Midway through the 2025 Australian Grand Prix, a team-radio exchange between Charles Leclerc and his engineer became one of the season’s first unmistakable meme moments. In true Ferrari fashion “I have the seat full of water,” Leclerc reported, only for his engineer to reply, “Must be the water.” What followed was an avalanche of jokes, edits, and emoji replies across social feeds. A mundane exchange inside the cockpit was quickly transformed into shorthand for the season’s absurdity, reposted without explanation or context, just the punchline. If you got it, you reacted instantly. If you didn’t, the moment passed before there was time to ask. No one was being overtly excluded, but the rhythm was precise: participation in fandom felt less about watching races and more about keeping pace with the jokes.
In Formula 1, this kind of language is often framed as harmless, a shared sense of humour that makes fans feel part of a community. Memes, shorthand, and irony foster a feeling of belonging, especially in digital spaces that reward speed and wit. But they also do something quieter. They establish fluency as a condition of belonging, shaping who feels confident enough to speak and who stays silent instead. In a sport that prides itself on global reach and growing accessibility, it’s worth examining how fandom language operates, not just as expression, but as power.
It’s not gatekeeping in its most apparent form. This is not about people telling others that they don’t belong; no knowledge is being intentionally hoarded and guarded. Instead, what’s really at work is something softer and more complex to challenge: a set of norms that rewards speed, fluency and the right kind of response. In this sense, fandom language operates as soft power, shaping behaviour not through exclusion but through expectation. To “speak” is to demonstrate that you are “in the know”; to ask for clarifications, well, that is to slow conversations down. Over time, this imbalance teaches fans what kinds of participation and knowledge are valued, and what quietly marks you as out of step.
The Illusion of Playfulness
What makes this influence so subtle is its guise of playfulness. Memes, in-jokes, and rapid-fire reactions circulate as entertainment, a wink between fans who “get it.” During the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, McLaren executed a mid-race position swap that contradicted months of messaging about letting their drivers race freely. Online reaction followed almost instantly. Screenshots of timing towers, cropped radio captions, and single-word replies such as “papaya,” “Monza,” and “so” spread across timelines within seconds. Max Verstappen’s visible reaction to the swap, widely read by fans as dry disbelief rather than surprise, was quickly absorbed into the shorthand and reposted as punctuation rather than commentary. No one stopped to explain what had happened or why it mattered. The humour assumed shared memory: McLaren’s earlier assurances, the logic of papaya rules, and Monza’s history as a pressure point. If you had followed the discourse, you would have understood everything. If you had not, the moment moved on without you.
On the surface, fans are invited to react: laugh, emoji, share, repost, all at the speed of the next punchline. But the rapid-fire, often opaque nature of these interactions ensures that only those fluent in the language move seamlessly. Humour becomes a filtering mechanism: everyone is welcome to try, but fluency determines who truly feels at home. At the 2025 Austrian Grand Prix, Oscar Piastri’s heated on-board radio message: “Alpine still managed to find a way to f**k me over all these years later, huh?” was not broadcast live (on the standard broadcast, but could be found by watching Piastri’s realtime viewpoint provided by Sky Sports) but quickly surfaced online, clipped and shared as shorthand for lingering frustration with his former team. Fans reposted the snippet and turned it into memes and shorthand reactions, assuming shared knowledge of Piastri’s long-running contract saga with Alpine and subsequent rise at McLaren. In a fandom that is increasingly developing on X, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Discord, belonging has become less about who you are or how long you have followed the sport, and more about whether you can perform understanding in real time.
Language as Literacy
To participate and be a part of the modern F1 fandom, you must be literate in its language. Understanding a meme, deciphering a shorthand reply, or catching a subtle radio joke that most overlook is a way to feel more connected. Excuse the use of puns, but speed really matters; a joke missed by a few seconds can make you feel left behind. Familiarity with irony, sarcasm, and cultural references builds confidence, encouraging fans to engage more deeply with the broader conversation. Fans who are new, casual, or back from a hiatus quickly discover that passion alone isn’t enough – they must also master the nuances of a digital dialect that evolves exponentially, at a pace that would rival the cars on track.
Early in the 2025 season, a familiar pattern emerged around McLaren’s on-track decisions, and the ever-elusive “papaya rules”. Screenshots of timing screens, cropped radio captions, and single-word reactions under posts like “papaya,” “order,” and “interesting,” began circulating online mid-race and after. No explanation followed, and none was expected. Fans who understood were able to get the message from the one word, while others were left confused. The moment wasn’t confusing because the information wasn’t available, but because an understanding depended on having followed the discourse long before it appeared across their timeline. Across platforms, these exchanges reinforced an unspoken rule: participation requires prior knowledge, asking for context means arriving too late.
