In recent months, with the film Brad Pitt F1 Approaching then exceeding the box office (he has just spent $ 100 million during his second release weekend), longtime fans of sport have found us trying to explain the attraction to some of our compatriots-American-American F1.
What makes you so enthusiastic, they ask them. Are they the exotic localities? The speeds defying death? The high -end brand? The fetishization of the machine?
All these factors force a little, of course. But the real secret of the reason why Formula 1 fans devour sport, as we will again when the British Grand Prix at Silverton Motors on Sunday is much more devious: it is reality TV.
I do not mean that in the metaphorical sense of “it has the excitement of the way in which reality TV has excitement”. Or: “It is not scripted by the way in which reality TV is (claims to be) not scripted.” I mean that in a much more literal way. All conventions, all conceptions, which make us love Real housewives Or Love is blind Or Treatments Play on the perpetual multi-screen drama of F1.
The 24 Grands Prix that occur in the world every few weeks are the new episodes, of course. But the real sreadment occurs before and after the races, when various drivers and team directors (they are the coaches) offer disgusting of provocative dissatisfaction on other teams, try to sign drivers from other teams, explain why they did not try to send the other teams to a wall at 220 mph
The best analogy that I can really find is the fight, with its sub-textes that exist outside the ring. Of course, everything that is traced. F1 offers the drama of Gunther and Sami Zayn who goes there, except that no one here distributes scripts.
Consider the current saga between Christian Horner, team director at Red Bull and various other team directors, such as Toto Wolff de Mercedes and Zak Brown from McLaren.
Horner doesn’t really like Brown. You know it because Horner called Brown a “bite”. Wolff does not like Horner, what you know because Wolff called him “Mesquin and childish” after Horner posed a call after the Canadian Grand Prix last month, who himself followed Mercedes George Russell by trying to bring the maximum race of Red Bull in an idea of the suspension to Russell in the last year, which followed the last year. Bayleigh and Tyler of Big brother would be proud.
(How many F1 fans there is in the United States is difficult to know, but the number is increasing. Some three million people watched the Miami Grand Prix last year, the most American who regulated. Survive Of course, played a big role, but its figures fell. Pitt’s film aims to kill them.)
The drama will continue on Sunday, because Tous-Saut Lewis Hamilton will try to win his first GP victory since he announced shockingly at the start of last season that he was leaving Mercedes for Ferrari-a Kristen-Sleeping With-Jax-And-Screwing-Screwing Kax-And-And-Screwing. Hamilton won more F1 races than any driver in history and won Silverton nine times. But it starts fifth and is an outsider decided on Sunday. (Hamilton’s drama this season was with his team director, which he has sarcastically said to “take a tea break while you are there” in mid-term when the director did not respond quickly enough if he orders his teammate Charles Leclerc to let Hamilton pass.)
Anyone who is beaten Survive quickly grasps F1 Baccalaureate pleasures. The program happily accentuates moments of reality-television, between and within the teams. Look in season one while Horner (the tamra of the series) fights with the leaders of its then supplier, Renault. Or in the seven season, when McLaren’s Brown asks one of his two pilots, the Champion Lando Norris, to slow down and leave his teammate Oscar Piastri so that he can win the Hungarian Grand Prix – a kind of scandalous demand that is, well I can’t even think about anything other than in other sports. When the Netflix camera zooms in norris when he speaks to his friend of the controversy afterwards, you can almost feel the 30 rock Queen of Jordan Vibrations.
But the truth is for all the ways in which Netflix has looked (or, as some have loaded it, artificial) these moments, the producers had just taken up what was already there. Formula 1 A always was motivated by the pistons of reality TV, surprisingly for many years before the genre was even invented. More than a decade in advance on Kimmi and Alicia to fight Survivor The second season, the F1 legends Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna fought in several F1 seasons in a way that would make Jeff Probst blush.
“He behaves like a coward,” said Senna about Prost. “It has absolutely become impossible to work with Ayrton,” said Prost about Senna. (They were in fact teammates in the late 1980s with McLaren, which only seemed to aggravate his rivalry.)
Film fans Ron Howard 2013 Rushing Know that even this Square OG was preceded by many backbette between the Playboy Brit James Hunt and the Austrian Niki Lauda buttoned a decade earlier which, even more than Senna and Prost, had extremely different personalities and driving styles.
At least these drivers have shared a contrecoric respect. A few years ago, when the young Huntian Brit George Russell directed the Laudien Finn Valteri Bottas out of the Imola Grand Prix Road in a brutal accident, the two drivers met … so as not to check each other, but so that Bottas gives Russell and Russell the headache. In progress. Mid-Race. It is Real housewives with motor oil.
Like reality TV, part of the reason for combustibility is the adjustment of so many ego in a tight space. Literally, with some of the narrow passes on various courses. But also figuratively. All F1 teams have exactly two pilots, which means that there is really room for a first competitor between the two Egos – the type of mathematics that makes chaos. Almost all other sports lack such dynamic; These are team matches or solitary efforts.
Even structurally, the F1 teammates are not really that, because even if they compete with all the other teams for a team championship at the end of the season known as “manufacturer”, they also participate within the team For the catwalks and the points that count to the end -of -year “driving championship” and its luck for an athlete to solidify its headquarters or to attract the attention of another team with a better offer. Two teammates with a common objective but also radically individual incentive structures? Mark Burnett couldn’t have a better script.
That’s why F1 The film is such a natural Hollywood that it may almost seem crazy that it took so long to produce. The battle of the film between Sonny and JP – These are teammates! These are rivals! They are both at different times! They are both at the same time! – Isn’t that the kind of thing you even need Jerry Bruckheimer. This already happens in half of the Formula 1 teams while we are talking.
The fans dissected the film as a team of stands which results in a damaged front wing, and there are indeed freedoms taken – a 60 -year -old old man does not hold up in many F1 races; They are athletes of the peak condition under the shelter. But if anything, Kosinski and Pitt are play intramural drama.
Thinking about the appeal of F1 reality TV, I recalled the line of cultural criticism Laura Miller Sopranos. The program David Chase has proven, she said, “That if you add enough violence, men will watch a soap.” Only here to exchange in the tire strategy and the howling speeds for violence (but sometimes also violence).
Of course, many women also look at F1 – according to its director general Stefano Domenicini, they make up 40% of the current fans base. The truth is most of us, no matter our sex, like to attend a good personality confrontation. When this implies spoiled millionaires acting like morons, we love it even more. And we love it directly when the said millionaire pull on a track with the possibility of constancy of an explosive accident. The only thing better than Sashaying is accelerating the law.
