I have no quarrel with Formula 1, or with most of its global fans. I have a quarrel with a lot of its American fans, the ones who like a Netflix show and say they like a sport.
F1 is in Miami this weekend, doing laps around a parking lot in the suburbs by the stadium where the Dolphins play. The sport is growing in America, and that’s great. It’s an historic sport, featuring some of the best drivers and most impressive automotive engineering in the world. But like any sport, it has its good games and its bad games, and this Miami Grand Prix is a bad game. Last year’s race, the inaugural one in South Florida, turned out to be a parade, a line of cars driving single file with varying gaps and no passing. Some F1 parades are great. Monaco is great. Las Vegas, if it’s a parade, should be great. Miami lacks the history and even—impressively, since it’s Miami—the scenery necessary to get away with finishing most of the competition before the lights go out and the “race” begins. You can’t hold a race in a parking lot. Not when you have one of the coolest cities in the Western Hemisphere at your disposal.
You will not hear this from the breathless coverage. You won’t hear much of anything about the race from the breathless coverage. The breathless coverage centers on F1’s American growth, and on which celebrities will be there, and on which driver someone said might be dating Taylor Swift. Every F1 piece of content directed towards Americans is a sales pitch, and like other timeshare hucksters, those peddling F1 door-to-door are taking some liberties when it comes to the truth.
“It’s actually really strategic.”
This is F1’s big lie. It’s strategic, sure, there’s some strategy involved. But compared to even the American brand of open-wheel racing—IndyCar—F1’s in-race strategy is checkers. The engineering pieces of it could be called strategic, sure, but then so could pitchers maximizing spin rate, and neither of those things really goes on in front of fans. Once engines have fired, there are hardly any levers F1 teams or drivers can pull. It’s driver execution, and it’s having the faster car. Drivers are consistent enough that the latter is the big deal. The latter doesn’t change much race to race.
F1 is not competitive. Already this year, with the season far from halfway over, you’d need to spend 25 dollars to win a single buck on Red Bull to win the team championship. You’d need to spend eight dollars to win one on Max Verstappen to win as an individual. The season championship is mostly over, and the sport still has more than six months to go. That isn’t a competition.
The lack of competition can be good and it can be bad. At its best, it creates a fierce rivalry at the top, like that of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen that was so good in 2021 until F1’s lack of black-and-white rules (something which plagues auto racing and is not a problem specific to F1) resulted in a race official subjectively choosing the champion in the season’s final moments. At its worst, it highlights the truth about motorsports everywhere: You either have to be rich or extremely lucky to ever get a chance to find out if you’re a good racecar driver. Some of the best drivers in the world drive F1, but the likelihood we’re missing out on even better performers is sky high compared to soccer or American football or rugby or cricket.
I don’t say all of this to discourage people from liking Formula 1. I like Formula 1. I prefer most sports over it, but I do still like it. Rather, it’s to encourage people to be honest about what they like. It’s ok to like Netflix shows. I like plenty of shows. But “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila” is not a sport, and neither is Drive to Survive. They’re shows. Drive to Survive has stoked massive interest in F1, and again, that’s great, but people claim they like the sport when really they like the drama and the glamour and the vicarious travel they’re doing as they follow it. They like feeling that they’ve discovered something before everyone else, like when all those Americans a decade ago briefly got really into soccer as though it was something fresh and new. Also? F1 Grands Prix are extraordinarily easy to follow live. That helps.
If you do like F1 as a sport, you should also enjoy IndyCar. The best F1 drivers are probably better than the best IndyCar drivers (it’s hard to know, since they come up through different pipelines), but the racing is more exciting and the cars go faster. You might also like NASCAR, though stock car racing is a different beast from the open-wheel world. If you like F1 as a sport and you don’t like IndyCar, or at least respect the quality of competition? You’ve either never watched an IndyCar race or, to go back to a prior point, you don’t like F1 as a sport. You like a TV show. You’re like the NBA fan who only consumes the league through reddit. You don’t have to like the sport part of sports. It’s ok. Just quit it with the posturing.
My real complaint with all of this, at least on this particular weekend, is that as the parking lot festival gets all this breathless coverage, I’m not hearing much at all about the Kentucky Derby. This is my fault, of course. Clearly, I’m consuming the wrong media if it’s bludgeoning me over the head as it explains who Christian Horner is for the fifteenth time and begs me to grovel at the altar of memes about Charles Leclerc. But, it’s frustrating. The Kentucky Derby is a great race. I’m not especially a fan of horse racing—I don’t follow it at all, it makes me sad when the horses die—but I like sports, and I like culture, and so I like the Kentucky Derby. The Kentucky Derby is a great race! And it’s an institution. It’s like Monaco for F1, except if Monaco was a competition in addition to being a storied, fun weekend. I have no idea who the Kentucky Derby favorite is. I don’t even know when post time is. I have managed to see that a rapper I don’t know named “IDK” will be attending the Miami Grand Prix (pretty good name, I guess).
So please. Stop feeling like you need to like Formula 1, and stop feeling like those who only follow it and don’t follow other sports are anything more than fans of a docuseries with a bizarre need to prove that they can “like sports.” And please. Stop telling me about this specific race. The Miami race sucks. It’s one of the worst on the whole schedule.
A Proposed Governors Bet
The concept of Mayors Bets is everywhere in sports these days. During the postseason, when two cities are playing one another, politicians like to make these wacky, unique, high-stakes bets where…the loser has to wear the other team’s jersey or something!!!!! Those crazy cats. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s gotten old.
But!
We have one on the horizon that could inject new vitality into the tradition.
With last night’s win in Toronto, the Florida Panthers are the new Eastern Conference favorites. Meanwhile, the Dallas Stars have about as good a chance as anyone of getting out of the West. If it’s Florida vs. Dallas in the Stanley Cup Finals, we need Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott to make a bet, and the bet needs to be this:
Loser wears drag.
Come on, you cowards. Do it! Face your fears! Put something you care about on the line.
If this Finals matchup does come to pass, and if this bet does not come to pass, I will be disappointed. Here I was thinking our elected officials had courage.
The Preseason NIT Is Back
Today’s NIT history lesson doubles as a piece of news, and that piece of news is that the Preseason NIT is back after a one-year hiatus.
The Preseason NIT started in 1985, hosting its semifinals and championship at Madison Square Garden, just like the real NIT. It’s been watered down over the years—it used to be 16 teams, with four regional sites and a real bracket—but any NIT is a good NIT, and even if they call it the NIT Season Tip-Off and even if they hold the event in Brooklyn and even if they do that thing where there are regular nonconference games they call part of the tournament when they have no bearing on the tournament’s champion, we’re glad to have the Preseason NIT back. Florida, Baylor, Pitt, and Oregon State. Great crew. You could dominate a jungle with those four mascots.
If you’re looking for more on the tournament’s origins, we have primary source material. Austin Murphy wrote a piece about the genesis of this beautiful tradition for Sports Illustrated back in 1985. Murphy comes off as a real jackass in the article, but the NIT’s glory shines through, and the journalist ultimately got what was coming to him, as he was laid off in 2017 and resorted to delivering packages for Amazon, much like how this NIT blogger on the other end of his career delivers food for Uber Eats. Welcome to my world, buddy. Don’t cross the NIT.
