Spoiler-free Blog
To celebrate my birthday I visited the F1 Exhibition at the ExCel Centre in London this weekend.
Before the exhibition booking at 15:00, my dad and I visited Canary Wharf and had lovely steak meal at Blacklock, located under the railway tracks at Frobisher’s Passage. Great tasting steaks at a great value, the highlight being the Denver steak. They did get our order wrong, but we cannot fault their professionalism in helping us sort it out and enjoy our meal. Shoutout to our waitress who made the initial mistake, but made up for it with her charisma. We would highlight recommend Blacklock as your lunch stop before the exhibition!
Following our meal, we had a quick stroll around Canary Wharf before hopping on the tube to Custom House, and reaching our final destination, the ExCel centre. We had arrived 20 minutes earlier than our booking, so we just joined to the relatively long queue outside the event (glad it wasn’t raining). When we made it to the front of the line we were turned away because our booking wasn’t for another 15 minutes, which was somewhat annoying, as we had to re-join the end of the line. Once we were inside, we had to pay £2.50 to put our bags in a locker before proceeding and throw away and plastic bottles (F1 is always doing its bit for the environment). The actual exhibition took us roughly 2 hours to complete, but it could definitely take half or double the time depending on your interest level in the sport. We ended the day with a quick visit to the exhibitions shop – I say quick because we took one look at the prices (£80 for a t-shirt) and left.
Continue reading for my full review containing plenty of spoilers.
Review
On the Exhibitions website, they highlight 3 main features of the show: F1 cars, immersion and interactive features. I will be structuring my review around these features and giving them a rating out of 10. At the end of this blog/review, I will give my overall thoughts, and let you know whether I think you should give it a visit before December 31st when it goes!
Formula One Cars
A F1 exhibition would not be and F1 exhibition without multiple Formula One cars, luckily, there were plenty. From Phil Hill’s 1961 Championship winning ‘sharknose’ Ferrari 156 to Red Bull’s first championship winning car since Sebastian Vettel, the RB16B, the cars did not disappoint.
The RB16 was designed by Adrian Newey, for the 2020 F1 season, however following COVID-19 pandemic, F1 decided to defer any technical regulation changes to the car until 2022. Therefore, in 2021, all the teams ran a slightly upgraded version – mainly to the floor – of their previous car, hence the name ‘RB16B’. You may have read that Newey has taken on a new career path at Aston Martin, begging the question, will we see Aston Martin cars in these sorts of car halls of fame in 5-10 years?
My dad’s favourite car was the Lotus 72, from 1970, iconic with its John Player Special livery. The 72 won the drivers championship in 1970 with Jochen Rindt and in 1972 with Emerson Fittipaldi. Adrian Newey famously stated, “I wish I’d designed the Lotus 72”, a testament to its capabilities.
My favourite car, at least what is remains of it, was Romain Grosjean’s burnt HAAS from his fireball crash at the 2020 Bahrain GP. The emotion in this room was completely different to the others, as everyone stopped to take in the severity of the damage, but also the miracle of his survival. The fact that Grosjean survived to tell the tale shows how much F1 safety has progressed over the last 50 years. Some other notable cars were Senna/Prost’s McLaren MP4/4 from 1988, and Lewis Hamilton’s championship winning Mercedes AMG F1 W09 from 2018.
With all this being said, my dad and I have the same critique with the cars on show – it was all too perfect. We wanted to see more of those experimental cars or cars with unique history/stories even if they weren’t successes. It would have been great to see the infamous Tyrrell P34 with its 6 wheels up close or the Life L190.
Overall, I’d give the F1 car displays an 7/10.
Immersion
At the beginning of the exhibition you are given an audio guide headset with a pointer remote to scan receivers on the wall. The guide had a fitting background noise of a Formula 1 race which really helped to set the scene as you walked about. As you navigate the exhibition, there are multiple receivers on the walls that you can scan to hear audio from the videos on the associated TV’s from people like Will Buxton and Eddie Jordan. Unfortunately however, the headsets were uncomfortable and the pointer was a nuisance to operate. At least 50% of the time it would fail to scan the receiver. Eventually I decided it was just better without the headphones.
Another thing that took away from the immersive experience was the crowds. It was so busy in there, to the point where we had to just skip past a few sections in order to actually progress. The large crowds also meant that people would gather around a sign at a distance, making it near impossible to read with its miniscule text. Nobody wanted to be that guy who stands right in front of the sign to read it.
Immersion scores 6/10. They made an effort but were let down by dysfunctional tech and overcrowding.
Interaction
Whilst the exhibition’s immersion was spoilt by nuisance technology, the interaction’s were let down by the severe lack of any. In this section I am excluding the F1 simulator as it costs an additional £15 on top of the ticket price.
Maybe I missed something due to the crowds, but as far as I could tell, the interaction’s were limited to a few screens with ‘Learn about this…’ buttons and a lights out and away we go reaction test. I would have loved to have seen some of the interactive features that I saw in the Silverstone Museum, such as a Scaletrix track or a mock-car to sit and pose in. Some other things I can think of would be a comparison of the tyre weights/sizes over the years, a pit crew experience (did one of these at the Ferrari museum in Maranello), or at least let people hold the pit stop tools or parts of the car i.e. steering wheel. To be honest, I think I spent more time interacting with the headset’s pointer, trying to get it to work than I did anything else!
Interaction scores 4/10. There was a lot left on the table here.
Overall, the whole exhibition experience scores a 6/10. I would still recommend it if you are interested in Formula 1 but, despite its location, I would recommend the Silverstone Museum.
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