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F1, like soccer and the metric system, is OK for everyone except Americans
- nicholassmith 14y agoAs someone who's been an F1 fan for a while (although less so at the moment, but I digress), I've always found it curious that it's never really taken off in America like it could have. Americans love cars, and love racing, it's easy to mock the love of the oval and NASCAR but American teams show up in Le Mans quite a lot, and have a long history of racing on the long, winding and, well, non-American tracks. Maybe it's just a quirk of culture, something that slipped under the radar and never made it back into vogue. No American drivers, previously no American tracks, no American teams, there's little to get a fan hooked in. F1 suddenly got a lot more coverage in the UK when we had a couple of drivers, and oddly more coverage still when we had drivers doing well, maybe having one really good American driver would change it.
- ra 14y agoIt's the same with Cricket and Rugby. By some quirk of history, Americans got into Baseball and Gridiron instead. They're both fine sports so it's all good; but we all have a chuckle when you have a 'world series'.
- jacques_chester 14y agoThere's a theory (according to the relevant Wikipedia entry it's a controversial theory) that the World Series is named for the newspaper which sponsored early contests.
- zalew 14y ago> it's easy to mock the love of the oval and NASCAR Check out Top Gear s18e02 (edit: now I see you're British, so you probably have watched it). Not that I'm convinced or will watch Nascar, but how they pictured it in the show was hell damn exciting. > F1 suddenly got a lot more coverage in the UK when we had a couple of drivers Imagine what was going on here when Kubica appeared.
- nicholassmith 14y agoIf you've never watched NASCAR, you should definitely do it. I've not watched a race in years, but it used to be shown on Channel 5 around 10/11pm, it's perfect 'crack a beer' TV. Very fast, very aggressive, very loud, very full of crashes. The street brawl to F1's refined Queensbury Rules. However, it is frankly ridiculous in many ways and it's very easy to pick on the fact it's beloved by red necks and so on.
- zalew 14y agoUhm, I don't have channel 5 because I'm not in the UK nor I do have a tv ;) but I have watched some fragments and I don't buy it due to the oval thing. The crashes, yeah, they are cool, but it's a bit like watching gymnastics hoping that the chick will fall off and crack her arm. It's too bad tourer races (DTM, WTCC) don't get as much attention as F1. In the "sports I didn't watch" category I never expected motorcycle racing would be more exciting than F1. I've never shared an interest in bikes and I don't know most of the names except Rossi and Pedroza, but once got into watching a MotoGP race and wow, there is action!
- nicholassmith 14y agoIt was when you'd mention Top Gear and 'British' and I put two and two together and got 8. Honestly, you should try at least one race purely to see how aggressive some of the drivers can be. It's similar to the British Touring Car Championships, but even less polite. Superbikes is one of the reasons why I don't watch the F1 as much, it's far more entertaining, the drivers seem to be a lot more humble, and rules aren't constantly being monkeyed.
- zalew 14y agoRallycross is very cool too, if we're talking only about contact sports. If not, obviously rallies are the shit, mad skillz. Yeah, the rules mess is one of the reasons I kind of lost interest in F1 (the major ones were BMW dropping out and later the Kubica hiatus).
- objclxt 14y ago> No American drivers, no American tracks, no American teams[...] F1 was run at the Circuit of the Americas two weeks ago, in Austin. I think F1 is to the USA as NFL is to the UK: there's a dedicated, small audience in both (judging from my Twitter feed), and they're both trying to extend their reach - F1 with more races in the US, and NFL with more games in Wembley. I think F1 is planning a New Jersey street race in 2014 as well.
- nicholassmith 14y agoSorry I should have said 'previously no American tracks', was typing a bit too fast and I'll fix it.
- chaosprophet 14y agoThere was also an F1 GP held at Indianapolis between 2000 and 2007.
- nicholassmith 14y agoI still stand by 'previously' as 5 years is an awful long time to keep people interested in a sport that doesn't appear in your country and has none of your countrymen involved, especially with similar series (Indy 500 etc) running anyway. Especially 5 years in F1, where everything gets changed around and fiddled with.
- dnm 14y agoI've been an F1 fan since I watched Ayrton Senna get killed 10 minutes after I turned on my first race in '94. Weird, but I was hooked. The last time F1 was run at Indy in 2005 was a disaster. Michelin brought the wrong tires and 14 cars did one lap and pulled into the pits quitting the race.
