POLL: When Did You Start Watching Formula One?

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When Did You Start Watching Formula One?

  • Before 1970

  • 1970-1975

  • 1975-1980

  • 1980-1985

  • 1985-1990

  • 1990-1995

  • 1995-2000

  • 2000-2005

  • 2005-2010

  • 2010-2015

  • 2015-2020

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My earliest memory of Formula One is Damon Hill in a Rothmans Williams. I very clearly remember seeing it on the telly at my grandparents house so I'll say 1996 (aged 5).

I played F1 97, 98 and 99 a lot on the Playstation and did watch a lot of those seasons, particularly Spa 1998 and Coulthard winning at Monza in 1997 but 1999 was the first season I made a conscious effort and watched every race, start to finish, and kept up with the news on Teletext and in Autosport (aged 7 - March is before my birthday).
 
I put 2000-2005 though that's not strictly speaking accurate. In my pre-teen years I knew most of the big names and I remember seeing snippets of races around 2002/2003 and loosely supporting Eddie Irvine in a Jaguar. I was more interested in the cars themselves than the drivers or the sport at large. In January 2007 I bought a PS3 and with it downloaded the demo of Formula One: Championship Edition and was blown away by the realism and immersiveness, despite not following the sport at all and only know Alonso was a double champion because it said so in the Guinness Book of Records.

A couple of months later the 2007 season began and Hamilton came onto the scene, and obviously caught a lot of attention for being the first black driver and signing for a top-flight team, and reinvigorated a lot of interest in the UK as the first genuine title challenger since Damon Hill. I remember watching Indianapolis, a soaking-wet Japan and Brazil that year but nothing else, I spent so much time playing GT4 that I was more interested in endurance racing (but again mostly in the cars rather than the drivers) than Formula One. In April 2008 I was browsing the TV guide and saw the Bahrain Grand Prix was on. The race itself wasn't particular eventful besides Kubica being on pole and Alonso allegedly brake-testing Hamilton, but nonetheless I was hooked, I decided to start supporting Vettel because at that time he was at the bottom of the standings having not finished a single race, and since then I've missed fewer than ten races.
 
My earliest F1 memory is a bit fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure it was the 90 Hungary GP. The first race I can say I really remember start to finish was the 91 Japanese GP, but I have some flashes from that whole season.

I had the fortune to be 7 years old when Senna got his third championship, and being Brazilian, I got the bug and went on following F1 closely up until 2012-2013. Endured Barrichello's comical lack of good luck trough it all, never expected Massa to get anywhere, and to me, Alonso and Hamilton are the best drivers I saw. My favorite seasons were 1999, 2003, 2005 (mainly due to the last hurrah of the V10), 2007 was crazy good and so 2008. 2009 was a bittersweet one because I really cheered for Barrichello and I think he had a great shot at the title that year. I also had the opportunity to go to both 2001 and 2011 Brazilian GPs: I'll never forget the V10 scream shaking my body down the main straight on friday!

2012 to 2013 came and I got bored with it, thought it was getting too much artificial and I simply couldn't handle Vettel being so successful (always thought he was an average to good driver) I never liked Schumacher, but I respected him and got a kick hoping to see his car braking and he defeated, but Vettel? Meh. So I simply stopped.

I've been trying to get back but I can watch a full Le Mans, any WEC race to be fair, WRC, freakin FE, any GT endurance race, obscure GT events, IMSA, old F1 races, Indy - would love to follow Nascar, but the ads bombardment really gets into my nerves - but I can't watch a full F1 race: either I get distracted by anything else or fall asleep (here, in Brazil, the races are pretty much always Sunday morning), so I don't know. Maybe I'll try again this season, but I feel I simply don't care about it.
 
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I can remember a lot from the 2000-2005 era - Brazil 2003 especially - but 2007 was the year I fully started to follow everything from qualifying onwards. I still put 2000-2005 though.
 
Dad started watching it after we first got satellite, and I distinctly remember the blazing red Footwork cars with the blue cockpit and the Monaco race that only like 3 drivers finished; so it would have been 1996.
 
I think it had to be sometime in the early 80's or so when ABC would broadcast the Monaco Grand Prix on a tape delayed basis here in the US. But we didn't get any kind of consistent coverage here in the US until Speed Channel started in the late 90's so that's when I really started watching all of the races.
 
I went with 2000-2005 because that's when I was actively watching it, though I think I'd had a passing interest since about 1996.

Stopped in about '09, and since lost interest.
 
I remember the build-up to the 2003 Austrian GP when Räikkönen held a narrow lead over Schumacher along with some of the live race coverage plus snippets of the Sepang highlights that year. No recollection of any earlier snippets but I definitely got a taste of F1 around 2000/2001 while watching it with my dad.

Wasn't fully invested in the championship until the 2004 season. I missed Melbourne and Sepang but caught the remainder.
 
