The F1 YA romance novel epidemic is getting weird, y’all
Paddock romances keep reading like fanfic about real drivers, and readers are starting to say so
Formula 1’s popularity boom has produced a lot of things, and one of them is a shelf of young adult romances set in the paddock. This week, one of those books ended up at the center of F1 Twitter. A tweet pointing out that the lead in Hold Position by Erika Wilson reads exactly like Oscar Piastri went around fast, and the replies did the rest. Readers lined up to compare notes: the nationality, the personality, the career trajectory. By the end of the day, the original tweet had amassed ten thousand likes and more than a handful of quotes.
The thing is, most F1 fans aren’t shocked. Hold Position is just the latest entry in a genre that has been drifting this way for a while. Cross the Line gets read as a Carlos Sainz story. Throttled gets read as a Max Verstappen story. Drive Me Crazy and The Fast Track get the same treatment, along with a handful of others that keep showing up in the same conversations. Once you notice the pattern, it’s hard to read a new F1 romance blurb without playing spot-the-driver.
Writing yourself into a story about someone you’re obsessed with is one of the oldest and most joyful things the internet has done (I’ve done it!). It built whole writing careers. Some of the best romance on the shelves started in fandom spaces, and I’m not here to gatekeep that. But what happens when that same impulse gets a cover, an ISBN, and a price tag?
Fanfic is fine; this is something else
There’s a long tradition of fanfictions that get reworked into original fiction, the most well-known being Fifty Shades of Grey and The Love Hypothesis, and plenty of published authors started in fandom. The good version of that process involves actual transformation. You take the spark, build a world and characters that stand on their own, and end up with something a stranger could enjoy without knowing where it came from.
What’s happening in the F1 corner of YA looks different. When readers can map a protagonist onto a specific living driver, down to the details, nothing has really been transformed. The name changed, and not much else. Calling that “inspired by” is generous.
And these are real people. Drivers have families, partners, and private lives, and a romance novel pairs its lead with a love interest by design. Add a real partner to the picture, and it gets stranger still. Some readers have also pointed out that the protagonist allegedly seems to borrow from Piastri’s real-life girlfriend, who isn’t a public figure and never chose any of this. I can’t say whether that’s true, but the fact that readers are even asking says a lot. Fanfiction about real people, usually called RPF, has always lived in a gray area, and the community norm has been to keep it in fandom spaces, away from the people they’re about. Putting it on a shelf to be sold and marketed on social media breaks those unspoken norms.
The publishing question
I’m not sure about the specifics of how Hold Position is being released. Wilson is still drafting it, and as far as I can tell, there’s no word yet on a traditional publisher. If she ends up going the self-publishing route, that would explain a lot. There’d be no editor asking “can we make this less obviously about a real guy?” and no legal team flagging the resemblance. Self-publishing is a perfectly legitimate route, and plenty of great books come out of it, but it also means nobody is standing between the idea and the Kindle store.
That gap is where a lot of this lives. A trend like this grows because it sells. Racing fans are hungry for content in the off-season, the Drive to Survive effect is still doing its thing, and a book that gestures at a famous driver comes with a built-in audience.
So what now?
I don’t think anyone needs to cancel and harass anyone. Readers can enjoy what they enjoy, and people can write whatever they want in the privacy of their own docs. A fictional driver and a real one in a thinly veiled guise are not the same thing, however, and saying so isn’t the same as policing anyone’s fun. People, especially fans, are allowed to point this out and call it weird.
If you want to write about F1, write about F1. Invent the team, the rivalry, the heartbreak at a hairpin. Make up a person instead of borrowing one. The sport is dramatic enough without anyone’s actual life getting dragged along for the ride.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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