Hi, Alianora :) I've been reading your essays and you're just brilliant! I was wondering about your F1 journey, and I wanted to ask how did you get into it, and what's your journey been like? I know you supported Jules and you support Charles too but I would love to know more.
Thank you for the kind comment, anon :)
I had, and still have, a much longer version of this. I'm not sure how 100% sure to answer the "What's your journey been like?" part but I will try. Please let me know if you're interested in particular bits of the longer piece (it's definitely too long to submit in one go).
I'm a 3rd-generation F1 fan, and my parents tell me I watched some of the Mansell era with them, back when I was too young to understand what was going on. While I distinctly remember being interested in his move to Indycars, I don't recall these F1 races.
I do recall the moment I decided to become a F1 fan. France 1993. I'd been playing football outside when it started raining. The living room had F1 on (my parents were obviously watching) and I was entranced by the multi-coloured pointy things and the fact the names were on screen.
When I found out there were books about F1, that sealed the deal. I'm a bookworm and the intellectual side of F1 came through very clearly. (One of the books helpfully had a section on how much safety had improved since the early days, despite being written in 1980. This was a lot of the reason I didn't quit watching F1 in the immediate aftermath of Imola 1994).
Damon Hill was the first driver I supported - because his last name was short. Despite that unpromising selection criterion, he made me a very happy fan because of his intellectual approach and determination. The 18 months covering his time at Arrows (a near-backmarker team) and the half-season at Jordan where he scored absolutely nothing were when I learned the basics of how to handle being a fan during bad performances.
Spain 1998 was when I started supporting my team. Damon Hill had retired from the race ten laps earlier when I suddenly heard myself saying, "Come on Ralf!" Followed by wondering, "Who's Ralf, apart from Damon's team-mate and Michael Schumacher's brother?" That was when I realised I'd been attracted by Eddie Jordan's bright and feisty attitude, combined with its non-nonsense racing crew. I've now supported Jordan through five name changes.
Giancarlo "Fisico" Fisichella was someone I started supporting because I saw an interview after Spain 2001 that made me think he had a really interesting way of seeing the world. I think I was right :) I'm still supporting him in his Italian GT adventures and am happy he can now depend on Arthur Leclerc's help.
The following year, Dad and I went to Silverstone to watch F1 qualifying. The fan belt broke on the car but we still got there in time to watch the end of the last practise session, as well as qualifying itself. Dad participated in the infamous prediction quiz that he lost to Alex Albon (I think Dad got 1 position out of the 5 correct), and I discovered that wearing a yellow hat meant getting followed by half of Silverstone's flying insect population. None of this put us off returning for the whole weekend in 2009.
In 2003, I discovered F1 forums. My first forum was Home of F1 and my second post (trying to explain why BAR's desire to present itself as perfect would annoy recently-dismissed driver Jacques Villeneuve) caused a minor flame war until I clarified that I did not think BAR was perfect. I've seen jokes about the reading standard on Tumblr; rest assured the generation of internet users before this one was just as bad. I also found a Jordan-specific forum that was much more chilled.
There was one particularly gatekeepery user who looked down upon Jordan fans, but I managed to convince even that one (never learned the user's gender) to not deploy it against me or in my sight, because I always had a good logical takedown of the hole in the arguments employed for those attacks. Part of the reason I could do this was F1 Magazine, which helpfully provided practise in the form of its Tom Rubython columns. Every month, he would write a "take" on F1 and it was one's mission, as the reader, to find and pull the thread which made the entire argument unravel. (Not that Tom was ever aware that this was arguably the best use of his column).
I started supporting Tiago Monteiro when he joined F1 in 2005, because I liked his backstory; absolutely no interest in F1 until the second year of university, whereupon a friend invited him to a track day. He then substituted for an injured friend in an entry-level series. He ended up enjoying it so much that after he graduated with a degree in hotel management, he decided to take up racing and see if he could make a career of it. Which he did. Including a point at Spa of all places and being the only person who was happy at Indianapolis 2005. Now he's a regular podium-finisher in the 24 Hours of the Nurburgring.
I started blogging in F1 (La Canta Magnifico Blog) shortly after Spa 2005, because the forum I was on split. I'd got friends on both fora and continued writing on both. The "new" forum wanted to get more people reading it. Initially there were four people writing, but I took the opportunity to start writing posts on other blogs and websites which interested me. The only ones which still exist are RaceFans.net (back when it was still one particularly devoted fan's blog) and a small forum called GP Wizard. Within six weeks, the other three had stopped writing their posts and focused their efforts on commenting on mine. Both fora sank in 2008. Although I have a number of posts from that time, it's not a full archive, rather a selection of highlights.
I spent a season as admin of the Jordan forum, the one that was Fisichella's last year in F1. This was also the year I managed to get onto the official Fisichella Forum (this was in the last years of drivers having fora they officially sanctioned). This gave me the confidence to help rescue the official Fisichella Forum when its management deleted it at the start of 2010 (apparently forgetting there were about 100 people still using it at that point and that they might appreciate at least a few days' warning to archive their writings!). I was a co-admin from 2010 until it ended in 2018, having spent the last three years as the sole admin with an audience of three people plus an ever-rising tide of spambots. I still have a penpal from that forum.
Jules Bianchi entered my awareness in 2010, because one of his jobs was clearly being prepared to be reserve Ferrari driver and a lot of Fisico's fans were initially annoyed because they thought that was Fisico's job. However, it was the way he did the Force India reserve job in 2012 that made me a fan. Here was someone who felt like he was completely embedded within his team, with a brilliant attitude, despite patently belonging in a much better position. I was sad when he didn't get the Force India position, but his adamantine willpower and gratitude went a long way towards making the Marussia/Manor team more than I think it had imagined being.
Jules gathered together a group of friends who enjoyed being around that positivity and determination, several of whom made it to F1 in their own right. In September 2014, one of the journalists I respected the most about junior series observed that one of the youngest members of that group was doing very well in FRECA and displaying much of Jules' personality. I looked at the article and thought, "Well, I could spend 5 years waiting for this driver to go through the junior ranks and inevitably start supporting him in F1 - or start doing it now and enjoy the journey." With that, I started supporting Charles Leclerc and am very happy to have made that choice.
Oh, nearly forgot to mention my solo F1-related trips: the annual visit to the Force India/Racing Point reception with goodies for much of the 2010s, visiting the Manor factory a few times during the short time in 2015 the F1 operation was based next to a steel merchant in Dinnington and the epic fail that was my trip to Hungary 2018 (so fail-y that I only found out who won a week later).
Hope this helps.
