Formula One is a mind game, no question. You have to think so hard sometimes when smoke comes out of your ears! And if you don’t keep your head in gear the car will overtake you.
– Mika Häkkinen, retired Finnish racing driver and two-time Formula One World Champion.
Every Formula One (F1) driver goes through it.
You’re crammed inside a tiny cockpit, sweating through your fireproof suit, with your foot to the floor at 320 km/h, when suddenly something goes wrong with your RM42 million machine.
Or you get passed. Or worse, you crash. Next thing you know—boom, out flies an F-bomb.
I’ve seen it happen for as long as I can remember.
As a teenager, I was obsessed with F1. I’d spend hours mimicking the engine sounds at home, imagining myself behind the wheel like my heroes Mika Häkkinen, Kimi Räikkönen, and David Coulthard — all in their McLaren-Mercedes cars decked out with West logos.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even know West was a German cigarette brand back then. I just thought it looked cool.
I also kept this notebook where I jotted down everything—powertrains, fastest laps, pit stops, fuel loads, track layouts, braking points—the whole shebang.
It was like my own little F1 logbook, and I’d proudly show it off to my school friends. I was that hooked.
One driver I couldn’t stand was Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher. He was always McLaren’s biggest rival, especially when Ferrari was dominating. Whenever something went wrong with McLaren, or the drivers had issues with Schumacher mid-race, I’d lose it—yelling, stomping around the house.
The problem with F1 drivers, though, is that the moment of frustration isn’t confined to the inside of their helmets—anything drivers say is relayed back to their team over a radio.
And in an age of wall-to-wall F1 race coverage, those radio communications are frequently broadcast straight to a television audience of tens of millions.
That’s why last Thursday (Sept 19), the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), motorsport’s world governing body, asked drivers to pump the brakes on running their mouths.
It just so happened that I was tagging along with Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon and CMO Fiona Carter to the F1 Singapore Grand Prix at the Marina Bay Street Circuit after we’d checked out TOKEN2049—the world’s biggest crypto event.
It was my first real dose of Grand Prix madness.
The smell of petrol, the screeching tires, and the sheer volume of the 1.6-litre V6 turbo engines roaring—there’s nothing like experiencing it live.
Announcements of gaps, overtakes, and retirements constantly filled the air in multiple languages.
During the Pit Lane Walk, I got up close to the teams practicing their pit stops.
Seeing the cars just a few feet away had me squealing with excitement.
The crowd went wild when Haas driver Nico Hülkenberg and Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc walked by, with applause rippling through the stands.
When Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton hit the wall and went into the pits illegally, everyone booed him, which was quite hilarious.
Then we made our way into the McLaren team garage, and suddenly I was that 15-year-old again, amazed by all the high-tech chaos happening around me.
Thanks to GS backing the team since 2022, I didn’t waste a second – jumped right in, firing off questions and trading stories with Team Principal Andrea Stella and drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
Naturally, the FIA’s warning came up in conversation. Most of the world’s top drivers only briefly toned it down, politely replying that they’ll keep on with their cursing.
“What are we, saints?” defending world champion Red Bull driver Max Verstappen said.
“People say a lot of bad things when they’re full of adrenaline in other sports. It just doesn’t get picked up.”
Verstappen, whose Dutch directness is famous in F1 circles, has never been one to censor himself.
In fact, mere minutes before he was asked about it, he had been complaining about the state of his car at this month’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“As soon as I went to qualifying,” Verstappen said, “I knew the car was f—ed.”
The debate kicked off when Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the FIA president, during a forum, said that he had enough drivers letting loose over the radio, even though it’s usually bleeped out on television broadcasts.
“We have to differentiate between our sport—motorsport—and rap music,” he told a room filled with drivers, team principals, bankers, sponsors, and investors.
“We’re not rappers, you know. They say the F-word how many times per minute? We aren’t on that.”
Seven-time world champion Hamilton was one of the few drivers who could see his point about language, especially regarding younger fans of the sport.
His issue concerned Ben Sulayem’s comparison to rappers, which Hamilton felt was racially tinged.
For the rest of the field, the idea of asking drivers to stop talking like sailors seemed about as absurd as asking them to race without wheels.
“For us to control our words when we are driving 300 kilometers per hour between the walls of some street track, it’s tricky,” Leclerc said. “We are humans after all.”
The irony is that these candid moments are precisely what F1’s modern success has been built on.
Until Liberty Media Corporation acquired Formula One from entrepreneur Bernie Ecclestone in 2017, most radio communications between drivers and their teams were private.
Only through F1’s widespread efforts to pull back the curtain and humanise the 20 men in the cockpits did that begin to change.
There were more cameras in garages, a fly-on-the-wall Netflix series, and, of course, more open radio channels.
“Here, probably also for entertainment purposes, things get sent out and that’s where people pick up on it,” Verstappen said.
“If you don’t broadcast it, no one will know…In general, it seems that people are a bit more sensitive to stuff.”
The conversation may continue, but drivers insist that this matter isn’t up for debate.
Cutting out cursing simply isn’t an option—especially not since it might actually serve a useful purpose in the heat of a race.
Norris explained that his occasional outbursts aren’t always momentary fits of passion.
There are instances when the most reliable way for him to hammer home the gravity of his point is to reach for a trusty F-bomb.
“Sometimes,” he added, “it has a bigger impact than saying, ‘I’m not very happy.’”
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
