Culture
Built with intention: F1 Academy’s car was chosen with the series’ goals in mind
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One of the biggest critiques F1 Academy faces from new fans is that the cars are, to their eyes, fairly slow.
Some fans have likened it to a tractor. Even Max Verstappen has questioned the speed, saying in part to De Limburger, “The cars they drive are way too slow. If you ever want to get them into Formula One, it really has to go to a higher level.” But when you ask F1 Academy, it is the right car for the right level.
F1 Academy, the all-women racing series launched in 2023, is part of the F1 pyramid and aligns with the F1 calendar for seven race weekends a year — Saudi Arabia, Miami, Barcelona, Zandvoort, Singapore, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Some tracks, like Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Saudi Arabia, are straighter than others – like the banked corners at Zandvoort. This can give the impression that F1 Academy is slow, F1 Academy competition manager Delphine Biscaye said, particularly compared to the high speeds of the F1 cars.
F1 Academy’s cars are similar to Formula Four, an equal competition level, but with a noticeable tweak that aligns F1 Academy more with F1. It’s the right choice for this series because it helps prepare the young drivers for higher competition and growth.
A general view of the F1 Academy paddock during previews ahead of F1 Academy Round 5 at Marina Bay Street Circuit on September 19, 2024, in Singapore. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)
All about perspective
The car’s speed isn’t because of a lack of talent from the drivers. It’s the nature of an F4 car and the track configurations. More often than not, fans watch F1 Academy after tuning into one of the higher series driving on the same track now that the all-women category aligns with the F1 schedule.
“If you see us and then (F1) straight after, you think we’re really slow,” Biscaye said. She pointed out that at a track like Jeddah, these young drivers, some of which are in their teens, dart between walls at 200 kph. That kind of driving, she says, is “already a huge challenge for those young drivers. Men or a woman is the same. But with the age and the experience they have, it’s actually not that slow.
“If we were challenging someone to do the same, they would see what slow is.”
However, this needs to be weighed against the advantages that the F4 car provides. This level allows drivers to train, adapt and secure crucial track time, gaining experience at F1 circuits. Biscaye added, “The fact that we are on F1 tracks makes it look slow, but it’s got massive advantage for the drivers because it’s really prepared them for the next step.”
Tatuus CEO Giovanni Delfino echoed similar points. He describes the car as “easy to drive” and one that uses the safety specs of higher categories, giving a safe environment for drivers to learn how to navigate single-seaters.
“The power of the car is enough to have the performance we desire, but it’s not that much to make the car undriveable,” he said. “All the specs of the car are exactly what you find in (Formula) Regional and then in an F3 car. But what is changing from the higher category is the power weight ratio.”
F1 Academy may not be an FIA championship, but it does follow the regulations, like the power-weight ratio that the governing body dictates for each level. The most significant step is jumping from karting into a single seater, but from there, each step as a driver climbs the motorsport ladder is about the same difference. Delfino said drivers typically stay in F4 for one or two years, adding that “after two years of Formula Four, it’s easy to go (into) a regional car.”
“So in reality, this kind of car is helping you to get used to the dimension of a single-seater car, to get used to the way to drive a single-seater car, to get used to the racing mode of a single-seater car.”
The nuts and bolts
The car is relatively similar to a Formula Four car, Biscaye said. For example, the chassis, designed by Tatuus Automobili, is the same as British, Italian and Spanish F4s. Biscaye said, “It’s only the aerodynamics that make a change.”
Delfino said the front and rear wings have been changed compared to an F4 car, which was a request from Liberty Media and F1 Academy managing director Susie Wolff. From start to finish, the process took around three months, from identifying the best shape and creating the first prototype to testing. The production, though, takes another month to six weeks, Delfino said.
“We found that as a good compromise between what we can do and what we cannot do on a Formula Four because the rear wing is not homologated,” Delfino said. “So you can do more or less what you want in terms of homologation, even if it’s not recognized as a Formula Four wing. In (the) case of the front wing, then we had to keep some of the design of the Formula Four because it’s linked to the noses.
