Death Drive: Why I’m Watching Formula 1 in the Midst of Climate Breakdown
Why are so many people with climate anxiety (myself included) watching a sport based around burning oil?
For decades Formula 1 had been about as niche as a major international sport could be. Friends were shocked and dismayed to learn that I watched F1. They would respond much as if I had expressed interest in collecting plastic Funko Pops or watching cottonbuds swirl down the toilet: it was stupid, boring and bad for the environment.
Even I (30M) find my love for the sport baffling. In other aspects of my life I am, if anything, irritatingly puritanical about this kind of thing. As a virtuous climate saint, I have not been on a plane for nine years, do not eat meat and sort my recycling even when I am very tired, which is all the time, because I walk everywhere.
I don’t own a car, and I haven’t driven since I passed my test 12 years ago. Moreover, please, for the love of god, do not talk to me about your car. I am no more interested in road transport than a cricket fan is interested in types of ball.
I’m not even really interested in other sports. Sportspeople are always saying things like, ‘I’m going to give it all I’ve got,’ ‘There’s no limit to what you can achieve,’ ‘That’s for all the kids out there who dream the impossible,’1 and other neoliberal hustle culture bullshit which makes me want to A) turn my skin inside out and B) suggest we all have a nice sit down instead.
I was, therefore, surprised when I recently discovered some of the actual people I know and like were not only aware of F1 but actively watching it. The sport started appearing on the front page of newspapers. Names of drivers would trend on Twitter. Reddit seemed at times comprised of nothing but Formula 1 memes. Formula 1 is suddenly everywhere.
Statistics confirm that, over the last few years, F1 has seen an enormous growth in its audience, mainly thanks to a new, younger, more diverse set of fans23. This sudden surge in interest, at a time of climate crisis, in a sport based exclusively around the excessive consumption of petrochemicals seems perverse. Especially baffling is the significant increase in its viewership among 16–35s: precisely those who will be most affected by climate change4. Why is a generation gripped by climate anxiety turning to motorsport?
Isn’t it because of Drive to Survive?
Most explanations for the F1’s recent success have focused, with reason, on the Netflix series Drive to Survive5.
Drive to Survive (DtS, if you must) is an impressive marketing ploy from F1’s owners, Liberty Media. It cannily presents F1 as less sport than soap opera.
F1 was made for this. It is The Real Housewives of Pit Lane. A small village of drivers, engineers and mechanics travel around the world in a mobile, gated community, seeing no one but their bitterest rivals for 40 weeks of the year. Along the way, they fight with friends, make up with enemies and smash office doors with alarming frequency.
The success of DtS is its simple appeal to the universal human desire for gossip. Plus, it features 20 (okay, perhaps 15) handsome young short kings with the bodies of athletes and the minds of aerospace engineers.
However, I don’t think this adequately explains the resurgence of F1. Surely we can’t believe that the hundreds of thousands of fans attending the British, Mexican, American, Brazilian grand prix are there to watch a mere appendage to a Netflix series? For sure DtS has introduced a lot of people to the sport, but what is it that makes them stay?
The thrill of the cyborg
What if those things which are most unappealing about Formula 1 are exactly what are bringing the sport a younger audience?
We are the generation that must live under global capitalism while enjoying few of the benefits that it gave to our parents and grandparents. The system which gave them stable work, increasing living standards, affordable housing, leisure time, education and a comfortable retirement offers us none of those things.
Formula 1, on the other hand, actually delivers on one of the promises made by 20th Century industrial capital: that we can, through union with dangerous, polluting machines, achieve a new, better, more liberated humanity.
The Formula 1 driver – strapped snugly into the heart of their machine, their seat moulded perfectly to their body – becomes part of a cyborg: a human‑car conjugate often described in explicitly biological terms.
The body becomes a machine and the machine becomes a body. The petrol‑driven racecar lives. With the engine running, even the stationary car shudders and purrs. It courses with vital fluids: fuels, oils and lubricants passing through an intricate network of veins. Close up, the cars stink. Drivers can diagnose a problem with a car ahead of them by smell alone6.
Animal metaphors proliferate in F1 commentary. Engines roar and scream (or, to the sport’s detractors, have a ‘mosquito whine’7); the high plume of spray ejected from the back of the car in wet weather is a ‘rooster tail’; cars race in a ‘pack’; they have wings, ‘shark noses’8, ‘lobster claws’9 and ‘walrus tusks’10.
The car and the driver together form something more, and something miraculous. I think a racetrack is one of the few places you can go to understand how it might have felt to see a steam train in 1830.
I first saw an F1 car at the 2008 British Grand Prix. It was the Honda of Jenson Button, on an installation lap, in the rain, just getting the car from the garage to the starting grid. It was nowhere near race pace and yet I, sat at the other end of the circuit from pit lane, could hear it coming from three miles away. Nothing is like that noise, loud even through earplugs, a piercing scream that rattles your bones11.
The car itself was a tiny gleaming thing slipping across the tarmac, at the head of a triumphant plume of spray. One moment it travelled at lethal speed, then, at the next, a sudden collapse through the gears, a spring through the corner and gone. A weightless predator, its howl Doppler shifted to a baritone.
The future is electric, and boring
I fear that more climate‑sensitive alternatives to F1, like the all‑electric Formula E, will probably never create such a magical creature. An electric car is clearly an inert lump of minerals. At best, its motion recalls the uncanny, silent scurry of an insect. The petrol car is noisy and frightening; it has an inscrutable life of its own. An electric car does not (other than perhaps the all‑too‑knowable AI of the ‘self‑driving’ car.)