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I caught bits and pieces around 1999 and 2000. I didn't start fully watching until around 2001.
 
I have to say that I am so far surprised that the plurality has been this side of 2000.
 
Early/Mid 80's for me. There wasn't much in the way of live coverage in those days and you had to wait for the Sunday night highlights in "Grand Prix" which was on late, and random times, on BBC2*


* except for viewers in Scotland.
 
Liquid
I have to say that I am so far surprised that the plurality has been this side of 2000.
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You have to remember that quite a lot of people on the forum are relatively young. I'm 25, and my earliest memories are around the age of 5, which is already 2000. People born after me, and especially people born in 2000 Definitely have no chance of starting in the 90's.
 
Grew up watching with my dad in the early 2000s but I remember my first season of fully following all the storylines and races being 2008.
 
I remember first watching the Spanish Grand Prix back in 2005 and there my grandpa saw me watching the race and there he taught me all about F1 (he started watching F1 around the era of Graham Hill and such) and there I asked him who's that guy in the silver car that won the race and from there I tuned in to F1 since.
 
The first race I remember watching was the 1996 Australian GP. I gravitated to the British driver winning in a British car - apparantly those things were important when I was 9 - and became a Damon Hill fan, transfering my allegience to Jenson Button 4 years later. I still don't know what prompted me to watch that race in March '96, or how I found it, as none of my family were even slightly interested in cars; I can only assume my 9 year old body clock hadn't figured out what a lie in was and I was probably looking for cartoons at 5.30am. I've been following F1 ever since.
 
Parts of 2001, 2002 was the first full season I watched. To survive as a fan after 2002, I must have been a dedicated maniac. :lol:
 
I started watching in 2005 and missed all that Schumacher greatness. I have watched every season since then.

Before that I watched the ALMS series and 24 Hours of Le Mans, possibly some WRC,
 
I started reading about F1 in 1961 as Phil Hill was becoming world champion. When ABC's Wide World of Sports began broadcasting F1 in the US, that's when I first began watching. I recall the thrilling GP of Mexico in '64 when, toward the finish, on alternate laps either Jim Clark or Graham Hill or John Surtees was going to be world champion. Thanks to a convenient ramming of Hill by Lorenzo Bandini (boo, hiss), Surtees got the nod. I was hooked.
 
I first started watching F1 in 2007. Back in those days, dad had to tape the races so we could watch them back on Monday night. We did this until the live free-to-air coverage was axed in 2015. I knew about Ferrari so I naturally rooted for Kimi Raikonnen, who of course won the championship that year. I still remember the pivotal moment where Hamilton got his car beached at Shanghai, effectively losing the championship right there and then. I also remember the last race in Brazil.
 
'99? Preferred CART and the IRL at the time (still do), but wasn't until Montoya made the jump did I make my 11 year old self get up to watch F1. Would say in the late naughts and early teens, college intervened and found myself not following much of anything outside college football. Sadly missed much of Mark Webber's later career, as I always liked him, but rewatching many of those races over the last few months, I felt I didn't miss anything historically important from that time.
 
First race I ever watched flag to flag on TV was South Africa 1992, but that's only because we didn't get full TV coverage in Canada before then. First real world experience with F1 was the 1990 Canadian GP, won by Ayrton Senna, which immediately made him my favorite driver at the time, and made McLaren my favorite team, still to this day.
 
An infant me was plopped in front of mid 90s F1 immediately as a lucky charm for Damon Hill. It went OK, I guess...
 
96 Japanese Grand Prix I'm pretty sure was the first race I watched, used to watch the odd races until 2006 when i watched full time from that point on as I had a TV in my room, viewing times are bad for Australia so I rarely got to watch F1 races before then usually only the Aus and Asian races where good on time here.
 
Started mostly reading about F1 races (Road and Track) in the early 70s, not many on TV then. Remember being excited when Ferrari hired Lauda.
 
Being in the U.S., I didn't really get to watch Formula 1. I was very much into NASCAR in the 90's growing up.

Oddly, my first real exposure to F1 was watching Formula 1 Decade on Speed Channel here in the States. It was 2004 and the first race I happened upon was the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix...:scared: I heard about Senna's death when I was a kid but didn't know the details. I think they only ran that program for two years, though I could be wrong. What's interesting is I don't remember actually seeing a current race from those years. If Speed did show the races, it was always early morning or the middle of the night, meaning I never saw them. It wasn't until I moved out of my folks' home and got DVR that I started watching on a consistent basis in 2017. I'm a late bloomer. :lol:
 
2003 Austria is the earliest I remember. 2004 was my first full season...not the best of starts, if I'm honest. Good job things got good for a long time after that.
 
@Dolph Drago @YoungGTPlayer

As the two voters who have so far selected 2015-2020, what is your opinion on Formula One? I'm interested considering the fact that you're relatively new to it all and you've been watching through a period of arguably boring dominance.
 

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