Late NITe notes! Let’s get after it.
Formula Fun (But Not Very Strategic)
I watched yesterday’s grand prix, the finale of an historic title chase, the final bout in a year-long duel between two extraordinarily talented men. It was decided arbitrarily, mainly by the whims of Formula 1 officials. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
We’ve talked a few times this year about how dumb Formula 1 is, and we want to be clear that this isn’t an insult. We are an NIT blog. We like NASCAR. We’re not looking for grand exemplars of sport over here. But the fact of the matter is that Formula 1 does not seem, from a year of following it, to have any rules, and yet at the same time, it has an abundance of rules. Its rules cup overfloweth. The way the sport straddles this divide is to leave its many rules largely in gray areas, gray areas which result in arbitrary, inconsistent rulings. This might put some people off, but it’s a common theme within sport. Most sports’ governing bodies try to drive out the gray areas, in the name of fairness, and I’d assume Formula 1 is trying to do the same. And while it’s probably not something to embrace, I suppose that if you’re going to set things up such that every “rule” is arbitrary and inconsistent, you should at least use that to create excitement, and Formula 1 certainly did that, opting in the end for a dramatic scene—a one-lap race to the finish which Max Verstappen, on fresher tires due to the whims of fate, won.
Our complaint with Formula 1 is not that its dumb. We love the dumbness. We love the commitment to dumbness. Our complaint is with the way its evangelists do their evangelizing, and specifically with one pillar of this evangelization.
I have been encouraged for a few years now to “get into Formula 1,” and I am grateful for these encouragements, because again, this year was very fun. Within the encouragements, though, there was a consistent piece of false advertising. People told me Formula 1 was “really strategic.” It is not “really strategic.” It is the least strategic sport of which I can conceive.
This is not to say Formula 1 isn’t strategic. It’s that it’s less strategic than it lets on. Fans look at pit strategy and tire strategy and passing and DRS and the thousands of technical adjustments to the vehicles and say, “Strategy!” and they are right to say, “Strategy!” It’s strategy. But compared to other sports…
The best example of this is Mercedes’ strategy with Lewis Hamilton yesterday morning. Mercedes was pinned down, forced to react to Red Bull’s strategy with Verstappen and left with obvious choice after obvious choice of how to react. They weren’t left with the worn-out tires due to a poor decision of their own. They made the optimal decision in every moment—the clear, optimal decision—and were left at a disadvantage, with no strategic recourse. It wasn’t baseball, where everything down to the order in which a catcher flashes various signs can gain or lose a team an advantage. It wasn’t football, with eleven levers on the field at once and dozens of directions in which to pull them. It was Formula 1, where the tire strategy was rather simple and the pit strategy was rather simple and Hamilton’s maneuvers to attempt to hold off Verstappen were interesting, but in the same way it’s always interesting to see a great athlete perform her or his craft, not interesting in a way unique to Formula 1 (in a similar vein, the engineering feats within Formula 1 are fascinating and impressive and cool, but every sport relies on complex engineering, with a key difference being that in most other sports, the human body and mind are the primary focus of such efforts—and yes, I recognize that those machines are part of Formula 1 as well). Formula 1 is not particularly strategic. It is, in fact, particularly unstrategic. But it has a few pieces of brutally simple strategy, pieces so simple that fans can understand them nearly immediately, and because fans understand the strategy in front of them, an illusion of strategy builds. This is beside the point, though. Strategy isn’t why people like Formula 1.
Why, then, do people actually like Formula 1? My best guess is its combination of glamour, drama, and simplicity. The sport traverses the globe, with races like those in Monaco and Baku taking place in the streets of scenic, exotic cities. It’s chronicled in a scintillating Netflix series. Its stark divides between haves and have-nots, on top of the tiny number of competitors allowed to race in the first place, create straightforward championship campaigns in which one knows, entering the season, that at most a handful of drivers could capture the title. Better still, those drivers and their team principals come from diverse locales and often marked generational wealth, making them somewhat out of touch with reality and decidedly different from one another. Hamilton vs. Verstappen was sensational because the two are such demonstrably different people. Beyond them, even, it’s easy to keep everybody straight. On top of all of that, races often hinge on one or two moments, if that, and they rarely last more than two hours, making their consumption delightful and simple.