- patrickk 14y agoSenna was before my time, and I'm not even a F1 fan, but watching him in action is a mind-blowing display of skill. Here's an on-board view of an on-board lap in Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkvo5v5-VU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkvo5v5-VU 1400hp engine (in a car body weighing half-nothing), manual transmission (Senna would drive with 1 hand on the wheel a good chunk of the time), no electronic driving aids...pure driving. I've watched documentaries where he would make the car 'dance' in the rain and destroy everyone on the track. One commentator described his cornering technique - Senna would flick the wheel in the direction of the corner before turning into the bend - allowing him to get the tightest possible racing line, so he would brake less than other drivers. His famous heel-and-toe technique: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8By2AEsGAhU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8By2AEsGAhU
- djhworld 14y agoI think it's more the time difference problem, A lot of F1 races take place in Europe/The Middle East/Asia Only Brazil, Canada and Austin are in the "prime time" US timezones.
- mytrile 14y agoIt's football, not soccer.
- smoyer 14y agoI'm American, like F1 and NASCAR but rarely spend time watching either (or any other television). I also prefer to drive on a winding country road in a European touring sedan versus more boring routes. I played soccer (shouldn't he have said football?) when I was younger and I'm fine with the metric system (the real question is why they taught it in elementary schools starting in the '70s, but didn't bother switching). I think there are a lot of people in the US like me, but we don't spend enough money to get sponsor/advertiser attention. When was the last time you saw F1 tee-shirts, or F1 drivers on beer cans? Which events are offered is all about the almighty dollar.
- sjh 14y agoIt's 'football' in the UK, but in most of the rest of the Anglophone world, it's 'soccer'. Australia has its own 'football', as does Ireland.
- nicholassmith 14y agoOddly in most of Europe it's 'football' as well, EUFA, IFA, Ligue de Football and so on, seems to be quite fractured depending on whereabouts in the world you are, and with the rise in people learning American English through TV/movies/etc I can see it becoming more popular to call it soccer.
- riffraff 14y agoit's football in south america too ( Fútbol,Futebol). Maybe of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football
- dbaupp 14y agoOver the last few years, there has been a move in Australia to use "football" for soccer. The 3 other footballs (rugby league, rugby union and AFL) are more commonly "rugby" or "footy". (At least, that's what I've noticed.)
- rmccue 14y ago
- vishnupr 14y agoMan, this website has the worst navigational experience ever. I accidentally flicked my magic mouse upwards and I was on another article, I tried to correct it by scrolling to the bottom but I ended up at yet another article instead of the original one. Before I knew it, I was just lost.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- wheaties 14y agoAgreed. Can't use my android phone to nav around. It just flips articles.
- sabret00the 14y ago"You don't have Javascript enabled" so let's show you just how badly we can make rendered HTML look. Great work there Quartz! As for the article, it's an article about racing, not sure why they mentioned football or the metric system at all, but to mention it in the context they have, they should've called it by it's proper name "Football" and then perhaps added "Soccer" in brackets.
- sergiotapia 14y agoIf you don't have Javascript enabled that's a conscious decision you've made, fully aware of what the tradeoff is. Either turn it on for websites you want to read properly, or just accept the fact that it's 2013 and the vast majority of websites use it.
- errnoh 14y agoI do have JS enabled but still run into problems. Probably some script blocking plugin that's causing them but the cause doesn't really matter, what does is the fact that it's preventing one from reading the article. There's really no reason at all to obfuscate text based information in such way unless you want to display ads or track the user. It even shows the actual article behind the loading screen but you can't read the article itself since the loading never finishes. That's just bad design. It's not the first time I've had to open lynx in order to read an article that's behind some javascript nonsense. (note: the text data is fine, it's actually only broken on modern browsers which actually handle js)
- sergiotapia 14y agoshrug What can I tell you? If you are using a script blocker this is what you get in the current landscape. There really isn't a reason why text should be mangled without javascript, but that's just the way it is with some sites.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoBelieve me, their "badly-rendered HTML" is sooooo much better than the stupid, stupid "thing" they show you when JS is enabled...
- josefresco 14y agoNo real meat to this article. Americans don't love F1 because the track isn't oval? Really? And the shot about how poor F1 drivers do well in NASCAR ruins the credibility of the argument even more.
- alpeb 14y agoAn article like this on the homepage is probably the result of someone gaming the system. This is when a down voting arrow would come in handy.
- antr 14y agofeel free to check my submission/comment history. good day
- jacques_chester 14y agoThanks to the sheer weight of numbers of people in the Indian subcontinent, I'd say cricket is second only to soccer in global popularity.
- Tloewald 14y agoDriving on complicated non oval tracks is just in-American. What I don't get is how a racing sport derived from bootleggers outrunning police on back country roads turned into driving around an oval track.
- zalew 14y agoStreetracing is a topic I'm hoping to somehow appear in Boardwalk Empire in the future. I will be disappointed if it doesn't get mentioned even as a third-rate scene or side joke.
- vaadu 14y agoI'm an American and love F1. I hate NASCAR because ovals are boring, like soccer. Hockey is even better. NASCAR also sucks because it uses spec cars instead of letting teams be creative. NASCAR should include real muscle cars and allow the Camry to be front wheel drive if that's what Toyota wants.
