FERRARI. Hello. You’re rooting for Ferrari because you believe in things. You believe in tradition, since Ferrari, the big red glossy Italian grandmama, holds an esteemed and hallowed spot in the history of Formula One unlike any other team. Ferrari remains the only team to compete in every season of the Championship, are a founding member of the F1 universe, and have won 16 Constructors’ Championships and 15 Drivers’ Championships. You are here because you love pedigree and brands first.
You are here because you love pedigree and brands, a thing that often lives and dies in a diet of high emotion and low information. Do you love Drake, but not rap? Do you order anything with truffle oil on it at a fancy restaurant despite not knowing what truffles are, or maybe not even noticing a big difference between something with truffle oil on it and the regular item? You’ve purchased cars because they had inscrutable buttons, a nice badge, or twin tailpipes when you can’t even tell someone how much horsepower the engine has. You believe college football is better when Notre Dame is good, because [FILE NOT FOUND]. The sommelier picked the wine personally, and that meant a lot to you.
This is not inherently bad. It’s actually deeply romantic. The Ferrari fan wants, above all else, to feel something. And like in romance, you need to know how all this might end. Romance begins with the flush of rosso corsa red and a legit claim to be the second best team in the sport, just nanoseconds behind Red Bull at the top of the pack.
It blossoms under the gaze of the handsome faces of the supernaturally gifted Charles LeClerc and the charming Carlos Sainz. It shows new hope after the firing of their old crew chief Mario Binotto, and the hiring of new boss Fred Vasseur. Their new head of strategy has a masters in mathematics and theoretical physics from the University of Oxford. Their paddock espresso machine: I have seen it, and it is a shining sterling silver calliope played by angels.
The romance is real. Romance sometimes grows into happy marriages, and sometimes all that belief and fantasy crumbles. The pit crew brings out three tires for a four tire pit stop. The engine turns into million dollar confetti on lap 22. Brilliant race strategists forget to carry the one doing some lap math and tell their driver to stay out when every other driver on the lead lap pits. Charles LeClerc quietly plots murder while his bald tires give away yet another early lead.
This is the power of belief. It really might be the year when Ferrari completes The Plan, wins a championship, and fulfills both the promise of the brand and validates all the actual hard work it took to get here. Alternately: Ferrari, above a beautiful promontory overlooking Amalfi, might attempt to get down on one knee to propose to Lady Victory, slip on a banana peel, and fall headlong down a cliff. That, too, is how romance works sometimes, too.
MERCEDES. The Big Tent Team. A lot of things make people Mercedes fans, and it’s important to note them, since none of them seem to fit on paper.
Bear with us, the taxonomy gets kind of weird and unnecessarily complex here. But like the wiring on a German car, it generally ends up working most of the time.
One: Lewis Hamilton People. The one driver currently working who transcends the borders of F1’s footprint draws his own immense pool of supporters to Mercedes, and for a hundred different and not mutually exclusive reasons. He’s a social justice progressive who’s dominated a sport bankrolled by Very Much Not That. He made it despite lacking the connections many other F1 drivers use to gain access to the sport in the first place. Hamilton is a hero for black sports fans and has never shied away from talking about the challenges of being the only black driver on the grid. I watched him stop and talk to an awestruck kid asking for an autograph for five minutes in the paddock at the Miami GP for no reason whatsoever other than “this is what the nice superstar does.”
I regret to inform you that, unlike so many others at the pinnacle of their sport, Lewis Hamilton appears to care a lot about doing the right thing. So if this is your dude, and you’re a Mercedes fan as a runoff result of Hamilton fandom, good on you. No notes, no objections, completely sane choice. (The same can be said of George Russell to a lesser extent, simply because George Russell really does appear to be nice enough to prompt his own niceness memes.)
Two: Everyone else who roots for Mercedes simply because they love Mercedes-type things. A completely different group of people in thrall to the Teutonic Efficiency Gods, Mercedes fans might also be the type of people who root for the thresher over the fleeing family of rabbits in an animated farm drama. If someone is a fan of power Austrian and Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff instead of the drivers, and lights up a little when they hear someone talking about DISCIPLINE UND ORDER? Then they are this type of Mercedes fan, and somehow also root for Lewis Hamilton.
The great part about Mercedes: If they get something right, they will win 100% of the time with no variance whatsoever. The bad part: If they get it wrong, as they did last season with their frog-hopping bounce house of a car, they will spend the rest of the season having an identity crisis wondering how they could have gotten it so wrong. (No one will ever be more hurt than an engineer betrayed by math.)
