🚧 F1'24: Did you know? Why didn't you know?

I wasn’t planning to write anything until after Qatar, but you’ll have read the news about General Motors/Cadillac joining F1 from 2026. This isn’t really about that, although I personally think it’s great to have another team on the grid. Instead, I wanted to write about gatekeeping - a problem Formula 1 has over a lot of sports, and it happened to me on Threads of all places.

An 11th team on the Formula 1 grid is nothing new. General Motors/Cadillac will join the series from 2026, initially being supplied with an engine while they build their own powertrain, and the speculation over who will take the two vacant seats has started at pace along with all the other fun things a blank sheet of paper brings.

One of them, I speculated on Threads, was maybe a change in the qualifying format. For clarity, the Q1, Q2, Q3 format works well for F1. It’s better than one-shot qualifying, which feels like track evolution wins, and it’s much better than starting a clock and seeing who is at the front in 60 minutes time, with large swathes of the session having no cars on track. 

Like it or not, F1 is a TV sport, and this format gives three bouts of jeopardy and crucially, the chance to throw in an ad break in between each mini-session. If you don’t think F1 wants to add another natural break in proceedings, I admire your naivety and urge you not to operate any heavy machinery. 

I speculated that we could add a Q4 t/o the session, with 22, 16, 10, 5 drivers going through to each round. Let me explain before you bring your virtual pitchfork. At the bottom of the grid, there is a clear-ish pecking order. Whether you want to use the standings, or momentum, Sauber are at the bottom, then probably Aston Martin on form, then any of the four mid-pack teams, then the big four at the top. If you eliminate five, then on form, it should be the worst two teams and one of the smaller teams rueing their luck on a wasted Saturday.

By moving the odd number elimination from Q1 to Q3, you introduce drama at the sharper end of the grid. The sport has time for another ad break and another division, which allows for better analysis and a deeper look at Saturdays.

However, Formula 1 is in a weird place when it comes to its fans. The sport has existed for generations, but no sport has had such a defined entry point for new fans as F1 has with Drive to Survive. The Swifties following the NFL is a similar phenomenon. 

I want to make clear right now that the only thing long-time fans should be saying to new ones is “welcome”. Without new fans, any sport will die. But after I posted a speculative opinion about potentially changing the format, men (and it’s always men) were falling over themselves to tell me that we’ve had 12 teams on the grid before! We just eliminated six cars over the first two sessions! Didn’t you know this?

Well, thank you for venting at a stranger with all the warmth of a bad carpet salesperson, but yes, yes I did. The sport has changed since 2016, and so has the world. Hell, so have the owners of Formula 1. They will absolutely be looking at literally everything they do to change, optimise and fiddle around with as much as they can to make it better for fans, and better for their bottom line. There will be trade offs, of course, but the one thing the sport won’t do is stand still.

They might not change qualifying, and that’s ok. Among the competitive pedantry were some reasoned arguments against it. Tyres and sustainability was a good reason. Another was cramming another round into an already cramped weekend schedule. All good reasons. But any sport that continues to do things the same way because that’s what they’ve always done is in trouble. Any sport whose fans relish in trying to prove their fandom to others is really in trouble.

There’s a bit of a creepy undertone with some F1 fans on social platforms. Absolutely desperate to tell you the most obscure stat they know and itching to correct you. They’ll use pointless phrases like “wheel knowledge” to dismiss people’s opinions and will make themselves feel better by branding others as “Drive to Survive” fans.

This isn’t everyone, obviously. On Threads especially, there is a strong community of people who go out of their way to make others feel welcome and that they’re posting in a safe space, and you see some of the team admins use it as a way to build a community. On this at least, I know of what I speak, having worked at a social platform for most of my 30s. I’ve seen the quality of conversation fall, and what happens when a good place gets wrecked. 

As Threads the platform grows, it brings with it the anoraks (all the anoraks really want to tell you why they’re called anoraks - answer at the end of this). And these anoraks are shuffling and squawking around their phone keypad looking for a juicy opinion they can swoop their fact gullet onto.

If you are one of those people, I promise you being a gatekeeper will not win you any extra magical internet points for thinking you know a little bit more than anyone else. Sport - any sport - is for anyone. I promise you there isn’t a sport in good enough health that is in the position to turn down another fan. 

No matter when you started watching F1, whether you care who Juan Manuel Fangio was or you don’t know what happened at Monaco 1996 or that there used to be a six-wheeled car, and there used to be a team called Footwork or all manner of weird and wonderful stories, I promise you once you scratch past the irrelevant gatekeepers, there’s a (simply) lovely community there, no matter which team or drivers you follow, whatever your reasons are for following them.

As quickly as the boom for F1 arrived, there’s no reason why it should continue to grow and maintain itself. People might fall off and follow something else on a Sunday afternoon instead. F1 has to constantly improve and reinvent itself. Some of its fans would do well to do the same also.

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The origin of the word anorak comes from pirate radio, which was all broadcast from offshore. When excited fans would visit, they would often be wearing anoraks when they visited the radio station ships.