By The Recliner Quarterback | May 1, 2026
I am not here to make fun of Formula 1. I am not going to suggest that watching cars go very fast around Miami while millions of people lose their minds is a lesser use of a Sunday. I am not going to say that — not because I don’t have the thought, briefly, every time someone explains tire compounds to me like I’m new to the concept of rubber — but because I once cried during a regular season game in October. Not the playoffs. October. So I will be keeping my opinions to myself and my mouth completely shut.
The Miami Grand Prix is this Sunday. Round 4 of what everyone in the Formula 1 world is calling a historic season, and for once they seem to have actual reasons. New engine regulations. New teams. Lewis Hamilton — seven world championships, a level of global fame that makes your own life feel modestly scaled — has left Mercedes and joined Ferrari. He is now in red. People who follow this sport speak of it the way I speak of major trades in sports I actually care about. I nod. I say “wow.” I mean it as sincerely as I can manage, which is more sincere than it sounds.
And this Sunday, while all of that is happening in Miami, I will be in my backyard fixing my fence.
The fence has needed fixing since September. Two posts have gone soft at the base — push them and they move in a way fence posts are not supposed to move. One section of slat is being held up by what I can only describe as one nail and a strong feeling. Various Sundays have come and gone. Football season happened. Basketball playoffs are happening right now. The fence has waited, leaning slightly, patient as a fence can be, for a Sunday when there was nothing else on. This is that Sunday. The Miami Grand Prix and my backyard fence landed on the same day, and the fence won, and I feel completely fine about this. The fence will not fix itself. Twenty cars in Miami will go fast whether I’m watching or not. These are simply the facts.
I won’t pretend I fully understand what I’m missing. I know there are tire compounds — different colors, different purposes — and that they cause grown adults to experience real emotions in real time. I know the pit crews change four tires in about two seconds, which is genuinely the most impressive thing I have ever seen and I include playoff basketball in that. I know Max Verstappen won four championships in a row until Lando Norris stopped him last year, and that Verstappen is still out there, lurking, in the way that certain teams go quiet and then show up when it matters. I have absorbed these things through proximity to people who love this sport the way I love mine — completely, irrationally, with a loyalty that has never once been fully deserved but has always been fully given.
That’s the thing about sports passion. You can’t explain it and you can’t transfer it. You caught it somewhere, young, from some moment that got inside you before you had the sense to protect yourself, and now you’re stuck with it forever and you wouldn’t trade it for anything. The Formula 1 people have that. I can see it on them. I just caught different things. And I have absolutely no standing to say a word about it, because I once watched a rain delay for two and a half hours rather than go outside — rather than go outside and fix a fence that has now been waiting since September.
Enjoy Miami, everyone. I’ll be in the backyard. You’ll know which house by the intermittent hammering and the occasional silence that means something has gone slightly wrong with the concrete.
The Recliner Quarterback estimates this job will take three hours and will in fact take most of the day. The October game will not be named. Lewis Hamilton is in red now and the author wishes him well from the post-hole digger.