#polepositioned meta

therefore, the easiest way to keep them straight is to ask what the behaviour is for.

i. the three constructs of aggression

the foundational distinction in sport-aggression literature is between hostile aggression and instrumental aggression, with assertion falling outside the category of aggression entirely (Silva, 1983; Husman & Silva, 1984; Tod, Thatcher & Rahman, 2010).

hostile aggression has harm as its end. the reinforcement the actor is seeking is the opponent's suffering itself, and it is characteristically preceded by anger (Husman & Silva, 1984; Anderson & Bushman, 2002). the encyclopedia framing is simple: hostile aggression is aimed at someone who has provoked you, and its purpose is to harm for its own sake.

instrumental aggression has harm as a means. the actor may genuinely intend to injure or impede, but the reinforcement sought is some further reward: a track position, a championship, or intimidation that pays off in the next lap. It is typically not accompanied by anger; it is generally calculated, even cold. crucially, in sport, the empirical record suggests instrumental aggression is far more common than hostile aggression, and thusly more experienced athletes use more of the instrumental kind and less of the hostile kind (Coulomb & Pfister, 1998; Anderson & Bushman, 2002, on the means–end distinction).

assertion is not aggression. it is the application of legitimate force at high intensity, with no intent to harm; if an opponent is disadvantaged, that is incidental to the goal (Silva, 1983, cited in Cox, 2007; Bredemeier, 1994).

in order to understand these differences, on-track examples are best; a late-braking lunge into a hairpin, the driver having fully committed, made on a real overlap and within the rules, is assertion. there is no fundamental harm intent; the danger is a by-product of legitimate force. a defensive driver who deliberately runs a rival wide, or "leaves it late" to break a tow in order to keep a position, is doing something morer akin to instrumental aggression — the harm (denying the other car its line) is a means to the end of track position, and it is usually done without anger, as a strategic move. a driver who, having been beaten, turns in on the car that has just passed him — suzuka 1990, Jerez 1997, etc — is acting out of hostile aggression, harm pursued as its own reward.

first, intent is instrumental. a crash is not aggression. a racing incident is not aggression. the whole construct hinges on the actor wanting harm, as either end or means — which is precisely why "aggressive driving" is such a slippery phrase, and why the stewards spend their evenings adjudicating exactly the intent question the psychology demands.

ii. what is aggression?

the standard definition, inherited from social psychology, is behaviour directed toward another living being carried out with the proximate intent to cause harm, where the target is motivated to avoid it (Baron & Richardson, 1994; Anderson & Bushman, 2002). two consequences follow for formula 1 that the fandom typically seems to ignore.

second, aggression and violence are not synonyms. violence, a subtype of aggression aimed at extreme physical harm, is aggression, but most aggression is non-violent; to put it simply, all violence is aggression, but most aggression is not violent (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). in f1 the "harm" in instrumental aggression is typically competitive and psychological — denying a rival their line, getting in their head, purposely frustrating them in an attempt to cloud their judgement — rather than bodily. this is vital, because it means the most consequential aggression in this sport often leaves no contact and no debris at all. it looks, on television, like excellent racecraft.

the GAM treats a single aggressive episode as the product of inputs → internal state → appraisal and decision → outcome:

iii. the general aggression model

given the assertion/instrumental/hostile triad taxonomy previously mentioned, it's prudent to discuss the General Aggression Model (GAM; Anderson & Bushman, 2002; updated in Allen, Anderson & Bushman, 2018).

inputs arrive in two streams: person factors (traits, learned beliefs, attitudes, scripts, dispositional aggressiveness) and situation factors (provocation, frustration, aversive conditions, incentives, the presence of cues) (Anderson & Bushman, 2002).

these inputs converge on an internal state with three routes — cognition, affect, and arousal — which interact intersectionally rather than operating in isolation.

the internal state feeds appraisal and decision processes, which can be fast and automatic or slow and controlled. here, the model names a culprit most in this fandom will recognise instantly! hostile attribution bias, the tendency to read an ambiguous act as deliberately hostile (Dill, Anderson, Anderson & Deuser, 1997). the driver who is certain a rival "did that on purpose", when the data might support either reading, shows exactly this bias, and it is one of the landmark predictors of whether an episode escalates.

the power of the GAM for the purposes of meta-discussions regarding athlete psychology is that it forces a person × situation analysis rather than a personality verdict. "is X an aggressive driver?" is the malformed question. "what person-inputs does X bring, which situations load those inputs, and through which route (hot affect? pragmatic cognition? raw arousal?) do they reach the wheel?" is the answerable one. a driver with high dispositional aggressiveness and a strong hostile-attribution tendency, placed in a high-provocation, high-frustration situation (held up by a backmarker on an out-lap, undercut by a teammate, denied a place by what he reads as a dirty move), is a model-predictable escalation. change the situation, and the same athlete produces clean, controlled, instrumental racing. this is one reason why a driver can look like a scrappy underdog one season and an exacting surgeon behind the wheel the next: the person-inputs barely changed, but the situation-inputs did.

Berkowitz argued that frustration produces aggression only insofar as it generates negative affect, and that this readiness still requires aggressive cues and is mediated by higher-order appraisal. frustration does not cause aggression; it raises the predisposition to it, especially when the thwarting is unexpected (Berkowitz, 1989; Weinberg & Gould, 2011). many thwarted efforts produce no aggression.

iv. frustration

most people half-know the frustration-aggression hypothesis: thwart a person, and they lash out; the original source dictates that frustration always produces some instigation to aggress, and aggression always traces back to frustration (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer & Sears, 1939). but for the purposes of this discussion, the version i'll be using is Berkowitz's (1989).

for a grid of elite athletes this difference is monumental. every driver in the field is, by definition, constantly frustrated — the car is never fast enough, the strategy is never perfect, someone is always in your way. if frustration mechanically produced aggression, every race quickly become a demolition derby. it does not, because the route from aversive event to an aggressive act runs through appraisal, and appraisal is trainable. interesting cases are the ones where the negative affect is high, the cues are present (being forced to return a position; a perceived injustice from the stewards; a teammate handed the strategy), the thwarting was unexpected, and the controlled-appraisal route fails to intercept the automatic one. this is a specific, traceable series of events, rather than the athlete being reduced to "he's a hothead."

in sport specifically, anger rumination — the tendency to replay provoking events obsessively — is itself an antecedent of athlete aggression (Maxwell, 2004). the driver stewing over a lap-12 chop for thirty laps is not discharging anything; he is loading the GAM's affect route, lap after lap, until the controlled-appraisal route can no longer hold.

v. the myth of catharsis

folk wisdom – and a surprising amount of paddock talk – runs on catharsis theory: let the driver vent, get the red mist out, blow off steam on the radio, and he'll come back calmer. empirical records state the opposite. in Bushman's (2002) experiments, participants who vented anger (hitting a punching bag whilst ruminating on the person who angered them) were subsequently angrier and more aggressive than those who did nothing at all; rumination fed the flame rather than extinguishing it. reviews going back decades reached the same conclusion — venting does not reduce aggression and instead, tends to increase it (Geen & Quanty, 1977; Bushman, Baumeister & Stack, 1999) — to the point that Bandura had called for suspending catharsis theory in therapy as early as the 1970s. even physical exercise, the supposed cure-all pressure valve, fails, as it raises arousal rather than lowering it (Bushman, 2002).

put the catharsis findings next to the Coulomb & Pfister (1998) result — experienced athletes lean on instrumental, not hostile, aggression — and these results invert what most fans are told. hostile aggression is not the apex of competitiveness; it is sign of mental failure. the driver who lets the red mist arrive has lost the appraisal contest. the genuinely formidable athlete is the one who operates on pragmatic instrumental aggression: intimidation deployed without anger with a greater goal in mind, capable of being switched off the instant it stops benefiting them.

