At yesterday’s Saudi Arabian Formula 1 (F1) Grand Prix race, young Melburnian Oscar Piastri became the first Australian driver in 15 years to lead the F1 drivers’ championship standings. The last time this happened, apparently, was late in 2010 when Mark Webber held the lead in that year’s drivers’ championship standings. (And it happens that Mr. Webber is Mr. Piastri’s manager.) Perhaps this is another example of Australia, as a nation, ‘punching above its weight’ (performing better than expected) when it comes to international sporting competition.
I have followed F1 racing for several years now, starting in late 1999 but then taking a break through most of the 2010s. Although I had been aware of F1 for a long time, I had not really taken much interest in the sport until hearing Murray Walker (1923–2021) and Martin Brundle commentating—and coming to the realisation that F1 is a sport that focuses on optimisation.
In an F1 race, the drivers and constructors are not just seeking to reach the finish line before everyone else; they are seeking to do that by optimising every aspect of the race as much as possible, from the aerodynamic design of the car to the power delivery of the motor to the racing skill of each individual driver to the tyre and pitstop strategies applied on race day. They are seeking to eke out every last bit of performance that they can, not just from the car itself but from all of the people in the team—the driver, the pitstop crew, the engineers, the strategists, and so on. On race day, each team is not just aiming to run a perfect lap; it is seeking to run every lap perfectly (given the circumstances for each lap), for the allotted number of laps (usually around 50–60 laps, depending on the circuit).
F1 is an extremely high pressure environment; a moment’s distraction during the race can lead to disastrous errors in driving or in pitstop execution, and hundredths of a second can make the difference between qualifying positions and finishing positions. There is no room for error, and no room for complacency.
To many people (and I was one of them), F1 is about 20-odd cars racing repetitively around the same circuit for an hour and a half. But if you look carefully and if you understand what is happening, that same race becomes an intriguing and nerve-wracking battle of strategy, skill, concentration, and determination.