Have you ever loved something that has made you question why you love it in the first place? Well, for those of you who aren’t familiar, that’s the relationship Formula 1 fans have with the sport. From crash outs both on and off the tracks, decisions that make you question why you even support the team you do, F1 fans go through it all and more.
Let’s talk about what’s currently happening.
Nineteen-year-old Kimi Antonelli, a Mercedes driver, is about to win his first world championship. Think about it like this: someone who is our age, maybe a little older or even younger for a lot of us, has a very high chance of being a world champion for one of the biggest, toughest and most competitive sports in the world. Yeah, we know, we already had our existential crisis.
Although, there are some people that are having a bigger existential crisis than us: the rest of the drivers on the grid. Past world champions such as Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, and extremely strong contenders such as George Russell, Oscar Piastri, and Charles Leclerc, all of whom have had, to put it lightly, very strong careers, are being crushed by someone in his second year of the sport.
Shifting the focus to Ferrari, it’s been another huge emotional rollercoaster of a season for the fans. They are the second strongest team after Mercedes this year, to the point where they have even matched Mercedes’s speed for a good amount of races. However, like always, their strategies doomed them. Being a Ferrari fan is not for the weak. After every weekend the fans are left disappointed, saying they are going to stop supporting the team, even stop watching the sport. And yet, every weekend you see the stands covered in red and people from all over the world tune in to say “Forza Ferrari.”
And then there’s Max Verstappen.
To put it simply, being a Verstappen fan leads to a constant cycle of hope, delusion, and rage. Every race is the emotional process: maybe this is it, maybe he will win, or end up on the podium. Maybe Verstappen will have a clean race, maybe the car will cooperate, and the strategy will make sense.
That, of course, never happens.
At this point, being a Max Verstappen fan feels less like supporting a driver and more like participating in a long-term social experiment designed to determine how much nonsense one person can tolerate before finally giving up. And yet, every race weekend, there we are again. Watching. Hoping. Getting emotionally invested. Making increasingly bold claims about how “this weekend will be different.”
It’s never different.
And somehow, we keep coming back.
Moving on to last year’s champions. Oh God, poor Oscar Piastri. After being done dirty by his own team last year, this season has unfortunately not played out in his favor. One too many mistakes from the team for a damn good driver. But everyone in the Formula 1 world can agree that he has a world championship in him.
As for Lando Norris, after last year’s championship he seems to have taken a bit of a backseat. He still pushes and gets podiums and pole positions. However, the competitiveness of last year is not as present. The car itself hasn’t done either drivers any favors.
Lastly, the other teams. The rivalry between the big four is so strong that it’s easy to forget that there are 17 other teams on the track. None of them have made a really big dent this season, with the exception of Racing Bulls and Alpine.
While Racing Bulls are unable to push for consistent results to be at the top, they do a good job of being in the middle and in producing good drivers for Red Bull.
Alpine, on the other hand, pulled a miracle that no one in the F1 universe could’ve ever even dreamt of. They put Pierre Gasly in pole position. The same team that struggles to even get points in races was able to compete with and beat the big four. Surprises like that are what keep the Formula 1 fans invested and give so many of us hope for the teams that we support.
In conclusion, this season hasn’t been as exciting as the previous ones. A very clear winning team was determined really early and the races haven’t had much to offer other than crashes for the teams and crash outs for the fans. We could say that we will move on to a different sport, and will change the team we support, but you will all see another article from us about this again, so why even lie?
See you after the next ragebait.
Featured image: Sprske Novine
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