What kind of Formula 1 books are being published right now?

Let's see what recent F1 releases have in common!

If you know me, then I think it's no secret that I've been working on a book proposal centering on the American experience of F1 (and if you're an agent/know an agent who is interested, I am actively seeking representation!). Part of that process has been reading as many of the F1-related books that have been released in the past year as I can in order to understand their appeal; why they've been published, why now is the best time to publish them, who represented them, etc.

My primary goal here was basically market research (i.e. to see how my book would fit into what's currently being released), but I was able to draw some really interesting conclusions that I think other folks might enjoy!

Let's get started with a rundown of the books I've been reading and some of the more basic facts about them — and then we'll dig a little deeper.

My F1 reading list

At the start of 2025, I dropped my reading list for the year. This featured a “market research” section composed of all the major recent releases I could find, and those are still the books I'll be referring to here! But today, I also want to include additional info.

F1 Racing Confidential by Giles Richards

• Length: 304 pages

• Author status: F1 journalist

• Agent: Ross Hamilton (editor)

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

• Blurbs from: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly

• Basic premise: Unveil the inner workings of the Formula 1 scene with contributions from high-profile personnel.

Remarkable Motor Races by Andrew Benson

• Length: 224 pages

• Author status: F1 journalist

• Agent: Frank Hopkinson

• Publisher: Pavilion Books

• Blurbs from: Matt Bishop, Autosport Magazine, Motorsport News, Greg James, GP Racing

• Basic premise: Learn about the history of major races around the world.

Growing Wings: The Inside Story of Red Bull Racing by Ben Hunt

• Length: 336 pages

• Author status: F1 journalist

• Agent: Melanie Michael-Greer

• Publisher: Harper

• Blurbs from: N/A

• Basic premise: Dig deep into the history of Red Bull Racing, featuring exclusive interviews with team personnel.

Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane by Matt Whyman

• Length: 352 pages

• Author status: Novelist and columnist

• Agent: Eleanor Lawler

• Publisher: Crown

• Blurbs from: Will Buxton, Damon Hill, Greg James, Gareth Southgate, Forbes, The Athletic, The Race, The Mirror

• Basic premise: Embed with the Mercedes F1 team during its 2023 to 2024 struggles and resurgence, with exclusive interviews from key personnel.

Grand Prix: An Illustrated History of Formula 1 by Will Buxton

• Length: 240 pages

• Author status: Former F1 presenter, current IndyCar commentator

• Agent: Ben Gorman (overall media/entertainment talent management)

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press

• Blurbs from: Mario Andretti, Brad Pitt, Lindsey Vonn, Jerry Bruckheimer, Gordon Ramsay, Alfonso Ribeiro, Joseph Kosinski, Patrice Evra, Jannik Sinner, Martin Garrix, Tom Kerridge, Greg James, Jake Humphrey

• Basic premise: An illustrated summary of Formula 1 — its history, how it works, and how we've ended up to where we are now.

How to Win a Grand Prix by Bernie Collins

• Length: 400 pages

• Author status: Former F1 strategist turned presenter

• Agent: David Luxton Associates

• Publisher: Mobius

• Blurbs from: Sebastian Vettel

• Basic premise: Learn about the ins and outs of a Grand Prix weekend, starting with the design phase back in the factory.

How to Read F1 by Jennie Gow

• Length: 224 pages

• Author status: F1 broadcaster and presenter

• Agent: Nell Warner

• Publisher: BBC Books / Penguin Random House

• Blurbs from: Will Buxton, Valtteri Bottas, Damon Hill, Nico Rosberg

• Basic premise: An A-B-C guide to Formula 1, with a summarized selection of topics starting with related letters.

On the Grid: Life Behind the Scenes of Formula 1 by Luke Smith

• Length: 304 pages

• Author status: F1 journalist

• Agent: Allison Devereaux

• Publisher: HarperVia

• Blurbs from: Will Buxton, Esteban Ocon, Toto Wolff, GP Racing Magazine

• Basic premise: Dig into the aspects of F1 that you don't see on the broadcast.

