From Boy Band Dark Ages to Race Car Driver Heartthrobs!
Formula 1’s new female fanbase is hanging up band tees for team jerseys
Hi there! Welcome to Track Limits, a weekly F1 newsletter where we break down the major headlines and dive into the questions, trends, and topics that spark our collective curiosity. Nothing is off-topic and a little fun is always part of the mix!
Good evening!! This week, I’m thrilled to introduce the first guest writer for Track Limits’ special feature, Beyond Track Limits — a series where we dive into the topics, questions, and trends that have captured our attention, with the help of experts and amazing insiders!!
In today’s issue, Olivia – a motorsport and environmental journalist – explores how Formula One has reignited the passion of fangirls after years of “boy band recession” and how they’re redefining what it means to be a motorsport fan.
A shrill scream is ripped from a teenage girl as four figures emerge on stage, one stop on a 21-country world tour in 10 months. There’s blubbering and tears at the sight of bedroom posters come to life. Her wrist is weighed down by a collection of Taylor Swift-style neon pink friendship bracelets. The lettered beads hold no meaning alone. When strung together, they communicate fidelity. Her fingers shakily wrap around a handmade poster board. The dried sparkly Sharpie asks if one man would marry her. Other signs in the crowd display cryptic inside jokes only chronically online fans are privy to.
If you didn’t recognize the four faces with microphones on stage and were blissfully unaware of your surroundings, you might think they were about to break into song: their matching costumes and boyish grins loosely resembling a long-lost Jonas Brother. Even the bellowing hum in the distance could be mistaken for a bassline or the screech of microphone feedback. But it's not a thrumming guitar string or a faulty mic, it’s a race car. And those four men will slip into the driver’s seat in a few short hours.
“I feel more like Harry Styles,” Alex Albon admitted over the cloud-covered British Grand Prix weekend in July. The Williams Formula 1 driver speaks for his 19 competitors, who, in varying degrees, have become global pop culture sensations in a few short years: attending movie premieres and the Met Gala, ending up on viral celebrity gossip sites and gracing the cover of GQ. Conor Daly, an American IndyCar and NASCAR driver, said he has never seen the level of celebrity Formula 1 drivers are experiencing, comparing them to the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.
When I saw teen girls sobbing over a guy in fireproofs, I understood the signs of a shifting culture.
Formula 1, the tippy-top of the motorsport world, has surged in popularity among women and girls over the past five years, with female fans increasing by 9 percent. Women now make up 41 percent of Formula 1 fans, and the average fan is younger than ever: 32. Motorsport, historically associated with stuffy middle-aged British men in tweed or American bootleggers and bandits, is in the midst of a makeover.
Netflix’s “Drive to Survive,” a “Real Housewives”-style reality TV show masquerading as a serious and sporty docu-series, has been credited with this rise and increasing Formula 1’s value to nearly $20 billion. But women are the real driving economic force.
“At one level, fans are ideal consumers,” Henry Jenkins, known as the “father of fandom studies,” said in Kaitlyn Tiffany's "Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It.” “They’re deeply invested in the performer and they will buy all kinds of merchandise related to that performer. But fans reject the basic relationship that is set up by the industry. They’re always trying to push beyond the basic exchange of money.”
A “fangirl economy” is subsequently created: one world tour amounting to a $4.1 billion payout for Swift and another reportedly accelerating inflation in Sweden during a Beyoncé concert. Along the way, fans have created their own terminology and online community — a kind of cultural currency.
On TikTok, fangirls stitch together driver edits with punchy pop music playing in the background. Some even put the viewer behind the camera — called a “POV” on the app. The captions range from adoring to overtly sexual. On the popular fan-created literature site, Archive of Our Own, fans wrote over 10,000 stories about Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and, according to the platform’s 2024 data, writers created more stories about Formula 1 than any boy band. In bookstores, those fan-created stories have transformed into traditionally published romance novels featuring a race car driver main character. On Tumblr, posts about Formula 1 drivers broke the year’s top 50 viral topics. And on Instagram, fans post sneakily papped images of the 20 athletes eating at cafes, lounging on their yachts and passing through TSA security lines. Other posts instruct fans how to emulate the drivers’ wives and girlfriends’ — known as WAGs — styles. On bedroom walls — from London to Lusail — teen and 20-something girls plaster posters of their favorite drivers, accompanied by baby pink bows and cut-out hearts.
