IDEAS / POST
Why F1 Fans Pay Thousands to Hear an Engine
A Night in Brescia
I was 27 years old, standing on a street in Brescia, Italy, in a sea of the most beautiful cars ever built.
It was the starting point for the Mille Miglia, a much-storied rally for pre-war and early postwar classics. The gems rolling past me were probably worth well over a million dollars apiece.
They weren’t there just to be seen, though. This was a race that covered some of the most picturesque roads in Italy. That year, the route ran through Verona, then Siena, then back through the hills of Tuscany.
Ok, ok, not a real race. The Mille Miglia hasn’t been that since 1957 – the year Alfonso de Portago’s tire blew 40kms from the finish, causing a crash that took eleven lives, including five children. What I was watching was a… resurrection.
And quite a resurrection, at that. Massive Mercedes roadsters with goggled drivers peering over their mini-windscreens. Jaguars with shark fins rising behind the driver’s head. Ferrari after Ferrari after Ferrari. The visual was sublime, the engine sounds symphonic.
The start happens at night, on a ramp in the city centre, one car at a time. Driver pulls up, says a few words to an interviewer, and accelerates into the darkness.
The crowd had been warming up for hours. The mood was jubilant. I think the Campari helped.
Then, the whispering started.
An Italian F1 driver pulled onto the ramp in a Ferrari. Apparently, he was one of the first Italians to race for the team in years.
The energy shifted like the still before a storm.
The interviewer put her microphone to the window for a few words. Instead of speaking, the driver gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and screamed off into the night. The sound, THAT sound, amplified through the PA system, setting off car alarms in a two block radius.
He was gone like a wailing banshee, with young women sprinting after the car down the street.
And standing there in the chaos, I was left with one thought in my mind.
Now I know why Italians love cars.
What Just Happened?
Nobody made a rational case for Ferrari engineering in that moment. No spec sheets, no facts and figures. The surge of desire from the engine sound just happened. And in the long years since, it hasn’t left me.
This week, I stumbled upon a story in the Hagerty newsletter (Hagerty is a hot rod insurance company) that explained why.
It turns out the explosion of emotion we all experienced that night in Brescia wasn’t irrational at all.
The Physics of Goosebumps
According to the article, specific engine configurations produce even-order harmonics in the 40–1200 Hz range. That’s precisely where the human auditory cortex generates involuntary physical responses: aka goosebumps, adrenaline, the sudden overwhelming sense that something important is happening.
That Ferrari in Brescia wasn’t casting a magical spell. It was simply making a well-engineered noise that the human nervous system finds irresistible.
F1 fans who pay thousands just to stand trackside and hear a Ferrari V-10 at full scream? They aren’t behaving irrationally. They’re responding to the side effect of brilliant engineering. And spending big bucks for the privilege.
Does Your Competitor Have Better ‘Harmonics’?
Here’s where it gets interesting for founders.
The technical founders in my world are generally skeptical of brand.
I get it. Brand feels soft, fuzzy… the opposite of engineering. And when growth stalls (as it often does), their instinct is to look for a technical solution – more features, engineering, and innovation.
What they (and most of the world) don’t realize is that brands are engineered. They start as research into human perceptions, needs and desires. Those insights are distilled into a crystalline idea. And that idea is wrapped in creative expression to turn heads and hold eyeballs (or, in staying with our theme, ears).
Like all well-engineered products, the technical bits of a good brand reside beneath the surface. It’s the impact, not the intelligence, that matters.
Brands capture emotion to drive preference and sales. That said, rational sales do happen without brand-building. Early adopters, who usually resemble the founder in their needs, worldview and technical bent, pride themselves on ‘buying the specs’.
But as every founder knows, the big cheque writers aren’t early adopters. In B2B, they’re the CEOs and CFOs that run companies early adopters work for. And those leaders aren’t buying a spec sheet. They’re buying emotionally.
Certainly, the emotion isn’t lust and rapture, like that night in Brescia. It’s the feeling of gained stature and respect from savvy business decisions.
It Can Be Built
So how do you build a brand that hits people the way that Ferrari hit us in Brescia?
First, change your thinking around what brand is.
It isn’t decoration, a logo refresh or a new colour palette, but a business tool as precise and purposeful as any other system in your company.
It requires expertise. You wouldn’t let your 20-year-old nephew in college design your product. Don’t let him build your brand.
And even if you have experts on the job, understand that building the brand is the start. Ongoing testing and tuning is essential, like building a race-winning engine. Like every performance system, the brand gets better the more attention it receives.
Racers, start your engines.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the emotional hook engine acoustics create?
The response isn’t emotional, but physical. Specific engine configurations produce even-order harmonics in the 40–1200 Hz range, triggering involuntary responses like goosebumps and adrenaline. Fans aren’t being irrational. They’re responding to a system engineered to produce exactly that reaction.
Q: What is the connection between engine sound and brand strategy?
Both work by reaching people before logic intervenes. A brand that resonates emotionally isn’t soft or unmeasurable; it’s a system producing a predictable response, the same way a Ferrari V10 produces goosebumps. The emotion is the output. The brand is the machine that generates it.
Q: Why do technical founders struggle with brand?
Technical founders trust specs and logic, which work well when selling to other engineers. But CEOs and CFOs – the people writing the big cheques – buy emotionally (despite their denials). They’re not buying a spec sheet. They’re buying the feeling of gained stature and respect. If your competitor has figured that out and you haven’t, your specs don’t stand a chance.
Q: Can a strong brand be engineered deliberately?
Yes. Like the 2005 Ferrari F1 car – cited in a video accompanying the Hagerty story as the peak of harmonic perfection – a great brand is researched, crafted, and built with intention. The emotional response it generates may feel like magic. The work behind it is anything but.
Q: What is the Mille Miglia and why does it matter to brand strategy?
The Mille Miglia is a historic Italian rally for pre-1957 classic cars, resurrected in 1977 after the original race was banned following a fatal crash. It’s a procession of arguably the most beautiful objects ever built, moving through the most beautiful landscape on earth. And it’s where Marc Stoiber had the visceral realization – standing in Brescia at 27 – that great engineering doesn’t just perform. It makes people feel something they can’t explain and can’t ignore.