F1 Drivers Are Too Relatable - Bring Back The Mystique

It’s getting easier to see yourself in F1 drivers today, and I don’t like it.

Think back to the heroes of F1 – drivers from the days when death was not only around every corner, but would often visit multiple times per season.

Jim Clark. Niki Lauda. Nigel Mansell. Graham Hill. Alain Prost. Ayrton Senna.

These are people who looked at the odds, the danger, the risk and reward, and accepted it all for a chance at driving.

It’s a very specific kind of person who can do that – having an almost James Bond-like confidence and acceptance that they were putting themselves in incredibly dangerous situations, but that through their own skill and unwavering self-belief they would come out as victors.

I just don’t see that today.

Of course I’m not trying to advocate for more danger in Formula 1. Deaths and injuries are mercifully few and far between, and that’s to the benefit of everyone. However, those inescapable elements did add something to those drivers. An air of danger, a certain aura that normal people simply don’t have.

That cavalier attitude seems almost non-existent in today’s F1 – replaced with relatable people who you’d be able to have a chat with and who just happen to also drive an F1 car for a living.

It all makes F1 – the pinnacle of motorsport, an impossible mountain to climb but for those select few – seem almost attainable, and the drivers in it seem like people you could have a pint with down the pub. Fans form a parasocial relationship with the drivers, seeing them less as gladiators duking it out and instead as something much less – another human being. And part of that problem has come from social media.

F1 was slow in its adoption of it, only really taking the plunge in 2017 with the takeover by Liberty Media (and, in doing so, claiming to have the biggest social media growth in sports in 2017), and it’s since grown to almost 90m followers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter).

Perhaps this is a side effect of the increased availability of drivers, and people in general today. The pioneers of F1 had scant few opportunities to have their personalities showcased outside of the car – media essentially being limited to magazines, TV shows and, of course, their driving itself.

Today’s landscape is vastly different. Social media and its insatiable thirst for content means we now know everything about an F1 driver – their favourite colour, their dog’s name, what their parents do for a living, what they wore to the track, what they’re having for tea, what they’re thinking at 7pm on a Tuesday. This undoubtedly brings fans and drivers closer, but removes the mystery around them. We know them as people, and everything comes replete with a shout out to a sponsor.

Perhaps this is another consequence of the commercial nature of F1. The commoditisation of drivers – seeing them as products that come and go through the sport, rather than being the sport themselves – has them saying what their teams and benefactors want them to, giving PR-friendly answers to everything and not wanting to upset them by daring to show a flash of their real self. When they do, media and fans alike dissect their every word, every syllable, to extract meaning or nuance until the next quote comes along and the process starts again.

Saying less is a much more effective way to retain some secrecy, and perhaps the best example recently would be the notoriously private Kimi Raikkonen.

Known for his efficiency in communication (read: not saying a single word more than required), he had a presence on the grid – making times when he did say something even more exciting. And with the skills to back it up, he was a firm fan favourite.

You do have to wonder whether that attitude would fly with today’s drivers, or whether this is a courtesy only offered to world champions. Maybe it’s something that exists only within the people capable of becoming champion, or if he and Fernando Alonso (another loose cannon in the polished world of F1) were some of the final “old guard” to get in. Either way, we know an awful lot more about F1 drivers than we used to and, for me at least, it’s at the detriment of the sport.

Familiarity breeds contempt as they say, and we need to become a lot less familiar with F1 drivers – not just for their sake, but for the sake of the sport. They aren’t regular people with a desirable job, they’re athletes who’ve spent their entire lives and millions of pounds to get to be in a group of just 20 people worldwide. The more we personalise them, the more normal they seem, when in reality they’re anything but. Bring back the mystique. Bring back cool drivers.