The fans that offer a ray of light in an increasingly partisan F1

As Formula 1 continues to enjoy a boom in mainstream popularity, there has been a clear increase in the level of partisan fans supporting a single driver or team. For Jake Boxall-Legge, the Japanese Grand Prix offered a rare escape from this

Updated Sep 27, 2023, 9:13 AM

When this author was growing up in the early 2000s, Formula 1 was always a painfully niche sport. One likes to think that his early fandom hopefully exposed a few minds to its presence, at least, but it was always rare to meet anyone else who liked devoting their Sunday afternoons to sitting in front of a CRT television to watch gratuitously fast cars traverse around a race circuit at some far-flung location on the globe. It even had a terrestrial TV deal in the UK in those days, but stories about F1 in the mainstream news always felt so novel.

PLUS: How Verstappen’s crushing Japanese GP win showed Singapore was a blip

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Author Jake Boxall-Legge

Jake studied engineering at university, as his original ambition was to design racing cars. He was bad at that, and thus decided to write about them instead with an equally limited skillset. The above article is a demonstration of that. In his spare time, Jake enjoys people, places, and things.