Making friends these days can be hard, especially if you’re a racing series beholden to oppressive regimes with horrible records of human rights abuses. You don’t have to worry about Formula 1 getting lonely anymore, though. Not after it announced that Jack Whitehall is now an official Friend of F1. How they found each other, who’s to say, but Whitehall’s willingness to help whitewash Saudi Arabia’s image at the Riyadh Comedy Festival probably didn’t hurt. It’s important for friends to have something in common, you know?
Personally, I don’t think I’d be friends with a racing series, mostly because I like my friends to be people. But I bet there are plenty of race car drivers who could use a new friend. Being on the road that much probably gets old fast, and while racing people are (in my experience, at least) much more enjoyable to spend time with than the average person, if you spend all your time socializing with coworkers and colleagues, it’s much harder to safely gossip about said coworkers and colleagues. That’s where you, the normal friend come in.
In the cool friend zone
The question is, if you could only be friends with one driver, who would you pick? Maybe it’s an F1 driver, but there are so many other non-F1 drivers out there, there’s no reason to stick to F1. Nor should you pick a driver simply because they’re your favorite. Max Verstappen is very good at racing, but as Daniil Kvyat can confirm, he might also start dating your ex right after you break up, which definitely moves Max down a few rungs on the friendship ladder.
I’ll also allow you to pick someone who’s retired, but let’s leave the dead in the ground. Reanimating corpses gets weird fast, and there are far more ways that could go wrong than right. More importantly, allowing retired drivers in the mix means I get to pick my fellow tennis-appreciator, Daniel Ricciardo. He just seems like the most fun, and I guarantee he’d support my plans to get an American Aquarium/Dale Earnhardt tattoo. The distance would be annoying, but we’ve both probably got miles to burn, and the internet helps make the world a smaller place.
What about you, though? Who’s your pick? Let us know which race car driver you’d actually want to be friends down in the comments.
