#machismo

In the culture of f1, there is the fabled and almost legendary ‘championship mentality’. As a newcomer to the sport this year, i had only heard the term ‘winning mindset’ prior to this and assumed nothing of it to be honest. Then i kept hearing it over and over and over again throughout the latter half of the season and realized that this was not going away anytime soon. This was something that clearly no one in the media was going to let go of and clearly did not want to let go of. This particular term and the dichotomy that springs up around it were very apparent to me in the three-way title battle between Lando Norris, Max Verstappen, and Oscar Piastri this year. 

This term has many different uses and means many different things to many different people thus making it a bit difficult to pin down as a concept. To make my job much easier i decided to analyze the term itself using our three main title contenders from 2025 and other historical examples to illustrate what the word can mean to people, how it can be twisted to fit narratives, and what the word should represent and why it does not represent that. 

Do Whatever It Takes

Championship mentality has an unsaid meaning that leaves it open to individual interpretation by drivers, pundits, and fans alike. When we look at the term championship mentality there is most likely a certain definition that comes to the reader’s mind. While I was doing my research, this term was never actually defined by any one person but was more like a feeling that everyone could identify when given the correct prompts.

The term has a more “i know it when i see it” basis rather than any formal declaration. The definition or its inverse come up normally in heated arguments about a driver doing what he needs to win or what a driver is not willing to do in order to win. This makes the definition hard to specifically pin down as it has become more of an understated cultural marker within the sport itself. The few times you have someone define “championship mentality” only happen when justifying their actions to the audience. When Max Verstappen got a win in the 2024 Brazilian Grand Prix after going ten races without winning he said this,

“On the track, I will put it all on the line. I am not going to back out. I want to win. That needs to be the end result. “Some people criticise me for that, but most of them don’t have a championship-winning mentality so they don’t understand. And they will never understand that kind of approach.”

The mentality is that every decision and every single thought in the sport must revolve around winning. The only path forward is supremacy and everything in the way should be cut down to size to make way for the driver. Verstappen’s comments also came as a response to the criticisms he received from British pundits after getting multiple penalties while racing against Lando Norris. Rather than saying that in his quest to win he happened to get these penalties and that was not his intention, he doubles down that he can and will do anything within his purview to achieve success. This is the championship mentality – winning at any and all costs, critics be damned. 

If we even decide to go back a little further in Formula 1 history we can see this common thread in how pundits talk about the character of someone like Michael Schumacher. An article from Motorsport Magazine writes this about Schumacher, 

“Unlike the ostensibly similar incidents of Ayrton Senna before him, these Schumacher fouls didn’t carry obvious premeditated cynical intent. They were more like competitive panic. As if in the millisecond of realisation of his potential failure to achieve the task, he couldn’t allow it to happen and all reason was short-circuited. But with Michael there was an insecurity that he might not be the fastest and therefore he had to do absolutely everything in his power to ensure anyone who might be faster couldn’t beat him.”

Like the Verstappen example, Schumacher is described as needing to work every single available option at his disposal to clinch a win and not mind the cost. While Schumacher is highly regarded as one of the greatest drivers of all time, his championship mentality is what many deem to be the decisive factor in getting him many of his wins and is a piece of his lasting legacy in the sport. And this mentality, though not necessarily celebrated, is accepted and seen as a necessary part of being a winning driver within the wider culture. 

Fans of the sport, not just the drivers and those who work in the sport, as we all know love to contribute to this image. In a substack article i found on “The Championship Mentality” , the author writes that what makes a champion is the ‘relentless hunger that makes you awful to be around and keeps you unpopular with fans’. This author’s analysis also takes into account the narratives that grow around drivers and their personas. Specifically Max Verstappen who seems to be in a league of his own when it comes to driver attitudes towards their craft in modern day Formula 1, and this is what puts him a cut above the rest. This analysis of image and mentality seems to hold up pretty well to me until the ‘unpopular with fans’ part comes up because as we can all see from various social media platforms, pundits, and professionals, Verstappen has plenty of fans. 

I am in no way saying that Verstappen does not have his detractors, but i would argue that his image and mentality jell very well with the overall image of F1 and the masculine ideals that the sport wants to portray. Even though his aggression has achieved him his fair share of detractors, because his attitude and mentality on track match so well with the dominant culture (machismo), he gets to maintain his position as the “correct” type of champion across the sport. 

