[jongala]

The main thing that helps me is being interested in the technology itself. The actual sport as it plays out is highly optimized/refined, as you say, but if you’re interested in what determines the performance envelope and how the different teams approach the problem of expanding it, then the whole thing takes on another dimension. The teams design and build their cars themselves with a huge range of available resources, so there is a nice mix of scrappy ingenuity, dogged refinement and luck on display.

This, together with the huge budgets involved at the front of the grid, also produces a sport that features celebrity engineers who command multi-million-dollar salaries and have dramatic contract disputes, etc. This may or may not appeal to you.

Crucially (for me), the teams are very secretive about what they are doing and why, so figuring out the mechanical and aerodynamic approaches that are in play, which ones are winning, which brilliant ideas are languishing on underfunded teams, etc. becomes a very interesting saga of nerdy armchair detective work. Even the parts of the cars that they can’t hide — the bodywork — are sophisticated enough aerodynamically that you can’t necessarily tell what is going on (or copy it for your car) without a relatively detailed understanding of how it works within an overall aerodynamic philosophy. There is a good and growing online community to get into with that.

Then you add the drivers; there are only a couple dozen to know about so its pretty accessible that way, and you get a sense as others here have said about who is under pressure, who has the talent but not the machinery and vice versa, and how they all interact.

Another interesting interaction is between drivers and cars, or driving styles and car characteristics — there are drivers that can uniquely exploit certain car characteristics, or cars that may be designed to suit certain drivers or styles, etc. and those will evolve as drivers move among teams and as the technical regulations change.

I realize typing this out that these things point more to enjoying the sport more than the races themselves. I am a lot less fixated on watching the races than I used to be, but there are still some great moments and I catch what I can. Today’s Russian GP was notably boring for the last couple of years, FWIW. For more instant gratification Moto GP might be a better bet, and most of the technical drama unfolds over there too. I still think F1 is pretty exciting though.

[wastedhours]

Interesting - now you say it, that's how I feel as well, that it's more about the sport in general than the races themselves. I'll quite happily skip watching a race, but almost never skip reading the news and rumours in between.