Compared to F1, Formula E is modern cybercapitalism. It has better refined the process of reification. Of course Formula E is environmentally disastrous, just like Formula 1. It requires the same toxic coltan mines, the same jet travel, the millions of tons of disposal plastic tyres, bodywork, grandstands, beer cups, Portaloos and team merchandise. But Formula E tucks all this away behind a clean, green silent façade.
Formula 1 relies on equally exploitative infrastructure but it has a harder time denying it. I mean, come on: the sport is sponsored by Aramco; former team sponsors include Osama Bin Laden’s uncle, innumerable dodgy crypto apps and a multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme12; the sport has a litany of cheating scandals, including espionage and deliberate crashes13. The corruption is part of the show.
F1 is often described as a circus, but it’s really the circus as imagined by Angela Carter: the giddy, bright daring and glamour is suspended above an equally‑visible, stinking support of filth, danger, piss14, corruption and blood, which is just as much part of the appeal as the officially‑desirable shiny veneer.
Blood, did you say? I hadn’t got there yet. But of course the most vulnerable biological component in F1, other than the car, is the driver. For all its dense technicality (“Gah! Ferrari should have pitted him onto softs! The undercut would get him DRS before the graining sets in!”) F1 is also immediately accessible, because its peril is apparent to even the casual viewer. Drive to Survive obviously makes much of this, from the title on down.
Though (thankfully) diminished by decades of safety innovation, the danger remains. It needs no explanation. A 250mph machine, that exerts five times the force of gravity on its driver’s neck, is manifestly a hostile environment for the soft human body.
Liberation machines
However, the machine’s callous disregard for its occupant is also, at least potentially, a liberation. Though the sport is athletic, it is not simply a test of strength. And there are professional racing drivers of various ages, genders and with a number of disabilities, competing against each other at an elite level, without further sub‑categorisation. Admittedly, this is not the case in F1, which remains overwhelmingly white and (currently) exclusively male, but the other disciplines of motorsport – rally, oval, endurance, touring cars – have a better variety of drivers.
Moreover, please do not forget this is a team sport. The frequent complaint, ‘But whoever is in the best car wins,’ exactly misses the point. This is not a competition for drivers. It is a competition between teams of hundreds of people. There is perhaps no other sport where such a wide range of people, from wheel gun operators to aerodynamicists to strategists, can actually make a significant contribution to the performance of a sports team.
Of course, and here comes quite the understatement, motorsport is not free from inequality. Quite the opposite. It costs an unimaginable amount of money to get a child from karting to F1. It is unquestionably a sport for those with rich parents.
But motorsport still, like industrialisation itself, offers the dream that we can reach an escape velocity sufficient to burst free from social bonds. It is like the high‑speed train that takes you away from your small(‑minded) town towards the big city.
This is how Lewis Hamilton described his experience of beginning karting among a crowd of white kids:
“When I got in the car, I put a helmet on, and I wasn’t seen any different. You can’t see my skin colour. You just see me as a driver. And I was able to do things that others weren’t able to do. And it didn’t matter how big the other kids were, I could still beat them.”15
Why I’m watching Formula 1 in the midst of climate breakdown
Industrial capitalism is destroying the planet. It has a constant demand for speed to sustain the growth that keeps it alive. Everything, from microchips to messaging to cycles of obsolescence, must get faster and faster. This demand for speed is mostly experienced by my generation as deterioration: more precarious work, more emails from the boss at midnight; cheap, flimsy goods; worse environment; more unstable government.
However, industrial capitalism also produces miraculous machines, like the F1 car: the living embodiment of capital’s obsession with speed.
I think it is no coincidence that F1 is at its most popular at exactly the time of greatest climate anxiety.
F1 offers a holiday from capitalism’s relentless, ever‑accelerating drudgery by celebrating that very system. F1 allows us to momentarily revel in the grip of this rapacious global monster.
What I’m saying is: if we must live with the anxiety produced by capital, can we not also enjoy its cars going zoom‑zoom?
If you will permit the pun, F1 offers pure Freudian death drive. Its young audience are like the anxious, sensitive people (like me) who constitute the core demographic of horror film fans: we are endlessly drawn back to reawaken our fear.
It is this perverse, frightening joy that is the real reason for F1’s newfound success.
Thank you very much for reading.
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‘Gruel Deluxe’ will be a blog about mass culture, including genre fiction, strange music, video games and other parts of the spectacle.
Watch with caution:
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/research-says-f1-could-reach-1bn-fans-in-2022/5900701/
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct/21/kids-in-america-drive-boom-in-formula-ones-popularity
Most affected that is, of course (WARNING: large caveat approaching) relative to other comparatively wealthy people in the global north.
Like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/sports/autoracing/drive-to-survive-netflix-formula-one.html
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/formula-one-a-waste-of-money-l79tjzpr2d3
https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/magazine/articles/the-year-of-the-sharknose
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/october-2003/65/xray-spec-brabham-bt34
https://wtf1.com/post/on-this-day-in-f1-williams-launched-the-walrus-nose/
Television doesn’t really convey this. Oddly, the best video representation of the sound of Formula 1 that I could find is this shaky handheld footage of a race start:
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/jean-pierre-van-rossem-f1s-wildcard-backer
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/the-biggest-incidents-of-f1-cheating-spygate-crashgate-and-more/6552372/
https://www.news24.com/Wheels/hamilton-ive-never-peed-in-my-suit-but-apparently-schumi-did-20161020
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/08/cover-story-lewis-hamilton-never-quits