The effects of this fluency gap are rarely dramatic. There is no single moment when someone is told they do not belong; instead, exclusion accumulates through slight hesitations: the joke they don’t reply to, the reference you don’t get or ask about, the conversation you read but don’t enter. Over time, older fans, newer fans, returning fans, and fans from outside Anglophone internet culture begin to participate less, not because their interest is diminishing, but because the cost of speaking feels higher than the reward. Silence in these places is often mistaken for disengagement, when it is more accurately a response to tempo. Recognising this can foster empathy and understanding among fans of all levels.
International fans feel this particularly sharply. Like it is for many other sports, English dominates F1’s online discourse, but fluency goes beyond language alone. It requires comfort with idiom, irony, and culturally specific humour that doesn’t always translate accurately. Even fans watching the same live race can experience radically different levels of access depending on how familiar they are with the rhythms of online conversation. For example, the radio messages broadcast by Sky Sports may differ from F1TV or the national broadcast of a country, due to the level of access accredited to these networks. Still, data colonialism is a story for another day. The result? A fandom that appears to be global, while quietly privileging those who can move fastest within the narrow set of linguistic norms.
Soft Power Is Not Gatekeeping
It is tempting to describe this dynamic as gatekeeping, but doing so flattens an important distinction. Gatekeeping is about enforcement. It draws visible boundaries and relies on confrontation, whether through correction, dismissal, or outright exclusion. Soft power works differently. It does not depend on telling people they do not belong. Instead, it shapes the conditions under which participation feels possible in the first place.
Where gatekeeping blocks access, soft power guides behaviour. It establishes norms that feel natural and rarely questioned, rewarding certain forms of participation while quietly discouraging others. No one is prevented from speaking outright, but not everyone feels equally comfortable doing so. Over time, this difference matters. Some voices become louder and more confident, while others hesitate, withdraw, or remain present only as observers, without ever being told to leave.
In Formula 1 fandom, this influence is subtle. The language remains playful, ironic, and even generous on the surface. Yet by rewarding speed, familiarity, and the correct tone, fandom culture teaches fans how to participate, and just as importantly, when not to. This is why critiques of fandom language are often dismissed as humourless or overly sensitive. Jokes are meant to be fun, but humour has always been a social tool, capable of reinforcing norms as easily as it challenges them. In F1’s online spaces, irony functions less as rebellion and more as regulation, narrowing the range of voices slowly enough to feel natural.
Why This Matters Now
This dynamic matters now because F1 is in the middle of a deliberate expansion, not just in calendar size but in potential audience size. The sport wants new fans, global fans, casual fans, fans who arrive through TikTok, Netflix’s “Drive to Survive,” or a single viral clip rather than years of accumulated knowledge – this is evident through the influx of celebrity and social media influencer invites to the paddock. Nevertheless, the fandom culture has not met the same fate, nor has it expanded at the same pace. Instead, it has grown faster, denser, and more self-referential, rewarding those who keep up to speed while filtering out those who cannot. The contradiction is subtle but significant: a sport that markets itself as increasingly accessible, while cultivating a fan culture that privileges fluency over curiosity.
Digital platforms exacerbate this tension. Algorithms reward immediacy, wit, and recognisable formats, pushing fandom language toward even greater compression, leading to less space to ask questions and more incentive to perform understanding. Over time, this reshapes how fans relate to the sport itself. Emotional engagement gives way to performative participation, and caring becomes secondary to getting it right. What is lost is not the enthusiasm, but the sincerity – the slower, messier kind of connection that sustains fandom beyond the joke cycle.
Belonging, Slowed Down
None of this is an argument against humour (not like humour can be avoided in F1 with the antics and mishaps in which drivers and teams incur on the daily – looking at you, Ferrari), or against the shared pleasure of a shared reference). Language is what gives the fandom texture; it is what makes watching together feel like a community rather than an individual. But when fluency becomes the price of admission, something subtle shifts. Understanding must be immediate to count, and curiosity begins to feel like a liability rather than an invitation. The joy of “getting it” remains, but it increasingly belongs to those who already know how to keep up.
The question, then, is not whether the Formula 1 fandom should be more serious or more playful, but what kind of belonging it chooses to practice. A culture organised around speed will always reward those who arrive early and stay consistently present. A culture organised around care makes room for pauses, for questions, for people who enter the conversation out of sequence. As the sport continues to expand, the language its fans use may prove consequential, as the stories it tells shape not only who is visible but also who feels permitted to stay.
In a sport defined by speed, the slowest thing we make space for may be care.
By Hannah Kate Costello, Coeditor