It started with Formula 1. Somewhere along the way, it became much more than that.
There is a particular moment I have experienced more times than I can count.
The race is over.
The podium celebrations are done. The interviews are finished. Everyone has already decided who was the hero, who was the villain, and what the headlines should say.
And I'm still sitting there thinking:
“But why did that happen?”
Why did one car suddenly become faster?
Why did a driver lose three seconds after a pit stop?
Why did a team choose that tyre?
Why does a certain circuit expose one weakness but hide another?
Why does a tiny aerodynamic change matter so much?
And sometimes the question gets even more ridiculous:
“What is actually happening to the car when it does that?”
That's the kind of question that pulled me deeper into Formula 1.
And eventually, it became the reason I started F1Mavericks.
I didn't want to build another F1 news website
There is nothing wrong with F1 news.
I read it. I follow it. I enjoy the drama as much as anyone else.
But I always felt there was another side of Formula 1 that was harder to find.
The side where you stop looking at the car as a beautiful machine and start asking what every part is actually doing.
Where a tyre isn't simply “soft” or “hard,” but a complicated piece of engineering interacting with temperature, load, slip, degradation and track characteristics.
Where “the car has more downforce” isn't the end of the explanation.
It's the beginning of one.
That side of Formula 1 fascinated me.
Because once you start looking underneath the spectacle, you realize that Formula 1 is almost a living engineering textbook.
Aerodynamics.
Vehicle dynamics.
Tyre mechanics.
Thermodynamics.
Materials.
Control systems.
Data analysis.
Strategy.
Human performance.
Manufacturing.
All of it comes together in a machine travelling around a circuit at extraordinary speeds.
You can watch a car take a corner in two seconds.
Or you can spend two hours trying to understand why it took that corner the way it did.
I prefer the second option.
And that's where F1Mavericks came from
F1Mavericks wasn't born as some perfectly designed media company.
There wasn't a giant business plan.
There wasn't a team.
There wasn't an audience waiting for me.
There was simply an interest that kept getting deeper.
I'd find something interesting about Formula 1, start researching it, fall down a rabbit hole, and eventually think:
“I want to understand this properly.”
Then came another thought:
“Maybe other people would want to understand it too.”
So I started building.
And that's where I learned something I hadn't really understood before.
Starting something is easy. Building something is not.
The internet doesn't owe you attention
You can buy a domain.
Build a website.
Write an article.
Publish it.
Technically, you have a website.
But that doesn't mean anybody is going to read it.
You can spend hours researching an article you're genuinely proud of.
You can hit publish.
And then...
Nothing.
A few visitors.
A few impressions.
Maybe a click.
Maybe nobody.
And, like almost every small website owner, you eventually find yourself looking at analytics more often than you'd like to admit.
You tell yourself:
It takes time.
And it does.
But knowing that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
Because effort and attention aren't automatically connected.
The internet doesn't care how long you spent writing something.
If people don't find it, they don't read it.
That was one of the first real lessons F1Mavericks taught me.
I thought writing would be the difficult part
It wasn't.
The difficult part was everything around it.
SEO.
Search intent.
Keywords.
Content structure.
Analytics.
Website optimization.
Distribution.
Understanding what people actually want to read.
Understanding why someone clicks one article but ignores another.
Trying to make something useful while also making it discoverable.
Suddenly, I wasn't just learning Formula 1.
I was learning how the internet works.
And I was learning it mostly by doing.
There was no neat roadmap telling me:
Step 1 → do this.
Step 2 → do that.
Step 3 → congratulations, you have an audience.
It was much messier.
Learn something.
Try it.
Get it wrong.
Look at the result.
Change something.
Try again.
Then there was the problem of being inconsistent
This is probably the least glamorous part of the story.
There have been periods where F1Mavericks moved forward.
And periods where it didn't.
Life happens.
Other priorities take over.
You lose momentum.
The website sits there while you deal with everything else happening around you.
Then one day you come back.
You look at the project.
And that uncomfortable question appears:
“What if I had just kept going?”
I could have abandoned it.
That would have been easy.
Nobody was waiting for the next article.
There wasn't a huge audience noticing my absence.
No team was asking when the next piece would be published.
I could have simply decided that I had tried it and moved on.
But I kept coming back.
And eventually I realized something:
Maybe the fact that I keep coming back is the answer.
I clearly haven't finished with this idea yet.
Building alone is a strange experience
When you're building something yourself, there is nobody to divide the problems with.
You're the writer.
The researcher.
The editor.
The SEO person.
The strategist.
The person looking at analytics.
The person fixing things when something breaks.
And sometimes you're also the person staring at a traffic graph wondering whether any of this is actually going anywhere.
There is no manager telling you that you're making progress.
There is no team celebrating a small win.
You have to learn to recognize progress yourself.
Sometimes it's a traffic graph finally moving in the right direction.
Sometimes it's a search impression.
Sometimes it's a stranger reading an article.
Sometimes it's simply realizing that something you struggled to understand six months ago now feels obvious.
Those small things matter.
Because when you're building something slowly, progress rarely looks dramatic.
Most of the time, it looks almost invisible.