In short, people like Formula 1 for a combination of the reasons they like the NFL and that Netflix show, Selling Sunset. Like the NFL, F1’s easy to consume. There are few competitors, the main characters stay the same, and there are big gaps between regular competition. Like Selling Sunset, it’s glitzy and glamorous and beautiful and filled with drama. I’m not personally much of an NFL or Selling Sunset fan, but I’m aware of both. It’s hard not to be. They’re simple and they’re captivating. Much like F1.
So to all of you who said, “You should get into F1,” thank you. But it’s not very strategic. I want you to know that. Stop telling me it is. We need to get past that untruth.
What Can NASCAR Learn from Formula 1?
I love NASCAR, but in what I think’s a rather clear-eyed way, meaning I understand why many of you don’t love NASCAR. Anytime Formula 1 has a big moment in the U.S., NASCAR has this conversation about what’s wrong with NASCAR. We’re going to participate in that right now.
The conversation is based in part on a flawed premise. Twitter is heavily involved, and Twitter is not all that representative of the sports fandom market. F1, proportionally, is much more popular on Twitter than it is in the rest of American life. NASCAR’s ratings dwarf those of F1 here stateside.
But F1’s growing, and NASCAR, at least over the long run, is not growing. There are things from F1 that NASCAR can emulate. There are many things it shouldn’t try to emulate.
NASCAR’s recent dalliances with a variety of tracks is a great idea. Part of what makes F1 enthralling is that every race is unique. In NASCAR, more are unique than the sport gets credit for, but the preponderance of more-boring-than-shit 1.5-mile tracks is a grenade to the guts for the sport. Get rid of every one of them that you can. It doesn’t matter if the track’s in Kansas vs. Fort Worth. It’s the same track, and it’s the same boring track. You don’t need too many road courses, but the differences between Martinsville and Talladega and Sonoma are great. Lean into those.
NASCAR’s drivers are all too similar to one another. They’re almost entirely straight, white, Southern men, and while that’s the sport’s lifeblood, it’s a regional crew rather than a national crew, which doesn’t make sense for a sport that tours more or less nationally. Efforts geared at diversity are good and smart for all sorts of reasons, but there are shorter-term things that can help this too. Lean into the regional differences between drivers. The Busch brothers are Las Vegas. Kyle Larson is California. Denny Hamlin is Virginia. Joey Logano is New England. Chase Elliott is Georgia. Brad Keselowski is Michigan. They’re all different from each other. Many of them don’t like each other. But they all end up conforming to this mold, and while it might play with NASCAR’s base, you can keep a few guys in that mold while still leaning in to the differing backgrounds.
NASCAR doesn’t lean hard enough into its team championship. I’m not even sure such a championship exists. The Mercedes vs. Red Bull rivalry was almost as good as Hamilton/Verstappen for Formula 1. Lean into this with Hendrick vs. Gibbs vs. Stewart-Haas vs. Penske/Wood. Set up a separate championship for the two-car teams—23XI, RCR, RFK, Petty GMS, Trackhouse. They can run the same races, and the drivers can compete individually, but get these crew chiefs hating each other, and get the owners at odds. It doesn’t need to be gimmicky. Let them compete enough, and it’ll happen.
NASCAR, lastly, needs to be more like golf in terms of how it approaches its calendar. Golf has four majors, each of which is appealing to a casual fan. NASCAR had this semi-naturally with the Winston Million (Daytona, Talladega, Coke 600, Southern 500) but got away from it. Bring it back. Golf also has its playoff and championship, which is gimmicky and not that important but still exists and gives meaning to every event. Make NASCAR’s more like that. NASCAR is too chaotic and random to have a title race like Hamilton/Verstappen or Hunt/Lauda. Don’t try to go that route. Try to go the golf route where four times a year, what’s happening is a big deal, and for the diehards, every other race matters for something too—just something smaller, and something drivers don’t care about as thoroughly.