vi. thrill-seeking versus risk-taking

the academic distinction worth importing from this discussion is thrill-seeking versus risk-taking, often conflated and not the same thing. sensation-seeking — the trait — has the largest effect size of any personality variable in predicting participation in high-risk sport (a meta-analytic g around 0.80; see the motorsport/extreme-sport syntheses, e.g. the work summarised in Ferrara et al., 2025), and elite drivers do score higher on it than the general population. but the applied finding that should interest readers is that drivers who take personal risks commit more errors and crash more than those who do not; the great ones are thrill-seekers who have minimised gratuitous risk, not maximised it (a distinction drawn in the applied motorsport-psychology commentary, e.g. Psychology Today's reading of the racing-driver literature, 2015). this goes hand in hand with the assertion/aggression split: what looks like reckless aggression in the elite is usually controlled, goal-orientated behaviour, and the driver who is actually reckless is slower and brakes more.

vii. how do you measure it?

my recommendation for this is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007): a twelve-item, two-subscale, trait-level measure which separates aggressiveness (acceptance and willingness to use aggression to gain advantage) from anger (the affective response to provocation). this model was purpose-built specifically for competitive athletes because the general-population scales were deemed unfit. it has been translated and revalidated across languages and sports, including rugby union, where it discriminates unsanctioned hostile aggression and relates it to anger, athletic identity and professionalisation (Maxwell & Visek, 2009).

viii. end

next time a pundit calls a driver aggressive, hold the word up to the light and think. is it assertion — legitimate force with no harm-intent, the clean late dive? is it instrumental — harm as a means to position, deployed without anger? or is it the rare hot thing, hostile aggression, harm sought for its own sake, the red mist that the catharsis literature tells us cannot be vented away and only feeds itself?

Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human aggression. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 27–51.

the whole of this framework series will be discussions of different psychological models and theories in relation to formula 1. i will do my best to cite every source for accessibility. if you made it this far, tysm for reading! <3 feel free to request topics you'd like me to cover :>

ix. sources

Allen, J. J., Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2018). The General Aggression Model. Current Opinion in Psychology, 19, 75–80.

Baron, R. A., & Richardson, D. R. (1994). Human aggression (2nd ed.). Plenum Press.

Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration–aggression hypothesis: Examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106(1), 59–73.

Bredemeier, B. J. (1994). Children's moral reasoning and their assertive, aggressive, and submissive tendencies in sport and daily life. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 16(1), 1–14.

Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731.

Bushman, B. J., Baumeister, R. F., & Stack, A. D. (1999). Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence: Self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 367–376.

Coulomb, G., & Pfister, R. (1998). Aggressive behaviors in soccer as a function of competition level and time: A field study. Journal of Sport Behavior, 21(2), 222–231.

Cox, R. H. (2007). Sport psychology: Concepts and applications (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Dill, K. E., Anderson, C. A., Anderson, K. B., & Deuser, W. E. (1997). Effects of aggressive personality on social expectations and social perceptions. Journal of Research in Personality, 31(2), 272–292.

Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. Yale University Press.

Geen, R. G., & Quanty, M. B. (1977). The catharsis of aggression: An evaluation of a hypothesis. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 1–37). Academic Press.

Husman, B. F., & Silva, J. M. (1984). Aggression in sport: Definitional and theoretical considerations. In J. M. Silva & R. S. Weinberg (Eds.), Psychological foundations of sport (pp. 246–260). Human Kinetics.

Kerr, J. H. (2008). A critique of the development of the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 9(6), 721–728.

Maxwell, J. P. (2004). Anger rumination: An antecedent of athlete aggression? Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 5(3), 279–289.

Maxwell, J. P., & Moores, E. (2007). The development of a short scale measuring aggressiveness and anger in competitive athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 8(2), 179–193.

Maxwell, J. P., & Visek, A. J. (2009). Unsanctioned aggression in rugby union: Relationships among aggressiveness, anger, athletic identity, and professionalization. Aggressive Behavior, 35(3), 237–243.

Silva, J. M. (1983). The perceived legitimacy of rule-violating behavior in sport. Journal of Sport Psychology, 5(4), 438–448.

Tod, D., Thatcher, J., & Rahman, R. (2010). Sport psychology (Palgrave Insights in Psychology). Palgrave Macmillan.

Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2011). Foundations of sport and exercise psychology (5th ed.). Human Kinetics.

on telemetry: i don't actually think dependence on real-time data is the villain people make it out to be. the cars now generate vast quantities of data per lap; tyre carcass + surface temperatures, pressures, brake disc temps, ERS deployment curves, differential maps, engine mode lookups, GPS accurate to within centimetres. strategists run live tyre degradation models that can predict cliff-edges to within tenths. that 100% sounds dystopian, and i totally understand where peoples' (especially f1 old-heads who lived through 70s/80s through to 90s f1) intentions lie with the constant stream of data drivers are provided until i remember the alternative. famously, schumacher at ferrari was almost his own race engineer at times because ross brawn (their technical director from 1997-2006), baldisseri + dyer couldn't see what michael was feeling through the seat. the upside of that partnership was that schumacher could verbally communicate fuel load shifts, tyre balance, understeer migration corner-by-corner with a precision most modern drivers aren't required to develop, because the data does it for them. was that better? it produced one of the greatest competitive partnerships in the sport's history, but it also produced an environment where only a handful of drivers on the grid were capable of reading their machines at the level schumacher did. modern telemetry simplifies something the likes of schumacher had to build in his own head. for that reason, i think the telemetry issue is a complicated trade-off rather than a straightforwardly bad one.

where I draw a hard line is DRS. the drag reduction system was introduced in 2011 as a band-aid for the wake/dirty air problem. cars couldn't follow closely enough to overtake, so they bolted on a movable rear flap that opens when you're within a one-second gap through a designated zone. the 2022 ground effect regs were specifically intended to reduce that wake so DRS wouldn't be necessary, and yet here we still are. DRS doesn't reward the overtaking craft of yore; the late-braking dive, the switchback, the dummy, the corner-exit traction battle. it rewards being within a one-second window at the right point on the lap. it's as much luck as it is "push-to-pass" with extra steps. the reason it makes me grind my teeth is that overtaking is one of the most visible expressions of race-craft. it's where you actually see a driver out-think and out-execute another driver in real time, and DRS makes it so that thinking is no longer necessary. all you have to do is get close enough, and push a button.

which brings me, miserably, to 2026, because if you were hoping the regs reset would fix this — reader, they did not. the headline change was that DRS is "gone" as an overtaking aid (it's technically still on the car, used now to drop drag on every straight for energy efficiency reasons, which we'll come back to)- in its place we got Overtake Mode, originally called Manual Override Mode (MOM), which the FIA renamed because they realised MOM sounded silly. what the mechanism boils down to is when you're within one second of the car in front, you get access to a 350kW electrical deployment boost from the MGU-K. the leading car, meanwhile, starts derating; its own electrical deployment tapers off above 290 km/h and hits zero by around 355 km/h, so the chasing car gets a power surge the defending driver, by regulation, cannot match.

the trigger for the old DRS system and this new remodel under the 2026 regs is basically identical, with one second, designated activation zones. the justification is identical, too- we need to "facilitate overtaking" because the cars otherwise can't follow closely enough. the only meaningful difference is the mechanism: instead of a flap that drops drag, it's an electrical surge that hands you a power advantage your rival isn't allowed to use. for context, the old MGU-K capped at 120kW deployment (about 160 hp). the new system delivers 350kW (about 475 hp). that's nearly triple the electrical output of the previous generation, deployed asymmetrically. it's more of a band-aid applied to the dirty air problem than an elegant solution.

the reason all of this exists is the 50/50 power split. the 2026 power units run a roughly even ratio of internal combustion to electrical power, where the old regs sat closer to 80/20. the MGU-H is gone and the battery is doing vastly more work, so the cars now have to actively manage their state of charge across the lap or they'll run out of deployment down the long straights. this is why DRS-the-flap still exists in 2026. it's not for overtaking anymore, but so every car can drop drag on every straight to save energy. and it's why Overtake Mode has to exist at all, because without that asymmetric electrical boost, a chasing car running low on battery is a sitting duck on a straight against a car that's paced its energy consumption better. the "strategic" framing the FIA loves (drivers can choose when to deploy, it adds tactical depth) admits that the sport is now substantially about energy management. drivers are lifting + coasting more, not less. the amount of skill being tested isn't getting smaller, necessarily, but is shifting away from wheel-to-wheel competence and toward the pitwall dashboard.

