Charles Leclerc, with his high cheekbones and chiseled jawline, is one of two Formula 1 drivers for Ferrari. But in recent weeks, it wasn’t his podium finish in Baku or his spinout in Melbourne that had people buzzing. A video of Leclerc playing the piano while smiling coquettishly at the camera sent a subsection of the Internet into a tizzy. Comments ranged from “I am unwell” to “Can he get any dreamier?”
Within a week, Leclerc’s original composition, titled “Aus23 (1:1),” went soaring up the ranks of Apple Music.
This is in large part thanks to Formula 1 fangirls, who are devoted to following every team’s moves, both serious and silly, in a sport that has historically been shrouded in mystery.
Over the last four years, the wild success of Netflix’s Formula 1 docuseries, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which provides a look behind the curtain of the world’s most expensive and high-octane sport, has more than doubled the U.S. viewership of the races. And alongside the growth of an American appetite for the European motorsport, an Internet subculture has cropped up, immersed in driver fashion, memes, and inside jokes.
Shifting Gears
There are only 20 drivers and 10 teams in any given F1 season—which makes the storylines, drama, and petty war games easy to follow. The calendar trots the show all over the globe, from Saudi Arabia to Italy to Singapore to Brazil. For the 2023 season, the U.S. will be the only country to play host to three Grand Prix races: Miami earlier this month, Austin in October, and Las Vegas in November.
A decade ago, Formula 1 was more covert, according to Lily Herman, the writer behind Engine Failure, a newsletter devoted to F1 culture. The paddock (the area at the track where cars are housed and serviced) was closed off to press and outsiders, cultivating a sense of mystery around the drivers.
Fandom cropped up slowly. In 2013, a small but dedicated group of gals on Tumblr became obsessed with the Formula 1 of the 1970s.
It was Liberty Media’s acquisition of the racing series, in 2016, that led to the blossoming of the digital eco-system surrounding F1—teams began posting about the behind-the-scenes process on social media, drivers started streaming themselves hanging out, and TikTokers got invites to livery launches. Then came the wildly successful show Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and the Internet subculture exploded. As more information is made available to the public, more fodder is generated for Internet fandom.
“People take this sport so incredibly seriously—they want things to have depth and meaning and gravitas,” says the senior editor of motorsports at Jalopnik, Elizabeth Blackstock, who in 2017 began cultivating a less serious space for F1 fandom on the Internet. “Now we’ve gotten to this point where there is a whole group of people who want to have fun with it, tell jokes, make memes.”
While the races unfold, memes compare drivers to Taylor Swift songs, thirst over shirtless–Lewis Hamilton photos, and speculate as to whether Carlos Sainz’s race-day pants determine the quality of his performance.
Formula 1 parties have followed suit. Kate Lizotte and Nicole Sievers, the two women behind the popular podcast and Instagram account Two Girls 1 Formula, have hosted TG1F watch parties in New York, Texas, and Ireland for “girls, gays, and theys.” Viewers mingle around a bar, shouting jokes and trading gossip on the latest driver drama while watching the Grand Prix. At smaller brunch gatherings, the menu is often themed—during the recent Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a banquet of kebabs, pomidor yumurta, khachapuri, dushbara, and paklava was paired with the screening.
“When we started Two Girls 1 Formula, there was nothing else out there that we saw,” Lizotte says. “We were trying to insert ourselves in the conversation, and we were looked down upon and not taken seriously.”
The responses weren’t all positive. Lizotte and Sievers were shamed in some of the comments under their posts by men who believe that the Formula 1 fangirl is a stain on the sport. Hater pages cropped up to talk about how horrible, ugly, and disgusting they are, and death threats poured in.
Yet women kept flocking to their page en masse. “People enjoy the TG1F events because they see people who look like them,” says Sievers.
“In women-centric spaces, there’s a more collaborative environment,” says Herman, who has attended a few of the TG1F events. “There’s not a feeling of competition and hostility, and we’re all here making jokes. It felt safe and natural and didn’t feel like I was encroaching on turf, and I could just be.”
Blackstock agrees. At male-dominated F1 viewing events, she’s been quizzed by men who want to test her knowledge of the sport and whether she is a “legitimate” fan. What are her thoughts on the 1976 Spanish Grand Prix? What opinions might she have on Ferrari’s strategy this season compared to seasons past? “Being a woman, there’s a lot of expectation of how you perform being a fan,” says Blackstock.
The rise of the Formula 1 fangirl coincides with a larger trend of women becoming invested in the sport. In December 2022, F1 noted that 40 percent of its global fan base is now female, up 8 percent from 2017.
“To see the complete one-eighty that has happened in the past three years has been amazing,” Sievers says. “We’ve heard constantly, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so glad I found this community. I thought I was the only one. I didn’t think there was anyone out there like me.’ Just to have this community of people who felt alone but now have this breadth of friends is incredible.”
And the fun and frivolity are a valid part of the fandom. “Sometimes I just want to say, ‘Charles Leclerc is cute,’” Blackstock adds, “and have that be a valid thing to say.”
The Monaco Grand Prix is on through May 28
Lynn Q. Yu is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL