Why Formula 1 romances have us racing to the bookstores

CBC

2 days ago

When Nova Scotian writer Amy James first attended the Formula One (F1) Canadian Grand Prix in 2019, she brought a book with her, thinking she would be bored for most of the race.
By the time they waved the checkered flag, the book had never left her bag, but James left the track a fan for life.
Now, six years later, a love for motorsport has inspired her romance novel Crash Test — one of the many books currently on the market that centre around the whizzing world of race cars.
Crash Test is a second-chance romance set in the highly intense atmosphere of professional racing. The story centres around Jacob Nichols, who is involved in a massive crash. No one but Travis, the driver currently leading the championship, knows they've been secretly dating for a year. As the races trudge on and tensions grow, their love is tested both on and off the track.
James' novel is right at home in a popular new subgenre of F1 romance books published in the past year. Along with titles like Simone Soltani's Cross the Line and Madge Maril's Slipstream, these stories imagine the winding road of an athlete's love life. As an author and a fan, James says she hopes to see more motorsport love stories pop up in bookstores.
"Authors are really having fun playing with the traditional romance tropes, but just in the F1 world. I have a feeling that's going to continue to grow as the world's obsession with F1 grows," said James.
The phenomenon of sports in romance fiction is not new. According to BookNet Canada's sales data, sports romance was one of the top selling subcategories of romance novels in 2024, accounting for five per cent of total sales in Canadian Romance.
However, the majority of sports romances depict sports like hockey or football, with motorsports a more recent addition.
James says she wrote Crash Test a year before writing her debut novel, A Five-Letter Word for Love, when F1 romance was not something editors were looking for.
Picking the topic hadn't been a conscious decision at first, she says. But as she began to write, James says she quickly realized that F1 itself had all the elements of a thrilling romance.
"High stakes, tension, adrenaline — those are the same things that you see in any sport…. I think it lends itself really well to romance novels or fiction in general," she said.
Adding to the appeal, F1 takes place in beautiful locations, James said. "They travel all over the world, so you can really pick whatever location you want to."
'It's a soap opera'
Long-time F1 fans and commentators have noted an increase in media attention for the sport in recent years, notably due to the popularity of Netflix's Drive to Survive, which has given fans unprecedented access to the personal dramas of the sport that go on past the pitwall.
"It's a soap opera," said CBC Montreal's sports journalist Douglas Gelevan. "You talk about novels — it's character building. [Drivers] are characters and we're watching them play out in reality.
Speed is one part of F1's appeal, he says, but so is its elite nature.
"There's only 20 seats in the entire sport, and to get one and to keep one is so difficult and just the sheer amount of money and spectacle that goes into F1 is intoxicating in a lot of ways."
As someone who has been covering F1 in Montreal for many years, he credits Drive to Survive, in part, for the new demographic of gearheads.
"[The show] has brought in people who wouldn't have been traditional race fans in a way that has really blown my mind … And it's really peeled back the layers of the onion of the sport that were always there, but really weren't fully understood by the general public in a way that they are now."
Canadian TikToker and romance book expert Lu Aburawi is one of the many people who became an F1 fan through the Netflix docu-series.
"When I watched Drive to Survive, I thought, 'Whoa, exceptional storytelling.' There's so much more politics behind the money … it's unlike any other sport."
Tangling with the tropes
While the drama of motorsport lends itself to fiction, Aburawi notes that when it comes to romance books, "it's the responsibility of the author to take F1 as the backdrop and make it interesting," with the added task of representing those within the sport fairly, particularly the gender disparity.
In the 75 years of F1 globally, only five women have ever raced in a Grand Prix, and as campaigns to involve more women in motorsport have gained traction, they are seeing themselves reflected in the main character of these novelizations.
"A lot of these women who are playing these main characters are trying to be taken seriously. Whether they're journalists or photographers or they work for the team or marketing people, they want to be taken seriously in the industry," said Aburawi.
"So what ends up happening is that there's a sense of desperation for them to not fall into their own trope and their own stereotype when [the main character does] date an athlete."
Motorsports content creators like Montreal-based Nora Jo, or @norajooo, have even found themselves as the unintentional muse of F1 fiction.
"Two years ago, I posted this picture of me in front of a Charles Leclerc car in Monaco and it ended up being the cover of one of the F1 fanfiction[s] … I think there are like two books currently using my name and my picture just casually out there. So sometimes I feel mortified by that fact…."
Now with this summer's F1 The Movie, and legions of younger female F1 fans taking to social media to share their love of the sport, it's easier than ever to get introduced to F1.
For her part, James says she wrote Crash Test so it would work "both for someone who loves F1 or someone who doesn't know anything about F1 and literally just wants to read a romance novel."
As motorsport romance enjoys its heyday, James says she recognizes that trends in publishing move faster than Ferraris and sometimes you just have to appreciate the ride.
"If you try to chase trends in publishing I think you will inevitably never catch up because it changes so fast…. Writing a book to actually seeing it on the shelves could be many years, so [it's] just luck. I hope that what I'm writing now becomes the next niche trend."