We feel the need to point out now and then how Formula 1 does not have the best drivers in the world. There’s no chance. They’re drawing from too small a pool. The up-front cost to enter racing as a youth exceeds the median global household income, which means it costs more to get into racing than most human families make in a year. At the professional levels, sponsorship demands cull the talent pool even further, adding a variable number of zeroes to that price depending on the racing series. This is most dramatically the case in F1.
The sponsorship restriction is common across motorsports, and no sport is immune from some level of pay-to-play. F1, though, is on another plane. F1 sponsorships are worth more than those of any other circuit. This makes F1 seats cost more than any other spots behind the wheel. This creates a funny phenomenon where instead of money attracting the very best, as it does in most industries, it keeps the very best out of F1. In F1 more than maybe any other sport in the world, it’s silly to believe that the athletes you’re watching are the best at their craft.
There’s nothing wrong with this. Some things cost a lot of money. We have no problem with things that cost a lot of money. We don’t bring this up all the time because we’re bothered by the phenomenon itself. Watching shitty athletes is a favorite pastime of this blog. We bring this up because we think it’s an important piece of context. For casual F1 viewers, it’s easy to walk away with the impression that these drivers are the best drivers in the world. They’re not. We should probably be more impressed by the Olympians who get horses to dance.
Anyway, F1: Not very inclusive, as far as the drivers are concerned. It is very hard for a person to live their way into an F1 race. Systems of government, on the other hand…
While the hurdles F1 drivers must cross are stridently anti-competitive, the right to host a grand prix is a refreshingly open market. Any country can do it, so long as someone on its soil ponies up. A few years ago, Major League Baseball took the All-Star Game away from Atlanta because the Georgia state legislature made it a little bit harder for people to vote. In F1, it took a full-on invasion of a European country to get a grand prix off the schedule.
Democratic republics host F1 races. Constitutional monarchies host F1 races. Theocracies and oligarchies are eligible to host F1 races. Brutal authoritarian regimes? If my count is correct, that’s more than 20% of the F1 schedule this year.
But for as welcoming as F1 is towards those committing genocide in Asia, and for as much as it loves its friends whose slaves build soccer stadiums in the Middle East, F1 continues to refuse to give races to African despots.
Lewis Hamilton is trying to change that.
From ESPN:
Lewis Hamilton has backed proposals for Rwanda to host a Formula One grand prix in the future having travelled around Africa during the summer break and visiting a refugee camp.
…
“Rwanda is one of my favourite places I’ve been to. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the background and spoken to people in Rwanda and South Africa. That’s a long project, but it’s amazing that they’re so keen to get it.”
Rwanda! Who’s in charge there? Paul Kagame?
From ESPN (different article; four weeks ago):
The U.S. State Department repeatedly has cited credible reports that Kagame’s government is responsible for human rights violations ranging from the imprisonment, torture and murder of political opponents to the funding of child soldiers in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Kagame consistently deflects and denies the allegations.
“He is, and has been for decades, a Putin-style dictator,” Elizabeth Shackelford, a former U.S. diplomat who spent more than a decade in Africa, tells ESPN.
That second ESPN article was about the NBA’s own Kagame courtship, one which seeks to expand the league’s already thriving market share in places that will kill you if you disagree with the government. The NBA is trying to start a league in Rwanda. In a sign of how preliminary this planning process is, the NBA hasn’t yet announced the hypothetical league’s threshold for how many citizens can be murdered by agents of the state before the players cancel games. If the number’s similar to what it is over here, those guys are looking at quite the brief season.
F1 isn’t the NBA. F1’s not pretending to be something it’s not. The NBA talks (rightly) about the importance of the right to vote, then looks abroad and says “Lol not those guys.” F1 hears about voting and asks what it is, or whether they can send a butler to do it in their stead. F1 should absolutely put a race in Rwanda! The point of F1 is to be the most global racing series. Africa is part of the globe. This needs to happen. Max Verstappen needs another continent’s worth of ego boost.
This weekend:
Max Verstappen has won every Dutch Grand Prix since 1985, and that’s only three but three is a lot! Zandvoort has a wind warning right now and is supposed to be wet on Saturday, then dry on Sunday. That should give the commentators something to talk about during the parade.
- Friday, 6:30 AM EDT: Practice 1 (ESPN2)
- Friday, 10:00 AM EDT: Practice 2 (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 5:30 AM EDT: Practice 3 (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 9:00 AM EDT: Qualifying (ESPN2)
- Sunday, 9:00 AM EDT: Heineken Dutch Grand Prix (ESPN)
Other news:
- Peter Bonnington (also known as Bono) will stay at Mercedes rather than accompany Hamilton to Ferrari this winter. I hope Kimi Antonelli calls him “Mr. Bonnington” on the radio. At least at first. Gotta show respect, you know.
Larson vs. Verstappen
We’re not the only ones with F1 vs. Competition on the mind. Kyle Larson and Max Verstappen have had a little back and forth.
Credit to Verstappen, who mostly deflected the question:
“That’s fine. Everyone thinks their own way, right?”
