I bet you’re still thinking about Max’s overtake on Hamilton in Abu Dhabi 2021.Yeah, me too.Rewatching that race and that very specific moment a thousand times made me question something, why did it feel so personal ?Was Lewis my big brother ? Ha, I WISH.
No. It felt personal because we’ve all lived moments like that. We’ve watched people surpass us at things we thought we were naturally meant to excel at. We’ve felt the panic of losing control over a story we believed was ours.That sudden loss of control over a story we assumed was already written.And that’s where something interesting starts to blur.
Like Sebastian Vettel once said, “The marks I left on track will stay until time and rain will wash them away. New ones will be put down.” That idea quietly sits between two worlds, cinema and Formula 1. Both are obsessed with time, but in different ways. Cinema captures it, freezes it, makes you live inside it. Formula 1 fights against it, tries to bend it, beat it, even though, in the end, both are still taken over by it. Which defines what exactly is the difference and similarity between them, inevitably both are washed with time either against or with the flow.
The first time I realised this was fairly recent, at the São Paulo Grand Prix 2025, I somehow fell in love with turn 9. I do not know how it happened, why it happened but it happened.
It was something about the way the cars glided around the turn, as Kimi Antonelli chased Max Verstappen.Rushing through my veins were memories of a past I hadn’t lived but had been captured through a camera lens, of things I couldn’t even imagine if it were upto me but a something cinema presented so effortlessly
It felt like time wasn’t moving normally anymore. Like every second was stretching and collapsing at the same time.And maybe that’s where Formula 1 and cinema overlap completely.
Just like cinema, Formula One unravels the parts of our stories that we keep suppressed; ego, ambition, fear, rivalry and maybe that’s exactly what pulls us towards it.