seems over-arbitrary, or maybe just well worn, since this is the year before a shake up in the technical regulations which will bring totally new cars to the tracks. The teams have learned all the can and found all the space in the rules, leading to mostly cut and dry races, with a handful of deliciously weird incidents to chew on. Monaco’s race is constantly in my head as this race where nothing could happen - the cars are too big for any real racing on the streets of the principality, so the whole thing turned into a phenomenally stupid game of “one asshole slows everyone else down so their teammate can get safe pit stops.” Nothing happened, but I watched the whole race front to back being like “but what if tho.”

“But what if tho” is more or less the promise of the sport for me right now. The aesthetics of mechanical crunch and slick Brand Engagement, the electric pulse of fuck-all happening. There’s something in between the what-could-be, and what-is, and apparently that's enough to grab me, to sit my ass down at the movies, and keep me tuned in and paying up for a monthly sub.

Gonna delete this once I get into rally racing tho. You see that shit? It's so sick, they drift on dirt roads and it's just two homies in a car reading notebooks and driving together. The only thing that could possibly gayer that two guys racing against each other is two guys racing, reading loving crafted handwritten maps and coordinates together.