Some drivers are more popular than others. McLaren’s Lando Norris sports a head of curls and oozes boy band potential. If the Brit was seven years older and found himself on an X Factor stage in the UK in 2010, One Direction may have had six members instead of five. GQ labeled Daniel Ricciardo America’s first Formula 1 superstar and a photo of Leclerc made Ellen DeGeneres’ live audience ooh and aah. Fans on TikTok compare which Formula 1 driver correlates to which One Direction member: One podcast host explains that Leclerc is the Harry Styles of Formula 1, Norris is Liam Payne, Ricciardo is Louis Tomlinson, Carlos Sainz is Niall Horan and Lewis Hamilton is Zayn Malik. A comment reads “I am now convinced there is a 1D to F1 pipeline.” Others compare Formula 1 Fever to the infatuation around K-pop, or Korean pop, groups.
Like “Directioners,” fans have teetered to the extreme at times. Last year, Leclerc publicly asked fans to stop showing up at his doorstep.
Formula 1 has begun to capitalize on female interest by adding Grand Prix activities and booths targeted towards women and girls, throwing pink t-shirts into merchandise collections, posting ice bath thirst traps on official team social media accounts and partnering with fashion and makeup brands. However, the love isn’t always consistent. In August, Formula 1 reportedly sent cease and desist letters to fans and content creators, giving them a deadline to remove “F1” or the sport’s branding from their usernames and merchandise.
Before I was a Formula 1 journalist, I grew up a boy band fanatic. In fact, I’ve brought a kind of fanaticism to most interests: the Watergate scandal, “High School Musical,” sharks, Northern Ireland, One Direction. Casual has never been my strong suit. School papers always turned into phases. Pastimes were never passive. That is to say, when I saw teen girls sobbing over a guy in fireproofs, I understood the signs of a shifting culture. And I began to write about it extensively.
The 2010s were a prime time to be a teenage girl with four Wi-Fi bars. The internet was no longer in its infancy, fanfiction flowed from crystal blue parasocial pools and the boy band mania of the ‘80s and ‘90s was reborn in the shape of five boys from across the pond.
But then Malik left One Direction and the four remaining members went their separate ways. Five Seconds of Summer, an Australian boy band, opted for a new sound and broke off into solo acts at the turn of the decade. Twenty-One Pilots, The 1975, The Neighborhood, Walk the Moon and The Wanted went poof.
“We’re living in the dark ages of boy bands,” the host of Two Girls One Formula told me while reporting in June. A self-proclaimed lifelong fangirl — armed with a degree in decades of Tumblr virality and fandom speak — she directly laid out why recovering boy band fanatics have found a new, unlikely, outlet for daydreaming: motor racing — more specifically, the 20 men of Formula 1 driving machines made of carbon fiber at 220 miles per hour.
The purr of a V10 engine, attached to the single-seaters from 1989 to 2005, hits all the notes to create a harmony. Even with this era’s V6 turbocharged race cars, tears, screams and full-body shakes are commonplace trackside.
Why? It’s sexy, fast and dangerous. Plus, there are fewer than two dozen yacht-owning, jet-setting, Monaco-based 20 and 30-something athletes to keep tabs on, instead of, say, 1,696 NFL players.
Then, there’s the science behind it. In the 2013 One Direction documentary “This Is Us,” Dr. Stefan Koelsch, a psychologist and neuroscientist, explained why fangirls react in a way people call “hysterical.”
“As soon as Directioners listen to music and find the music pleasurable, what happens in the brain is that a neurochemical called dopamine is released and provides feelings of joy and happiness, shivers, goosebumps, strong pleasure,” he explained. “The girls are not crazy, the girls are just excited.”
