If anyone wants to share who they root for and why I’d love to hear it. I may be rooting for a bunch of butt heads and should be cheering for better humans instead.
This is actually an interesting subject.
I have followed Formula 1 since the 70s. First got into it when the legendary Mark Donohue (former Indy 500 winner who lived near us and was a friend of my father) came out of retirement to help Roger Penske launch his F1 team. (F1 was almost the only racing series that Donohue and Penske had not conquered.) That ended when Donohue died in something of a freak accident in Austria, but I was hooked.
Since then, the racers that I have followed/rooted for are those who, IMO, combined their personal drive and immense talent with a certain flair. Mario Andretti, Ayrton Senna and Nigel Mansell were my early favorites and my reverence for Senna borders on the unreasonable. I appreciated giants like Lauda and Schumacher, though, for reasons I'm not prepared to explain, I could never really root for them. (Something in the ruthless nature of both of them felt almost over the line to me, but I'm sure that's an unfair judgment.)
I've been a fan of Lewis Hamilton since his early days, and while it's clear that he's insanely talented, it's hard to judge him as the "best" because he's spent almost his entire career in cars that were at or close to the best equipment available.
In terms of the younger drivers, I really like Verstappen for similar reasons - he's manically driven and insanely talented. And I've been following George Russell for a few years and look forward to seeing him in a strong car next year.
To more directly answer your question, I don't know if there are any "good humans" among the top formula 1 drivers. I say this because I cannot imagine that F1 is a breeding ground for what would be considered admirable traits. In order to succeed, you have to have an incredibly skewed, selfish perspective; almost almost to the point of delusion where you attempt to bend reality to your will. This is why the top drivers often sound like such children in the radio transmissions that are captured during (and after) the broadcast - they are operating at peak stress and are commenting from inside an incredibly distorted bubble they live in 24/7. To the extent we can ever judge any of them as "good" or "bad" is just a guess. So I root for what I appreciate and don't get too attached.
Probably a longer response than you had expected, but there you have it.
