F1 Estrangement and Karting Beasts
The racing world is getting very strange. It feels weird.
It should be inhabited by, basically, heroes. We like to make life worth living by doing something so magical that it is worth losing life for (statistically maybe not, but it feels like it very often). We like to advertise that fact too, by displaying what we do in the most flamboyant ways we can - why? because for many people, they need to see racing being done so they can experience some hope and aspiration.
We know some of our racing kin are out there who need to see that, for without it they are facing nothingness.
Karting - Solidly the only surefire path to greatness
But something is happening where the racing world is joining the daily grind of nothingness.
F1 is leading the way to nothingness, and I think they just passed a tipping point.
Because F1 is so important, I like to have a moan about it - a lot. That’s because like it or not they have a great heritage. They aren’t the pinnacle of motor racing, that accolade belongs to karting, but F1 is still important and I’m attached to it.
My first memories of racing are F1 on the telly, it gave me my first self-aware conscious thought that said ‘oh, that’s what it’s all about!’. Grainy footage of a black and gold JPS Lotus at Brands hatch late seventies is what I have locked in to my mind - being 4 years old, yawning and waiting for spectacular crash.
If I play Fleetwood Mac the Chain, I get goosebumps.
That’s because that song, that memory and the feel of F1 is a touchpoint, it says life can be magical when you live at the edge. The whole heady mix of beauty, romance, heroes, villains, death, fire, cars and racetracks.
F1 is there every year, still singing that song. If you have the ears of a racing type, you can hear it even when its muddied by a lot of the nonsense F1 gets involved with.
BUT never before did I hear what I hear now, like a whisper that says ‘we don’t like you racing lot - go away’.
For a long time you could hear hints of that in various ways, like overtaking rules that don’t make sense, or white line rules and commentators saying dumb stuff like ‘they have lines in tennis, why not racing’. Those were understandable misjudgements.
But the current rules are designed, deliberated over with priorities set that mean; what racing IS does not matter.
The most basic racing instinct - we are both pushing to the maximum of man and machine in an honest contest of nerve, will, bravery, sacrifice, risk - is gone as of 2026. That is replaced by priorities set by the motoring industry during a giant self-esteem crisis.
F1 has become very confused, sharing the motoring industry’s fear of being found out for it’s original sin, it has scrambled to get with the narrative in the most clumsy, unconvincing and fear based and weak ways. And from that weakness I believe the 2026 rule set is born.
Now, that may have been forgivable until...
Like the most disconcerting organisations when a terrible scandal occurs, where they abandon their reasons for existing and principles in order to defend their personal interests, everyone in and around F1 closed ranks and went on the attack - in advance with pre-emptive strikes against racing people.
I watched Melbourne on UK CH4, where before the season even started, they put together a little hit-piece with a comedian accusing naysayers of being scared of change. Clearly, so badly judged was this piece of fan vilification, telling people to get lost if you don’t like it, that it must have been decided at boardroom level with a memo going round to hold the line, and gaslight the audience.
The message being, if you think racing is about actual racing, you are not who we are looking for.
My estrangement from F1 got confirmed right there.
That’s exhibit A.
Next, the media around F1 taking the policy ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ making them intolerable to a racing oriented audience. Kind of understandable, but would James Hunt have that? Or would we hear something like this:
What’s next? Oh, of course - F1 taking the policy to hide comments on x that express disapproval. My God that’s projecting frailty on an industrial scale.
Weakness is not a value of motor racing.
So, suddenly I feel a very strange detachment and estrangement towards F1, because F1 did stand for something, which it now stands against - racing.
