Formula 1

A race of heirs

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

— John Adams

European nations sending their best sons to battle. Fragile alliances and fierce rivalries generating technological leaps. Vast treasures expended to fund the struggle. Dynasties pitted against one another. Epochal rivalries between brothers. Furtive attempts to carve up the New World.

I am talking, of course, about Formula 1.

Is it sad or beautiful that the apogee of several millennia of civilisation is bottled in a motor race? The same restless id that produced the stirrup, metallurgy, open-sea navigation, the cannon, the steam engine and the aeroplane has culminated in a race around a track. The princelings who fill the grid (the self-made Lewis Hamilton is the conspicuous exception) would once have poured their energies into ruling well, crushing their rivals on the battlefield, and winning glory for the nation. Perhaps it is a feature and not a bug that we have built them sandpits instead. And yet it is not exactly inspiring to realise that today’s Napoleon is driving an F1 car, building an AI app, or running a hedge fund.

This is made flesh in Max Mosley, who ran the sport’s governing body for sixteen years. His father was Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. He married Mosley’s mother, Diana Mitford, in a private ceremony at Joseph Goebbels’s home, with Hitler in attendance. (Decades later the News of the World would run footage of the son under the headline “Sick Nazi Orgy with Five Hookers”.) The father tried to seize a country. The son wrote motor-racing regulations. Is that an upgrade? To paraphrase John Adams, I must study war so that my son can race cars and enjoy hookers.

Like a city in Shogunate Japan, F1 is part spectacle of power, part cage for otherwise rowdy elites. If not this race to amuse them, to sink their finances and energies into, what terrible plotting might be unleashed? Perhaps better to leave the European Commission and national governments to the eunuchs.

The knights of this realm sport the colours of their houses and their sponsors. They track the rise and fall of industries and norms. For its first couple decades, tobacco kings dominated flows. Then they were banished, replaced by finance and oil barons, energy drinks, and then the crypto kings. F1 is a trophy room, where power is laundered by sheiks and dirty tycoons. F1 sponsorship shows which industry currently has more money than legitimacy. The car’s livery is a gauge for moral panics and manias.

In this international arena, once more the British shopkeeper and tinkerer defeats the continental aristocrat. Enzo Ferrari sneered at the small British teams — Cooper, Lotus, Williams, McLaren — as garagisti, garage-hands who came from nothing and bought their engines instead of forging them like a proper aristocrat. Those modular, underfunded, improvisational outfits then spent forty years beating him. It’s the English sea dogs, the Francis Drakes and John Hawkinses, taking on the rich Spanish galleons until they became the incumbents themselves.

There is no sport that more purely manifests Girardian rivalry. The fiercest rivals are their closest reflections (take Ferrari and McLaren). But no rivalry is fiercer than between two hero drivers of the same team. Vettel and Webber, Hamilton and Rosberg, Prost and Senna. Subject to the levelled playing field of same car, same engine, same team, they are reduced to nothing but their individual supremacy. Total zero sum rivalry, where one must defeat the other. Eventually one twin must be cast out for the house to function. It always ends with a scapegoat. The team courts the rivalry until it threatens the team itself (Prost and Senna literally driving into each other at Suzuka).

We revel in the blood sport. We want the smell of blood without the blood itself. We want the drivers to court death then act shocked when they are aflame. We mass around them as they duel and wrestle. Death is too much, but to walk the line of death is essential.

At its apex, the sport transcends its purpose. For the driver, F1 is not so much about victory as transcendence. Senna drove with the mandate of heaven. After one qualifier in Monaco, Senna said:

And I suddenly realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was kind of driving it by instinct, only I was in a different dimension… On that day, I said to myself, ‘That was the maximum for me; no room for anything more, I never really reached that feeling again.’

For its engineers and designers, performance fully decouples from utility. The overwhelming majority of F1 engineering is gloriously useless for any normal purpose. A billion dollars and a thousand of the planet's best engineers are spent to find a tenth of a second that helps no human being do anything. This is the engineering equivalent of pure mathematics or haute couture: excellence pursued past the point of use, for its own sake. Like all civilisational peaks, sublime uselessness is the point. They stand like the cathedral, the journey to the moon. We do it because it is hard and sublime.

The sport has its sacred institutions. Ferrari is kept alive even through extended periods of decrepitude. Ferrari is the only constructor present in every season since 1950. It is paid a unique historic bonus the other teams don't get and has held a contractual veto over the regulations. The sport needs Ferrari to exist more than Ferrari needs to win because the red, the tifosi, and the myth support the whole spectacle. Like monarchies, legacy universities, and flag-carrier airlines, Ferrari is too sacred to fail.

At its essence F1 is about people. We care about engines and cars but Liberty Media’s insight was that people bond with people not machines. This insight transformed the sport from a niche fascination to a global phenomenon. Drive to Survive made heroes of the men who lose — a soap opera of the doomed mid-grid strugglers, the foul-mouthed team bosses. I confess to being a pathetic Netflix F1 unter-fan. If you have loved this sport since the day you wept watching Senna die, you are entitled to sneer at me from your inherited season tickets. We care about our heroes made flesh. We admire the scimitar and the steed but it is the man who wields them that we venerate.

For in the cockpit, for the length of one impossible lap, a man stops driving and begins to pray with his hands, while a hundred thousand others lean in to smell a death that must be courted. The kings are dead. The wars are too terrible to wage. What remains is the duel, the steed, the colours of the house, and the twins lusting for victory. We gave them a sandpit. They built an altar.