There are two religions in Italy: the Catholic Church and Ferrari.
One offers forgiveness. The other offers a podium. Motorsport has always demanded faith: in engineering, in weather, and in the hands of men hurtling down straights at 200 mph.
Lights out and away we go. Not just a race start, but a kind of prayer.
So what happens when something built on combustion and chaos is asked to become sustainable? When a sport defined by spectacle and excess is told to clean itself up?
Formula 1 has always been about speed, sound, and story. But lately, it’s being asked to be something else entirely.
In layman’s terms, Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motorsport. Ten teams, 20 drivers, 20-something races a season, spanning five continents and hundreds of millions of fans. Each Grand Prix weekend is a three-day spectacle—practice on Friday, qualifying on Saturday, and the main race on Sunday. Whoever crosses the finish line first wins. Points are awarded based on placement. The driver and team with the most points by season’s end take home the world championships.
In the legacy teams—Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren—history stretches back decades, and fanbases feel more like bloodlines than communities. The mythology lives in the circuits too: Monaco with its hairpin turns, Silverstone with its wartime echoes, Monza with its holy speed. It lives in the dynasties—Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna, Lewis Hamilton—and in the chaos: the DNFs, the safety cars, the pit stops lost to a single misstep. It lives in the politics as well, in the quiet wars of team orders, national pride, and who gets to sit behind the wheel.
It begins with the holy trinity: speed, sound, and story.
Formula 1 is a sport where entire careers are measured in tenths. A driver takes a corner at 180 mph not with instinct, but with memory—of grip levels, wind angles, tire wear, and telemetry from the lap before. They brake not when they need to but at a marker they saw out of the corner of their eye while traveling faster than most planes at takeoff. At Monaco, there are no runoff areas. A single mistake means your car is in the wall and your Sunday is over. At Spa, the cars go flat through Eau Rouge and Radillon with 50 meters of elevation change and no visibility. In Baku, you drive 200 mph through a medieval castle gate wide enough for a Toyota Corolla.
Max Verstappen once drove an entire lap of Suzuka with purple sector times—in the rain. Hamilton won a championship on three wheels. Alonso drove with broken bones. Charles Leclerc qualified first in Monaco with a car that was already breaking. These aren’t just stats. They’re stories told in fractions of seconds.
Speed is sacred because it doesn’t lie. You either are fast enough, or you are not. No politics, no PR. Just lap time. And in a world obsessed with optimization and control, there’s something deeply human about watching someone flirt with the edge of chaos, lap after lap.
Sound is loss. The modern hybrid engines hum and whir, clean and restrained. But older fans still grieve the V10s, the V12s—those machines that screamed like they were dying. That kind of noise didn’t just fill a circuit. It possessed you. You didn’t hear it. You felt it: through your sternum, in your fingertips, in the part of your brain that registers awe. The sound was proof that something volatile and almost mythic was happening. Now, with every quiet lap, you can hear that era fading.
This is a sport that doesn’t just crown champions—it creates mythology and stories that Netflix executives love to snatch up. The stories and mythology are built by the ghosts in the machine.
Senna, the saint of São Paulo, drove like he believed in God and no one else. He died in 1994, and fans still cry about it yearly at Imola. Niki Lauda was pulled from a burning car, his lungs scorched, his face disfigured—yet he returned six weeks later, wrapped in bandages, because he had a title to fight for. Schumacher became a machine. Hamilton became a movement. Sebastian Vettel became a villain, then a father, then an environmentalist. Even now—Leclerc crashes at his home race in Monaco with a kind of tragic consistency, as if the city has a curse on his last name.
The teams are dynasties too. Ferrari, oldest of the old blood. McLaren, home of Senna. Mercedes, the silver empire. Red Bull, brash and brilliant and born from nothing. Even Aston Martin, with its British leather and luxury PR, dreams of myth. There’s a reason fans call Ferrari the Prancing Horse—not the fastest horse, not the winning horse, but the beautiful one you follow, even when it’s limping.
Formula 1 wants to produce net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. The plan includes synthetic fuels, greener freight logistics, carbon offsetting, and maybe even electric components that make the sport quieter, cleaner, more palatable.
This is a sport that exists to burn fuel and time. Twenty cars fly around the globe in a convoy of private jets, freight ships, and paddock palaces—for what? To chase milliseconds. To test tire compounds in the desert. To make carbon fiber beautiful.
And yet, Formula 1 is not as wasteful as people think. Every team operates under strict limits: fuel flow restrictions, aerodynamic testing caps, wind tunnel hour allocations, spending caps down to the dollar. The engines are already hybrids, the most efficient in the world. Brake energy is harvested and reused. Power units must last multiple races. Drivers get penalized for taking too many components. Every tenth of a second is paid for in sweat, strategy, and spreadsheets.
It’s controlled chaos, regulated brilliance. It’s not a free–for–all. It’s a game of limits, played at impossible speed.
If Formula 1 is champagne and blood, Formula E is a green juice you didn’t order.
It’s what people think they want—a cleaner, quieter, morally acceptable motorsport. Fully electric. Raced on temporary street circuits in city centers. Promising sustainability, innovation, and the kind of buzzword optimism that looks great on pitch decks.
A Formula 1 weekend at Spa-Francorchamps means 44 laps of elevation changes, unpredictable weather, 200 mph down the Kemmel straight, and history so thick you can feel it in the mist. A Formula E weekend in Jakarta, Indonesia means a tight street circuit that looks like an overgrown go-kart track, lower top speeds, no tire strategy, and commentators trying to make “Attack Mode” sound dramatic.
It’s hard to mythologize a sport when the defining phrase is “Fanboost.”
Even the crashes feel different.
At the Monza circuit, Leclerc once spun out at 180 mph and slammed into the barriers in front of the Tifosi—he walked away, then apologized to the nation. In Formula E, a crash is more likely to be a clumsy tap into a wall on a track that barely allows overtaking. The cars bounce. The moment passes. No legacy, no heartbreak.
At the end of his final Grand Prix, four-time world champion Vettel stepped out of the car, removed his helmet, and bowed. Not to the crowd. Not to the cameras. But to the machine.
This was a driver who had become the conscience of the sport. One of the most decorated athletes on the grid, Vettel spent his final seasons speaking openly about climate change, equality, and sustainability—wearing “Save the Bees” across his helmet in Baku, planting trees in Canada, collecting litter after races, and acknowledging, with quiet clarity, the contradictions of the sport that had made him famous.
But even with all that knowledge, all that awareness, all that advocacy—he still bowed. And that gesture carried more weight than any press release or policy goal. Because it wasn’t sentimental. It was reverent. It understood what outsiders often miss.
Formula 1 is not perfect. But it is not careless. It is not thoughtless. It is not, as many critics suggest, irredeemable. The cars themselves are among the most efficient machines in the world. Hybrid power units. Fuel flow restrictions. Engine allocations. Component penalties. Budget caps. Wind tunnel limits. Nothing is unlimited. Nothing is easy. The sport is not a free–for–all—it is a study in precision under pressure.
And still, the conversation often returns to a single binary: whether or not a sport like this should exist at all. Whether it’s sustainable enough to deserve its future.
Formula 1 does not ask to be loved by everyone. It does not seek to be morally simple. What it offers, instead, is something stranger, more enduring, and more difficult to replace. It is a living archive of memory and machinery, bound by contradiction and refined by time. And for those who understand what the sport is—not just what it looks like—it remains, even now, something sacred.
And the bow was not just goodbye.
The machine is not just a machine.