Oscar Piastri’s persona also feeds into the dominant culture of machismo though in a slightly different way. Throughout the entire season that I was watching, there was no corner I could turn to where someone was not speaking to how ‘calm’ Oscar was or how ‘unflappable’ he was or how ‘mature’ he was. While Piastri is not generally considered to be as aggressive or as much of a backtalker as Verstappen, both on track and off it, his form of machismo coincides more with a stoicism that still goes along with the dominant culture but feels a little more progressive in image. I write ‘progressive’ only because it is a more understated yet still very present type of a male persona compared to the in-your-face type that we see with Verstappen. Make no mistake, it can still be used as a form of machismo when stripped down to its bare parts. 

While fans and those in the industry alike seem to agree on what makes a champion’s mentality, they also seem to agree on what does not. Does anyone remember that Lando Norris Vogue shoot? The photoshoot where we get this quote

Today I notice this brutal honesty – he’s almost subversively rational in his attitude to his sport. “I want to enjoy my life and have fun and share it with others,” he stops the chat to tell me at one moment. “For me, that’s the priority. Priority number two is to try and win the championship.” When was the last time you heard an elite athlete say anything like that?

Because I do. 

Lando’s outlook on the championship was even a bit of a shock to the person who was supposed to be giving a positive interview about his mentality surrounding the championship.

“When was the last time you heard an elite athlete say anything like that?”

The writer here is clearly surprised that this is his outlook on his career and output halfway through the season. She, whether it is implicit or explicit, knows that the dominant culture/hegemon demands that being a good driver is putting the championship above all else. Above friends, family, and even a driver’s own health and wellbeing. Norris’ candor on not wanting to sacrifice the greater things in the one life we all share seemed to have, as we all know by now, made fans of the sport think he was not up to the challenge and was weak-willed or weak-minded. 

This has been the dominant narrative about Norris before this interview ever even dropped. 

Here is a quote from Helmut Marko about Max Verstappen being able to take the 2024 WDC title

“He’s the best, he’s the fastest and, above all, he has the mental strength to theoretically fight for the world championship more than Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.”

“We know Norris has some mental weaknesses,” he continued. “I’ve read about some of the rituals he needs to do to perform well on race day.”

This came after Norris spoke extensively on the anxiety he has surrounding qualifying and race day. Norris said that he had trouble eating and drinking on Sundays due to the pressure of performing, and here we have a person who is (lol ‘was’ now) in charge of young racers saying that someone who gets nervous before a performance has a mental weakness. The fact that he felt comfortable enough to make those statements and received not too much pushback on those statements should tell you exactly what is expected and accepted within this sport’s culture. 

Norris is clearly seen as the odd man out here in terms of mentality by insiders, pundits, and fans alike because he admits to his ‘weaknesses’ or has already been perceived as weak in comparison to his competitors (i.e. Verstappen, Piastri) in the sport. As we can see, once a narrative has been started surrounding a driver, it does not take much for it to snowball out of control. This is a large issue within the sport. Once a driver becomes known for something, it becomes very hard for them to shake that perception. 

Give It All to Him 

Championship mentality’s unsaid meaning leaving it in an ‘if you know, you know’ limbo which allows it to feed into its more negative definitions and personal narratives in the f1 space because the sport is set up to favor machismo. All three of the championship contenders for the year 2025 represent one of the two sides of the championship mentality that many who are involved in this sport already subscribe to. This then feeds into narratives about competition within the sport that have no real basis in what actually goes into creating success in Formula 1. Following the 2025 season finale, this article from planet f1 really stood out to me and here’s a quote from it,

His mentality is that of the old-school generation of athletes, to whom admitting weakness – any form of weakness – is to giftwrap an advantage and present it to an opponent.

The writer here was talking about Max recounting the mistakes he made along the 2025 season. One of the big mistakes being his Canada 2025 head loss against George Russell. Notice how the author invokes pathos to recall a time from the past where drivers like Verstappen were the norm (which they kind of still are) and how admitting to weakness is tantamount to defeat. 

