Are F1 cars easier to drive than NASCAR?
Formula 1 hasn't been as huge in the United States as it has been across the rest of the world, while NASCAR has been king in America for decades. Consequently, I have been dragged into several arguments about how much easier F1 cars are to drive, with their lighter weight and all their downforce, whereas NASCAR is heavier and has negligible downforce. Are these arguments valid, though?
Aerodynamic Dynamic
Key to car performance is grip. When your car stops gripping the track, you're going to have a bad time. A race car, whether it's NASCAR, IndyCar, V8 Supercars, a Le Mans prototype, or Formula 1, has its weight pushing it down against the road surface. In the case of NASCAR, that's at least 3,200 pounds pushing its tires firmly against the track surface. It enjoys that 3,200 pounds pushing down on the car whether it's doing 200 miles per hour or just rolling out of its pit box at 5 MPH, and everything in between.
A Formula 1 car has roughly half of that, at 1,764 pounds. An F1 car gets additional support from aerodynamic downforce, which helps push the tires into the road but without the momentum of all that extra weight. One key difference between these is downforce isn't a flat rate. Instead, downforce increases to the square of velocity. In other words, if you double your speed, you quadruple your downforce. Conversely, cut your speed in half and you now have a quarter of the downforce. An F1 car has the most downforce at its top speed, when you actually don't want it because of the aerodynamic drag slowing you down.
The real catch is at low speeds you have very little downforce, even from an F1 car, and at a standstill, like on the starting grid at the beginning of a race, you have zero pounds of downforce. If you hop into a car that theoretically has four-digit downforce and just carelessly fling it into turns and stomping on the throttle like you have infinite grip, you're going to learn a lot very quickly. Cornering at 100 and cornering at 200 are going to be very different experiences, one with a quarter of the downforce of the other. That downforce will constantly be changing from one moment to the next.
No matter how much downforce you somehow gift your car, it will never have infinite gripping ability. It will always have a limit, just after which you lose the car. That limit is constantly changing on you throughout your lap. It's also effected by other cars ahead of you, as the "dirty" air boiling behind the car just ahead of you destroys the effectiveness of your wings and whatever other aerodynamic devices. Maybe you could take a particular corner at 135, but if I'm half a second ahead of you, I'm destroying your aero and now you're struggling and cannot pull off 135.
Sunday Driver
If you take a Formula 1 car around a race track at about the same pace that you would a NASCAR stock car, then yes it should be an easy drive. If you do that, however, you're wasting the car. It's not meant for such pedestrian performance. You're not really racing it but just going out for a casual drive. All the performance advantages, including lower weight and higher downforce, increase the car's capabilities, and if you're not pushing farther in that F1 car then you're wasting it.
A novice perspective of race car performance is power equals speed. From an American stock car fan's point of view, more power equals faster laps, and an F1 car's lower weight and higher downforce just contributes to easier handling. The reality is power is only useful on straights, while the rest of the car's performance dictates how fast it goes through the twisty bits. 800 horsepower is useless when weaving through corners, but downforce increases how fast you can take those turns.
This means that even if you had a NASCAR stock car and a Formula 1 car with matching top speeds, the F1 car will still lap significantly faster because of its advantages - braking faster, needing to decelerate less for turns, cornering faster, and coming out of turns from a faster speed. The net result of all this is the F1 car should lap a road course dramatically faster than NASCAR. In fact, if you're in the stock car and I'm in an F1 car, for every three laps you complete I should put you a lap down. If we have a 60-lap race, the race will end around your 45th lap, with you 15 laps down. That's the brutal performance difference, if you actually push the F1 car to its limits.
In short, if you feel comfortable, like you're in complete control, you're not really racing. Regardless of what car you're in, there's a limit to what it's capable of doing, and if you're a race car driver you're pushing as close to that limit as you can, and hoping you don't cross it. The difference between NASCAR and Formula 1 is where that limit is.
Power to Weight
There's an enormous power to weight difference between the two forms of race car. As of this writing in December of 2025, NASCAR's top series has cars weighting 3,200 pounds and producing up to 670 horsepower. That works out to 418.75 horsepower per ton. 2025 Formula 1 cars had a total power output of about 1,000+ horsepower, between the 850 from the engine and 160 additional boost, while the cars weigh 1,764 pounds. That's around 1,134 horsepower per ton. That's nearly double the power to weight ratio.