“So there’s also a crash homologation test that we have to perform before the current homologation, but the shape of the lateral parts of the front wing were free to be moved as Liberty Media wanted.”
Homologation is the approval process where the car is checked against technical regulations and the specification is frozen for the cycle defined in the rules, according to the FIA. This change to the wings allows the F1 Academy car to resemble the F1 cars and optimizes the aerodynamics, according to Biscaye. “The better aerodynamics allow us to have more overtaking, which was also something we wanted to create a more active racing.”
F1 Academy technically is not a FIA championship. However, certain parts of the car (like the chassis, engine, and gearbox) are homologated by the FIA. Aside from the percentages, the homologation process is nearly the same for Tatuus as for F1. Delfino said, “We have to homologate the car with 100 percent of the test, 100 percent of the loads. In Formula One, you can stop 80 percent.”
According to Delfino, the changes to the wings had “zero” impact on car performance “because they are not affecting the downforce of the car or the aero kit and the aero balance of the car.”
Right car, right series
Biscaye said the car largely remained unchanged heading into the 2024 season, aside from adding an onboard camera. There aren’t big changes planned for next year, either. It’s not that they won’t ever change the car; rather, the car right now is serving its purpose.
“Our goal is really to prepare the drivers physically, mentally, and giving them all the skills and the track time they need to progress,” Biscaye said, pointing out that the cars are safe and reliable. The reliability factor is crucial because this impacts the amount of track time the drivers have. As a support series on an F1 weekend, the teams only have a practice session or two before jumping into qualifying and the two races.
Biscaye said, “If you’ve got reliability issues, that prevents the drivers from running during the free practice; they actually lose a very important track time, and very important time to get to know the track and check the conditions and some tracks we can’t test before.”
Miami and Singapore are two tracks where the drivers can’t test beforehand as both are temporary circuits. So far, from a reliability standpoint, F1 Academy has had very few issues — close to none in 2024, Biscaye said. And it’s reasonably easy to maintain, which helps keep down costs for the teams. There are also limited track operational personnel who can work on the cars. Biscaye said, “So if you go with a more complicated car, then you would need more people. So you will increase the cost not just of the car, but the overall cost of operations of the team.”
This series is more straightforward than F1, allowing teams to focus on suspension and wing set-up changes and only a single tire compound. The goal is to focus on driver preparation and training, such as learning how to manage their brakes, clutch and tires.
F1 Academy cars wait in the pit lane during F1 Academy Round 4, Race 2 at Circuit Zandvoort on August 25. (Joe Portlock/Getty Images)
“We don’t realize, but when you are in karting and go to (single seater) cars, you discover the clutch,” Biscaye said. “If you’re just 16 and you’ve never driven another car, like that your parents get, you have no driving lessons in real life. So that’s the first time you will have a clutch and have to make a real start, and that’s already a huge step.”
Mental and physical training are also major learning moments at this level. Biscaye recalled a conversation with Courtney Crone, the wild card entry in Miami, during testing at Zandvoort earlier this year. She has good experience in single-seaters, but it was her first time in a F4 car. Zandvoort is a trickier track because of the banking, which Biscaye described as “very stiff and requires a lot of strength.”
“Courtney came out of the car and told me, ‘I was not prepared for this. It’s actually very demanding compared to some of the tracks and cars I’ve driven,’” Biscaye recalled. “So if you put all of this together, or if you take Jeddah where it’s more the mental and the focus (is higher) because of the walls and it’s technical, after three days of testing, the drivers are actually tired.
“I think that also shows the F4 car is the good step. If you want to make it safe and at the same time interesting enough to really train them and to allow them to really step from go-karts to maybe Formula Regional or Euro Cup or F3, you need this in-between. F1 Academy is giving them a huge training on track but also off track with all the support they have from the F1 team or from their F1 Academy team as well.
“They’re getting this, and that’s really the package that they need to be able to progress after.”
Top photo: Joe Portlock/Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton/The Athletic
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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