Formula 1 cars have the same effect. The purr of a V10 engine, attached to the single-seaters from 1989 to 2005, hits all the notes to create a harmony. Even with this era’s V6 turbocharged race cars, tears, screams and full-body shakes are commonplace trackside.
But what about fans who haven’t heard the penetrating pulse of an engine in person or felt the successive ecstasy mixed with anticipation, like bile pressing upwards? Neuroscience can also explain why fans become emotionally attached even through a phone screen. Parasocial relationships, or a one-sided connection between a person and a celebrity, produce a similar dopamine hit. People can develop intimate feelings towards public figures they see often in popular media. Fans call celebrities by their first names, have a running list of personal factoids and spend thousands of dollars to feel further connected with them, whether through merchandise or VIP passes. These relationships can both developmentally accelerate and stunt tweens and teens, with some research citing identity and confidence building while other research points at the dangers: like teens spending less time than ever with friends in person and, rather, having that human need for connection fulfilled via social media — whether interacting with acquaintances online or celebrities, influencers and artificial intelligence.
Formula 1 breeds the kind of fanaticism found in a teenage girl. In Maranello, Ferrari drivers have shouldered the weight of an adoring nation for decades. Leclerc is viewed more as a saint, chiseled from marble with precise care, than human flesh and bone. A photoshopped picture of the 27-year-old on a saint’s body is plastered onto prayer candles, attached to rosaries clutched during qualifying sessions and seen peeking out from the fan stage crowd. Other times, he is depicted as a dimpled cherub, innocent and never at fault — fans’ preferred term is “babygirl.” A martyr for Ferrari, a larger-than-life pope, Italy’s ‘Il Predestinato‘, each comparison paints the Monegasque Formula 1 driver as biblical. The Tifosi are more than willing to fold at his altar.
Fandoms have always resembled religion: they split into factions and branches, create their own ideologies and write stories based loosely on reality. Sports are most representative of this. Spectators from the stands sing team songs resembling hymns and consume the body and blood of Christ in the form of hotdog buns and beer. In 1980s Italy, Pope John Paul II rode a Ferrari through the streets.
Fangirls flooding Formula 1 shouldn't come as a surprise: Female fans have watched trackside since the sport’s inception in 1950, and comparing race car drivers to boy bands isn’t novel. In 2016, a handful of drivers joked their stage name would be “Wrong Direction.” Yet, how these fans are showing up and changing the future of the sport, from how much information teams share about drivers to sponsorships, is novel. Fans, primarily men, blame new female fans for “ruining” the sport and, although reacting with a similar passion as women, vehemently reject the term “fanboy.” In contrast, women and girls in the sport are beginning to reclaim the term “fangirl” — historically synonymous with “obsessive” and “crazed.”
“Let’s stop treating female Formula 1 fans like they all think the same,” the Formula 1 podcast, Fan Behavior Pod, tells followers on Instagram. Some women tune in for the engineering and thousand-part race cars. Others are there for tire strategy. Some like the environmental advancements or revel in the international implications: Saudi princes, sovereign wealth funds and billion-dollar bottom lines. Several consistently show up for a driver’s skill, personality or looks. It offers more entry points than just a boy band’s music or Justin Bieber’s hair, creating a kind of longevity musical groups lack.
Near the fan stage, women huddle in clusters, exchanging handmade friendship bracelets with their favorite drivers’ numbers or names attached. A handful link arms, strangers hours before, while whispering compliments on bedazzled team gear and giggling about new aerodynamic regulations. After elbowing for autographs, the women and girls will watch the lights go out and engines come alive just like any fan would — with their hearts stuck in their throats.
Olivia Hicks is a motorsports and environmental journalist who covers Formula 1’s culture, business and on-track action. She’s a contributing writer to the top racing publication, Motorsport.com, and the leading engineering magazine, among others. Her reporting has taken her from the streets of Monaco and blind corners of Belgium to the deserts of Chile and everywhere in between. Olivia runs the Substack newsletter Formula Flash.
 | A guest post by
|