{"id":44483,"date":"2025-08-05T01:27:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T01:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/44483\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T01:27:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T01:27:12","slug":"f1-isnt-just-in-hollywood-its-in-romance-and-booktok-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/44483\/","title":{"rendered":"F1 Isn’t Just in Hollywood \u2014\u00a0It’s in Romance and BookTok, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Formula 1 racers sit in the driver\u2019s seat of a professional car, they\u2019re pulling all of their skills, training, and focus to speeding a custom-made vehicle close to 200 miles per hour down a track \u2014 pushing the limits of their body and a turbocharged engine toward a crowded finish line. This is the world of motorsports director Joseph Kosinki\u2019s new movie F1<\/a><\/a> drops viewers directly directly into the action. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe blockbuster film \u2014\u00a0filled 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 \u2014 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\u2019s fussier European cousin, F1 has developed a crossover appeal in the U.S. in the past six years. The Netflix docuseries Drive To Survive<\/a>, 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<\/a> and turning already big names in the sport into bonafide global celebrities. While F1\u2019s growing popularity means bigger paydays for team principals, drivers, and experts, there\u2019s a surprising group of people who are also betting big on F1\u2019s success: romance authors.<\/p>\n

\n\tNew Zealand author Lizzy Dent, writer of the forthcoming F1 romance Drive Me Crazy, hasn\u2019t been an F1 fan her entire life. But around 2021, she worked at Red Bull in the company\u2019s content department, where she found herself surrounded by die hard fans of the sport. \u201cI was suddenly working in this environment where F1 is worshiped. You come in in the morning and everyone\u2019s standing in the kitchen talking about the race the night before,\u201d she tells Rolling Stone. \u201c 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tSo 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. \u201cRomance readers like tension. They like drama,\u201d Dent says. \u201cFormula 1 provides a perfect sort of trampoline to get that. Formula 1 is high stakes. It\u2019s super glamorous.\u00a0 I kind of think of my book as Drive To Survive with snogging and shagging.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 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<\/a>, women make up 41 percent of the F1 fanbase, and that number grows every year. There\u2019s 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<\/a> are just a mainstream extension of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSimone Soltani, author of the F1 romances Cross The Line and Ride With Me, says much of the interest in F1 romances comes from fascination\u00a0 in the nitty gritty of the sport \u2014\u00a0not just the televised or streamed races. The purchase of F1 by American group Liberty Media in 2016 <\/a>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\u2019t been able to get enough since.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cF1 is a growing sport. It\u2019s evolving. We\u2019re seeing more attention put on it, and that allows us to really see more behind the scenes stuff,\u201d Soltani tells Rolling Stone. \u201cThere 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\u2019re in the paddock, a lot more people are seeing just how entertaining the sport can be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tBut writing F1 romance isn\u2019t 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. \u201cIt was so much research,\u201d she laughs. \u201cI wanted everything to be both narratively and factually correct, from tire temperatures to compounds.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe digital success of sports romances isn\u2019t entirely new. TikTok\u2019s book community<\/a> 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 \u2014\u00a0going so far that the wife of Seattle Kraken hockey player Alex Wennberg accused BookTok<\/a> creators for sexually harassing her husband<\/a>. F1 romance isn\u2019t just hockey books with the main characters\u2019 jobs switched. But Maril does note that there are similarities that make sports based romances popular choices, both for readers and authors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s about the human body and spirit and what pushes us to keep going,\u201d Maril says. \u201cThose things are just explored in sports romance, no matter what genre it is. Whether it\u2019s hockey or baseball or basketball, it\u2019s the physicality mixed with that drive to overcome something.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tRealism is important for many F1 romance readers\u00a0 \u2014 books that say F1 in name but don\u2019t include the actualities of the sport can have far lower ratings on review sites like Goodreads<\/a> or StoryGraph<\/a>. But while romance authors are pushing for realism, they\u2019re also using their novels to cheekily poke fun at some of the less than progressive parts of the sport. There\u2019s an ongoing desire to see F1\u2019s actual stars represent the diverse and vast makeup of its fans \u2014\u00a0is why Dent wrote her female main character as a woman F1 principal. (There have only been two in the sport\u2019s history.) \u201cWomen have rarely been in leadership roles,\u201d Dent says, noting that F1 is starting to change for the better. \u201cSusie Wolff has launched the F1 Academy for driving [a female only league]. There\u2019s a lot of female strategists starting to rise up in Formula 1. So it just felt important.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tSoltani 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\u2019s 75 year history. But it has remained a primarily white and male sport. When Ferrari\u2019s 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\u2019t mean their books can\u2019t imagine what F1 could become.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI am a woman of color, I want to see that representation, especially in Formula 1, which is not exactly the most diverse sport,\u201d Soltani says. \u201cWhether 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Formula 1 racers sit in the driver\u2019s seat of a professional car, they\u2019re pulling all of their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[457,25392,1687,372,7318,6537,101,617,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-44483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-books","tag-booktok","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula-one","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-tiktok","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}