The narrative here is that Max Verstappen does not admit to weakness simply because he is Max Verstappen, and his image will not allow it. No matter how much his own emotions or mistakes cost him, they do not show that he has a poor championship mentality or no championship mentality at all, but that he is a champion who needs to work on himself and come back better next time. This is because Max’s current image leaves no real room for accusations of mental weakness for being angry or aggressive. Aggression is to be expected. He still has the championship mentality, but he needs to work on himself, and the rest will follow. 

This type of narrative spin also happened with Oscar Piastri this year. After leading the championship for 15 (? lol i cannot remember and don’t care enough to confirm) weeks he begins to hemorrhage points majorly after Monza and no one can seem to figure out why. In any other instance, in any other sport (and let me say this is my own personal opinion) i think most people would have said he was choking or had simply gotten the yips. Especially after Azerbaijan and COTA. This narrative that he was being sabotaged by McLaren or that he simply no longer had the support of the team can only come about when a captive audience has to make sense of why their stoic, masculine idol no longer seems so unflappable. The narrative has to correct itself to continue to make sense. 

Examples of this disbelief came in the form of his own countrymen crying foul play in their own halls of government. His own manager was setting up trial balloons for him potentially leaving the team due to this perceived mistreatment. Many of his fans want to see him walk away from his team. The audience so tied to the hegemon and its narrative does not want to see their driver as a man who can make mistakes over the course of season but as someone who was wronged in order to make sense of his reversal of fortune and keep him in line with their view of championship mentality. 

And then we have Lando Norris whose narrative already leaves him as the number one target for accusations of mental weakness, being too open about his feelings, and not being serious about the championship. When Norris was also screwing the pooch multiple times during the early part of the season, the only thing you could hear from pundits, professionals, and fans was not ‘he has made some mistakes’ or ‘he was being sabotaged’, but ‘he is mentally weak’. 

Here’s a smorgasbord of quotes talking about Norris from earlier in the 2025 season.  

“I do think Piastri is mentally stronger, even if Norris is faster on one lap,” Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko said recently. When told a few days later that his comments were controversial, the Austrian added: “But we know that – it’s nothing new.” Former F1 driver Christijan Albers says Norris stands out as a driver who is far too open about his struggles with the media. “You still have to stand there and give a confident interview,” he told Viaplay. “You can see from his attitude that he is not as mentally strong as the others. That’s really striking to me.” Another ex-F1 racer, Giedo van der Garde, agrees: “You can always say ‘Listen, I made a mistake and wasn’t completely on top of things today’. But you can tell that there is no confidence left in himself sometimes.”

I would also say (in my own opinion once again) that in literally any other sport people would have just said that he was choking or had gotten the yips and would have moved on with their lives, but this is Formula 1. We have to make an example out of someone, don’t we? We have to let everyone know what is behavior that will get you punished and what is behavior that will get you rewarded. 

When it comes to championship mentality, the narrative and how closely a driver follows the hegemon dictates how the audience will perceive their faults or lapses in character.

With Versteppen, they are mistakes. With Piastri, it is sabotage. With Norris, he has a mental weakness. And somehow, this all makes sense to a majority of people. 

Meet Him At the Finish Line

While ‘championship mentality’ does feed into machismo, it can also be used to represent a more progressive outlook on competition within the sport. We are about to slide into more personal opinion analysis once again here. Because Formula 1 is a very machismo driven sport where the competitors use one of the greatest symbols of not just power and dominance but of male power and male dominance, the car, the sport generally will lean towards who has the most power – men. And these men will lean towards what gives them power and keeps them in power – money, ownership of capital, and dictation over who can join the club and how they can join the club (dictation over the status quo). This leaves very few avenues for a more progressive outlook on ‘championship mentality’ but some kind of shine through. Like this one. 

“But most results coming from work done, rather than mentality or things. But mentality’s improved, the approach has improved, preparation has improved. “All of that has improved because of doing more work and working harder, and spending more time trying to understand things, rather than, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose now, I’ll just go for it.’ There’s maybe been two, three, four decisions along the way since then where I’m like, ‘Just risk a bit more.’ “I think much less than you think, and more of it down to just work.”

This quote from Lando himself came right after Mexico 2025 going into Brazil 2025. Instead of saying that he would do literally everything it takes to win and only that, he cites hard work and trying to understand where he was going wrong for the better half of the season to make improvements and get himself the win. 

