The F1 Newsletter
We're talking about Full Swing and MLB's ridiculous volume of content, not Max Verstappen's march to inevitable victory.
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul. I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. Follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league at my new project, The Maroon Observer, which is an independent newsletter about rugby league in Queensland (and maybe somtimes at my old project, pythagonrl.com).
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How much is too much F1?
This is an insanely obscure thing to obsess over and build a newsletter around but here we are:
Smug nerds were in the replies, to the effect that real F1 fans watch practice and casuals don’t have to watch, so why do away with it. That’s a hilarious hill on which to stake your gatekeeping, as if it didn’t show an enormous lack of understanding of how the sport actually works.
F1 is a bit like the airline industry. Airlines only book revenue when the plane is actually flying people places, so any time the plane is not flying is money down the toilet. This is why airlines want you to board as quickly as possible, even though, comically, there’s also no way of doing that is both reliable and efficient, and don’t clean the plane properly between flights.
F1 only makes revenue when the cars are on track and racing. Every second spent not racing is a cost incurred because you have to pay people to stay in hotels and travel from home to the ass end of the world and get them to set up and pack up their stuff and all the other activity that makes two hours of cars go fast that no one is interested in watching. I’d guess that there is an order of magnitude drop off in the ratio of attention, and corresponding revenue, from racing to qualifying and another again from qualifying to practice. In short, only a small and barely monetisable number of nerds are watching practice, which is dreadfully sad when you think about it1, but F1 shows it anyway because they're already there.
Worse, the racing itself is very expensive, so if you’re going to the effort of putting the cars on track, you want the maximum amount of attention and return. That’s why there’s now two dozen grands prix and, inevitably, F1 will add a petit prix - what they insist on calling a sprint - to every round and push qualifying to Friday. If a grand prix weekend is only three days long, which it has to be if you’re going to get from Azerbaijan to Canada in a week, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for cars to circulate around the track for the sake of some Twitter Blue-paying numpty who can’t connect the leopards eating the face of F1 to his - it’s always a he/him - broader support for leopards eating other faces and probably pirates his stream anyway.
Obviously, I understand that teams and drivers need practice. An hour warmup time on Friday mornings might be all they get. Whether the rest gets replaced by sim time or local track testing - without the attendant circus - or whatever, is up to F1 and the teams to negotiate. The point I’m making is that the overwhelming need to make revenue is going to override any silly concerns you personally might have about sporting integrity or the need for preparation and it always has2. You don’t have to like it but if you’re going to be a dick about it, don’t be a dumbass as well.
At a certain point, the endless expansion of F1 will hit saturation. It’s probably worth remembering that Liberty Media, owners of F1, are American and also own the Atlanta Braves. They’re clearly working out how to use the American sports playbook on a traditionally European affair.
Baseball has a 162 game schedule, which means there’s more major league baseball played in a year than you can actually watch - it’s 300 straight days of content just in the regular season. It’s so much that, despite what bloviating assholes like Keith Olbermann will tell you, no individual game actually matters, unless it’s - get this - game 163.
If you’re like me, and relatively casual and trying desperately not to be a completionist because its simply not logisitically possible, how do you choose to what to watch when you’re overwhelmed with 15 games a day, every day? Even following one team via highlights is an hour long commitment each week, all of which blur together because they might only play two, maybe three, different opponents in that week. Even the worst teams win at least one-third of their games, which also makes it impossible to judge if they’re any good or not from a limited sample size.
The irony is that MLB has proved, with some of the most watched games of baseball of all time, the value of a short sharp tournament with clearly defined stakes.
One of the things I admire about American and college football is that the season is short and to the point. There’s 17/12 games plus playoffs and then you move on. If you follow a dud team, it could be less than three months of your year. This less is more approach - which yes, the owners would do more if they could overcome the limits of human endurance but then payroll would go up - is partly why if you want to buy the Washington Commanders, you’ll need $6+ billion.
I’m not sure where F1 will land. NASCAR has 36 rounds plus a pre-season fixture in a season, which is just ludicrous3, and F1 probably can’t mimic that unless it focusses on having more grands prix concentrated in one area, either the US or Europe, although the latter doesn’t have the money for hosting fees. I am fairly sure you’ll be inundated with all the racing you can handle and then some.
The grace, the beauty of sports
I watched Full Swing and Drive to Survive
At a certain point during my recent binge watching of FIFA Official Films4, I started to worry that I only watch things so that I can either a) listen to podcasts about it during the week on my commute or b) write about it in this stupid newsletter. Turning our lives into Content seems to be the way of things in the 2020s, which I hate, but also am just as much a slave to as any Tiktokking 15 year old because I like writing and need an audience to tell me how smart I am.
