When Formula 1 racers sit in the driver’s seat of a professional car, they’re pulling all of their skills, training, and focus to speeding a custom-made vehicle close to 200 miles per hour down a track — pushing the limits of their body and a turbocharged engine toward a crowded finish line. This is the world of motorsports director Joseph Kosinki’s new movie F1 drops viewers directly directly into the action.
The blockbuster film — filled with a the star studded cast of Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem, and all-star real life drivers like Lewis Hamilton, Lando Norris, and Max Verstappen — is just the latest examples of an industry trying to capitalize on the global sports phenomenon that is Formula 1 racing. What used to be considered NASCAR’s fussier European cousin, F1 has developed a crossover appeal in the U.S. in the past six years. The Netflix docuseries Drive To Survive, which premiered in 2019, turned the lives, dramas, and rivalries of competing F1 teams into must-watch television. Add in continuous deals between F1 and ESPN, and the support for F1 has transformed everyday Americans into fanatics, doubling viewership and turning already big names in the sport into bonafide global celebrities. While F1’s growing popularity means bigger paydays for team principals, drivers, and experts, there’s a surprising group of people who are also betting big on F1’s success: romance authors.
New Zealand author Lizzy Dent, writer of the forthcoming F1 romance She Drives Me Crazy, hasn’t been an F1 fan her entire life. But around 2021, she worked at Red Bull in the company’s content department, where she found herself surrounded by die hard fans of the sport. “I was suddenly working in this environment where F1 is worshiped. You come in in the morning and everyone’s standing in the kitchen talking about the race the night before,” she tells Rolling Stone. “ It was absolutely infectious. By the end of my time there, I was watching every single race, I had WhatsApp groups going. It was love.”
So when it came time for Dent to write her next romance book, she was watching a race when she realized the answer was staring right in front of her: a romance about a Formula 1 driver and his new team principle. “Romance readers like tension. They like drama,” Dent says. “Formula 1 provides a perfect sort of trampoline to get that. Formula 1 is high stakes. It’s super glamorous. I kind of think of my book as Drive To Survive with snogging and shagging.”
While romance and multi-million dollar vehicles thundering down asphalt tracks around the world might not seem immediately compatible, F1 must attribute some of its success in the U.S. to its dedicated female fan base. According to a 2023 report from Nielsen Sports, women make up 41 percent of the F1 fanbase, and that number grows every year. There’s an active F1 fandom online, where fans discuss how hot drivers are, make fan videos, write fanfiction, even strategize the best ways to catch Grand Prix around their schedules. Romance books are just a mainstream extension of that.
Simone Soltani, author of the F1 romances Cross The Line and Ride With Me, says much of the interest in F1 romances comes from fascination in the nitty gritty of the sport — not just the televised or streamed races. The purchase of F1 by American group Liberty Media in 2016 came with relaxed rules around social media and partnerships. People got never-before-seen looks into how drivers train and prepare for races. And they haven’t been able to get enough since.
“F1 is a growing sport. It’s evolving. We’re seeing more attention put on it, and that allows us to really see more behind the scenes stuff,” Soltani tells Rolling Stone. “There was a time where Formula 1 was a pretty small circle. It was exclusive. And now with this ability to kind of feel like you’re in the paddock, a lot more people are seeing just how entertaining the sport can be.”
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But writing F1 romance isn’t as easy as giving your main character a helmet and a fancy car. Slipstream author Madge Marill tells Rolling Stone that even if F1 fans are reading racing-based romances, they are still sticklers for technical accuracy. “It was so much research,” she laughs. “I wanted everything to be both narratively and factually correct, from tire temperatures to compounds.”
The digital success of sports romances isn’t entirely new. TikTok’s book community made hockey romances so popular in 2023 that it drove up real life ticket prices. People loved the hockey book boyfriends and brought that same lust to games — going so far that the wife of Seattle Kraken hockey player Alex Wennberg accused BookTok creators for sexually harassing her husband. F1 romance isn’t just hockey books with the main characters’ jobs switched. But Maril does note that there are similarities that make sports based romances popular choices, both for readers and authors.
“It’s about the human body and spirit and what pushes us to keep going,” Maril says. “Those things are just explored in sports romance, no matter what genre it is. Whether it’s hockey or baseball or basketball, it’s the physicality mixed with that drive to overcome something.”
Realism is important for many F1 romance readers — books that say F1 in name but don’t include the actualities of the sport can have far lower ratings on review sites like Goodreads or StoryGraph. But while romance authors are pushing for realism, they’re also using their novels to cheekily poke fun at some of the less than progressive parts of the sport. There’s an ongoing desire to see F1’s actual stars represent the diverse and vast makeup of its fans — is why Dent wrote her female main character as a woman F1 principal. (There have only been two in the sport’s history.) “Women have rarely been in leadership roles,” Dent says, noting that F1 is starting to change for the better. “Susie Wolff has launched the F1 Academy for driving [a female only league]. There’s a lot of female strategists starting to rise up in Formula 1. So it just felt important.”
Soltani also purposefully includes main characters of color in her book. While each F1 grid has a limited number of drivers, around 20 for the 10 teams involved, there have been hundreds of drivers in F1’s 75 year history. But it has remained a primarily white and male sport. When Ferrari’s driver Lewis Hamilton became the first Black driver in the league, his success and star power has helped raise fan concerns about a lack of diversity in the sport. For the romance authors who spoke to Rolling Stone, they know how the sport runs currently. But that doesn’t mean their books can’t imagine what F1 could become.
“I am a woman of color, I want to see that representation, especially in Formula 1, which is not exactly the most diverse sport,” Soltani says. “Whether that is from the drivers down to the people working on the teams. But when it comes to fiction, I can kind of idealize things and make it into something closer to what I personally want to see. I can make it my own little world.”
From Rolling Stone US
