DNF: Did Not Feel

In Formula 1, chaos used to feel rare. A sudden downpour. A late safety car. A last-lap overtake. You could almost hear collective heartbeats pause around the world.

Now, the drama scrolls past at 60 frames per second.

Drive to Survive rewinds it. Twitter replays it. Instagram captions it. TikTok remixes it. And before the cooldown room interviews are over, there are reaction videos, data breakdowns, memes, and a dozen think-pieces telling you exactly why you should care, even if you've already stopped caring.

The noise keeps growing. The emotions don’t.

The Overexposed Overtake

When everything is framed as historic, nothing feels historic. 

We are flooded with highlight after highlight until even the spectacular starts to feel ordinary. A double overtake that would have dominated headlines in 2005 becomes just another 30-second clip buried between two memes.

Fans don’t lack access. They lack space. Space to sit with a moment. Space to replay it in their heads before someone else decides what it meant.

F1 has never been more visible, yet somehow it has never felt more distant.

Narratives on Autopilot

The content machine rewards volume, not connection.

Broadcasters recycle old storylines because there is no time to build new ones. Commentators lean on familiar rivalries like Max vs. Lewis or Ferrari vs. strategy, even when the reality on track is more complicated.

And fans, conditioned by the endless loop of clips and headlines, consume without really connecting. We scroll faster, react quicker, but invest less.

It is not apathy. It is exhaustion disguised as engagement.

Relearning How to Feel

This is not about switching off. It is about slowing down.

Maybe we need to reclaim some scarcity. To let silence do its work. To accept that not every team radio needs a remix and not every lock-up needs a meme.

Because when everything is packaged to provoke, genuine emotion becomes harder to find. And in a sport built on fractions of a second, feeling nothing is the real DNF.

Formula 1 does not need more content. It needs more room to breathe.