RED BULL. Sharks, self-described winners, sociopaths, hard trollers everywhere, and the entire nation of Mexico: Behold your team. Red Bull starts at a baseline reading of “The team sponsored by a gonzo energy drink brand that once dropped someone from a balloon hovering seven miles above the earth,” and only goes up from there. The anti-Ferrari, Red Bull’s history really only exists in the 21st century, holds little loyalty to manufacturers (the team has run on Ford, Ferrari, Renault, and now Honda engines,) and lives off a reputation as a ruthless startup with zero fealty to the past.
But wait, there’s more edgelord stuff here. Their boss, Christian Horner, is a five foot-nothing shit-talker of the highest degree. Their lead driver, Max Verstappen, is a shark-eyed killer with enough nepotism points to genuinely irritate, but also a cold-blooded ability to dominate races with brutal tactical force. Their number two driver is Sergio “Checo” Perez, an incongruously chill personality still capable of some of the most muscular and aggro driving you will ever see on any track at any level. I don’t know what he’s doing here, but it’s cool anyway.
They’re the officially “fun” team in F1 by brand, but there’s a lot of shin-kicking nouveau riche attitude here, too, right down to their pit crew looking less like athletic math majors like many teams’ crews, and more like raucous Aussies you got poisonously drunk with at a bar in Bali once. It’s hard to love them, but it’s also hard to not like what they do, if that makes sense.
Anyway, they’ve won the last two Constructor’s Championships, including last year’s in a laugher. If you’re the kind of person who orders wings at a Michelin starred restaurant simply because you want to let them know what’s up, you pull for Red Bull. Alternatively, if you’re a bandwagoner in your heart and know it, then enjoy the peace of self-acceptance and come aboard.
Other categories of person also filed under Red Bull: Deeply problematic and perennially drunk Dutch fans, the aforementioned entirety of Mexico (VIVA CHECO,) and Drive to Survive fans entranced by Christan Horner’s addiction to the camera.
ALPHA TAURI. Red Bull’s JV Squad. Formerly known as “Scuderia Toro Rosso” until 2020, when it rebranded to support Red Bull’s signature fashion line. That sentence will be the most Euro sentence I will ever write.
Alpha Tauri serves as Red Bull’s developmental team. It’s probably most charitable to think of them as a charming spinoff never quite earning the success of the original franchise, but pleasant nonetheless. The Lower Decks to the original Star Trek if you will. Actually this makes a lot of sense, given Alpha Tauri’s employment of Yuki Tsunoda, a man so profane he sets land speed records in cussing while working in his second language.
If you’re a cozy, occasionally quirky spinoff-type person with low expectations, choose Alpha Tauri. Otherwise, they would probably agree with your estimate of the situation, and admit that they, too, sometimes aren’t clear why they’re really there, either.
ALPINE. HON HON HON. Renault in disguise — Alpine is their sport brand — and thus proud holders of the title of Most French Team Available. The tangible Frenchnesses here: Neon color scheme, a fiercely competitive but not exactly winning set of results, a pair of eminently likable, talented, and handsome drivers in Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, and if Drive to Survive is to be believed, the best lunches in the F1 paddock. (I have no data on this, having only stolen coffee from several teams while on assignment. It’s Ferrari’s on top, FWIW.)
To root for Alpine is to root for one of the best of the second tier teams, a matter of keeping yourself on simmer for the better part of the season without ever quite boiling over.
ALFA ROMEO. A conundrum. Do we call them the Italian Alpine? Or more disrespectfully, are they Sam’s Club Ferrari? Wherever you classify them, they’re somehow both legitimate legacy F1, and also new and slightly downhill from the Ferrari-class of the sport.
The specifics are slightly confusing. Alfa’s been around F1 since its inception, but hasn’t participated consistently throughout its history. The latest Alfa team came into being in 2019, making Alfa Romeo F1 the only team with a legit claim to being both an upstart and a legacy team in the sport.
The particulars of the team, though: They’re both decent and charming. Their red and white paint scheme and lacy cursive logo emit powerful artisanal Italian vibes. You’re rooting for an F1 team, yes, but they could just as easily be an expensive espresso machine maker or boutique goat cheese concern. The team brought on Zhou Guanyu, a gifted Chinese driver who performed admirably as a rookie, and Valtteri Bottas, the Finnish driver best known for occasionally no-selling his strategy chief while driving the number two spot for Mercedes. Bottas sold a picture of his own ass for charity last year. This is Finnish excellence.
