F1: 101
So you just binged Drive to Survive. Now what?
This post is for all those fans in the making who are maybe getting pressured to start watching Formula 1, keep seeing driver thirst traps on GQ, or just are simply intrigued and want to know what the heck F1 is.
Below, we'll break down the basics of F1 – who's on the grid, what a typical race weekend looks like, how points work, what's at stake and any important rules or lingo. By the end of this, you’ll be able to kick it with the most diehard fans.
Who’s on “the grid”?
“The grid” refers to the starting lineup of cars at the beginning of a race. For many years now, there have been 10 teams each with 2 drivers. That means there are 20 cars on “the grid” every weekend. Typically, the season spans 20-22 races every year. This year Liberty (the new owners of the league) has upped the calendar to 23 races which means even more frequent flyer miles.
The beauty of F1 is that the calendar covers glamorous locations all around the world – Australia, Monaco, Austin, Abu Dhabi.
Behind those 20 cars, there are whole teams. People like to call it the “flying” or “traveling circus” because it's such a production to get these 20 cars, 20 drivers and thousands of people to different corners of the world. It’s even crazier when that ends up happening on back to back weekends.
There are two types of races:
True, purpose-built race tracks with crazy turns and kerbs to really maximize the cars at crazy high speeds, test how well they can brake, etc.
City tracks, where they shut down regular city streets in a place like Singapore or Monaco for these cars to race.
We’re both big city or “road race” fans – if you want to sound like an insider and you hear people talking about street racing, drop Baku, it's bananas. People are hanging out of their windows, watching the race, and these cars are driving 200mph+ down historic small streets next to a castle. Vegas is one of the new, most discussed tracks coming on in 2023, which will take place down the main strip at midnight.
What does a typical race weekend look like?
Teams will start to touch down on Wednesday, so you may see drivers & WAGs instagramming from their new location.
Thursday is press day, which yields juicy tidbits from both the team principals and the drivers. They’ll cover what they think about the track, weekly drama, and lots of shade.
On Friday, practice starts. There are two “free practices” for teams to do whatever they want, each about an hour. That's the only time they get to try out the track. Everything else the drivers and teams do in these cars happens in simulators, which is pretty wild. It’s the one of the only sports where you have such constrained practice time, despite each track being quite different.
On Saturday, they have one more practice “FP3” before qualification in the afternoon. There's a whole cult following of qualifying or “quali” as we call it. Why is quali important?
If you’re a Leclerc fan, you may have started to believe quali doesn’t matter. But in theory, quali determines where drivers start the race. It’s a huge advantage to start in what people call “pole”, which is the very front of the grid, with the best side of the track and clear air in front. Each additional position has advantages because it’s historically been very hard to pass in the race. So quali is your chance to show your very best single lap. But, there are famously no points in quali.
Sunday is race day – Grand Prix Sunday. That’s when the champagne and shoeys happen. That’s also usually where all the points are.
Points – how do those work again? What’s at stake?
The top 10 cars to finish the race get points. Starting from the winner, they get: 25, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1. Everyone below that gets nothing. There's also an additional point for fastest lap if it goes to a driver in that top 10, which becomes a whole crazy arms race as the season progresses.
Occasionally, there are additional points up for grabs in sprint weekends – there were 3 sprints in 2022 and there will be 6 in 2023. In a sprint weekend, quali is actually on Friday in lieu of FP2, and drivers race a 100km race in the sprint on Saturday afternoon. The sprint allocates points to the top 8 finishers (8 for the winner) and determines the starting grid for the Sunday race. Sprints were meant to add further drama to race weekends, although they’ve been met with mixed reviews from fans.
All points are summed up throughout the season towards two major championships.
The Driver’s World Championship is for major bragging rights. Currently, there are two people on the grid who have won the last 9/10 years – Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton.
Then there’s the Constructors’ Championship, at the team level. That’s where the real money is made, and where a lot of the team principal drama comes in around the budget cap and whatnot. Red Bull won the Constructors in 2022 after 8 straight years of Mercedes dominance prior. The Constructors’ also highlights the importance of the second driver.
What is a second driver? How do these driver dynamics work?
They say in this sport, your biggest competition is your teammate. In theory, teammates should work together to bring home the Constructors’ title. But these are (all) men with huge egos, ambition and competitiveness. They are constantly trying to one up each other.
In some rare cases you have a second driver who is comfortable with that identity. That seemed to be the case with Valtteri Bottas under Lewis Hamilton, and is true to some extent with Checo under Max at the moment. Checo may have forgotten that a little bit last season, but Red Bull quickly put him in line.
