逃离F1泡沫后我学到了什么
The 比赛的Scott Mitchell-Malm在休陪产假离开F1三个月后，分享了他以车迷视角观看比赛的新认识，包括对冲刺赛周末的意外好感以及对2026规则和F1官方宣传的批评。
在泡沫中待了近十年是很长的时间。其他人待得更久，但连续第九个赛季奔波或工作近200场比赛，意味着F1占据了我生活的很大一部分。
无论好坏，在围场内关注F1与从远处观看是不同的。这既是一种巨大的特权，也是一种相当大的负担，取决于具体情况——而且，为了完成工作所需的信息，我越来越依赖一种精心策划的研究F1的方法，这也让我看待F1的视角变得非常狭窄。
我已经很久没有为了享受而观看一场F1比赛了，也没有在一个周末不仔细阅读数千字的引述、数小时的数据或车载镜头的情况下关注比赛。尽管F1媒体经常与车迷交流，有时还代表车迷发声，但我们很少拥有相同的视角。同样，无论好坏。
今年夏天不同。我休了三个月的陪产假，专注于我三岁的儿子和去年九月出生的女儿，从而逃离了那个长期支配我大部分时间的泡沫。
在此期间举行了七场比赛，我最初的一个想法是：如果我不必关心F1，我还会关心多少？尤其是在这个由于新规则而在职业和个人层面多次考验我耐心的赛季中。
我注意到的第一件事是，我竟然没有注意到它的发生。
在赛车甚至还没上赛道的前一天，F1的马戏团就已经全面展开。媒体日在围场里是件大事，我知道有些车迷非常清楚这件事，并且知道要留意引述甚至关注车手新闻发布会。
这是一个庞大的运作，以喂养一个比以往更大、更饥渴的内容机器。所有车手都要与各种广播公司和文字媒体交谈，还有几位车队人员也会发言，车队也在制作自己的内容。规模令人难以置信地庞大。
我理解人们对这些内容有兴趣，我并不是在贬低它。但我常常觉得这有点浪费。
预览内容被采用后的保质期很短，而且在双赛和三赛（如今如此常见）中，我们通常几天前就已经听过这些人的发言了。F1几年前确实试图取消这一天，我认为原则是正确的，即使试验的方式没有成功。
我常常想——鉴于我们自己的分析显示周四的关注度并没有显著上升——这在多大程度上是一种自我服务的行为，已经膨胀成F1足迹的很大一部分，却没有实际价值来证明其合理性。而且我很惊讶，一旦我不在场，周四就这样完全被我忽略了。
至少有几次，我只是看到周五有练习赛，才想起‘这个周末是X比赛’。我知道这很大程度上受我自身情况的影响，但这正是重点：对我来说，最大的转变是从一个占据大量时间和精力的日子，变成一个甚至不会注意到的日子。
我想知道这对多少车迷来说也是如此。
我从车迷角度观看的两个比赛周末是冲刺赛。它们的功能实际上比我预想的要稍微奇怪一些。
在正常周末，要真正投入三场练习赛是很困难的（而且周五根本无法实时关注）。正如我所说，我甚至没有注意到其中一些练习赛的开始！
这意味着我在观看排位赛时，与可能的情况相比，存在很大的知识缺口——我有时确实感觉到了这一点。这也不可避免地延续到正赛中，而且不是好事。这不是‘哦，我不知道会发生什么’，而是‘哦，事情正在发生，但我并不真正理解’。
但我发现冲刺赛周末出人意料地适合快速了解情况，而且不会让我对周末的理解被拖累。无论是周五晚上错过了白天的活动，只是快速了解一下冲刺排位赛，还是在周六某个时候找时间看冲刺赛，它们都是更轻松、更好的休闲观赛体验。
所以，冲刺赛实际上比我预想的要享受得多——尽管比赛本身还是那样。
我一直接受F1的主要论点，即冲刺赛周末能带来两场更好的同类观看赛事。冲刺排位赛比FP2好，冲刺赛比FP3好。但这并不改变我认为比赛通常不好的事实，我希望F1在冲刺赛制整体上做更多——在家观看冲刺赛也强烈地强化了这一点。
这已经是旧闻了，因为在我写这篇文章时，这些评论是很久以前发表的，但从远处看，F1和Stefano Domenicali关于车迷想要什么的言论令人恼火。尤其是这并不是今年第一次发生这种情况。
我们现在都熟悉Domenicali觉得有必要相当好斗地面对任何对F1产品的挑战。即使面对令人不安的现实：2026年的规则是一个极其糟糕的妥协，经过广泛审议后，明年将有许多变化来解决那些据说并不存在的问题。
我愿意认为这只是表达方式不对，而且比预期的更糟，但我能理解为什么这么多车迷觉得这种宣传近乎对‘传统’车迷的蔑视，因为所谓的指标以及George Lucas显然非常重要的证词——实际上，新车迷喜欢这个版本的F1，他们不关心技术信息或车手驾驶技术的细微差别。
我个人认为，这是对那些确实重视大奖赛这些精彩元素的车迷的错误轻视——而且我认为这低估了新车迷，因为我们遇到过很多通过《Drive to Survive》进入F1的人，他们很快就想要更深入的报道。
这与我看到的另一件事混在一起，很糟糕，那件事体现了现代F1某些方面充斥的夸张：夏季休赛期期间预告的某个东西，结果只是没有任何深度或实质的宣传材料。
这在职业层面会让我恼火，但作为车迷随意看到时，我觉得这至少是判断失误：我认为今年不是炒作一个达不到期望的东西的时候。
关于2026年规则，我愿意坚持的一个观点是，比赛中确实有一些好的元素。它们只是被有问题的极端情况所掩盖。
最初，我从赛道边观看新车如何移动的特权位置支持我的立场（即使这仍然让包括维斯塔潘在内的车手不满），现在我从远处看到了这套规则的最好和最坏之处。
蒙扎比我想象的要好得多，而且赛车仍然可以在各种赛道上紧密跟随，尽管真正的超车可能很难——如果我再也看不到2026年马德里赛道比赛的一圈，我会很高兴。
有几次让我失望的是，很难跟踪谁做得好谁做得不好。当你在周末工作并身处其中时，信息会源源不断地传来，几乎只要在那里就能形成一幅图景——所以当比赛中发生事情时，通常会有一些背景或理解来帮助理解。
但我看到了太多感觉像是第一圈随机的电池使用情况，以及赛车上升或后退，却不真正确定这些人做得好还是不好。这取决于算法吗？车手在关键时刻是否比以往任何时候都更加被动？
我发现有时几乎难以看到这项运动的本质，这真的令人沮丧。所以在赞德沃特，Verstappen谈到F1在这方面太容易时，我深有共鸣。
尽管如此，我对2027年将发生的变化感到好奇和乐观。我在开头写道，我很好奇当F1变得更休闲时，我与它的关系会是什么——我想知道我是否仍然关心。我想我最大的收获是我仍然关心。
我有点担心我不再喜欢它，或者当我不再被迫关注时，我的兴趣会消退。这从来不是我的首要任务——这正是休假的意义所在！——我承认有几次因为无聊而没看一两场比赛。
但对F1的热情仍然非常强烈。而且现在也许基于一种稍微不同的视角，而不仅仅是我长期以来从特权位置获得的视角。
英文原文