I recently had a second child and if there’s one thing a newborn means, it’s a lot of sitting on your ass and watching TV while you feed it/wait for it to go to sleep/burp it/try and fail to not yell at it for it to just stop please just stop I’m tired and you’ve been doing this since 3.30 this morning stop spitting the dummy out fuck where’s your mother.
So I watched Full Swing, the golf version of Drive To Survive, not because I’m particularly interested in golf but I was interested in the execution and, consequently, you’re going to read about it.
Given the success of DTS, the laziest sports marketing strategy in the world has been to go to the producers and ask them to follow your sport around and put it on Netflix. It’s the early 20s version of getting on social media to connect with the youth and their atrophied attention spans. Tennis also did a series, and there’ll be a Tour de France version5 in the not too distant future.
It was fine, I guess. I’m not converted to watching golf, although I understand it marginally better now, because I think ultimately the sport itself is probably still pretty boring. “Golf is hard” is the repeated refrain, as if all world class sport isn’t hard, but never really shown why other than players seem to fail at inopportune times because of mental deficiencies, except when they don't. Because there isn’t a clear Championship, it’s hard to distinguish between the merits of the different successes that three-quarters of the players achieve and they all sort of blend into one. The golfers aren’t as sociopathic as F1 drivers, so they’re naturally less interesting. Joel Dahmen came across as an actual well-rounded human being with life experience outside of golf. I probably won’t bother with season two, unless the LIV split goes up another notch6.
Drive to Survive released its fifth season ahead of the first grand prix of this year. It, too, was fine. The 2022 championship was significantly less dramatic than the 2021 edition, so that played a role with more emphasis on how important it was to finish fourth in the constructor’s championship, instead of fifth (Will Buxton: “it’s tens of… millions of… dollars”). It’s clear which races the production crew turns up to and - bear in mind, I haven’t checked this - it seemed fewer than in previous seasons, so they have to work harder to manufacture storylines out of what they do get. While this season felt a bit flat, beacuse of the above and possibly the premise is starting to wear out, the cast of with team principals and two drivers at each team, all competing for more or less a single prize makes it easy to structure and to follow.
Hardcore fans, and old and newly minted alike, don’t like the series for reasons varying from “F1 is Serious Business” to “Only Newbies need this explained to them and I’m not a Newbie”.
That shit’s tiresome. I’ve been watching F1 for more than two decades now, with interest levels that have waxed and waned over the years, and I’ll still watch season six with it’s stupid made-up commentary and confected story lines and Masterchef-level of talking down to the audience. Why? Fast cars go vroom and rich European men say the most maniacal things. It’s the only reason anyone should watch F1 in the first place.
The Maroon Observer
If you didn’t notice the slightly modified intro, I’ve launched a second newsletter: The Maroon Observer.
This is exclusively about rugby league and more specifically, rugby league in Queensland. Please subscribe if you haven’t already.7
What does that mean for the Sick Sad World of Sports? Not a lot. It’s likely that this will be monthly or quarterly8 or basically whenever the ugly seed of an idea starts to germinate into an ugly shrub in my brain and the only way to weed it is to write it down and send it out to you, my loyal readers, to share. I may even continue the Splinters series, of which I've had three ideas sitting in drafts for over a year now.
Otherwise, I'll tweet out a random thought about cycling or baseball or motor sport or American football or retweet a funny or weird highlight or to laugh at soccer's ongoing collapse into a collateralised debt obligation with a sport taped to it, and Twitter will show it no one and life will go on as always. I'll feel better for not having it in my head any more and if you like it as well, then that's all we can really hope for.
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Find something else to do with your time than watching a glorified training session.
See also: the NFL reducing pre-season by one game and increasing the actual season by one game.
Don’t get me started on NASCAR. They’re just going around in circles. They throw a pace car twice a race to bunch the pack to make it more exciting. Every race goes to “overtime” because they keep crashing. What are we doing here? Where’s the guy driving into the wall?
Which I never finished. We’ll have to wait for the next World Cup in 2026 to catch up on the films of 2010, 2014, 2018 and soon 2022. The latter should be fun.
Real ones were already watching El Día Menos Pensado, true aficionados enjoyed Höllentour, sickos watched Overcoming and only the most depraved lunatics have seen En Forårsdag i Helvede. I didn’t make a single one of these up. There’s also a 30 for 30 about Greg Lemond that was pretty good and I am just now realising that I have spent a lot of time watching sports documentaries, a genre I didn’t think I actually liked all that much.
Which the series covered at a basic level, reasonably well. For Australians, there’s a million short shots of Cam Smith but he never actually speaks to the cameras.
Substack tells me there’s about half a dozen of you sickos already subscribed to both. Thank you.
Weekly, as this was for a while this time last year, seems impossibly ambitious.