Racing is the purest competition there is: two people, machines at the edge of control, and a finish line that does not care about anything but who got there first. The motorsport story taps something deeply human under all the horsepower, the obsession that makes someone risk their life for tenths of a second, the rivalry that defines two careers, the terrible cost when the car finally fails. The best of the genre knows the racing is the easy part. The drama is in the garage, the rivalry and the fear, in everything the driver gives up to chase the line.
From a legendary Formula One feud to a quarter-mile of street-racing bravado, speed is the spectacle, but obsession is the subject.
Essential Racing
The track, the obsession, the redline: the cross-media canon of speed.
The rival makes the racer
The great racing stories are rarely about beating the clock. They are about beating the other person, and the genre's finest, Rush, Ford v Ferrari, Senna, understand that a driver is defined by their rival. The competition is what gives the speed its meaning and the risk its weight.
Born to race: the films
From Le Mans to Talladega: the drivers, the rivalries, the wrecks.
Grip the wheel: the games
Sim rigs to arcade burnouts: where you take the corner yourself.
No genre belongs to gaming more completely, because racing is something you do, not watch. From the photoreal sim that models every apex to the chaos of a kart with a blue shell incoming, the controller is the closest most of us will get to the limit.
Motorsport on TV
Paddock politics, garage banter and tofu-delivery drifting on four wheels.
And on television the sport reinvented itself, turning the paddock's real-life rivalries and politics into some of the most gripping unscripted drama around.
More stories about speed and rivalry
Sports & Underdogs
Explore the Sports & Underdogs guide →The racing is the easy part. What the genre is really about is everything the driver gives up to chase a finish line that will never love them back.