Research Shows 'Swear Jar' Could Be Bad For Formula 1 Drivers

Motor sport's governing body the FIA (International Automobile Federation) has not ruled out extending its recent swearing ban to Formula One (F1) team radio communication. Last month FIA president Mohammed Sulayem said the body could "shut down the radios of live communication" over the issue.

At first glance, this might seem like a minor issue of professionalism. After all, athletes in many sports are expected to control their language.

For some, the idea that drivers need to swear during races may seem unconvincing, given that emotions can be expressed through other word choices. Many people are not permitted to swear in their workplaces, so why should F1 drivers be an exception?

But research suggests that banning drivers from swearing during races could have wider effects. It may disrupt how they regulate their emotions in Formula One's extreme environment.

It could also affect how they communicate efficiently with their teams, and how they shape their identities as racing drivers – functions that swearing, arguably, serves in live racing communication.

To date, the drivers have argued that swearing isn't just incidental – it's a necessary release due to the extreme, high-pressure, adrenaline-fuelled nature of their sport. Research may support this claim, as studies have shown that swearing is deeply linked to emotional regulation.

Experimental and lab-based studies suggest that swear words are processed differently to other words. They have been linked to brain regions responsible for processing emotion, threat detection and survival responses.

Given that F1 drivers operate in an intense, high-stakes environment where rapid decision-making and threat assessment are key, this connection may suggest that swearing is a natural response under pressure.

Some studies also suggest that swearing activates the fight-or-flight response, triggering physiological changes like increased heart rate, faster breathing and adrenaline release. The fight-or-flight response is an instinctive mechanism that helps humans react to danger.

For F1 drivers, who must remain highly alert while making critical decisions at extreme speeds, this connection between swearing and physiological arousal could play a role in maintaining focus and performance under pressure.

Beyond cognitive and emotional regulation, swearing may also increase pain tolerance, which has clear implications for F1 drivers enduring G-forces, mental strain and long stints behind the wheel in a very cramped space. Banning swearing could interfere with drivers' instinctive mechanism for coping with extreme conditions involved in racing.

Swearing and communication

Beyond these more cathartic functions, swearing, arguably, plays a crucial role in interpersonal team communication, particularly in the high-pressure environment of live racing. In Formula One, where split-second decisions can define the outcome of a race, communication between driver and engineer must be concise, clear and unambiguous.

Research suggests that swearing, far from being just an emotional outburst, serves several pragmatic functions that may enhance communication in such high-stakes environments. One key function of swearing in interpersonal communication is that it acts as an "attention getter".

Studies have shown that swear words command more cognitive focus than neutral words, making them particularly effective in cutting through noise and grabbing attention when urgency is required. For drivers, an expletive-laden message may serve as an immediate cue for the race engineer and the wider racing team to prioritise a response.

The strong response from drivers may also reflect the inextricable link between language and identity, and that, at a deeper level, this swearing policy may challenge how they construct their identities as racing drivers.

F1 drivers are socialised into the sport, often from a young age, learning not just how to drive but how to talk and interact like racing drivers. Perhaps due to these cathartic and team communication functions, swearing may have become an assumed way of claiming and performing the identity of a racing driver.

People (and communities) resist imposed changes to their language, especially when it is seen to alter how they present themselves. Seen in this way, the proposed swearing ban is more than a simple matter of professionalism. It is an external attempt to reshape how drivers construct and "perform" their identities within their sport.

Entertainment value

It is also worth mentioning the potential effects on the entertainment values of such a ban. One of the biggest shifts in modern F1 has been the opening up of the team radio communications to the public.

Once a private channel for strategy and decision-making, it is now part of the entertainment package – broadcast, clipped and replayed for millions of fans. This has given audiences insight into the intensity of racing, but it has also altered the meaning of driver communication, turning functional exchanges into public performances.

Yet team radio is not designed for entertainment: it is for the vital, two-way flow of information during racing events. So any decision about what is broadcast should be a negotiation, not a policy imposed on speech itself.

It should also see the broadcasters accommodating the norms of the environment rather than the other way around. The FIA's approach treats this as a regulatory issue rather than a broadcasting one, placing restrictions on competitors instead of reconsidering how private communication is curated for public access.

Viewed in this context, this ban may inadvertently create a contradiction in F1's wider media strategy. The sport wants the authenticity of raw radio exchanges but not the discomfort of unfiltered emotion.

A swearing ban risks making team radio feel sanitised and staged, diminishing the very sense of access that made it compelling and exciting in the first place.

Kieran File, Associate Professor, Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.