Now, pair that with F1 not having traction control. NASCAR doesn't have traction control either, but NASCAR fans that don't follow other motorsports often seem surprised, or refuse to believe, that Formula 1 cars don't have traction control. There was a time that they did, but the last F1 season with TCS was 2007, nearly two decades ago now. So, if you find yourself with a heavy right foot, you're going to find yourself accidentally doing donuts a lot easier in the F1 car, on account of roughly double the power to weight.
Slide Versus Snap
Because NASCAR stock cars are heavy with small tires and low downforce, they have a wide slip angle. When a NASCAR driver approaches the limit, they can feel feedback from their car in the form of slides and wiggles, and then they can take corrective action and wrestle it into submission. This is very different from the snap of a Formula 1 car, which is effectively glued to the track surface right up to the point that it suddenly isn't. The car lets go rather abruptly. You go from being in total control to spinning off into a barrier without warning. The edge, for an F1 car, is razor-thin.
Mental Strain
Driving a race car isn't like driving to the store for milk. Race cars aren't particularly concerned with driver comfort. They don't shield you from the engine noise or heat. The ride isn't smooth for comfort but rather harsh for performance. Drivers experience forces equivalent to several times Earth's gravity, so if your head is 9 pounds, it's being yanked to the side like it weighs 45 pounds. It's like this for NASCAR as much as any other series.
However, it's not just physically demanding. Racing is mentally taxing on a driver. A Formula 1 car is particularly straining, as it does everything so quickly that you have to be even more alert and think and react extremely quickly. We're talking about decisions and reflexes at the upper limit of human ability.
For example, in NASCAR you don't do a great deal of braking. Sure, you'll typically fluctuate between a higher speed and lower speed on different parts of the lap, but you're rarely standing on the brake pedal rapidly decelerating. Even if you do, it's a relatively leisurely deceleration. A Formula 1 car might drop you from 202 to 61 MPH in under two seconds. It happens so quickly that there's no room for error. If your timing is off by a tenth of a second, that could be the difference between making the turn and not making it. You don't get ABS, so if you find you've locked up your brakes, you don't have room to react. You just destroyed that corner.
A typical NASCAR lap sees zero gear changes. During an F1 race, 40 to 60 gear changes might be typical per lap. Circuits like Monaco might see 70 to 90 gear shifts in one lap. It's really everything coming at you hard and fast, though. So much happens in a short span of time, and the driver is processing all of it in split seconds. Hop onto a racing sim and try some laps of Monaco in an F1 car, and then take a NASCAR stock car around Daytona for a while. You'll understand the difference rather quickly. Five laps around Monaco is more mentally draining than 200 laps around Daytona.
Clarification
To be clear, we're not favoring one sport and dunking on another. There was a time, many years ago, that I'd have done exactly that, but over the years I've come to appreciate a broader range of motorsports, each in their own ways. At no point do I mean to belittle anything about NASCAR. Instead, I'm defending F1 against some unjust arguments I've heard against it. While ovals aren't my favorite form of racing, I enjoy some NASCAR or dirt oval racing from time to time. Every form of motorsport has its own unique experiences and challenges.
For example, to give credit to NASCAR, for me it's not so much getting my car around the track that's the tricky bit so much as doing it in close proximity to 39 other drivers, often inches apart. It feels like you're constantly threading a needle, not only trying to keep your car under control but avoiding everyone around you, and you never quite know exactly what the other guys are going to do. If we're running two-wide and I'm on the inside, am I going to have wiggle room coming through this turn and maybe ride up the track a hair or is the guy on the outside expecting I'm going to move down the track? I have to do high-speed choreography with these other fellows and pray we don't come together and have a twenty-car pileup.
By no means do I intend for this to sound like I'm downplaying NASCAR. I just wanted to clear up some misunderstandings I've often encountered from race fans that don't care so much for road racing, like F1. Honestly, if you're reading this, I presume you're likely a motorsport enthusiast that's at least had plenty of virtual experience, and you likely already fully get all this. However, maybe someone that doesn't quite get it will stumble upon this and gain a bit of insight.