then there's active aerodynamics; the moveable front and rear wings that switch between corner mode (high downforce) and straight mode (low drag), originally labelled X-mode and Z-mode (before the FIA rebranded those too). the official position is that this is a sustainability/efficiency feature. that the functional reality is that every car now has DRS on both wings, all the time, on every straight. they removed DRS as an overtaking gimmick and rebuilt it into the baseline operating mode of the car. as i'm sure you're thinking, the cognitive dissonance required to look at this and call it "stripping away gimmicks" is about the only impressive feat the FIA's achieved recently.

i want to be fair where i can: the cars are 30kg lighter, narrower by 100mm, with shorter wheelbases, and they're meant to be more agile and harder to drive at the limit. drop-in sustainable fuel is a breakthrough engineering achievement + matters significantly for the sport's licence to exist long-term, especially with recent emphasis on climate change sustainability strategies in motorsport as a whole. the reason these regs were written this way is partly climate-driven and partly to attract manufacturers; audi entering, cadillac coming in, honda staying for aston martin. in f1 especially, money talks, so I get it. marketing and mass appeal is important, i just don't think we should pretend the trade-off is small. the driver's job in 2026 is more about energy budgeting and battery state than it has been in any era of the sport, and the FIA's response to the resulting overtaking problem is a button that gives you 475 horsepower your rival isn't allowed to use at the same time.

here's the bit i think doesn't get said enough, and is also where i diverge from the "cars are too good now" consensus, in a way. the more sophisticated the car, the more clearly it exposes which drivers have actual skill, not less. it sounds counterintuitive, but follow me here. when the technical envelope is narrow (when every driver is wrestling a hand-shifted, no-power-steering, no-traction-control beast) natural talent gets noisier. brave drivers crash. brave drivers also occasionally win on raw aggression. when the envelope opens up and the car can do more for you, you'd think it flattens everyone toward the car's ceiling. it doesn't, though. what it actually does is reduce the variance contributed by the machinery (i.e- your car dropping 3rd, 4th, and 5th gear in the ending laps of the race, leaving you stranded in 6th gear and making finishing the race as much a feat of physical exertion as one of skill, like what happened to senna at interlagos in 1991) and let the driver's own performance distribution show through.

this is where i bring in something i'm likely to keep harping on about in future (sorry): intra-individual variability. if you watch verstappen across a season (qualifying, race pace, wet conditions, traffic, damaged cars, the Brazil 2024 monsoon, for example) his performance distribution is tight. his floor sits remarkably close to his ceiling. this is what talent and skill looks like when the car removes the noise that might otherwise be generated by human error in other areas. compare that to drivers whose ceilings are high but whose floors fall off a cliff when conditions are adversarial (qualifying-versus-race-pace splits, dry-versus-wet, clean-air-versus-traffic) and you get someone like norris, who when all seven planets and major constellations align can 100% produce a credible lap, but whose sunday-to-saturday delta and weekend-to-weekend consistency tell a different story.

in summary, no, i don't think sophistication is necessarily bad. i think the design philosophy matters more than the level of complexity. telemetry: fine, genuinely useful in 95% of cases. strategy modelling: fine. lighter, more agile cars: actively good. DRS, Overtake Mode, active aero, and any future gimmick the FIA designs to manufacture overtaking because the underlying aero or energy rules made it impossible: deeply bad. they introduce substitutes and buffers for the thing the sport is supposed to be testing. these things actively eliminate the tests of skill and driving mettle we saw in, for example, the 80s through to the early 2000s. the 2026 regs are the most aggressive version of this pattern we've ever seen; they took the dirty-air problem and the energy-management problem and solved both by handing the pursuing driver a magic button. the worst part is that the modern car, far from making it impossible to tell drivers apart, actually makes the gap between a great, skilled driver and what is simply a very fast driver more legible than it's ever been. ironically, with the modern car comes a surplus of data that gives us a better idea of who the superior driver actually is in any pairing, but asymmetric power deployment serves to paper over what the numbers tell you.