Formula One Racing’s transition from being a pure sport to a form of entertainment for large crowds of people (if, indeed, the transition is not complete already) is part of a larger phenomenon that neither soccer nor the Olympics has been able to avoid. Added to this is the fact that F1 drivers are now in the top salary bracket for all professional athletes, with a truly staggering amount of money also changing hands over television broadcasting rights and sponsorship deals. An army of public relations specialists, publishers and members of the mass media has sprung up in the wake of F1’s success, and now that the sport is catching on in the US, there are undoubtedly a great many people who are laughing all the way to the bank.

But is F1 really a form of “entertainment”, similar to the motion picture industry? Admittedly, F1 drivers have a movie star presence about them, with their team managers playing the part of their directors. And because it is just another event that audiences pay money to see, it is probably no overstatement to say that F1 is entertainment, is show business. While Hollywood’s influence on the movie industry is enormous and cannot be ignored, the flip side of the coin is that European filmmakers (which is to say, perhaps, everyone outside of Hollywood) lament the lack of talent among Hollywood actors, and decry the fact that Hollywood has taken commercialism to a pitch of excess. But just as the world of European film makes clever use of Hollywood, European-born F1 makes clever use of America, which keeps the proud Europeans in business even as they look on stubbornly from the sidelines.

This European pride of being in a different league, and of coming from a different background, than America and Japan, which are the world’s two biggest automobile manufacturers, springs from the fact that when it comes to making a Formula One race car, Japan and America simply cannot keep up. When you look as a casual observer upon all of the hoopla surrounding F1—which seems to get flashier and glitzier with each passing year—you will see that for engineers who push the envelope of the cutting edge of technology in order to shave one more hundredth of a second off of a lap time, F1 is nothing more than an arena in which they compete to hone their technological skills. For those who live for the pure, childlike joy of running a car they’ve built faster than any other kid on the playground, exorbitant salaries and broadcasting rights don’t mean a thing. This is yet another area in which the difference between countries that build to make money, and countries that build to make the best, becomes all too clear.