Hello and welcome to The Perfect Formula – An F1 blog. I’m thrilled you are joining me on this journey. To introduce myself, I am a 26-year-old lifelong F1 fan from England, and this blog is a place for me to share my thoughts, test my writing skills, and begin to engage with a community in which I haven’t really dipped my toes before. While I have watched and followed F1 religiously for at least 20 years, I haven’t had anyone to speak to about it apart from my Dad. Please bear with me as I get to grips with this writing malarkey, but I hope that I can both inform and entertain you!
My family’s link with the automotive industry came from my grandfather, who worked for British Leyland as an engineer in the UK, and then took his talents to Sri Lanka as an advisor where Leyland’s buses were – and currently still are – being used as the country’s public transport. I have personally taken one of these buses in Sri Lanka, and can confirm that their drivers most definitely share an F1 driver mentality. The precision, coordination and speed are a beauty to watch as they travel around Colombo and its sister cities. Some of my favourite early memories are of being woken up at 4:50am by my dad – after struggling to sleep all night from excitement – to watch the Australian Grand Prix on ITV and going downstairs to find the TV on and a cup of tea next to my seat ready for Murray Walker to call “5 lights and its GO GO GO’’. Here, in this sacred space, I got to experience another side to my dad that I had never seen before – the first time I ever heard him swear was when Felipe Massa spun Lewis Hamilton around at Fuji Speedway in 2008, and then watched as he shed a tear a couple of weeks later when Hamilton won it all in the most dramatic season finale in any sport, ever. F1 is one of the ways we have always been able to express ourselves to each other, a common language, something we will always share and never get bored talking about. F1 has given us father-son time, something I never fully appreciated until I moved away and soon realised not everyone is as interested in my F1 theories as him. It also means for Dad, he no longer has a majority vote over watching sport at home. Sorry, Dad.
The two races that we’ve attended together were the 2009 British and 2019 Italian Grand Prix. They were two of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Spending both Fridays walking the tracks, taking in the atmosphere of the two legendary circuits and just trying to absorb as much F1 as possible. For me, Fridays were the best days; that was where you really saw F1 Tifosi. My dad would be taking pictures of anything that caught his eye; a Damon Hill cap on a confused Dane, a Schumacher tattoo on the shoulder of an unsuspecting Italian lady, a fan hanging from a tree to get a better look at the track or a group of quite-drunk Dutchmen decked out in Red Bull gear. He would always stop to have a short chat to find the story behind the picture. The best part was that the supporters would always be more than happy to have their photo taken with their piece of F1 memorabilia and tell their story of F1 fandom to my dad, a complete stranger. We all have one thing in common, a love for F1. No rivalry, just passion. I immediately felt both at home and in awe of these hallowed places. Dad was right when he said that these events truly are a celebration of F1. The Saturdays and Sundays were spent watching the action from Luffield (the old last corner at Silverstone) and the Rettifilo (the first corner at Monza) as Sebastian Vettel drove away in his Red Bull and Charles Leclerc delivered Ferrari its first home win in 9 years respectively. These two experiences culminated with us joining in with the famous Italian Grand Prix pit-straight invasion, especially after a Ferrari win, something that even a lifelong McLaren fan knew was special. It’s hard for me to put it into words – despite the waffling above – what those days meant to me. All I can say is that they will never be forgotten. For them, I am eternally grateful.
Our team is McLaren. I don’t know why Dad started to support them, maybe James Hunt winning the 1976 World Championship did it, but I was indoctrinated from birth into Ron Dennis’ ‘grey machine’ with my first hero being Mika Hakkinen in the late 90s, who took on Schumacher and beat him twice. The mantle was then passed to ‘The Ice Man’ Kimi Raikkonen, who should have won a championship with the team in 2005, if not for unreliability (I’m not bitter, I swear). He was fantastically fast as soon as he stepped foot in an F1 car and deserved more from his McLaren years. Then along came Lewis Hamilton. I feel my F1 life is split into two parts: pre-Lewis Hamilton and then the Lewis Hamilton era.
To have an up-and-coming British star in my favourite team felt too good to be true and kept feeling so until a fateful couple of weeks in China and Brazil ‘07, but we will not be going into that any further – if you know, you know. I have been brought to tears only twice in my sport watching life, and Brazil ‘07 and ‘08 are those times but for polar opposite emotions. The Hamilton and Jenson Button years from 2010-2012 felt like the next step in this British super-team, but it didn’t quite work out the way I hoped. The car was good but never quite on par with the leading Red Bull of the day. This, coupled with bad strategy, mistakes, and pitlane mishaps, meant that the dream was over by the end of 2012, and Lewis decided to move to Mercedes. Unlike Kimi, who moved to ‘The Red Team’ as my father puts it, we have been able to watch from afar with happiness as Lewis has become the best driver of his generation. The next 4 years for McLaren were a struggle to watch as this once great team rather quickly fell to its knees. The McLaren Honda partnership did not work out as hoped, with the previous arch-enemy Fernando Alonso returning. Something I was not happy about as it felt like there was always too much pressure for results right away, and it became the Alonso show. I still feel the effects of the 2007 season when thinking of Fernando – super quick, but too much negative baggage. He ‘retired’ in 2018, and I was overjoyed. While he is still a world-class driver, the fit/timing wasn’t right, and I think Alonso’s impatience to return to the front hampered the development of the McLaren Honda partnership. It felt like a weight was lifted when he left.
