The fastest cars on the planet, eleven teams, twenty-three races, one champion. Here is the whole sport in about five minutes.
Formula 1 is the top level of single-seater car racing. Formula means the set of rules every car has to obey. The 1 means there is nothing above it.
Eleven teams design and build their own cars, each team enters two of them, and they race each other at circuits on five continents. Nobody sells a team an F1 car. Every one is built from nothing inside that team's own factory, and no two are the same.
That is the part newcomers miss. F1 is a driving contest and an engineering contest at the same time. The best driver in the world, in a slow car, finishes eighth.
An F1 car weighs less than a small family hatchback and pushes itself into the ground harder than it weighs. That push is called downforce: air travels over the wings and bodywork and presses the car down onto the track. It is why an F1 car corners faster than anything else on four wheels. The grip comes from the air as much as from the tyres.
They reach around 350 km/h (220 mph) on the longest straights and scrub that speed off in a few seconds under braking. The driver's body takes forces several times its own weight in the corners, the cockpit sits at around 80°C, and drivers lose weight over a race distance. More than 100 sensors on each car send data to the garage every second, so an engineer on the pit wall usually sees a problem before the driver feels it.
Every team runs two drivers. They are teammates and rivals at the same time, and that is the honest part of F1: the driver in the other garage has the same car you do, so he is the only fair measure of how good you actually are.
There are two championships every year, and both matter. The Drivers' Championship goes to the individual who scores the most points. The Constructors' Championship goes to the team whose two cars score the most points together — and it decides how much prize money each team takes home, which decides what they can build next year.
The 2026 season runs 23 races from March to December, from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi, with a break in August. Six of those weekends also have a Sprint, a short extra race on Saturday that pays its own points.
Every weekend has the same shape: practice, then qualifying, then the race. Qualifying sets the starting order. The race hands out the points. Do that 23 times and whoever has the biggest number at the end of it is world champion.
Pick a driver. Not the one who wins most — the one you like watching. Then watch one race from the formation lap to the flag, without checking your phone. The first half hour will feel like cars going round in circles. Somewhere around the first pit stops it stops feeling like that, because you start seeing the plan underneath it.