For reference, back after Knoxville Nationals (note to Europeans: here in America, people like to race cars on dirt), a reporter asked Kyle Larson if he feels like he’s better than Max Verstappen. The logic—that Larson wins in stock cars, wins in various dirt track cars, and sure seemed capable of handling an open-wheeler at the Indy 500—is straightforward. Larson agreed:
“I know in my mind I am better than him as an all-around driver.”
…
“There’s no way he can get into a Sprint Car and win the Knoxville Nationals. There’s no way he can go win the Chili Bowl. There’s no way he can go win a Cup race at Bristol. There’s probably no way I can go win a Formula 1 race at Monaco, but I think I’d have a better shot at him just because of the car element.”
Obviously, it’s not a question with a straightforward answer. That doesn’t stop the answer from being obvious. Of course Kyle Larson is a better driver than Max Verstappen. Verstappen races in a series where the best car almost always wins. Larson races in a variety of series where the best car only wins half the time or less. Larson finds ways to win. We’ve never seen Verstappen have to do that. When he’s won, he’s almost always had the best car, for a long stretch in part because his team was spending more money than everybody else.
Verstappen’s done well in an uncompetitive series, backed by the best car in the game. That’s not to take away from his accomplishments, and it’s not to call him a bad driver. He’s a very good driver. Many have had this opportunity, and few have seized it like Max Verstappen. Look at Sergio Pérez right now! But just because F1 is global and F1 has the most money doesn’t mean we have to pretend it comes down to the drivers.
This is a tough thing about F1. It’s a cool sport, but it’s a team sport that looks individual, and the drivers are a smaller part of the team than they are in other series. My impression is that their role is getting even smaller as time goes on. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Ayrton Senna and Niki Lauda spent more time with wrenches than Max Verstappen and Lando Norris.
None of this is Verstappen’s fault. But what he does still isn’t as impressive as flying around a continent all week winning in cars as different from each other as bulldogs are from greyhounds.
This weekend in NASCAR:
DAYTONA!
Love the Pepsi 400. I know it’s called the opposite of that now, but it’s the best. The Pepsi 400/Southern 500 combo is the best two-race stretch of the current schedule. Storied chaos followed by storied order.
It’s a lot harder to win at Darlington for guys who aren’t a great driver or don’t have a great car, which makes Daytona the place we should find out how many playoff spots are open for cars qualifying on points. With twelve different winners so far, there are currently four spots available, one of which Martin Truex Jr. has almost clinched. Ty Gibbs and Chris Buescher lead the race for what’s currently the other three, with Ross Chastain and Bubba Wallace next to each other for the last one. Get a winner from that group or behind it, and the number of spots shrinks to three, one of which Martin Truex Jr. has, again, almost wrapped up.
ARCA and the trucks are at the Milwaukee Mile this weekend. Big couple weeks for the Milwaukee Mile.
- Friday, 3:00 PM EDT: Xfinity Qualifying (USA)
- Friday, 5:05 PM EDT: Cup Series Qualifying (USA)
- Friday, 7:30 PM EDT: Xfinity – Wawa 250 Powered by Coca-Cola (USA)
- Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: ARCA Practice
- Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: ARCA Qualifying
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Trucks Practice (FS1)
- Saturday, 4:30 PM EDT: Trucks Qualifying (FS1)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Coke Zero Sugar 400 (NBC)
- Sunday, 1:00 PM EDT: ARCA – Sprecher 150 at the Milwaukee Mile (FS1)
- Sunday, 4:00 PM EDT: Trucks – LiUNA! 175 (FS1)
(That was strangely hard to compile. Shoutout NASCAR for not having a functioning website.)
Other news:
- The NASCAR appeals process is two parts, and Richard Childress Racing lost the first part. Austin Dillon will have one more chance to convince somebody, but nobody sounds like they expect that someone (the Final Appeals Officer—what a title) to take Dillon’s side.
Portland: Penske vs. Palou
The basic setup for the rest of this IndyCar season is that Álex Palou is going to try to hold off Will Power and Scott McLaughlin in the standings while running the final three races on ovals, tracks where Power and McLaughlin’s Team Penske performs very well. There are other characters in the mix: Colton Herta, good on ovals himself, leads Power and McLaughlin in the standings. Palou’s teammate Scott Dixon is ahead of the Penske pair as well. Josef Newgarden is too far back to win the championship, but he’s also a Penske driver, he’s probably better on ovals than Power and McLaughlin, and he’s a dick who’s liable to cause one of them to crash at any moment (like he did last weekend).
Overall, though, it’s looking like Palou vs. Penske. Palou has the 70-point lead. Penske has the ovals. In essence, the question is: How many ovals does Roger Penske need to schedule to keep Chip Ganassi’s Spaniard from winning his third title in four years?
This weekend, the race is not on an oval. It’s the last road course of the year. It’s a road course where Álex Palou has raced well in recent seasons. He won at Portland in 2021 and 2023. In 2022, though, McLaughlin and Power finished 1–2.
The schedule:
- Friday, 5:55 PM EDT: IndyCar Practice (Peacock)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: IndyCar Practice (Peacock)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: IndyCar Qualifying (Peacock)
- Saturday, 8:15 PM EDT: IndyCar Practice (Peacock)
- Sunday, 1:10 PM EDT: Indy NXT Race (Peacock)
- Sunday, 3:00 PM EDT: BitNile.com Grand Prix of Portland (USA)