The 2019 season brought a new era of McLaren; two new drivers in Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz, and a new management structure put together by Zac Brown and led by Andreas Seidl. While I did not fall out of love with McLaren during the lean years, I have experienced success and failure with the team – and I pick success every time. It is not just about results, though; this McLaren iteration feels different. It feels organised, coordinated, and unified. I have been really impressed with Seidl since he joined, and the return of the Mercedes engine feels like the last piece of the puzzle for McLaren to get back to the front of the grid. Now that 8-time Grand Prix winner Daniel Ricciardo is on board, I’m excited to see what the future holds for McLaren.
My love of Formula 1 is not just based on the McLaren team; however, I am an F1 fan. Everything about this sport excites me; the speed, the technology, the innovation, the competition, the politics, the personalities, the history – to name a few. What impresses me about Formula 1 is the excellence. Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motorsport, the World Cup of motorsport – it just happens every year. There is no international league system like football. There are only 10 teams and 20 cars in F1. In every single department, F1 has the best that the world has to offer. The late, great Chris Wesseling of NFL.com and the ‘Around the NFL’ Podcast summed it up best when he said:
“If I was going to hire a sportswriter, the first question that I would ask him is: How do you reconcile the essential meaningless in sports? How do you reconcile watching young men bang into each other and try and advance an inflated pigskin against marked territory? How do you reconcile the importance of that? Just like Shakespeare or Beethoven’s symphony, this is going above and beyond. At its best sport is – look at what humans can do.”
While this quote is about American Football, to me, it perfectly sums up what makes F1 great. We get to test how far the boundaries of human mental, physical, and team effort can be pushed every single day, week, month, and year. It is like watching a rocket ship head for Mars every single weekend.
There is one thing that I like about this sport more than anything, and one that I think puts it above the rest; the strive for perfection. Yet, perfection is never going to happen. It’s an impossible dream. You may wonder why I have called my blog ‘The Perfect Formula’ when I have just said that perfect is impossible to achieve. Well, this is why: In no other sport is perfection attempted to this highest degree of detail; in no other sport is it so unashamedly pushing towards perfection in all aspects of its existence; in no other sport does it have teams of 1,000 employees, 80,000 different components per car, budgets upwards of £600 million per year (now capped at £150 million), and yet the two most high-profile employees – the drivers – are openly and directly competing against each other. In no other sport is your teammate your primary competitor and your only real benchmark of performance as you are the only two with equal equipment. No team has ever reached ‘perfection’; the joint closest was the 1988 McLaren and 2016 Mercedes teams. The 2016 Mercedes won 19 of 20 races, and in the only one they didn’t it was because the two drivers took each other out. They had perfection within reach, but the driver’s selfishness – and bid for personal glory – scuppered that. It is the largest organised team sport in the world, but one which is also at constant war with itself.
So what is the Perfect Formula? For me, the perfect formula is the car, the driver, and the team. There are formulas within those, but the above is its simplest form. Each part of the formula has to be working in unison and performing at its highest level in order to finish, let alone win. The driver needs to drive the car to its maximum consistently, while the car needs to be able to give the driver enough confidence and reliability to reach that level. The team needs to provide the car and make the correct strategic decisions to get the driver and car home in the quickest way possible. In a sport where every millisecond counts, this is easy to get wrong. Only when all three elements are in harmony will a team have the chance to succeed in F1. If one component doesn’t work, the other two have no chance. Absolutely, no chance. Only one car can win each race, and only one car can win each championship. The rest lose. In a sport where there is only one objective, to reach the chequered flag first, only 14% of drivers in history have ticked that illustrious box.
Formula 1 has taught me many lessons that I have been able to take on to certain degrees of success. It has taught me that attention to detail and small changes can lead to greater success, to never give in until you see that chequered flag, that teamwork always outscores individual effort, and to strive for perfection. I am not going to tell you which ones I have been more successful at, but with this blog, that is what I am going to do; strive for perfection. I will never get there, but in true F1 fashion – I will give it my best shot.
Speak soon.
JL
Thank you to NQ, for always knowing which way the words go.
The Perfect Formula 