The Grand Prix Year: An Insider's Guide to Formula 1 Racing by Phillip Horton

• Length: 272 pages

• Author status: F1 journalist

• Agent: Melanie - no surname provided

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Sport

• Blurbs from: Alex Jacques, Jennie Gow, Lawrence Barretto, Nate Saunders, David Tremayne

• Basic premise: Get to know the inside world of F1, including how the sport travels the world and how a weekend works.

Life in the Pit Lane by Calum Nicholas

• Length: 288 pages

• Author status: Former F1 mechanic

• Agent: Oscar Janson-Smith

• Publisher: Mobius

• Blurbs from: N/A

• Basic premise: Part memoir, part insider guide to Formula 1 from a former Red Bull mechanic.

Alright, got that? Let's get concluding!

It's all about the ‘insider guide’

We're firmly in a printed Drive to Survive moment right now: Almost every book being published right now promises to provide some kind of “inside” look at Formula 1, much the same way that DTS does.

How this comes into play is naturally different within each book. For Bernie Collins, that means shining a light on all the work that goes into a race weekend — which starts months before ever arriving at the track, when the design process begins. For Phillip Horton, it means studying the logistics of arriving at events, how trainers get their drivers fit to compete, and much more. For Luke Smith, it's exploring the personal lives of drivers like Esteban Ocon, or highlighting the ways that former engineers have turned their eye for detail into a successful baking career. For Matt Whyman, it's being a fly on the wall in the Mercedes garage, keeping tabs on all the various inner workings of the team. For Ben Hunt, it's in-depth conversations with any and all people associated with Red Bull Racing.

These are all fun and fascinating topics, and I think they do a lot to illustrate the various ways F1 exists in the world — but for me, the problem with an “inside guide” is that I always want more. I wish we learned more about the interaction between F1 and the FIA, for example. I wish there was more information on how a Grand Prix earns a space on the calendar, and how it maintains that space by evolving its offerings every year. I wish I'd learned more about the role of sponsors, how much say they have. To me, these are the really juicy insider-y bits — but they're also harder to expose without putting your own career on the line.

Overviews are also a big hit

I think in this current era, the insider guide and the overview are often confused for one another; books like On the Grid and The Grand Prix Year do provide a look at the inner workings of the F1 world, but I felt that both books were also geared toward an audience newer to F1, which inherently limits the insider-y depth on offer. You get a very horizontal sense of the sport, in that you cover a lot of ground, but there's a limit to the amount of vertical depth that can be achieved when you're hoping to get new folks invested.

I think this is part of what I'm talking about in the insider guide section. There are so many insane niches to delve into regarding Formula 1 that I think every “insider guide” is going to also end up being an “overview” unless you really narrow your scope.

You see that in full force with Inside Mercedes F1 and Growing Wings: These authors focused on a very specific race team, which limited the scope of history that they needed to share and the number of people they needed to introduce. But when you move into a full season-long description of Formula 1, you end up having to make a lot of extremely difficult choices about what to include and what to leave out. I do think a lot of the books I read this year have left me wanting more, but that's not by any fault of the author; it's most to do with the fact that no one is going to publish a 900-page tome detailing all the nuanced bullshit I'd like to see, haha.

The weightier your credentials, the better chance of being published

Obviously you want folks with credentials to write your books about Formula 1! Right now, with ‘insider guides’ being such a hit, it makes sense that most of the folks being published have a decade or more working in the paddock. These are voices of authority!

The big distinction here is Matt Whyman; while he's not a longtime motorsport journalist, he is highly credentialed in the longform narrative sphere. So, he's got weighty credentials, just not within the motorsport sphere.

Almost every other published author is someone who has been an active presence in Formula 1 for at least a decade, with ample experience attending a majority of races in a single season.

Considering my own goal for reading and analyzing all these books is to see how well my own book project can fit within this spectrum, I can't say that I've got a ton of confidence now! I've spent the majority of my career covering F1 from a distance; now that I'm on the “active” circuit, I'm still only at five races per year. The thesis of my book centers less on a back-of-the-hand familiarity with modern F1 and more on the ways F1 has historically interacted with America and our own distinct racing culture, and I do consider myself a master of that domain — but I also wonder if it doesn't put my proposal at a disadvantage when compared to folks with more reach.