Here we have no appeals to Norris’ aggression or stoicism nabbing him the win but instead getting the win by…studying? It’s almost inconceivable. Now this is not to say that no other drivers on the grid study their flaws and try to improve on them through hard work but this sort of statement is a marked difference compared to his competitors who do this but do not make it a large part of how they secure a win or secure their narrative. 

Every single driver I have written about today works hard every single day to deliver the best result for their team and whoever else they have cheering them on throughout the season. The only difference is that the audience seems to place more weight on the image tied up in the work and not the work itself.  

Pundits as well have chimed in with this kind of narrative. Here’s a quote from James Hinchcliffe about Lando.

“He was mad that he didn’t beat Max by more than 10 seconds, because if you look actually at the data in the Grand Prix, had Max not started from the pit lane, McLaren might not have won that race,” he noted. Talking about the British driver’s championship mindset, Hinchcliffe said, “So even though he wins the race by 10 seconds, and I was giving him a little bit of flak for it on the post-race show, I actually really respect that approach because even in the minutes after the Grand Prix, he was already like, we weren’t fast enough. How do we do better next week?”

Now once again, I am not saying that Lando Norris owns a monopoly on the ‘i am just going to work harder to improve next week and i have said nothing derogatory about my competitors’ industrial complex. He does not, and he still remains a highly flawed person, but OMG y’all. Is it not refreshing to hear a driver be written or spoken about like he’s a human being and not a cologne or the cars they drive for a living?

Once again, this is not to say that Verstappen and Piastri cannot be portrayed as people by fans, pundits, and insiders alike, but this sort of ‘oh they’re only human talk’ only really starts to ratchet up when they have made a mistake or at the very end of the season where narratives can finally take a backseat to logic and reasoning, and it never gets too loud. If it was too loud, it would disrupt the next cycle. 

With Norris’ win, we have people like his former teammate Carlos Sainz saying,

"But with his particular way of going about life and things, as much as he's got criticized a lot during the last few years for being how he is, he's world champion and everyone can keep dreaming about being F1 world champion while he goes about his own way and does things his own way.

We have pundits now saying

Norris not only proved himself wrong, but also a large number of onlookers. His speed was never in doubt, but there were questions over whether he had the mentality to harness it to full effect. By Sunday evening in Abu Dhabi, those questions had been answered.

We also have fans who now (sometimes begrudgingly) give Norris recognition for his achievement. 

Who said that you have to be obsessed with this sport to be successful? Why does racing have to be so enmeshed with a driver that their identity without it is naught? Piastri and Norris have both answered to similar things this year. 

As Piastri put it,

“I don’t think there’s one style or one perfect mould of what a Formula 1 World Champion looks like. I think they’ve all looked slightly different." “You could argue that some of them look similar in a lot of ways, but again, I think the most important thing is to try and do it the way you want to do it, and that will give you the most.”

This quote blew me away because it basically dovetails into this Norris quote from after Abu Dhabi 2025. 

"I feel like I have just managed to win it the way I wanted to win it, which was not by being someone I'm not," he said. "Not trying to be as aggressive as Max or as forceful as other champions might have been in the past, whatever it may be. I'm happy. I just won it my way.”

This should be the end of the story. We have finally come full circle and can admit that being a ruthless killer in sport gets an athlete nowhere. 

While this sort of internal cultural shift about ‘championship mentality’ sounds great and looks like progress, I sincerely doubt that will happen. 

Progress, I mean. 

‘Championship mentality’ should not mean masculinity which should not mean machismo, yet here we all are a few weeks later, and awards have been given out, drivers have solidified their roles for the next season, and new regulations have finally taken place. 

And there are still people who think that Lando Norris is unworthy of that trophy. 

Not because he made them mad (which i find legitimate). Not because he got in the way of a favorite driver (which is also legitimate). And not even because a person may think he is a bad driver (which i still find legitimate).

But because he didn’t do it the right way. 

Now what the hell does that even mean?

I want to take it back to this planet f1 article again where the author says that max only has himself to blame for losing this year. 

Here we do not get claims of ‘lacking in championship mentality’ when someone with blatant aggro uses his car to harm someone for seemingly no reason other than he was upset about something else. We are told his weakness lies in the mistakes he makes, and that he will learn from them as he always does. But would this article have even been written and Spain 2025 even be remembered had he won 2025?

