The most reality show-adjacent sport: Formula One

Former Formula Once driver, Daniel Ricciardo, smirking at the camera.

Over the summer, I found a new obsessive interest: Formula One.

Since then, the sport has consumed my algorithm across all social media platforms, been the main topic of conversation with many people and forced me to wake up as early as 5 a.m. for a Sunday race.

The motorsport piqued my interest after my dad forced me to watch The Seat on Netflix, a documentary about Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One rookie Kimi Antonelli. I’m a sucker for a well-done sports documentary or docuseries, so I started watching Formula 1: Drive to Survive immediately after finishing the Antonelli special.

I was instantly hooked. I think part of the intrigue was that I didn’t know anything about the motorsport, and the other part was the inevitable next-level drama that unfolds in the F1 world.

The best and easiest way to explain the extreme caliber of this sport’s drama is to compare the F1 ecosystem to that of the Dance Moms world. If you know, you know.

Think of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, or FIA, as Abby Lee Miller. They oversee all 20 F1 teams (soon to be 21) and penalize drivers and teams based on rules and regulations they’ve created and amended throughout the sport’s history. At the end of the day, they have the final say over the competition.

Team principals are — without a doubt — the dance moms of F1. They lead the team and make decisions about driver strategy and execution on and off the track. There’s a clip of a team principal meeting from Season 5 of Drive to Survive that’s identical to the scene of Kelly Hyland and Abby Lee Miller arguing in the dressing room in Season 4.

Last but certainly not least, the drivers are the dancers, of course. I often compare Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to Maddie Ziegler because both were built up to be torn down. I also find a lot of similarities between McLaren’s Lando Norris and Mackenzie Ziegler — both have bubbly personalities and have grown as competitors as they’ve gotten older.

The format of competitions is fairly similar, too. Just like the girls and their moms would pack their bags and travel near and far for weekly dance competitions, drivers hop on their private jets — or “PJs” — and fly with their girlfriends to a different country every race weekend.

At this point, I’m convinced F1 is just Dance Moms with million-dollar cars and million-dollar prizes — and I’m here for it all: the whiny (and often humorous) radio transmissions, the enraging collisions on the track and the champagne sprays at the conclusion of each race.