F1
Driving Ambition
Junior series, academies, budget. It’s not easy climbing your way to the top of the motorsport ladder. To get there you’ll need the perfect CV. Here’s how to assemble yours...
Age
The saying in F1 tuns that if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. Max Verstappen made his F1 debut at 17. Lando Norris was only one metre tall in his first grand prix (this isn’t exactly true, but he was quite little) and Sebastian Vettel won his first championship at 23. Yes, Formula One is a young man’s game and the starting point of your CV should be to highlight just how youthful you really are. Be sure to point out that your karting career began by listening to Rotax engines while in the womb and that you think anyone who doesn’t have a 4×4 Rubik’s Cube, a Roblox subscription and Super Licence by the age of nine is a loser. Likewise, if your progress has taken slightly more time than you’d like, you might want to change your favourite bands from Shed Seven and Ocean Colour Scene to something a little bit more contemporary.
Name and address
A bit like an avaricious superpower, Formula 1 has shifting spheres of influence, with most of that influence coming from just how much money it can extract from a particular region at any given time. A decade ago that meant your only hope of landing an F1 drive was if you were called Ugyen and came with a guarantee that a thrilling Bhutan Grand Prix was something the Dragon King was really sold on. These days, you’ll have to go west, young man. F1 has rekindled its on-off love affair with the US of A, so our advice is to find yourself a trailer park, get that John Deere cap, change your name to ‘Bubba’ and yee-haw your way to the very top.
Education
The key thing in any motorsport career is victory and a good CV must feature a litany of series wins that prove your godlike ability to ruthlessly crush the hopes and dreams of other eight-year- olds on a global scale. The good thing about motorsport is that you don’t even need those qualities to assemble such a list of honours. A bit like the clergy, the racing world is happy to provide refuge for the terminally slow and otherwise unemployable, so given enough budget, you should have no problem plotting a winning path from the Space Cadet Karting Championship to Formula Cautious and beyond, thus proving you are indeed a champion for the future.
Ayrton Senna built his first racing car before his fourth birthday.
© Picturedesk.com
Support
Speaking of budget, you’ll need one. The difficulty is that while back in the day, you could forge a credible grand prix career if you could lay your hands on enough cash to buy a backmarking team, a Cosworth DFV and a trailer to fit it in, these days you’re going to need half the GDP of Tuvalu (about $20m according to UN data) to get you through a single season. You could spend your life creating PowerPoints to try to convince investors that you’re a project worthy of their money or, alternatively, you could take the easy way out and find yourself a billionaire parent with a strong need to live vicariously through your racing career while simultaneously robbing you of your individuality and autonomy. A small price to pay for grand prix glory!
Work experience
It seems like the only way to truly make the leap from junior racing to F1 competition is to join the academy of an F1 team. But how do you stand out from the other spotty, teenage nerds desperately hanging around at the back of the garage? Simple: instead of telling reporters that you’re the lightning-fast future and the team’s ageing and scarily paranoid #1 driver is slower than a wet Wednesday in the sim, explain that you’re happy to be able to learn at the feet of a master and that one day, far in the distant future, you might be blessed to follow in his footsteps. Stir repeatedly and you’ll have that #2 seat in no time.
References
A ringing endorsement from a known and trusted source can work wonders for your reputation, so be sure to include at least one positive comparison to a former grand prix winner on your resumé – although it is preferable for that reference to be ‘as quick as Ayrton Senna’ or ‘as tigerish as Fernando Alonso’ and not ‘as complete a driver as Pastor Maldonado’.