My first F1 race was a blur. It won’t be my last.

“What could go wrong?” he gleefully asked. He then imagined watching from a room at Caesars Palace or the Bellagio as hyper-engineered mega-machines blur down the Strip at 200 mph.

There has been a lot of this talk. Bill at the gym, Nick the professor, Steve the general contractor. It’s common for people to bring up sports with the sportswriter, but lately the most popular topic hasn’t been Kansas City’s Super Bowl chances or LeBron vs. Michael or even Saudi Arabia’s hostile takeover of professional golf. There’s a noticeable curiosity about a sport that has been popular overseas for decades but seems to have only recently broken through in the United States.

How big are the cars? Do the pit stops really last two seconds? What’s a race actually like?

Well …

Last weekend I went to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix, my first F1 event, for a chance to see and hear and feel a race. I grew up in NASCAR country, but I never got into it or even understood why anyone would want to watch stock cars driving in a circle for three hours. And I tried! Built Dale Earnhardt model cars, watched the Daytona 500 most years, even attended a race at Kansas Speedway. Some of it was cool, but NASCAR never hooked me, probably because it didn’t have a sports-fueled soap opera like “Drive to Survive.”

With under-the-helmet drama and incredible access and cinematography, the show has built a massive audience over five seasons, painting some drivers and crew members as lovable grouches and others as cocky villains. Arguments become feuds, rivals become friends, teammates openly rip their own crew. The show’s following, which grew to 4 million viewers when the fifth season premiered in February, has inspired copycat series about golf, tennis, even the NFL. So like many F1 novices, I wanted to compare an actual race weekend against the production I binged.

“It’s a bit dramatized, a bit Hollywood-y, in a way. But, you know, we don’t complain,” Alpine driver Esteban Ocon told me before the race. Ocon is a celebrity now, he says, unable to go many places without being recognized. “I lived in both worlds: the world before Netflix and the world after Netflix.”

Ocon is 6-foot-1 and lean, and the vehicle he has to pile into is … tiny. Without tires, the car is roughly as big as a sofa. Separate from the engine, one team employee said, most adults could lift the carbon fiber body with one arm. But you better not try or be seen taking photos of the vehicle’s rear end, because that’s where the engine is and F1 mechanics are fiercely protective of their super-complex, uber-secretive work.

It is their baby, doted and loved on, so much that the engine travels separately from the rest of the car. Over three weeks in May and June, each 1,000-horsepower engine was carefully packed in a custom container and shipped from Monza, Italy, to Monaco to Barcelona before being reunited with its shell by its grease-fingered family.

Like all major sports, this one has its superstars: Red Bull’s 25-year-old wunderkind, Max Verstappen; seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes; popular old-timer Fernando Alonso, 41, of Aston Martin. But this sport is built less on slick driving and clever maneuvering than on which team can build — and rebuild — the most efficient machine before the all-important qualifying round.

Drivers aren’t expected to perform on-track heroics by passing (“overtaking”) competitors or resisting the need to pit (“box”) slightly longer than opponents. They are here to shave tenths of seconds off lap times and to not screw up. And definitely to avoid crashing, because these vehicles are built for speed, not durability. The close-ups in “Drive to Survive” show how the slightest bump can send these vehicles flying apart, prompting crew chiefs (team principals) to smash their headsets, because there goes a week of work and the estimated $15 million each car costs.

That has always been true. As of 2019, though, it was streaming in ultra high-definition in millions of American homes. There was one notable exception. Guenther Steiner, the surly and exacting team principal of Haas F1, lives in Charlotte and had no idea the show was a hit — despite being one of its breakout stars — until he walked into a meeting of F1 leaders in 2020.

“Everybody had a comment to make. I hadn’t seen the show. It’s like, what are they talking about?” Steiner said. “All of a sudden you get very insecure because what are they speaking about? You start to think about it, and what have I done?”

In real life, tiny infractions and slight delays more commonly determine the bottom of the 20-car field than the top. In front of each garage at Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is pavement marked with four stripes, meant for the place each tire should stop. Inside those stripes is a measuring tape with a zero at the center and five-centimeter markings to the left and right. Not long ago, driver Pierre Gasly stopped 20 centimeters past his zero, and a stop meant to last around two seconds instead took 4.2 seconds. Those two extra seconds essentially made it impossible for him to make up the difference and reach the podium that day.

Verstappen did, however. The podium has been a familiar place for him since he burst onto the scene as a brash 17-year-old in 2015. In 171 career starts, he has finished in the top three an astonishing 85 times. Forty-one of those were wins, making Verstappen a clear threat to break Hamilton’s record 103 career victories.

