Key Points
- Formula 1 is surging in popularity Australia, particularly among women.
- The Australian F1 Grand Prix will be held on Sunday afternoon.
- Many fans are concerned by the sport's environmental impact.
The motorsport fandom in Australia is not what it used to be — it's younger, more female, and more interested in the driver drama and technical aspects of racing.
When the 'one case per person per day' rule for beer consumption was brought in for the Bathurst 1000 in 2009, drunk revellers were very unhappy at what they thought was militant policy.
Australian Formula One (F1) driver Daniel Ricciardo has worked hard at creating a 'larrikin' persona, giving cheeky remarks to the press and celebrating podium places with a 'shoey' (drinking beer out of his shoe).
And while there will definitely be drinking and larrikins as hundreds of thousands of people descend on Melbourne's Albert Park for Sunday afternoon's Australian F1 Grand Prix, the crowd will be a lot more diverse than at the city's first race in 1996.
Daniel Ricciardo celebrates a podium finish with his signature 'shoey'. Source: AAP / IPA/Sipa USA
She said she fell in love with the complexity of the sport and the different strategies deployed by each of the 20 drivers while travelling over 300 km/h — what she calls "the nerdy bits".
"I got into it through somebody I was dating at the time and watched a weekend and then I ended up falling crazy in love with it and loved it more than he did," Ms Jayde told SBS News.
"I started learning about all the rivalries between different teams, different drivers, and how complex the sport is really drew me in."
How popular is Drive to Survive among F1 fans?
Any discussion of F1's newer audience tends to circle back to the hugely popular Drive to Survive (DTS) series produced by Netflix, which is presented as a high-drama reality show starring the drivers.
Ms Jayde said though the show is undeniably part of the growth of , it has highlighted how people can be really protective of the sport.
"The term 'DTS fan' gets thrown around as a derogatory term, implying that you know nothing about the sport, and you're only there because the drivers are attractive."
"We're very lucky on our social media spaces, we've created a really safe community, but I definitely have seen comments go around saying that women have no place in the sport."
"When I started our podcast about 12 months ago, there wasn't really a space for women, or for plus size women, or the LGBTIQ+ community, partly because the sport is marketed more to men".
Another way that many have gotten into the fandom is through social media platform TikTok, which has seen an explosion of F1 related videos from drivers, brands, and content creators in recent years.
But spectator is still the overwhelming role for women in the sport, with female driver representation at a minimum, even though the rules allow any gender to compete.
The W series is 'on hold' and not racing this year, meaning German driver Sophia Flörsch, who competes in Formula 3, is the highest-profile female driver.
What is greenwashing in Formula 1?
There are some aspects of the sport that bristle for fans, such as the environmental impact of car emissions, large amounts of waste including tens of thousands of tyres a year, and the 170,000km of flying each time does to get between races.
Tom Spencer used to work in the motorsport industry and is now editor of consumer advice website .
He says he used to be a lifelong fan of F1 until it became impossible to escape the damage that it was doing to the climate and what he describes as many examples of 'greenwashing', which is a term referring to .
"The best example are its claims around 'sustainable' fuels, which are anything but sustainable, and are based on unproven technologies that will maintain high emissions to the detriment of human and planetary health," Mr Spencer told SBS News.
"These eFuels are created from captured CO2 emissions, so they rely on greenhouse gas emissions to be created in the first place, and therefore delay cuts to emissions.
"Running a car on eFuels will require five times more energy than the same car if it was 100 per cent electric, and will produce as much nitrous oxide as traditional fossil fuels."
Formula 1 cars are not the biggest contributor to emissions in the sport - it's all the flying teams do across the globe. Source: AAP / James Moy
Mr Spencer said many of the measures "sound like progress but do little to target the biggest sources of greenhouse emissions".
F1's 2030 carbon neutrality pledge does not take into account the emissions of the teams racing in the championship or the staff employed by those teams, which is where the biggest emissions in the sport come from.
"The average F1 team is responsible for 2,899 tonnes of CO2 from flying alone — which would take the typical Australian 193 years to produce," Mr Spencer said.
"The emissions created by the teams simply wouldn’t exist without F1, so it is being highly selective and misleading fans about its promise of carbon neutrality while doing nothing to tackle the vast emissions that the sport creates from transport, manufacturing and staging events."
What is sportswashing in Formula 1?
Critics and politicians have also accused the sport of 'sportswashing' for conducting races in countries that have a history of human rights violations.
Driver Lewis Hamilton seemed to indicate his unease that the sport had returned to Saudi Arabia, at a press conference in March.
After other drivers said they were happy to be back and had trust in the event, Hamilton said he had "not much really to add. All the opposite to everything they said".
"When I'm going to these different places, I still feel that as a sport going to places with human rights issues, such as this one, I feel that the sport is duty bound to raise awareness and try to leave a positive impact," he said.
"And I feel like it needs to do more. What that is, I don't have all the answers, but I think we always need to try and do more to raise awareness for things that the people are struggling with."