Nearly a decade in a bubble is a long time. Others have done plenty longer but a ninth consecutive season travelling to or working nearly 200 races means Formula 1 has dominated a huge part of my life.
For better and worse, following F1 inside the paddock is not the same as watching from afar. It is both an immense privilege and quite a burden, depending on circumstance - and an increasingly curated method of studying F1 for the information I have needed to do my job gave me a very narrow lens to view it through, too.
It has been a long time since I watched an F1 race to enjoy it, or followed a weekend without poring over thousands of words of quotes and hours of data or onboard footage. Though the F1 media talks to, and sometimes on behalf of, fans an awful lot, we rarely have the same perspective. Again, for better and worse.
This summer was different. I stepped away for three months on paternity leave to focus on my three-year-old son and my daughter, who was born last September, and in doing so escaped the bubble that had dictated so much of my time for so long.
With seven races taking place in this period, a very early thought I had was: how much will I still care about F1 if I don't have to? Especially in the middle of a season that, thanks to the new rules, has tested my patience professionally and personally more than once.
One of the very first things I noticed was something I didn't notice happening.
The day before cars even hit the track, F1's circus is already in full swing. Media day is such a big deal in the paddock, and I know there are fans who are very aware it's a thing and do know to look out for quotes or even follow driver press conferences.
It is a colossal operation to feed a content machine that is bigger and hungrier than it's ever been. All the drivers speak to various broadcasters and the written media, there's a couple of team people that speak too, teams are doing their own content production. It's incredibly vast.
I get that there is interest in it, and I'm not knocking that. But I have often thought it feels like a bit of a waste.
There's very little shelf life for what preview content is picked up and often in double-headers and triple-headers (which are so common these days) we have typically heard from all these people a few days ago. F1 did try to phase this day out a few years ago, and I think the principle was right even if the way it was trialled didn't work.
I've often wondered - given we can see in our own analytics that there isn't any major uptick in attention on a Thursday - how much this is a self-serving exercise that has ballooned into a massive part of F1's footprint without actually having the value to merit it. And I was surprised how early on it was that the Thursdays just completely passed me by once I was not there.
