Stu’s Notes: When Did F1 Get So Lame?

The Austin City Limits music festival was the last two weekends here in Austin (I have to specify it’s the festival because four different things here bear the ACL name), and the patrons were mostly a delight. Their butts were hanging out, yeah, but it was mostly a laid-back assortment of music fans blissed out on psychedelics, and because the headliners were on around the golden hour, they let the rest of us mostly have the city to ourselves at the times when we wanted it.

This F1 weekend isn’t as fun.

Before we get into this, I want to specify two things:

First, we don’t get many global F1 fans in Austin. Global F1 fans are different from American F1 fans. They aren’t as much a product of the Netflix show, and they’re usually more established as a people, and they have different sporting options to consume than we do in America. Whole different decision tree. I have no quarrel with global F1 fans.

Second, we don’t notice many old F1 fans in Austin (“old” as in “have been fans for a decade or more,” not “old” as in “middle-aged”). There are plenty, but you don’t see them. They’re habituated to keep their mouths shut about it. They go to the race and enjoy their business. They still operate like it’s 2012. They also understand the sport, and they’re generally more into the cars than all the other stuff, which makes sense. If you like cars, you should like F1. The cars are cool. Even if the only thing I’ve ascertained about their technological prowess is that they’ve made it very easy to take turns quickly. They’re slower on straight lines than IndyCars, they’re more under control than stock cars (which counterintuitively makes them more boring), but they cost a lot of money and they turn really fast. F1’s technological prowess, all those millions of dollars, has mostly gone towards fancy digital ads on the cars themselves and the ability to make the cars turn without losing acceleration. All of this sounds suspiciously close to advancements in lawnmowing, but I have no quarrel with old F1 fans.

Now, the rest of ‘em:

Too many American F1 fans right now are guys around thirty years old who got into F1 because of the Netflix show and want to show off how much they think they know about this thing they’ve been conditioned to think is cool. They’ve never watched a NASCAR or IndyCar race, so they don’t know that those are far more storied stateside and far more competitive. They’ve been told F1 is strategic, and the evidence they’ve been given to support this claim is that you can use multiple pit strategies, which is kind of like saying doing the laundry is strategic because most of the time you can just throw everything in there on cold but sometimes it’s better to separate your whites. They want to “follow a sport,” and they want to seem cultured, so they follow the easiest sport in the world to follow (there isn’t even a race every week, it’s only two hours long when it happens, there’s a maximum of a handful of interesting happenings within each event but usually the number is one or zero), which happens to also be the most glamorous. The glamour is the real point of the sport for these guys—if this was about competition, F1 wouldn’t have designed their parking lot race in “Miami” to be a parade, and Las Vegas wouldn’t have been their second choice for an additional American Grand Prix—and that’s fine, but they won’t admit that. They tell you that you must just not get it. But they’re the ones who still think the emperor’s fully clothed.

This isn’t every American F1 fan, or even all the ones who aren’t old. There are people here in Austin this weekend or watching on TV who love the cars, or who love road course racing, or who appreciate the ability of the drivers whose presence in the series isn’t a complete farce (it’s a bummer at times like this that Nikita Mazepin got ousted, because he was the best example of what a joke F1.5 is). I don’t hate F1 myself. Covering it on this blog is a business decision, but I enjoy some F1 here and there. What really gets my head in my hands is hearing fanboys talk about F1 as though it’s a serious sport and not an engineering contest with a lot of reality television getting in the way. And in an hour and a half, when the rideshare bonus kicks in, I’m going to have to listen to a lot of fanboys talk about F1 as though it’s a serious sport. Bring back the music festival, please.

So, that’s the answer to our titular question: F1 didn’t get lame. We just got to know it well enough to figure out what parts are actually cool/interesting and what is Netflix fodder gulped thirstily by bros with some weird sports-fandom-based inferiority complex.

Trying

Our daily list of things I’m working on, to save the faithful from wondering where the hell all those things we promised are:

• Get on top of merchandise, including 2022 NIT pool prizes
• Get the blog active again on Instagram and TikTok (and set up the Facebook page)
• Do License Plate Bracket III
• Launch 2023 NIT Season-Long Challenge?
• Train Fargo so the kind employees at daycare stand a chance when she’s put her head under another dog’s butt and is waiting for the poo
• Fold the laundry (rough week)
• Build the latest database of NIT alumni in the NBA
• Resurrect MilkTime

The plan is for more notes tomorrow.

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Viewing schedule for the day:

7:37 PM EDT: Padres @ Phillies – Game 3 (FS1)

I believe Kyle Schwarber when he says just about anything, and he says Philly is loud. It’s hard to always tell on TV, so I’ll take his word for it and prepare for litness. (The F1 fans who call baseball boring are walking red flags, by the way.)

7:00 PM EDT: Bulls @ Wizards

The Wizards stink, right? That hasn’t changed? Seeing them favored. A little concerned.