IS MOTORSPORT ANACHRONISTIC?

Motorsport was born out of a world that, quite simply, no longer exists. At the beginning of the 20th century, racing meant proving that one car was faster, more durable, and technically superior to another. Competition had an almost direct relationship with the progress of mobility. Today, that connection is much weaker: society does not need a 220-mph single-seater to understand how we will move around in the future, and many of the central issues surrounding modern mobility — congestion, safety, energy costs, public transportation, urbanization — have little to do with who can lap a racetrack the fastest.

But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that motorsport has lost its reason to exist. That would be like arguing that sailing is anachronistic because we invented motorized ships, that equestrian sports no longer make sense because we no longer travel on horseback, or that skiing is pointless because there are far more efficient ways to get down a mountain. Sport does not necessarily have to justify its existence through utility.

In fact, from this perspective, motorsport is simply completing a transformation that has already taken place elsewhere: from a necessary technological showcase to a culturally independent form of competition.

There is also an interesting paradox: the more everyday cars become electrified, automated, digitalized, and progressively less engaging, the more valuable motorsport could become precisely as the deliberate preservation of something that is disappearing from everyday mobility. The manual transmission is technologically obsolete in many contexts, but that does not make driving a classic car with three pedals any less desirable.

Likewise, 30 years from now, we could easily be living in cities filled with autonomous vehicles while still watching 20 people drive race cars powered by synthetic fuels. There would not necessarily be any contradiction in that.

Where motorsport truly risks becoming anachronistic, however, is when it desperately tries to prove that it isn't. Part of today's communication around racing almost seems to apologize for the very existence of motorsport: every technology must have a road-car application, every racing series must present itself as a laboratory for sustainable mobility, and every decision must be justified by some form of future usefulness.

It is a culturally fragile position because it implicitly accepts the idea that motor racing needs an industrial justification in order to exist.

It doesn't necessarily. The 24 Hours of Le Mans can certainly have technological value. But it can also have value simply because pushing people and machines to their limits for 24 hours produces extraordinary competition. Just as we do not expect the marathon to develop new forms of pedestrian transportation.

Then, of course, there is the environmental question. Here the criticism is more substantial, but it needs to be put into context: the environmental impact of a championship is not limited to the fuel burned by the cars during a race. There is international logistics, the transportation of personnel and equipment, vehicle manufacturing, infrastructure, and, above all, spectator travel. Reducing the entire debate to "internal combustion engine = unsustainable motorsport" is therefore rather simplistic. Synthetic fuels, electrification, hydrogen, and hybrid systems could allow racing to continue without necessarily turning it into a replica of urban mobility.

The issue becomes even more interesting when motorsport is viewed from the human perspective. In a world that is progressively trying to remove humans from the act of driving, racing continues to build its meaning around the human being behind the wheel. Mistakes, risk, sensitivity, adaptability, courage, pressure management: these are inefficient qualities from the standpoint of mobility, but fundamental ones from the standpoint of sport.

Motorsport could become technologically less representative of everyday mobility while becoming culturally even more significant precisely because of that distance. Formula 1 in 2050 could have the same relationship with the cars we drive every day that a sailing race has with a modern ferry today: very little in terms of practical use, but a great deal in terms of technical and human challenge.

So I would argue that motorsport is not anachronistic at all. What is anachronistic is the idea that it must necessarily continue to represent the future of the automobile.

Perhaps this is the cultural shift we still struggle to accept: for more than a century, we raced because the automobile represented the future. Tomorrow, we may continue racing simply because we love to race.

And, paradoxically, that might be a much stronger justification.

© Simone Marchetti Cavalieri