The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport—A High-Octane History of Formula 1's Rise in ... Racing Culture, and Engineering Marvels

by Joshua Robinson

it’s important to understand that this whole enterprise can be boiled down to one central question: Which team best understands aerodynamics?

what distinguishes Formula 1 from every other major sport. This is a competition where the most decisive action of the season can take place not on the track in the middle of a Grand Prix, but in a wind tunnel simulation that no one sees, somewhere in the British countryside, months before the season begins.

Long before Silicon Valley promised to move fast and break things, Formula 1 was driving faster and rebuilding things every year.

Formula 1 is a sport literally named after the rulebook.

As the Ferrari biographer Brock Yates put it, Enzo had been the first to understand the most important rule of selling old-world taste in the United States: “Treat an American like a hick and you’ll own him for life.”

the teams were only really rivals for a couple of hours a dozen times a year on the track. They needed to understand that the rest of the time, they were business partners.

“You should never let people know you’re running a brothel,” Ferrari once said to Ecclestone. “You have to pretend it’s a hotel and keep the brothel in the basement.”

Hours after Mansell was crowned at the Hungarian Grand Prix, he announced he was quitting F1 after negotiations over a new deal for 1993 fell apart. (The final sticking point reportedly came down to the number of Mars bars the team would supply to Mansell’s hotel room.)

Funniest parenthetical ever!

“It’s better to sell one car less than the demand to protect the exclusivity of the brand,” he says, describing a core tenet of the luxury world. “You have to desire a Ferrari.”

Formula 1 served as the perfect excuse for Bahrain to build state capacity. It extended the road network with sparkling new highways and took a sixteen-ton shipment from Siemens containing only new traffic lights and the cables to connect them. A race for fewer than two dozen cars was now reshaping the entire country’s road system.

Within four years, Formula 1 cars were tearing around the Sochi Olympic Park and Lewis Hamilton was on the top step of the podium, spraying champagne at Putin.

Awkward!

That May, Newey received an invitation to attend the premiere of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, and found that he happened to be sitting right next to Horner.

“Gerhard, we have Adrian Newey here in Salzburg, but he is very expensive,” Mateschitz explained. “What should we do?” “Well, it depends,” Berger replied, “on the value you put on a second a lap.”