In a team principal's perfect world, a team has two almost equal drivers constantly pushing each other to the limits. The problems begin when they battle each other, risking a crash or car damage. Again, if you wreck or don't finish or have engine failure, that's a big fat DNF (Do Not Finish) = zero points for your team.
There have been plenty of examples of that, including when Danny Ricciardo accidentally rear-ended Max Verstappen, which Drive to Survive brilliantly captured in Season 1. Red Bull came away with nothing and tensions flared for both drivers thereafter.
What else do you need to know? What are all these flags and safety cars?
At times, it feels like F1 is a made up sport with all these rules and penalties that exist until they don’t. Still, there are some basics worth knowing.
Flags they'll wave on track:
Black and white checkered: signifies the end of the race, likely the most recognizable. If you’re first to cross it, you have won the Grand Prix!
Yellow: hazard ahead, pay attention and reduce your speed.
Pair of yellow: significantly reduce your speed and do not overtake. Something has been designated as dangerous enough up ahead on the track. Someone might have crashed out, debris on the track,etc.
Red = big bad sign. Red typically follows double yellow, when they've assessed that a situation is dire enough to stop the race. Red signifies that everyone must slow down and return as quickly and safely as possible to the pit lane. This comes out in horrible accidents like Zhou at Silverstone or Romain Grosjean at the end of Drive to Survive Season 3.
Green: all clear.
Blue: we call this one a sad, sad Latifi flag. Sorry for the shade! Basically, a race leader or someone much faster is preparing to lap you. When you see a blue flag you must make way for the approaching car at the earliest and safest opportunity. You can ignore up to three blue flags, but on your third blue flag, you will get a penalty.
Safety cars
Safety cars often accompany flags if there is debris on the track or a crash that needs to be cleared up. Maybe someone’s car is stranded on the track. It allows for people and vehicles to clear any such chaos safely.
There are two types of safety cars. First, there’s a virtual safety car, which feels particularly made up as its a little sign that drivers see on their dashboard. Under the VSC, everyone must slow to 30 to 40% of their normal track pace, which basically means that everyone is just going around in the same order and spacing but very slowly.
A full safety car means a physical car drives in front of the race leader, dictating how fast they can go. That usually means all of the cars get crunched up behind the leader, so it can feel like a restart at the end of the safety car. That dynamic led to one of the biggest moments in the 2021 season, when a safety car effectively created a restart in the final lap of the final race (which Max Verstappen proceeded to win ahead of Lewis Hamilton).
Typically safety cars – both virtual and full – are a great time to stop at the pits. Drivers that take advantage of that opportunity lose about half as much time (since the cars are going much slower) as a regular pit stop.
Sidenote: the driver’s dashboard
You should check out what a driver's dashboard and setup looks like at some point. It’s one of many reasons we could never drive an F1 car.
They basically drive in a heavily reclined position in cars with almost zero visibility (including a halo that cuts up their windshield). They navigate using a steering wheel and dashboard with hundreds of buttons / modes. Then, you picture Danny Ric with his 2008 iPod shuffle and you're like, how do these things go together?
I keep hearing about pit stops and tyre strategies
One of our favorite things to talk about is tyre strategy, which is really just all strategy because tyres dictate so much of your strategy in F1. Since you can’t refuel anymore, you have no other reasons to stop during a race. The only time you strategically step out of place is to change tyres. Cars are mandated to use at least two different types of tyres during a race, and often they’ll choose to use 3+ because of degradation.
There are five main tyre compounds: hard, medium, soft, and intermediates and wets for the rain. Wet races get particularly spicy, so check the forecast before race weekend.
Teams can win a race based on a tyre strategy, or lose a race as recent Ferrari fans know. To tie the whole post together, the whole point of those free practice sessions in the beginning of the weekend is to test out how these different tyre compounds react in that track’s specific conditions.
Since those little practice sessions are the only dress rehearsal drivers get, teams try to make an educated guess on degradation or how quickly a tyre is gonna fall apart based on the conditions on the track. That “deg” is impacted by the weather, heat, the grain on the road and previous races already run on the same track.
These decisions are so critical that there are whole teams of people constantly looking at tyre performance, tyre management, tyre degradation in the field to come up with a starting strategy which flexes and changes throughout the race.