There were at least a couple of occasions where it was only seeing that there had been a practice session on Friday that I remembered 'it's race X this weekend'. I know that's heavily influenced by my own circumstances, but that is the point: it was the single-biggest shift for me from a day that took up a huge amount of time and energy to one that did not even register.
And I wonder how many fans that goes for.
Two of the race weekends I watched from the fan position were sprint events. These actually have a slightly stranger function than I thought they would.
On normal weekends it was difficult to really engage fully with three practice sessions to labour through (and Friday just not being possible to follow in the moment). As I said, I didn't even notice some of them starting!
That meant I'd watch qualifying with quite a big knowledge deficit compared to what was possible - and I felt that sometimes. It also inevitably carries over into the race, and not in a good way. It's not, 'Ooh, I don't know what's going to happen' it's, 'Oh, things are happening and I'm not really comprehending it'.
But I found the sprint weekends surprisingly good for quick-fire catch-ups of what's going on, without really feeling like I had my comprehension of the weekend dragged down. They were an easier and better experience to follow casually, whether that was a Friday evening where the daytime action has been missed and it's simply to have a quick catch-up with sprint qualifying, or finding the time to watch the sprint at some point on the Saturday.
So the sprints, actually, I enjoyed a lot more than I thought - even though the races are what they are.
I've long been accepting of F1's primary argument that the sprint weekend makes for two better like-for-like viewing events. Sprint qualifying is better than an FP2, the sprint race is better than FP3. That doesn't change the fact I think the races usually aren't good, and I would like F1 to do more with the sprint format overall - this was also emphatically reinforced by sitting through the sprints at home.
This is old news now, because the comments were made a while ago as I write this, but the messaging from F1 and Stefano Domenicali when it comes to what fans supposedly want was a grating experience from a distance. Especially as it wasn't the first time that's happened this year.
We are all familiar now with Domenicali feeling the need to confront any challenge to F1's product quite combatively. Even against the uncomfortable reality that the 2026 rules have been an extremely bad compromise and many changes are coming next year, after extensive deliberation, to address the issues that supposedly don't exist.
I'd like to think it just comes out the wrong way, and worse than intended, but I can see why so many fans feel like the propaganda flirts with borderline contempt for 'traditional' fans because of supposed metrics and the apparently very important testimony from George Lucas that, actually, new fans love this version of F1 and they don't care about technical information or the nuance of a driver's racecraft.
Personally, I believe that's wrongly dismissive of fans who do value such wonderful elements of grand prix racing - and I think it sells newer fans short, because we have come across plenty who got into F1 watching Drive to Survive, for example, and swiftly wanted deeper coverage.
It blended poorly with another thing I saw that exemplified the hyperbole that engulfs some aspects of modern F1: the teaser of something dropping during the summer break, which just turned out to be promotional material that had no depth or substance whatsoever.
That would annoy me in a professional capacity but seeing it casually as a fan it felt ill-judged at best: I don't think this is the year to be hyping up something that doesn't live up to expectations.
A hill I am happy to die on with the 2026 rules is there are elements of the racing that are actually good. They're just clouded by problematic extremities.
Having initially championed my position from the luxury of watching trackside and seeing how the new cars moved around (even if that was still to the displeasure of drivers including Max Verstappen) I have now seen the best and worst of this ruleset from afar.
Monza was a great deal better than I feared, and it remains the case that cars can follow closely on a range of tracks even though proper overtaking can be hard to come by - if I never see a lap of the 2026 Madring race again, I'll be a happy man.
What disappointed me a few times was just how hard it was to follow who's doing well and who isn't. When you're working the weekend and in the middle of it all, there is a drip feed of information and a picture starts to form almost just by being there - so then when things happen in the race, there's usually some morsel of context or understanding that helps put it into context.
But I saw so much of what felt like first-lap randomness with battery usage, and cars rising up or falling back, without really being sure if these people were doing a good job or a bad job. Is it algorithm-dependent? Are the drivers more passive participants in crucial moments than ever before?
I found it really frustrating to almost struggle to see the sport in this sometimes. So it really resonated at Zandvoort, where Verstappen talked about F1 being too easy in that regard.
Still, I am curious and optimistic about what will change in 2027. I was not being glib when I wrote at the top that I was curious to discover what my relationship would be with F1 when it was more casual - I wanted to know if I still cared. And I think the biggest takeaway for me is I still do.
I was a bit worried that I wouldn't like it anymore, or my interest would fade when I wasn't obliged. It was never the number-one priority for me - that was the whole point of taking time away! - and I admitted I tuned out of one or two races out of boredom a couple of times.
But the enthusiasm for F1 is still very much there. And it is perhaps now underpinned by a slightly different perspective beyond just the one gleaned from the privileged position I had for so long.
The Race ·
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