Formula 1

2022 - 10 - 23

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Image courtesy of "The New Yorker"

Toto Wolff, the Compulsive Perfectionist Behind Mercedes's Formula ... (The New Yorker)

Mercedes drivers, including Lewis Hamilton, dominated the world's fastest motorsport for a decade. Now they can't win a race.

Hamilton had won the previous three races; he had the car on a string. The Dutch Grand Prix was the fifteenth of the season, and Mercedes’s best results so far were a couple of second-place finishes. He sees himself simultaneously as a competitor and as someone who is shaping the future of a multibillion-dollar business. In 2021, with five laps remaining in the final race of the season, Hamilton was leading the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, on his way to an eighth individual world title and solitary greatness. One of the aims of the new rules was to reconfigure the downforce generated by the cars, to reduce the amount of “dirty air” left in their wakes and to allow for closer racing. A million people waited in the heat to pay their respects, and many spoke of their saudade—an inexpressible state of longing for something that is gone. “He’s playing a game and he is always one move in advance,” one of them told me. Wolff, who speaks five languages and whose wife, Susie, is a former racing driver, is one of the show’s natural stars. The “formula” of Formula 1 refers to a set of rules, first enshrined after the Second World War, to bring some order to the urge to race dangerous cars on the asphalt of foreign cities. Wolff, who is fifty, is the best team boss in the recent history of the world’s fastest motorsport. Somewhere in the fumes was death. A Grand Prix begins when a row of five red lights above the start line is extinguished, one by one, but, for a short time before, the track is a twenty-thousand-horsepower mob scene.

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Image courtesy of "Formula 1 RSS UK"

'It's a new approach to sports reporting' – How Will Arnett is bringing ... (Formula 1 RSS UK)

But with the Toronto-born actor now the star of Amp radio show Fast & Loose, in which he – along with co-hosts Michelle Beadle, Katie Osborne, The Kid Mero and ...

But even as I say it, I'm like, Carlos Sainz has been driving so strong, he's amazing, Lando is starting to peak at the right time, so it's hard to say. He'll be like, ‘I was in Monaco in 1999 and this happened’, and having that experience of a guy knowing how hard it was and doing it at the highest level and succeeding, it's really, really cool. Max [Verstappen] looks really unbeatable, we all see it week to week, he just finds a way to drive faster, drive smarter, just make all the right moves. ESPN's taking a greater interest in it as well, and now I think that Amazon getting involved, I think it's going to change the game. I know Danny [Ricciardo] a little bit and I love him but I still have so much respect for him and what he does. I have more and more friends who say, "Don't tell me what happened because I'm recording the race and I want to watch it later." There's so much fun to be had in Formula 1, it's such a great thing, so I think we're trying to bring that kind of energy. So they heard Danny Ricciardo on Smartless, then subsequent to that, when Amp decided that they wanted to get into this space in F1, obviously they got Mika Hakkinen, who's a two-time champ and a legend, then they got other sports people like Katie Osborne and Michelle Beadle, who can speak to sports and know how to drive sports commentary, and The Kid Mero. And I'm learning on the job and hopefully people listening are kind of learning with me. Like a lot of people, Formula 1 was something that kind of existed out there and that I would sort of not really pay attention to. It was so immediate that I found myself looking at, not just the races, but I've got to watch qualis, I've got to see all of it, because you get into the drama of it all. What you might not associate with Will Arnett is a love of Formula 1.

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