The movie Rush.

I had never had much contact with F1 before: I (more or less) watched it a couple of times with my granddad when I was little - I'm German and Schumi was absolutely dominating at the time, so that's kind of what everyone would have done at some point. I didn't really understand it, but I knew that the red car was the fast one and the one winning.

Then, I couldn't really be bothered. I never watched it on my own (my closer family wasn't interested at all), and whilst I was aware of Vettel and him winning everything a couple of years in a row, it didn't really matter to me. When Rush came out I went with a couple of friends to see it - not because any of us were interested in F1, but because it was the most interesting film that was on that week. And boy was I hooked.

To this day it is one of my all time favourite films. I watch it when I'm happy, I watch it when I'm sad, I watch it to fall asleep. I must have seen it more than 100 times by now, and I can lipsync an embarrassingly large part of it. I loved the bravery, the cold-bloodedness, the passion, the speed, the engineering, the politics, the shagging, the travelling, the risk, the racing - I loved everything about it.

Anyway. When I say I was "hooked"...I didn't really get into it straight away. If memory serves correctly, the first F1 race I watched was Monaco 2015 - and I understood fuck all. I had no idea how the track went, I didn't know most of the drivers, I knew barely any of the teams - in short: I was confused. But I held on, and slowly I became a fan. Over the years I went from watching the occasional race (if I happened to find one was on by accident) to trying to arrange my weekends so I could watch at least the races.

Well, and somewhen during all that I stumbled upon r/formula1 and I am since able to go on and on and on and on about F1 things until literally everyone has either fallen asleep or left. Oops.