More diverse voices have started to emerge

Formula 1 has been a white man's world since the very founding of the sport, so I was really pleased to find a little more diversity creeping into my reading list. Yes, there are still plenty of white dudes there, but we also had two women (Collins and Gow) and a person of color (Nicholas).

I know that doesn't necessarily seem revolutionary, but it's definitely progress. I've got a beefy case of motorsport history books, and I have one small section dedicated to women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community — which describes the subjects of biographies (which were often written by men) as well as authors. Most of those books were written in the 21st century as well; the primary exception is Sylvia Wilkinson (at least on my shelf).

It's not that diverse groups didn't enjoy motorsport previously; it's that there were often barriers in place to prevent them from accessing these spaces. Women weren't allowed into the pits, garage, or press box at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway until 1971, and that only happened because one daring woman threatened to sue the track for violating the Civil Rights Act. And that only allowed women access; it didn't prevent them from being threatened or jeered at.

They're baby steps, but at least they're steps!

What are we missing?

I want to start this section by saying that I've enjoyed all the books I've listed above, so when I ask what they're missing, I'm not trying to point out some fatal flaw. Rather, I want to use this as an opportunity to think about what F1 insiders can and can't say. And unfortunately, they can't talk about negatives.

I think this is my absolute least favorite part of motorsport as a whole, but particularly about Formula 1. Teams, drivers, and series management have a very vested interest in seeing their sport represented in a positive light; therefore, they'd prefer it if you portrayed them positively. If you don't, you risk retaliation, frustration, a thousand text messages pressuring you to change your angle, and an overall unwillingness to work with you on anything in the future. (At least until enough new personnel have cycled through and your perceived slights are no longer being perceived.)

Case in point: Racing with Rich Energy. Alanis King and I knew we were potentially precluding ourselves from working with Haas in the future by writing that book. And several years later, my chances of developing a relationship with Haas are still nonexistent. However, we couldn't have written that book without taking that risk, and I wouldn't do anything differently.

Because of that experience, and because I'm now more embedded in the paddock, I'm pretty skeptical of any book that claims to be an “insider guide” that doesn't touch on the grit, grime, and frustration of F1. Which, again — I've loved all the books I'm talking about in this post, and I don't begrudge them for adopting this narrative angling.

I think the frustrating thing then comes for me now, as I'm querying the proposal for a book about F1 that isn't overwhelmingly positive, that digs into scandal, failure, death, and missteps, is that there is no precedent. I'm definitely working in a niche world already, but trying to shine light on its lesser acknowledged regions is made all the more difficult because pretty much every public representation of F1 is something F1 would be comfortable with.

When do we hit market saturation?

Formula 1 is clearly having a moment, both within the publishing sphere and in the general public. But when is that too much?

I obviously don't have an answer for that, though I do think we've seen this sudden influx of nonfiction F1 books slowing down. The sport is interesting, but I think a lot of agents and/or publishers pinpointed the same handful of interesting facets all at once and wanted to get their books out into the public sphere as quickly as possible — thus resulting in books that aren't exactly the same, but that are looking at F1 through a similar lens.

But a quick skim through some additional F1-centric releases coming later this year shows we do have more on the way. Simon Lazenby is releasing a book called Pressure that highlights the intense focus and precision required by everyone who steps foot in the paddock. Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid are publishing Fast Money: The Backroom Deals, Corporate Espionage, and Legendary Power Struggles that Drive Formula One which naturally sounds to be a bit more of a true white collar crime type tale. There are also quite a few F1 romance novels, which are not my thing but kudos to the folks who are relishing in that specific niche!

So, I don't think we're quite at market saturation just yet. I think we've reached a point where the market is likely realizing that we need new, fresh takes on the sport in order to really stand out — and hopefully that opens up opportunities for more creative or niche explorations of the sport we think we know.

(And if any agent out there is keen on representing a book about F1's failures in America…….. hmu)