Surprised at how many comments I’ve read from people similar to me. Born in ’84, vaguely remember watching it in the early 90′s, to be honest don’t remember at all about Senna, sadly. Of cours eI know of and respect him greatly, wish I’d been paying more attention as a kid. I’ve always liked F1, a gentleman’s sport, or at least a more intelligent person’s sport, the fact that the drivers are always riding on a knife edge, the cars have so much thought and energy put into them by an army of engineers and designers and just the very grand scale of the sport appeals to me. Why you’d want to go see a few guys kicking a ball round a muddy field is beyond me when human endeavour is all the more evident in a ‘sport’ like F1.
I’d watched it on and off but the first race I really think I can remember as really getting me interested has to be Spa ’98, probably the most dramatic race there ever could have been surely. The massive pile up, the crash with Coulthard and Schumacher, their subsequent pit-lane bust-up. I went to Silverstone the following year with my older brother and just seeing the cars for real taking the corners they do at such speed which is never fully depicted on TV was just mind blowing, and the sound..! I love this sport.
I think it’s the fact that the staked feel so high in F1, these guys are at the pinnacle of motorsports, there’s only 20 or so guys taking part each year and they only have so long in the sport. There’s hundreds of footballers who are all pretty good at what they do but these guys are more or less the best and having to deal with the most to prove themselves lap by lap, that’s what I love and why over the years I kept coming back to F1 (but missing large chunks of recent history). Since the Brawn season I’ve got back into F1 full time, trying to watch every practice and Quali I can.
F1 had a reputation as being boring, and to be fair mid-Sunday afternoon mid-race naps were pretty common for me, sadly. These days every race has something going on, and some of the climaxes to the seasons recently have been tremendous, it’s a really re-invigorated sport I feel, and this season’s new regulations are making that improvement even greater. I’ve booked to finally go back to Silverstone, this time camping next to the track for the whole weekend and with a much older head on me to appreciate it all the more this time around. I cannot wait, F1 is most definitely my one and only sport and provided the BBC keeps the coverage and Rupert Murdoch keeps his greasy hands out of the business I see nothing but great things ahead, we have a crop of truly brilliant drivers in Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel and co. My personal favourite being Kobayashi however (a slight Japan-phile here might be one reason for that), and Di Resta is starting our very well indeed, and as a fellow Scot I hope he goes on to truly great things, I’m very proud of the calibre of British racers and of Britain in the history of F1 and motorsports in general, a lot of which we have always played a large role in shaping.
Ahh, I’ve written perhaps too much but just very enthused by how F1 has grown a lot in recent years (at least in my mind), I don’t think I’ll ever be prone to mid-race naps ever again!
