I've been a fan of Formula 1 for 24 years. My interest in it has ebbed and flowed with ease over that time. Sometimes it falls out of favour due to my own personal schedule, sometimes due to its own mistakes. But I've come to the realisation that this recent disconnection may be permanent.
I have more self-awareness than most who rant on old-school forums about this topic[1]. Watching footage from the past, it's just as easy to remember the failures of each era as it is to idolise the supposed simplicity of the past. But even with this balance, the past wins out. There is a joy, a primal response, an appeal to the senses, that does not seem to exist today.
Look at the past. I am watching through qualifying sessions from the 2005 season, in a compact window in the corner of my PC screen. The cars, running 3.0 litre V10 engines, are godly entities. They are ultra-lightweight, clocking in at around 550kg before silly things like the driver, fuel, and water are added. Every twitch of instability appears lethal. The car sounds like it's trying to kill the driver and everyone in a 50km radius. And it is wonderful.
Add some realism to the above fawning. The capability of these cars to race wheel-to-wheel was dogshit. In-race refuelling may have made the cars lighter and more nimble, but this plus the heavy over-reliance on aerodynamic grip relegated the art of the overtake to being done via pit stop strategies. Mostly. When an on-track pass was possible, they were incredible.
You can look at many eras of F1 like this. The V8 era of 2006-2013 was a heavily mixed bag, with the technical regulations being shook up every few years in repeated attempts to shape the sport into a more "watchable" product. Sometimes it melded well, sometimes it didn't. Going much further back into the past, it was mostly an unpredictable clusterfuck - good for when it was thrilling, and bad for when it got people needlessly killed.
And back to the present. A burgeoning influence of corporate interests and environmental considerations has pushed the technical composition of the cars further and further away from being works of art. They burn fuel at an impressively low rate[2], incorporate electric power as the most important element of propulsion, and have looked at other sources of grip rather than just aerodynamic. The result is... rather disappointing. They are heavier than they could be, sound like an angry home appliance, and visually do not thrill like they used to.
The quality of racing is also very difficult to appraise, or enjoy. F1 has tinkered with the formula - pun intended - far too much. For the last 15 years, the tyres have been deliberately designed to degrade at a rate that seeked to encourage more varied pit stop strategies, and what it actually pushed was tyre conservation. Drivers deliberately holding off from the bleeding edge. This has now spilled over into straight-line performance as well. Now that batteries and energy regeneration are critical, teams have figured out how to deploy the power in the most efficient way: maximising acceleration even if the cars run out of juice before the end of a long straight. See this clip of a pole position qualifying lap in 2026, observe how Russell's car backs off a little bit around the 28 second mark, then wait for the 42 second mark and cry.
From a technical standpoint, it's impressive to see the cars recover so much kinetic energy. From a sporting standpoint, it's just miserable to observe. We are so far removed from being a pinnacle of motorsport.
I made a name for a few years online, building up a decent archive of Formula 1 footage, but what set this work apart was its shareability. It was widely disseminated, continually updated and seeded, eventually culminating in a 3.5TB monster that spanned all 76 seasons of this sport. The enthusiasm for maintaining it for current seasons has dropped off a cliff.
Some of this is rooted in a nostalgia that does not budge to realism. I'm aware that my love for the nimble 3.0 litre V10s is rooted in a memory on the 24th August 2003. I was with my family on a summer trip, bored and looking for something to engage in, and found the Hungarian Grand Prix on TV. Looking back, it was a shit race where nothing happened. Kid me didn't care, they were entranced. Again on 28th September, the United States Grand Prix, where F1 served an absolute banger of a race in changeable weather conditions. I often wish I held onto my VHS recording of that race. Being a recording of Irish TV, it is impossible to find on any archive online today.
I am mostly in agreement that the past is over[3]. But it will stay on the mind. I would give any amount of money to hear one of those V10s in person. I heard the V8s in person and enjoyed them, then the V6s and have little to grin about. To have my ears blasted to bits, just once, like this, would be plenty.