I don’t remember what brought me to it, possibly a conglomeration of a few things in 2017, my first full season was 2018.
My first visit to my dad’s new place in Southern California had us visiting the Newport strip, and we had a cool encounter with a friendly employee during our stop at the Mclaren showroom, who went in depth about design philosophy and the racing history of the brand, despite us clearly being tourists and not bringing any income for them in any way. It was a really cool experience got me and my dad geeked on all things Mclaren. Heading to the start of my story I’d also heard about the Honda engine woes, modern Mercedes dominance, halo outcry, and conflict between Hamilton and Vettel at Baku over the course of 2015-2017.
One morning I accidentally woke up obnoxiously early, 3 or 4ish am (very unusual for me at the time) and ended up browsing Motorsportsstreams or some other replay reddit before work or class. It just so happened to be that Australia 2018 was either just starting or had just happened within the last 24 hours, and (probably due to influences from the last paragraph) I ended up watching it live or a stream replay. I’d known of Hamilton, Vettel, Ricciardo, and maybe Alonso through Top Gear or some other media and many of the teams as well, but just about everything else was pretty much completely fresh. Midfield vs top three vs backmarkers, pit rules, anything tire related, most was a blur but I stuck all the way through. I still remember seeing all the drama unfold with HAAS’s pitstops. I was confused but fascinated, and I found myself looking up when the next races were, and watched the next round. And the next. And the next, with qualifying. I watched (I think) the whole season and slowly started figuring out how everything worked (still learning, F1 is a lot
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). I remember something from just about every race that year, except for Bahrain, so I may have actually missed that one.
So, I was hooked, and since at the time I was using pirated streams and my dad didn’t have any kind of access I was often sending him play-by-plays over text, and it got him hooked too. We eventually got to watch a race together the next time I visited California with my laptop, a few others in 2019 during family events, including Germany. We now share an F1TV Pro account and nerd out about everything F1 together, I’m actually sitting on some Mclaren team fan gear that I wasn’t able to get to him early “season” due to COVID canceling travel plans.
Not sure what purpose this story had but I’m really glad I hopped in on 2018, and I’m excited for 2020 to finally start, and to finally get my dad’s Sainz jersey and hat to him.