In preparation for one of the most anticipated and historic seasons — Formula One’s 75th season changed its way of showing the sport to the world in F1 75.
In previous seasons, each team had their assigned dates for releasing their liveries — the designs on the cars — with their own, unique way of showcasing their car. This helped build excitement and anticipation for the season with the dates being spread out for the separate teams.
But for this year’s Diamond anniversary, Formula One changed how the cars were shown. Instead of one by one on separate dates, they brought all teams to one celebration of the sport a week before preseason testing on Feb. 26-28.
This change adds to other new developments in the sport, with races in American cities like Miami, Austin, Texas and Las Vegas being the new norm, a movie called “F1” starring Brad Pitt releasing in June and the ongoing popularity of the “Drive to Survive” series on Netflix.
The event took place at the O2 Arena in London, England, where six of 10 teams are based. It was abundantly clear that the sport wanted to showcase the 75th anniversary, as the opening video featured the many decades of cars and drivers that made this sport one of the most well-known in the world.
It kicked off with singer-songwriter and rapper Machine Gun Kelly opening the whole event with a four-minute set with fire spraying in the background, which was the most interesting musical performance of the night as the three other performers — Take That, Kane Brown and Brian Tyler — were based on different teams.
Then, the event begins with introducing the host of the show, London-based comedian Jack Whitehall, who was by far the best host for this because of his comedic abilities.
His monologue joked about the biggest storylines coming out of last season and into the new season. It all started with the beef between Mercedes driver George Russell and Red Bull driver Max Verstappen after a feud began following the Qatar Grand Prix when they both got tangled up with Russell ending up in the gravel during qualifying.
Then Whitehall gets into the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton moving from Mercedes to Ferrari, McLaren’s dominance last year and McLaren’s team principal Zak Brown’s bet to his team about having to get a tattoo of every race win.
After his monologue, the main event started with an opening video to the history of the sport’s 75 years, going from the beginning with drivers such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher, just to name a few.
After we saw the first team come out, Kick Sauber, who finished last in the previous season, opened my favorite part of the entire setup. There were big video boards that dropped down to portray a hype video for each team, which had me hooked right from the beginning.
Some groups included comedians like Munya Chawawa for Visa Cash App Racing Bulls or used one of the musical acts like Haas — the only American team on the grid — had Brown in their video right after he performed “Miles On It” to the fans. For being the only American team, having one of the most popular country artists be a part of it fit the theme their video was going for.
While a lot of the well-known and historic teams — Red Bulls, Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes and Williams — stick to their historic liveries, I was fixated on their hype videos.
While I liked Mercedes’ video, I enjoyed the mixup of their mock pit stop even more. A pit stop is when a Formula One car stops in the pit box during a race for a quick change of tires and maintenance during the race, but during the reveal, they mess up putting on the front right wheel. While it doesn’t mean this will happen on race day, it doesn’t look great for Mercedes.
In terms of a media aspect, this was a big hit with some teams, Visa, Cash App, Racing Bulls and Haas and Alpine stood out with their significant changes to their cars, and others had a chance to make a video that would be memorable.
There hasn’t been a race since Dec. 8, and it has been a long offseason with little to no news, but what Formula One did with F1 75 made the wait worth it. With 18 days to go until the season starts on March 16 in Australia, I am now eagerly waiting to see the cars on the track.
Congrats, Formula One; you have succeeded in bringing me back into the sport after a dull offseason.