I am normally not a betting woman, but I would bet the farm that it most certainly would not. I am confident it would just be another casualty on the way to victory. This would have been a footnote in the comeback fervor that would have surrounded Verstappen. 

And how, you may ask, do i know this?

When I was trying to find examples of ‘championship mentality’ from the past, I stumbled upon that Michael Schumacher article i referenced earlier, and this one quote struck me in particular. This is Nico Rosberg talking about being teammates with Michael Schumacher. 

 "it comes naturally to him, to try and psychologically get into the head of his competition. And it would be from the morning to the evening. He’d love to walk around in the engineering room topless just to show his six-pack. Just another statement of strength. It just went on and on. Infinite examples like that. “When Michael came along he was like God in the team. We had some strategy meetings and even my strategy was being discussed with Michael and not with me! Even though I was sitting there! I’m sure every day after getting up, he would think, ‘How do I make my team-mate small?’

Schumacher is a universally revered driver and universally revered winner. His driver narrative cannot be separated from his championship mentality because it was him. Constant shows of strength, small psychological digs, and maybe even points of sabotage litter this man’s career, yet, for some reason, these stories are seen as ‘just Michael being Michael’ and excused. In the same article, two people from his time at Benneton mention very questionable behaviors that Schumacher would present that the team did not like but they would “never criticise him” and “stood by and supported [Schumacher] regardless”. 

Media in the modern day could make the difference for why nobody wants to really criticise him. After all, we have already made our collective verdict on Schumacher as a legend of the sport, so no more needs to be said. Respect for his current situation could also be the culprit since no one wants to speak ill of someone in his current condition. 

Or maybe…nobody actually cares. 

That article ends with this quote about Schumacher.

"So let’s appreciate Michael Schumacher for the giant of a racing driver he was and recall him as the very warm human being behind the mask. The controversies shouldn’t define him. He was a true great."

Schumacher is an ‘exceptional individual’ who does not need to be defined by his faults when we look back on his career. When Schumacher initially carried out his underhanded tactics, he did receive his earned backlash but moments like Monaco 2006 and Jerez 1997 are basically relegated to footnotes in this article and by a lot of fans and pundits. We only need to remember the greatness and glory he brought to the sport to round out our assessments, and nothing else should cause us to withhold praise because he was a winner. And everybody loves a winner. Especially when that winner already feeds into the dominant narrative of what a champion should be. 

And honestly, even though i love to watch that clip of schumacher storming down the paddock to knock the lights out of david coulthard at the 1998 belgian grand prix, i often think to myself, why are we like this? 

Why do i sometimes love watching someone i hate lose more than watching somebody i like win? What is the argument that states that you cannot have victory without brutality? Without ruthlessness? Without pain and suffering and taking your pound of flesh?

And what the hell does it even mean to be a champion? Does it mean crushing the dreams of someone you’ve known since you were little kids over and over again? Does it mean your teammate constantly has to sacrifice himself to give you a leg up? Does it mean suddenly having lady luck on your side? Or someone choking when you needed it most? 

The point is to win the game. That is the only stated objective. You have to get the most points to win the game. That is what makes a champion. A champion must be the person with the most points at the end of the season.

At the end of the day, “championship mentality”, as we have come to know by its hegemonic definition, does not always pass muster in this very game. 

Verstappen lost this year with his narrative intact and his ‘championship mentality’. Schumacher left in 2006 not on top, and left again in 2012 not on top with his narrative and championship mentality. Piastri lost this year with his narrative and championship mentality. Norris won because he got the most points. 

And i just want to go back to that article one last time for this mark webber quote, so i can finally put you all out of your misery (if you made it this far – five thousand words mind you – you are a saint).

“[Schumacher] told me straight and just showed me what he was prepared to do in order to win. I was happy he had the respect for me to tell the truth. Michael was an absolute phenomenon, but the levels he would go to just to keep being successful… That’s the way he was wired, he was such a ferocious competitor, always on the edge. Would you be comfortable looking in the mirror and saying, ‘This is what I did to achieve success?’”

For every single champion this sport has ever had, the answer is yes. Don’t make me laugh. The answer is yes.