- rickmb 14y agoThis isn't just a lack of interest in F1, it's an almost complete lack of modern motorsports in general. Oddly enough, for a country where cars are sacred, the US has barely any capability to develop racing cars of any kind (NASCAR is low tech, Indycar, like most other US racing series, buys its cars from Europe), and there is little to no serious competition. There are no modern racetracks (besides Austin), the facilities at ovals, even Indy, are cheap, low budget and utterly outdated compared to modern racetracks around the world. There is very little competition outside the major series compared to the many dozens of competitive racing series around the world, and no way for talent to develop. NASCAR's commercial success aside, the US is a third world country when it comes to racing.
- paulyg 14y ago"Third world country when it comes to racing." That is total BS. Maybe the problem is people don't know about all the different ways you can go racing in this country. It's a big country and there are a lot of different groups with different interests. Maybe you should check out the SCCA or NASA. Don't tell me there are no feeder open wheel series. And there is tons of technology going on in the tin-top road racing and autocross world. I know folks working on open source engine management. There is currently an indie-go-go for an open source data acquisition system. The "import scene" is full of turbocharged four cylinder cars. Look at some of the cars we have now b/c auto enthusiasts have been screaming about why does Europe get them and not us: Mini Cooper, Fiat 500 Abarth, Mitsu Evo, Subaru STi, Ford Focus ST, Ford Fiesta ST. There are plenty of people in this country who like to turn left and right and are aware of what is going on in the rest of the world. We just do not make the evening news. P.S. I also take offense to the metric system comment. I'm an mechanical engineer and in practice have to use both unit systems. I'd love if we could just switch to metric.
- lumberjack 14y ago>NASCAR is low tech Isn't that a common myth?
- snowwrestler 14y agoNascar is low-tech in many ways. The car bodies must fit production sedan templates, so the the chassis is welded tubular steel instead of carbon monocoque like on F1 or Indycar. The engines are carbureted instead of fuel injected. There's no turbochargers (although Indy just got those back this year as well). There are strict rules about spoiler size and type. They do make extensive use of sensors and telemetry, but the cars themselves are pretty retro.
- guelo 14y agoI guess its the international America-hating crew on HN at this hour but come on, this story has nothing to do with tech and is not even a good sports story. It is just a way for smug Europeans to feel superior. Get over yourselves.
- nir 14y agoJust to note, any discussion of the issue that does not mention Talladega Nights is incomplete.
- nikcub 14y ago> Racing isn’t like professional soccer or curling; something that Americans don’t do. Soccer it top 5 in the USA in most played for both men and women > and driving a French car (Renault). Don't tell Red Bull that their car is French > Americans are too fond of their ovals Both NASCAR and Indy race on regular racing circuits. The majority of the Indy season this year, 10 of 15 races, is on regular circuits. > a 120,000-person capacity track. But, said Weaver, a large part of that audience was from Mexico, Latin America, and South America. Ridiculous and unsubstantiated. I know a large number of US based fans who went to the race. It averaged 2.2M viewers in the USA. This article is furthering poor generalizations from both sides of the Atlantic about the various sports. For a better and more accurate take on F1 in the USA see The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2012/07/formula-one-united-states http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2012/07/formula-on...
- k-mcgrady 14y agoJust to clarify a few things: > "Don't tell Red Bull that their car is French" It's not. They use Renault engines but the car is built in Milton Keynes, England by the team. > "Ridiculous and unsubstantiated" I'm not sure it's been confirmed but it was talked about that 40% of the tickets to the Austin GP were bought by Mexicans.
- bobochan 14y agoI am a little surprised that Grand Prix Montreal did not even get a mention in the story. F1 supporters travel all over the globe to watch their teams, so it seems odd not to include an event in a great city within easy driving distance of fans in the northeast.
- debacle 14y agoI think the culture of NASCAR really prevents people who would be more interested in F1 from approaching motorsports. The reality is that the Venn diagram of people who shop and Wal*Mart and people who watch NASCAR is probably closer to a circle than a lot of people are comfortable with.
- paulyg 14y agoJust another thought on this. We had an American in F1 just a few years ago. Scott Speed drove for Toro Rosso. Unfortunately I think he was mediocre and drove for a mediocre at best team. American Alexander Rossi tested for Caterham F1. And American Conor Daly is enjoying success in GP3.
- coliveira 14y agoThe story of sports in America is the story of television interests. The reason the media doesn't promote F1 is that they cannot control the sport from that point of view. What TV (other than specialized channels) is interested in a sport in which half of the races happen before dawn (in Asia)? The only sports that do well in America are the ones with a powerful league that can control all the TV rights and make the necessary deals with TV networks.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- unkoman 14y agoAmericans getting defensive ITT