The team for entry-level strivers who aren’t really totally entry level? That’s kind of where we put you if you’re going to root for Alfa Romeo. They’ll be competitive, might even jack a podium spot here or there, and that’s fine.Expectations started low, anyway.
They’re not alone in this, of course: There are plenty of other teams in the exact same position. But what other one offers such styling, and the sense you’re rooting for a posh Milanese men’s shaving accessory brand? That’s right. Only Alfa Romeo does that.
ASTON MARTIN. Like a more sporadic Alfa in terms of F1 history, since Aston Martin fell out of the sport completely after 1960 before its return in the form of this team, a rebranded version of the old Racing Point Team, which was itself a reworked version of the Force India Team purchased by investors after its chief backer, Vijay Mallya, was arrested by British police in a massive international money laundering and fraud investigation. (This sport is incredible, in case you didn’t know it already.)
The name is British. The engines are German, borrowed straight from Mercedes. The money is Canadian, from owner Lawrence Stroll, whose son Lance Stroll happens to race in F1. For Aston Martin, in fact! Lance Stroll takes the crown as reigning king of the nepo babies in the sport, a designation not mutually exclusive to Stroll’s ability to actually race. (His average finish for the smallish Aston team: 11th, making him far more skilled than previous glaring cases of nepotism in the sport. Looking at you, Nikita Mazepin.)
Clearly if you’re an old-school Anglophile, Aston Martin is your choice. In addition to that and being the choice for those who are capable but still got their jobs from their dad, Aston Martin will also be the team of choice for Old Dudes Who Root For Other Old Dudes. Fernando Alonso will race for Aston at 41. He switched to the team without really telling his old team, Alpine, and then evaded their phone calls by retreating to a yacht in the Mediterranean.
If you wish to be the cranky old man avoiding phone calls on a yacht one day, you are an Aston Martin fan in 2023.
MCLAREN. Hoooboy. Maybe you like a moderate, tasteful shade of orange? It’s hard to sell McLaren right now without lying a little, so I won’t. McLaren entered 2022 with the modest goal of clinging to its spot as the third or fourth best team in F1. They didn’t do that, finishing in fifth behind Alpine while suffering a series of debacles, most involving driver Daniel Ricciardo.
Ricciardo’s gone, replaced by a quieter Australian, Oscar Piastri. Lando Norris is their clear number one. Lando drives super hard, but towing the load for a struggling McLaren team is taking its toll spiritually. Look at this man’s goals for this year. Look at them.
HIS GOAL IS TO LIVE ANOTHER YEAR. It’s grim, and not looking a whole lot better after struggles in preseason. Still, they’re the team for nouveau Anglophiles and guys who still say “hey that car had a solid gold engine bay!” every time the name McLaren comes up.
WILLIAMS. Do you like suffering nobly, and in silence? Choose Williams. Do you want to root for the only American on the board, Logan Sargeant, even if he’s the kind of American whose entire life is built around never seeing hoi-polloi like you? Choose Williams. Do you like Alexander Albon, who low key pulled off one of the most amazing results of the 2022 season by finishing tenth on one set of hard tires after starting in the dead back of the pack? Do you want to seem really cool when Williams pulls off the impossible and earns a point? Do you voluntarily slam your hand in kitchen drawers just to feel alive? It’s Williams for you, friend.
HAAS. Fuck you, we’re Haas. Bomb out of every other race, we’re Haas. Curse god and fight the devil for tenth place, we’re Haas. Watch Guenther Steiner visibly losing weight on camera like he’s sitting in a dehydrator due to the stress of strapping together spare parts with duct tape and pure anger every week, we’re Haas. Hell is where we wake up, and heaven is always five stops down the line. Haas, darlings.
Recommending Haas as a follow would be an act of sadism, and beside the point. No one chooses to be a Haas fan. It chooses you, either because you’re a vocal masochist, a glutton for punishment, or the kind of person who sees a wall and instantly thinks fuck you, wall. The only team with both NASCAR ties and unfortunately the budget to match, the #HAASGang truly plays a different game than anyone else in the sport. A point is a miracle. A podium, a revolution. A lap spent in the top three? Anarchy of the highest order.
You won’t win. But we have to imagine Sisyphus happy, or at the very least yelling FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING STUPID ROCK in Guenther Steiner’s exact accent.
