Everyone has an interesting pandemic story that they are now shoving down everyone else’s throat via personal essays and Instagram stories. This is not it.

If I had a buck for every time someone confronted me with, “Are you following Formula One because of the hot dudes?”, I’d have more money than the PM Cares fund (unaccounted, geddit?). This has driven me to the point where I feel like every conversation that I have had with people since COVID has somehow involved investigation or judgment on my interest in the professional motor racing sport. This deviates the conversation to the physical attributes of these men, the face and the body to match their talent. 

In all honesty, the shock and the amazement expressed in equal proportion by people shouldn’t come as a total surprise to me. My interest in sports has been in direct proportion to the rest of the world’s interest in my written work, practically non-existent unless forced via DM to read.

I don’t play any sport, I don’t follow any sport. For the lack of interest, I don't care to understand most sporting activities. I don't have a partner who's into sports, there's no vicarious living of sports situation here.

Thus, one of my many resolutions in 2020 was to take up a sport and follow it religiously. The motive was simple, to get rid of my total lack of understanding and have some background of the game, enough to sustain a conversation. At the same time be able to enjoy watching that sport (somewhat) if left alone to die.

Which is where I picked Formula One.

The shortlisting procedure was simple. Nobody in my tight circle of friends or anyone I have ever dated had seemingly talked about F1, so I couldn't hate it. It was also far away from sports I vaguely understood and abandoned at the idea of it (Cricket that was force-fed through the formative years, Tennis that my cousin played and wouldn't stop talking about, and Football which I briefly followed with a friend when I was in college). I don’t drive a car either, which makes this proposition interesting. Would I be able to sustain interest and fulfill a resolution where I have nothing in life holding me to it?

I conveyed this idea to a good friend, who follows most professional sports regularly. Incidentally, our friendship stemmed from a conversation related to sports in college. I had confessed to her, how the only “sports” I’d ever pursued in life was to “climb the stairs up and down when needed”. Over eleven years later, we still laugh about how true that statement is.

This time after relaying my predicament to her, she offered to explain the nuances of the game.

“There are ten teams competing for the Constructor's Championship and each team has two players, who are each competing with the others and their own teammate for the Championship trophy. They have an assigned number of laps to complete in the team car and that’s it, you'll understand.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. I’ll text you when the race starts. You can follow the calendar from there.”

Except, as luck would have it, the racing calendar was postponed due to COVID. The season this year didn’t quite go as per the schedule. I spent that time following up on the existing body of content online and attempted to watch Drive to Survive (2018-present) on Netflix. The former was fun and the latter took two whole attempts from start to end to sit through it.

When the racing calendar resumed in July, I had almost forgotten about this conversation. One evening, I received a text from her,

“Shit I forgot to tell you but the game this evening was great! It was crazy, man. You should watch the GP next week.”

A week later, I saw my first F1 game by myself. There’s been no looking back ever since.

I can go on and on about how enjoyable it was, and how I felt, and all that garbage, but I’ll spare you the horror. Instead, let me tell you how I became a convert here.

I was sucked into the abyss that constitutes team radio conversations. For the uninitiated, it is almost like being made privy to an inside conversation between two people, the driver and the assigned engineer, and you have no business of being there. Which makes me come to my point, why Formula One stuck with me unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. This was basically like watching live television.

As an audience, when you see a natural reaction of a driver snapping at his engineer or being curt or funny, there’s something raw about it. The neutered emotions and press briefings can be quite dull to sustain interest in any game for someone who's not been raised on a diet of sports. The liveness of the reaction and instant response makes this one just about a little more personal. You feel as if you belong there, even if you have never gone karting in your life.

It is also not just about watching and hearing other people play the sport, A lot has to do with what is happening outside of the grid, and between the race-days. I followed the engagement outside the paddock, through social media.

Social media is a turf that I understand and a game that I play. It is fitting to say that the aggression they show with the speed and the car is replicated in toto online; between the teams, the players, and the fans.

I don't apologize for the last pun. I won't apologize for the last pun.

F1 related social media for me has been a game-changer in my own understanding of how content development works.

Most teams and players are self-aware; enough to take a dig on themselves, before being shown the mirror in the comment section. The sheer irreverence that the team’s social media representatives show towards the situations and their swift response time in creating that content is a lesson in itself.

If you speak to anyone who’s professionally led social media for an organization or for their own self, vetting content and running it with the agencies involved takes an enormous amount of time. In my years of working around social media and platform studies research online, never have I once seen a cult/organization/industry own that in record time and simultaneously be as refreshing each time.

When they do occasionally mess up and someone points that goof-up in the comment section, these teams, players representatives respond in a cheerful, almost celebratory manner.

As a creator online, I found myself thriving on the pace, the aggressiveness, and the ability to own up to their strengths and weaknesses and to be able to call out the trolls wholesome.

I came to truly enjoy F1 in living and breathing capacity through this easiness and a sense of breathing room they generated within the sports and in their content outside the game. It also helps that each of these players is distinctly different from another viz a vis their personality and interests. That makes them a delight to follow and watch during the race.

I rooted for Ricciardo to get his first podium each time I saw him this season, and for Gasly to push his limits to show RedBull what he's made of. I cheered for the McLaren boys, despite everyone's opinion on them being overrated memelords and nothing more. I hoped for Racing Point to lead the mid-field, and for Checo and Hulk to be teammates for 2021 Haas (fingers crossed). I have lived for every minute this season, despite seasoned fans telling me to calm the fuck down.

Personally, it has been the most gratifying thing I have done this year and a huge relief to think that I am actually capable of understanding sports, more than I thought I would. I also made friends along the way from other parts of the world who are F1 fanatics and we have just, somehow, found each other through Tweets and comments online.

I learned more about F1 at a time when the world was simultaneously taking up new things all around me. People who had no sense of cooking were baking sourdoughs, serious workaholics were busy playing Ludo, and me? I was watching sports as if my life depended on it. F1 became my religion and Grand Prix, my Sunday church ritual.

If you, like me, spend your day breathing in Instagram and breathing out Twitter, the motorsport will definitely appeal to you more than you can imagine. I know my Häkkinen from Räikkönen, not just because they are legends in their own light, but also cause they made the sport enjoyable outside of the liveness of it, even for someone who knew little to nothing.

Watching F1 in that sense has been a lot like going to a party where you don't know anyone except the host, who is busy with the hosting duty. By the end of the night, you want to stay there, just another ten minutes over one last drink, and one last cigarette. Even as an introvert attending the party (in this case, someone who had zero background in sports) I found something warm and enjoyable to stick around and make myself at home.

I do still find it funny that people think I am following Formula One because of some crush who’s into it (no) or because the dudes are all hot (no, but it helps). Much to everyone's dismay asking these questions, I am more than capable of finding pleasurable men and more on PornHub, if not the dating apps that I am trying to avoid

Now, where's my share of people who want to get in a conversation with me about the game?

(Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels.)