Think of compound speed and durability as inverses. Soft tires are typically the fastest tires, but they also degrade the fastest. So if you have a very long track, you're only gonna make it a couple of laps before these tires go. That can be worthwhile to nail the start of the race, but it’s also a risky bet. The same is true if you have very high temperatures, or a Mexico City-style high elevation race. A lot of teams got Mexico City wrong because they thought the elevation and heat would degrade the soft and medium compounds more than proved to be the case.
A hard tyre is always going to be slower but it’ll last longer. Often times, drivers will try to fake each other out to get their competition to pit ahead or behind them.
At risk of getting too deep here, if you want to sound like seasoned pros, this is where the undercut or overcut comes in.
The real pro move: the undercut (or maybe the overcut)
It took us a while to understand the overcut and the undercut!
The undercut happens when a driver pits while everyone else is on old, worse tyres. The drive has to warm up their new tyres, but then they’re (i) behind everyone else, giving them clean air to run freely (ii) on new, fresh tyres that go faster. That advantage can amount to many seconds per lap (races are won in seconds) and can compound over the 1-10+ laps it takes their competition to pit.
The undercut happens both between teams (e.g. Mercedes vs Red Bull) and within teams, where the preferred driver gets the undercut strategy.
The overcut is more of a freak occurrence. Drivers try to stay out as long as possible on used tyres and just make them work. The overcut only works if the timing is such that if you pit early, you would come out into traffic. So, you wouldn’t get the full benefit of clean air and new tyres and no one in front of you. Thus, the undercuts would have been wasted.
The most classic example of the overcut is Esteban Ocon’s win in Hungary, which he won on fewer stops than most. Alex Albon had a similar move in the opening race of 2022, where he waited to pit until the second to last lap! These drivers are called “tyre whisperers” – Checo is another whisperer – because they're able to make tyres last unbelievable amounts.
Still, we've seen the overcut backfire many times, so look for more undercuts than overcuts.
What does “Mode Push” mean?
On the driver’s crazy dashboard simulation (the original metaverse) there are a bunch of modes that they can flip through. Mode Push is one of those modes.
Stepping back, the race is usually won in a few moments – quali which determines where you start, the actual start of the race which is usually pure chaos and fun, and pitting strategy. But throughout the race there are all these micro-strategy decisions.
If you listen to the radios between the drivers and their race managers (usually boring but sometimes hilarious), you can hear the calls teams are making. They might say “now is the time to nurse your tires and chill and let the car recharge”. Then you'll have moments where they're like, “now is the time to push”. That is when drivers literally enter “Mode Push” and exhaust the battery. They go full out. Usually they engage Mode Push when trying to pass or in the final stretches of locking in a position. Those moments are most common in the DRS zones on track.
Wait, what’s DRS?
DRS = Drag Reduction System. When Liberty bought F1, one of their goals was to make the races more dynamic and interesting to watch. Their conclusion was that fans like when people pass – that's where the action is. So Liberty expanded DRS, which is like the highest gear and then some. A flap opens on the back of the car to make it even more aerodynamic, and the car can go 10 to 20 kph faster than the person in front.
Drivers can only use DRS in certain designated zones, and only if they are within one second of the driver ahead. You’ll often see a driver trailing someone for 8-10 laps trying to close the gap to the person in front of them, to get in the optimal DRS zone before they enter Mode Push. Interestingly enough, if they pull off the move, the passed car now has DRS on them! That creates crazy battles back and forth which is its own strategy.
DRS will also influence teammates. Sometimes, drivers will be given team orders to hang back and sacrifice their pace to make sure that the other driver on their team is in the DRS zone to lock out a competing team.
DRS has been fairly successful, as have recent changes to make it easier for cars to follow one another. Now, we get at least 20 passes per race.
You may hear about a DRS train, especially in the midfield, which happens when everyone has the same speed advantage so no one can pass. That dynamic can be particularly interesting when it creates traffic for frontrunners looking to pit.
Time to hit the paddock!
The punchline is that if you want to know more about F1 just watch the races, listen to the pod and know that F1 is still kind of a made up sport! If Fernando Alonso doesn't like a call on a rule, they're probably going to change it.
More seriously, all of this stuff comes back to the FIA, F1’s governing body. There’s a lot of closed doors post-race decision making, which goes back to F1’s roots as a driving club in Britain, a gentleman's sport if you will.
We hope that you all become F1 fans. Remember to drop some lingo – tyre strategy, the undercut, street races – it’s all about Baku! That should get you going for this crazy 2023 race season ahead.
