Hi, I hope you are having a great day!
I saw your masterpost, and so you became the random F1 blog that I ask my burning questions as a ex- (maybe still..) football fan who just got lured into F1.
Okay so the 2 totally unrelated questions are:
1) I looked into ao3 to see what the vibe was (most written relationships etc.) and wondered: How is it that most of the stories are so recent? (vast majority written after 2020)
and 2) Okay, I haven’t really watched many videos, but from what I have seen, how are the drivers‘ english all so good?
I hope this isn’t weird, just so curious!
Hello Anon!
First of all, great to have you here! Idk if you mean football as in soccer or as in American football, but I recently got into soccer football myself (miraculously unrelated to the world cup if you can believe me), so maybe kind of reverse twinsies? Regardless, glad to have you! And your questions aren't weird, I'm happy to answer them to the best of my ability 🫡
1)
So for your first question, the F1 fandom was semi-niche for a long while. It really grew in fandom popularity following the Formula 1: Drive to Survive (DTS) Netflix docu-series that was first released in March of 2019. DTS introduced F1 to a larger, non-sports-fan audience, and to an USAmerican audience, who had before likely never heard of F1 and only heard of Nascar.
While there still was an F1 fandom before, it was nowhere near as large, usually using professional interviews, old documentaries, the races, autobiographies, anecdotes, and other similar things to build fanon off of. The difference in content style between an older ship like Prosenna (Ayrton Senna/Alain Prost circa the 80s) is completely different from what we have of modern ships like say Carlando (Lando Norris/Carlos Sainz circa 2019-present).
Then, in 2022, Lestappen (Charles Leclerc/Max Verstappen) took off, particularly because of their title fighting moments and their shared history. The fandom had already been growing exponentially, particularly because it was now gaining popularity in the US, the fact that large fandoms just attract more fans, and that F1 teams were doing more media than ever (i.e. more shippable content). Newly iconic duos like Carlando, Landoscar, Charlos, Galex, etc. all came about this time as well so there was a lot of content to go around.
A quick note to add that the 2020-2021 live stream era did a lot for the F1 fandom as well, with several drivers (namely Charles, Lando, Alex, and George the so called Twitch Quartet) being active on Twitch, playing games together which also added to the fire. Since everyone was home and online in 2020, the rest is history lol.
Also, the fandom grew a very large amount last year and newer ships absolutely exploded in size and overtook older ships extremely quickly. Ships like Russtappen/Gax (George Russell/Max Verstappen), Bearnelli (Ollie Bearman/Kimi Antonelli), and Gabico (Gabriel Bortoleto/Nico Hulkenberg) all came about last year.
Another thing to quickly mention is that F1 the Movie came out last year as well, which brought in some new fans. Additionally, with it being an Apple TV film, it worked well that in the US, F1's exclusive broadcaster is now also Apple TV, which may have increased accessibility for some fans that otherwise would never have checked it out.
I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that there have been accusations of some people using AI to create fics in the past year or so, but I'm out of the loop on that in particular and I don't think I've stumbled upon any myself so how big of a problem it is, is unclear. If you like niche ships and weird tropes, you might be in the clear for AI content.
Hopefully that answers your first question!
2)
There's a couple reasons why the drivers all speak such good English, namely that there is such a small pool of people that make it to F1 and from so many places in the world that there needs to be a common language and English just so happens to be it.
Most F1 teams are based in England, and most of the drivers are either born in Europe or move to Europe to train there and a lot of European countries have being multilingual as the bare minimum. You'll also notice that most of the native English speakers on the grid only speak English besides Ollie who speaks mostly fluent Italian. Drivers learn to speak whichever languages they really need and for non-English speakers, English is invaluable. It makes you more attractive to teams because you are more marketable, you can more easily talk to mechanics, potential teammates, bosses, and sponsors. F1 is not a sport that is just about ability, it is about money.
And I can't forget to mention that most of the drivers are wealthy, as in they can afford to pay for English lessons if they need or can have lessons provided by their teams as well. Even the poorer drivers are usually not actually poor. F1 costs major money to get into, even for little kids starting out, and getting your kid into F1 is an investment, not a career path.
Additionally, English is the catch all language and since F1 is marketed as a "global sport" English is often required to be spoken by broadcasters and is most preferred by social media teams for any fun or fan geared content. For example, Alpine, a French team with two French drivers (Pierre and Esteban), did lots of media in English because it's so preferred for marketing. Even drivers who have a mainly non-English speaking fanbase, mainly do media in English. For example Checo, who has a huge following in Mexico, but does a lot of his F1 media duties in English.
Some of the drivers do enter F1 with non-fluent levels of English or at least they're not particularly comfortable speaking English, like Checo or Yuki, but by the time they leave, they are usually more fluent or are completely fluent in English.
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And that's about it! Honestly, I probably forgot to mention something, but that's the major points. I hope that answers your questions :)
Thanks for the ask, this was fun to answer! I hope you are having a great day too!
