Hello and welcome to The Perfect Formula – An F1 blog. I am really happy you are joining me on this journey. I am a 26 year old life long Formula 1 fan from England and this blog is a place for me to share my thoughts on F1, test my writing skills and hopefully to engage with a community in which I haven’t really dipped my toes into before. While I have watched and followed this sport religiously for at least 20 years, I haven’t had anyone to speak to about it apart from my Dad, so this is my way of expressing myself I guess. Please bear with me as I get to grips with this writing malarkey but I hope that I can both inform and entertain you 🙂
There is no other place to start in my Formula 1 journey than with my father. My family’s link with the automotive industry came from my grandfather who worked for British Layland as an engineer in the UK and then took his talents to Sri Lanka as an advisor when Layland’s buses were and still are used as the country’s public transport. I have taken one of these buses and their drivers definitely have the F1 driver mentality. The precision, coordination and speed is a beauty to watch as they travel around Columbo and its sister cities. Anyway, I’ve got a bit side-tracked, that’s going to happen every now and then. Some of my favourite early memories are being woken up at 4:50am by my dad after excitedly struggling to sleep all night to watch the Australian Grand Prix on ITV and getting downstairs to find the TV on and a cup of tea next to my seat ready for Murray Walker to call ‘lights out and away we go’. I have seen my dad show emotions that I never experienced from him before – the first time I heard him properly swear was when Felipe Massa spun Lewis Hamilton round at Fugi in 2008 and cry a couple weeks later when Hamilton won it all in the most dramatic season finale in any sport, ever. F1 has been one of the main ways we have been able to express ourselves to each other, something we will always have in common and never get bored talking about. F1 has given us father-son time which I never fully appreciated until I moved away and realised not everyone is as interested in my F1 theories as him. It also means for Dad he no longer has the majority votes over watching sport at home. Sorry Dad.
The two races that we have 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 Schumi tattoo on the shoulder of an unknowing Italian lady, a fan hanging from a tree to get a better look at the track or a group of quite drunk Dutchman 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 the subjects 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. The one thing we all have in common is 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 in 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 is hard for me to properly put it into words, despite the waffling above, what those days mean to me but 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 1975 world championship did it, but I was indoctrinated from birth into Ron Dennis’ ‘grey machine’ with my first hero being Mika Hakkinen in the last 90s who took on Schumacher (and beat him twice – just ignore a certain German broken leg). 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 by the end of 2012 the dream was over 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 coming back. 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 a 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 has 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 8 time Grand Prix winner Daniel Ricciardo is on board, I am really 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 them is – How do you reconcile the essential meaninglessness 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, it perfectly sums up what makes F1 great to me. We get to see how far the boundaries can be pushed of human mental, physical and community effort and strength every single day, week, month, and year. It is like watching a rocketship 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. Perfect is never going to happen. The impossible dream. So you may be wondering why I have called my blog ‘The Perfect Formula’ when I have just said that perfect is impossible to achieve. In no other sport is perfection attempted to the highest degree of detail, no other sport is so unashamedly pushing to perfection in all aspects of its existence. No other sport has teams of 1000 employees, 80,000 different components to build (per car), budgets upwards of £600 million per year (it has now been capped to £150 million), and yet their two most high profile and important employees; the drivers, are openly and directly competing against each other. In no other sport is your teammate your primary competitor and only real benchmark of performance as you are the only two with equal equipment. No team has ever reached ‘perfection’, the joint closest were the 1988 McLaren and 2016 Mercedes teams. The 2016 Mercedes won 19 of 20 races and the only one they didn’t was because the two drivers took each other out. They had perfection within reach but the driver’s selfishness scuppered that. It is the largest team sport in the world, but also at constant war with itself.
So what is the Perfect Formula? For me the perfect formula is car, driver and team. I think there are formulas within those but the above is its simplest form. Each part of the formula has to be working in unison and at a high level to finish in the points let alone win. The driver needs to be able to drive the car to its maximum consistently while the car needs to be able to give the driver confidence and reliability to be able to reach that level. The team needs to be able to provide the car and to make the correct strategic decisions to get the driver and car home in the quickest way. In a sport based around milliseconds, this is easy to get wrong. Only when all three elements are in harmony will you be able to have a chance to succeed in F1. If one does not 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 on any given Sunday – only 14% of drivers in history have ticked that illustrious box.
Formula 1 has taught me a lot of lessons which I have been able to take on to certain degrees of success. It has taught me attention to detail and small changes can lead to greater success, never to give in until you see that chequered flag, teamwork always outscores individual effort and to always 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’m going to give it my best shot.
Speak soon.
James
The Perfect Formula 