There’s some debate in the F1 paddock whether Red Bull is just that dominant, Verstappen is just that talented or one team got a lucky break following a significant 2021 rule change. F1 slashed each team’s development and production budget, introducing essentially a $145 million in-season salary cap. Mercedes, which had won six drivers’ championships in seven years with Hamilton at the wheel, had gotten used to spending upward of $400 million a year on its equipment.

Red Bull and Verstappen seem to be the primary beneficiaries, with the young driver having won world championships in each of the two years since the rule change. He’s charging toward a third, having won five of this year’s seven races entering Montreal. The two races Verstappen didn’t win, he finished second to Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez. Red Bull has its own production factory in England, which helped it adjust more quickly to the new financial constraints. Still, Steiner predicted any Red Bull advantage will be short-lived, in part because other teams are catching up. Many teams are attached to a manufacturer of high-performance engines, from Ferrari to McLaren to Alfa Romeo. Red Bull gets its engines from Honda, but that will soon change.

The sport is clearly determined to attract U.S. eyeballs (and dollars), with three races in the United States this season and Logan Sargeant becoming the first American on the grid since 2015. In February, Ford announced it will build engines for Red Bull starting in 2026. So my muddy walk past the drivers’ courtesy cars was interesting for a couple of reasons. There, in the assigned parking spaces for Scuderia Ferrari drivers Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc, were red and white Ferrari roadsters. A few spaces down was Alonso’s sleek Aston Martin SUV, and the spot closest to the track belonged to Red Bull’s $55 million-a-year poster boy. Parked there was Verstappen’s ride for the week: a beige Ford Escape.

His work car, matte blue with red and yellow trim, was a bit more powerful. Verstappen zoomed through qualifying, during a rain-soaked session in which teams alternated between intermediate tires (with shallow tread) and those for rain (deeper tread, like those on, say, a Ford Escape). Regardless, a steady downpour and standing water on the track sent alarm through the paddock.

“It’s just getting worse and worse,” driver Nico Hülkenberg told the crew of Haas, the only American-owned F1 team.

I viewed one session of Saturday’s qualifying from Alpine’s hospitality area, which, like most team meeting places along the St. Lawrence River, was outfitted with a high-end espresso machine, several large TVs and a buffet. It’s hard to make a sportswriter happier, especially when it includes shelter during a worsening rain.

But surrounding me were employees either saying nothing or forcing nervous chatter. One Alpine employee suggested this was the “peak moment of stress” for the week, made more tense by the off-and-on rain. I suppose I’m used to American sports, in which anything can happen and results aren’t decided until, well, the actual events. F1 is different. Upsets can happen on race day, cars sometimes malfunction or crash, surprises are possible. But because the vehicles are so meticulously crafted, the drivers so dialed in, much of race weekend’s drama occurs before the race.

The rainy conditions during qualifying felt simultaneously like an opportunity to shake up the field and a trap for drivers to take chances and try to prove something. Oscar Piastri spun out, and though he avoided a major crash, his attempt at cutting a turn too quickly briefly endangered McLaren’s $2 million driver and $10 million engine.

“Absolutely no risks, please,” an Alpine crew member reminded Ocon over the radio.

It was thrilling to watch, at least until the end. Verstappen won the pole, of course, covering the 2¾-mile track in 85 seconds. And the next day he won the race, of course, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Will Americans, notorious for our impatience and annoyance with sports dynasties, keep tuning in and coming to the track if the same driver wins every week?

It’s something the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, F1’s governing body, has become increasingly aware of — and, some say, concerned about. Two decades ago, NASCAR was at the height of its popularity: seating for more than 100,000 fans at many speedways, a 10-figure broadcasting deal, television ratings that were surging past those of Major League Baseball and the NBA. Then, following Earnhardt’s death at the 2001 Daytona 500, the sport instituted sweeping changes.

Most were intended to make cars safer, albeit not as fast or nimble, and further push NASCAR’s fan base beyond its Southern, working-class base and into the mainstream. It adopted an end-of-season playoff format that weighed statistics over actual results, and this made-for-TV Chase for the Cup came at the expense of the traditional points championship. Longtime fans hated it, believing NASCAR had kneecapped itself, and they didn’t care much for what felt like an abandonment of its roots.

Gone were sponsorship and naming-rights deals with the tobacco and beer giants of yesteryear, in was a new generation of drivers from California and the Midwest, and new tracks opened in fertile new markets — South Florida, Dallas, Las Vegas — that replaced older, smaller tracks on the schedule, effectively crippling local economies in places such as Rockingham and North Wilkesboro, N.C.

