F1: The Next Generation
Tags: Teenagers, Formula 1, Parenting, Fandom, F1

TFW your children develop an enthusiasm for something you’ve loved forever…

I became a Formula One fan in the early 1990s when it was still shown on free-to-air television. My obsession reached a peak in the mid-late 90s (Irvine! Hill vs Schumacher! Villeneuve! Hakkinen!) when I started buying Autosport and F1 Racing, my mum, sister and I stayed up all night to watch the flyaway races live, I covered my bedroom walls in pictures of Ferraris cut out of magazines and newspapers, played Grand Prix 2 (with a steering wheel!) on my PC, and was involved in an embryonic F1 chat forum where I was one of two female participants and had to ‘prove’ that I wasn’t just there because I fancied the drivers (I didn’t.)

I carried my love of F1 through university and on the night that I met my now-husband, we got chatting about things we liked and F1 came up. 20 years and two children later we’re still together. If we’d had twin boys rather than girls, we would now have a teenage Lewis. I gradually fell out of love with F1 in the 00s. I was vaguely aware of what was happening in F1 because my partner was still into it, but it felt like an enthusiasm that belonged to a different part of my life.

Last year my partner encouraged me to watch Drive to Survive. DtS gets a fair bit of flak from a few long-standing F1 fans for encouraging people to get into the sport for The Wrong Reasons. I dislike the policing of enthusiasm by others and it absolutely applies here. You got into F1 via a Netflix documentary? Brilliant! You watched a YouTube Video or Twitch stream and now you’re drawing pictures of your favourite drivers? Great! You’re all welcome, you’re all valid. Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t.

Our daughters were unfussed about F1 until this year. Predicting what will grab the attention of children is impossible. As a parent you end up throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. In the last few months they have gone from being occasional F1 watchers to complete obsessives. It helps that they’re old enough to have their own phones and social media accounts, into gaming, nicely nerdy, stuck inside with us due to lockdown at a point when they should be forging independence, and the drivers are *just* interesting enough to appeal to teenage girls. They both watched Drive to Survive after they started watching races in full, using it to flesh out back stories and to make sense of the recent past in F1.

When I was growing up motorsport seemed utterly inaccessible to me as a viable career because it was exclusively populated by old (they seemed to me at the time) white men. Nigel Mansell is the same age as my parents. I was an Oregon Trail/Cusper/Millennial (depending on the definition applied) watching Boomer and Gen X drivers. My children are Gen Z-ers watching drivers that could be older siblings. We’re pointing out careers that they could do in motorsport, from engineering to strategy (one of our girls would be a terrifyingly effective strategist), design (if designing a car was based on Sims speed builds), social media, lawyer, journalism, project manager….

My sister and I would have killed for social media when we were watching F1 together in the 1990s. We would have loved the memes, social media content, YouTube videos, Twitch streaming, and in-jokes. Being a committed fan used to involve serious effort. Joining a fan club involved a trip to the post office, an exchange of Swiss Francs and a postal order. Now your favourite teams and top five drivers have their own social media, free of charge, if you have access to reliable broadband.

I am practically howling with jealousy at the birthday presents the girls have just received and Christmas presents waiting for them. McLaren tops! Meme hoodies! Birthday cards, notebooks and stickers designed by clever, inventive, passionate artists on from Redbubble! I can’t with all conscience cover my laptop and water bottle in stickers, but my children can. I can’t justify buying a meme hoodie for myself, but I’m more than happy to buy them for my girls. I have a nice, stylish, discreet Mercedes Formula E hoodie instead of the Sidemen hoodie I would have coveted in my teens (I achieved Peak Mum by asking where the ‘Nice colour-blocky hoodie’ was from.)

It’s right that I step back and allow space for their F1 enthusiasm to develop a life of its own. I no longer need to forward them a gif via WhatsApp because they will have already seen it multiple times and developed several in-jokes about it (The joy of having a twin sister that loves the same thing as you.) They can watch a Twitch stream, participate in the chat, listen to the WTF1 podcast, eat a cheese sandwich, upload a complicated Sims house to the gallery, and send the Captain America ‘Language’ gif to a sweary classmate on the group chat at the same time. Their enthusiasm for F1 might be long-lasting, or it might have been replaced by something else in a few months’ time. That’s the joy of parenting teenagers (you cling on to it when you find it) you don’t know what’s going to stick. When their new favourite hobby happens to coincide with something you’ve loved since you were younger than them, it’s lovely to be able to enjoy it together, however long it lasts.