But somewhere along the way, F1Mavericks changed for me
Originally, I saw it as a website.
Now I see it as a project.
That sounds like a small distinction.
It isn't.
A website can exist.
A project needs direction.
So I've started asking much bigger questions.
What should F1Mavericks actually stand for?
Who am I trying to build it for?
What kind of content deserves to exist?
How do I make someone discover an article?
How do I make them want to read the next one?
How do I turn a visitor into a regular reader?
And eventually:
Can I build a real community around this?
I don't have every answer.
But I'm finally thinking about F1Mavericks as something that can become bigger than the collection of articles sitting on a website.
I'm not trying to pretend I'm an expert
This is important to me.
There are people who know vastly more about Formula 1 than I do.
Engineers who have spent decades working in the industry.
Researchers who have dedicated their careers to individual areas of vehicle dynamics.
Drivers who understand things through experience that no textbook can completely teach.
I'm not trying to pretend I'm one of them.
I'm learning.
And honestly, that's part of the reason I enjoy doing this.
Every time I learn something, I discover another layer underneath it.
Learn tyres → discover vehicle dynamics.
Learn vehicle dynamics → discover suspension.
Learn suspension → discover tyre behaviour.
Learn aerodynamics → discover another hundred questions.
The rabbit hole never really ends.
I've stopped seeing that as a problem.
The rabbit hole is the point.
F1Mavericks is also becoming my classroom
The more I work on it, the more I realize that writing is forcing me to learn differently.
If I read something and think I understand it, that's one thing.
If I have to explain it clearly to somebody else, that's completely different.
Suddenly I notice the gaps.
I realize which assumptions I'm making.
I discover what I don't actually understand.
And then I have to go back and learn it properly.
That's one of the most valuable things F1Mavericks has given me.
It's not just a place where I share what I learn.
It's one of the ways I learn.
And now I've given myself a ridiculous target
50,000 monthly readers by March 2027.
I've said it publicly now.
It's aggressive.
Maybe ridiculously aggressive.
But I deliberately chose a number that makes me uncomfortable.
I could have chosen 5,000.
It would sound reasonable.
I could have chosen 10,000.
Still ambitious.
Instead, I chose 50,000.
Because if I'm going to take this seriously, I want to find out what happens when I stop treating F1Mavericks like a side project that I work on whenever I have time.
To reach 50,000 monthly readers, I need to become much better at everything.
Writing.
Research.
SEO.
Distribution.
Analytics.
Strategy.
Consistency.
And probably a lot of things I haven't even realized I need to learn yet.
That's what makes the goal interesting.
The real challenge isn't simply:
“Can I get 50,000 visitors?”
It's:
“Can I become the person capable of building something that gets 50,000 visitors?”
There is no guarantee I'll get there
I want to be honest about this too.
Maybe I won't hit 50,000 by March 2027.
Maybe I'll fall short.
Maybe the strategy won't work.
Maybe I'll have to change direction.
Maybe F1Mavericks will become something completely different from what I imagine today.
But I would rather find out by trying than spend years wondering what could have happened if I had taken it seriously.
Because there is another possibility.
Maybe there are thousands of people who are just as fascinated by the engineering underneath Formula 1 as I am.
Maybe they're looking for something that doesn't just tell them what happened, but helps them understand why it happened.
Maybe F1Mavericks can become that place.
That's what I'm trying to find out.
So this is where I am today
I'm not writing this from the finish line.
Far from it.
The website exists.
The idea exists.
The ambition exists.
But the audience I'm trying to build is still ahead of me.
There is still an enormous amount to learn.
There will be articles that nobody reads.
There will be ideas that don't work.
There will be days when progress feels invisible.
There will be mistakes.
Probably a lot of them.
But there will also be discoveries.
Better articles.
More readers.
New ideas.
And hopefully, eventually, a community of people who care about the same strange combination of speed, engineering and curiosity that pulled me into Formula 1 in the first place.
I want to share the journey now
For a long time, I've mostly built quietly.
I think it's time to change that.
I don't want to only show the finished product.
I want to share the process.
What I'm learning.
What works.
What doesn't.
The experiments.
The failures.
The small wins.
The lessons from trying to grow a website from the ground up.
And, of course, the ridiculous attempt to take F1Mavericks to 50,000 monthly readers by March 2027.
Maybe you'll discover F1Mavericks through one of my articles.
Maybe you'll follow the journey here on Medium.
Maybe you'll disagree with something I write.
Maybe you'll teach me something.
Maybe you'll simply watch from the sidelines to see whether I can pull this off.
All of those are okay.
Because I'm not presenting you with the story of a successful website.
Not yet.
I'm inviting you into the story of building one.
And I genuinely don't know where it's going to end.
That's the exciting part.
If you're curious, stick around.
I'll be writing here about Formula 1, engineering, learning, building F1Mavericks, and the things I discover along the way.
You can explore the project itself at F1Mavericks.
And if you find something I've written genuinely useful or interesting, sharing it with another F1 fan is one of the best ways to support what I'm building.
If you want to support the project directly, you can also do that through Buy Me a Coffee.
But for now, I'm going back to work.
There are 50,000 readers to find.
Let's see if I can build something worth finding.