I’m sure I’m missing plenty of things, but the point of The Internet™, ostensibly, is to bat around ideas. Let’s put these up in the air.
NIT News: Memphis?
Memphis lost again on Friday night, this time to Murray State. It was hilarious. The whole thing is hilarious. Glass doors in the hallway to the locker room are being broken. Fans are losing their minds. Memphis has a ton of talent and if they put it together at the right time (not the soon time, the right time) they’ll repeat as NIT champions. Repeats are rare, folks. Much more rare than in that other tournament. That’s because winning the NIT is harder.
Not to be outdone, the flagship institution of Memphis’s parallel city, Louisville, also lost in devastating fashion on Friday, getting embarrassed at home by DePaul. Louisville has lost its president, its athletic director, and now its dignity. Come on down, friends.
St. Bonaventure got beat up by UConn, further affirming our decision to call them the preliminary NIT favorite. As far as we’re concerned, they still hold the crown.
Creighton kind of whooped BYU in the Pentagon. Oregon lost another game they should’ve won. NC State looks feisty. St. John’s is lurking. Shaka Smart’s Marquette did not compete with UCLA but who asked them to? Shaping up to be a fun season when it kicks into full gear.
The Sens Keep Rocking
The Senators’ grand prank on the NHL continued on Saturday, with Anton Forsberg shutting out the defending Stanley Cup champions and Brady Tkachuk netting a hat trick as the Sens absolutely smoked the division rival Tampa Bay Lightning. There will be plenty more to say, and soon, on this team, but we must leave it for tonight at the fact that they are pranking the NHL at every turn and we’re loving it.
Burnley Burnleyed West Ham
Burnley has no idea how to score with Maxwel Cornet hurt, but they kept West Ham from scoring yesterday, and they earned a point for their troubles while most of their cohort at the bottom of the table lost. Making moves, friends. Enormous game on Wednesday that’s very embarrassing to be this important. More to come on that.
Miscellaneous Nonsense
Texas got a big recruit through the transfer portal, and any opportunity to make fun of Texas is an opportunity we’ll take. Bevo’s Fake Nuts: Is Texas Back?
MLB players are locked out, but the mascots are good to go. What if the latter end up playing the games?
Half of Alaska is ungovernable.
***
No viewing schedule tonight, obviously. Partially because it’s so late, but partially because there was nothing to watch. Sleep tight, NIT nation.
As a person who has followed F1 for years and has attended several races throughout the world, your comments about F1 are not correct at all. F1 is the preeminent motor sport in the world for good reason and once you attend a race in person to see how far engineering has taken us, there is nothing like it. To even compare it to NASCAR shows how much you do not understand about this incredible sport. Also, I could write several pages on the complexity of strategy in F1 but your opinion about it precludes me from doing so. Without going on about how far off base you are, I would suggest you attend a Grand Prix of your choosing. Go and see for yourself the intricacies of a sport that has evolved into the pinnacle of all motor sports, costing teams half a billion each just to compete. Just the fact that an engine can spin at 19 thousand rpm’s without a lockup is proof of the brilliance of F1 engineering. Lastly, your comments come from a place I see all to often anymore, speaking about something you know nothing about and have never experienced….
Dennis, thanks for reading. I’m certainly wowed by the engineering within F1—just as I’m wowed each Summer Olympics by what makes humans capable of running nearly thirty miles per hour. I guess I should have included that I understand some people are drawn to the sport because they like fast cars (and they should—fast cars are cool!). My apologies for understating that part. I think, though, that you may be underestimating the degree of strategy in other sports. Several pages? I could write that much about cribbage strategy. As I said, I loved getting to know F1 this year and am excited to keep following it. Would love to attend a Grand Prix—hoping to be there next fall at COTA.