In other words, NASCAR made a few too many changes and drove away many of its core fans. More recently, as attendance plummeted and TV ratings steadily declined, the sport has been unable to curb this decline. In July 2020, amid the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, F1 was among the first sports to resume its schedule, albeit with empty grandstands. Those isolating could watch at home, though, as could they check out that new Netflix racing show everyone was talking about.

Last year, a record 2.6 million Americans tuned in to the Miami Grand Prix, about the same number who tuned in to NASCAR’s race in Darlington, S.C. F1 actually drew in 200,000 more viewers under age 50.

So this would appear to be a crossroads not unlike the one NASCAR faced — and went the wrong way at — 20 years ago. Does F1 put more value on fan service or tradition? A wider audience or being honest with those who are already tuning in? Racing teams and journalists occasionally complain that “Drive to Survive” manipulates facts and distorts timelines to amp up the drama. After Ocon won the Hungarian Grand Prix in 2021, he says, the “Drive to Survive” episode featuring him leaned into the ups and downs of a Formula One rookie, with the driver himself lamenting the challenges of breaking through in his first year.

But Ocon was no rookie, having debuted in 2016. He says the show aired interviews from years earlier, and this year he criticized filmmakers for misrepresenting a quote that suggested Ocon was pleased to finish eighth in a race.

Until the latest season, Verstappen refused to participate in the show and publicly indicated some storylines were embellished or even faked. When the show featured Steiner claiming not to have invited driver Romain Grosjean to a team dinner because Grosjean had been too reckless with his car and “doesn’t deserve any food,” those in and around the sport knew Steiner was joking and that Grosjean had a scheduling conflict.

For his part, Steiner said he has never watched the show, largely because his on-screen persona is that of a grizzled but amusing perfectionist. He’s almost constantly chewing out someone, and he said reliving it makes him feel insecure about his approach. It didn’t stop him from releasing his memoir, “Surviving to Drive,” in April.

“We give the people what they want, especially in the United States,” Steiner told me. “In 2023, people are not happy just to see a race on a weekend. I think people are demanding more because we are used to getting more.”

Race weekends are becoming festivals, then, with a Black Eyed Peas concert and “glamping options” for next month’s British Grand Prix, a pop-up beach bar with a daily rosé toast during the race in Le Castellet, France, and drivers being introduced by Michael Buffer in Texas as they pass through a smoke-filled stars-and-stripes entryway.

It sounds like fun! At least to this American. But veteran F1 journalist Frederic Ferret sees it differently, pointing out that each of these events has become “the clichéd postcard of your own country.”

“The sport hasn’t been this popular since the ’80s, when I was a kid, so I have to admit that they’re not doing a bad job,” said Ferret, who in the world before Netflix was the only F1 reporter for French newspaper L’Équipe. Now he’s flanked by three co-workers.

Ferret is a traditionalist, and he admits some discomfort amid such change. Entry lines are longer; traffic and parking are horrendous; Ferret’s editor occasionally nags him to write less about the technical stuff in favor of what’s juicy. The Miami event wasn’t a race, he said; it was a see-and-be-seen celebrity showcase and a symbol of the sport’s apparent willingness to cut out working-class fans in favor of a wealthier clientele. In this moment, he sounds like a NASCAR reporter, sounding the alarm for a sport with considerable growth and even more considerable ambitions.

“You can see that nobody cares about the race. They want to party; everybody is drinking, dancing, taking pictures,” he said. “There has to be a limit. I grew up wanting to be a Formula One reporter for this very newspaper, so I’m fighting for my sport.”

Three hours before the green flag in Montreal, Ferret turned to me in the press room. Would I like to be included on his favorite of these disappearing traditions? Of course, I told him, and he removed a bottle of Canadian chardonnay from his bag, uncorked it and poured a taste into a plastic cup. He always buys a bottle from a local vineyard for this good-luck toast.

“Salud,” I said, and he raised his cup before taking a sip.

So buttery, he complained, though better than what he had in Azerbaijan. Americans sure love their oak-aged, velvety white wines.

“Mm,” he grumbled. “I know.”

Ferret drained his cup, corked the bottle and faced his keyboard to begin typing. There was a race to write about, not a sideshow, at least on a few more computers here.

“Vegas will be the most ridiculous thing that we will see,” he said, and on that much, Ferret and Rick the dentist would surely agree. “I want to be there, but I’m pretty sure that I won’t like what I will see.”