F1 Exhibition’s Curator and Producer Tim Harvey at the Formula One exhibition in Toronto. The F1 Exhibition opened on May 3 and runs until mid-July.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
In early 2017, after Liberty Media took over control of Formula One from British impresario Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s new custodians realized they had a problem. Research suggested there might be hundreds of millions of potential F1 fans around the world. But physical constraints that limited the number of races to two dozen or so each year meant that total in-person attendance could only hit something in the neighbourhood of six million. Escalating ticket prices were going to make the sport even less accessible.
At the time, F1 was mulling various ways to extend the company’s intellectual property, including a documentary series about one of the teams on the circuit; that morphed into a larger reality-TV project, using the full F1 cast of characters, which became known as Drive to Survive. The show, now in its sixth season, became a global hit and created millions of new young fans.
Even so, that still left the original issue. “There is a huge Formula One audience that is only experiencing it through their television sets,” said Tim Harvey, a partner in the British-based events company Pathfinder.
Harvey met with a pair of F1 executives who wanted to know if he could create an in-person experience for fans at a price point that was more accessible than a race and that would, as he said, “really celebrate the heritage of the sport, and also show where it’s going in the future.”
The result was Formula One: The Exhibition, a museum-grade installation of artifacts, videos, and interactive exhibits that offers fans a dive into the history of the sport, some motorized eye candy, and a few glimpses behind the curtain of F1 magic (i.e. engineering). After opening in Madrid last year, the show moved to Vienna, where it is still running. The North American iteration opened Friday in Toronto at 1 Yonge Street, in the former printing press room of the Toronto Star, where it is tentatively scheduled to run through midsummer before moving to another (as yet undetermined) city.
The show is a co-production of Harvey’s company with Round Room, a New York-based live-events outfit previously owned by the Canadian film distributor Entertainment One, which produces family friendly touring theatrical shows such as Peppa Pig Live and immersive experiences such as Jurassic World: The Exhibition, a genre that has become a popular form of entertainment.
“One of the big thrusts of F1 as our partner is, they want to bridge the knowledge gap,” said Jonathan Linden, a Toronto-born partner at Round Room who, like Harvey, was interviewed amid the displays earlier this week while workers put the finishing touches on the show. “They want more recent fans to better understand the sport, and stay for a while. There’s no F1 Hall of Fame. There’s no real way to engage with F1, other than the Grand Prix weekends. There’s 24, they’re in fairly specific geographies. So this is an opportunity to tell the story of F1.”
F1 helmets on display at the Formula One exhibition in Toronto. The collection goes back to 1970 and includes icons such as Gilles Villeneuve's 1979 helmet.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The exhibition spans six sections, beginning with a walk through the history of Grand Prix racing, from its origin in the late 1880s with road racing around Paris – the wall text notes that the “top speed is 26 mph and all the drivers stop for lunch” – to purpose-built circuits and its development as a spectator sport, and its growth into a billion-dollar business under Ecclestone. There are displays about the sport’s relationship with Hollywood, as well as its occasional role in geopolitics, including a reproduction of a 1982 letter Ecclestone wrote to Leonid Brezhnev in response to the Soviet Union leader’s request for a proposal for a Moscow Grand Prix.
And it doesn’t shy away from the scandals that have occasionally engulfed the sport.
Harvey said that, in the early discussions with F1 he laid out the editorial approach he wanted to take with the show. “I said to them, ‘It’s really important that you don’t look at this as a brand activation’” – the term used by marketers to refer to elements of a campaign that enable consumers to interact with a brand, such as a ride sponsored by a beer company at a music festival. “If we’re asking people to spend money to come to this, it can’t feel like a marketing exercise.
“It had to be an authentic, independently curated show that leaves no truth untold, that provides a platform for lots of different voices. Formula One owns the commercial rights, but they don’t own the history of the sport. That is owned by lots of people: teams, drivers. There’s lots of people that should have a voice in a project like this.”
To that end, Harvey says, the production interviewed more than 80 people, including dozens of drivers, and gathered more than 200 hours of video. “Jackie Stewart gave us four hours – just talk, talk, talk, talk. Because we’re not asking him about what he thought about Esteban Ocon’s drive last weekend, we’re asking about how Formula One′s past becoming a safer sport first started to emerge in the late 1960s, what it was actually like to drive in that period.”
Visitors can watch videos about the process of designing and building a new F1 car, as well as the physics of the machines. They’ll also be up close to five cars, including two modern vehicles (a Red Bull, and a Haas VF-20 that was driven by Romain Grosjean), the Lancia D50 driven by Alberto Ascari in 1955, the 1987 Lotus 99T driven by Ayrton Senna, and Graham Hill’s suave BRM P578 from 1962. (Per conventional museum protocol, no touching those pieces.)
The 2020 Haas VF-20 F1 race car, driven by Romain Grosjean, on display at the Formula 1 Exhibition.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
There is also a section on the development of drivers that features an old Go-Kart driven by Nigel Mansell as a kid. One video includes the parents of Pierre Gasly, who described the sacrifices the family made to help their son land a Formula One seat.
“They were bankrupt, they had bailers turn up at the house,” Harvey noted. “Pierre is a wonderful supporter of this project. He’s been very candid with us. It was an emotional interview that he did with us, and it’s an important story for people to understand. It’s not like kids getting into football, where you have to drive the kid around. This bankrupts families.”
Harvey paused, then seemed to think better of what he’d said. “Well, it doesn’t bankrupt families,” he said quietly. “But there’s an investment, a commitment that goes beyond other sports.”
The official Formula 1 Exhibition is making its North American debut in Toronto. Curator and producer Tim Harvey shares the backstories behind three displays at the exhibition, which covers the sport's pursuit of speed and enhanced safety.
The Globe and Mail
The exhibition also doesn’t shy away from the scores of drivers who have been killed while competing, including Canadian legend Gilles Villeneuve, who is acknowledged with a special display in the hushed, mournful room titled Fallen Heroes. After that, visitors walk past a chilling display of part of the remains from a fiery 2020 crash involving Grosjean, who walked away.
The show wraps up with a five-minute video, displayed on three sides of an enclosed room, featuring clips of races sourced from the archives, all set to a propulsive music soundtrack.
Though there is, of course, one more room still to come: The gift shop, where, if you’re feeling bad that you can’t get to a real Grand Prix weekend, you can still spend as if you are.
Check The Globe and Mail’s website to see The pursuit of speed
Simon Houpt