Sunday 22nd March 2025

F1 - The Exhibition at the ExceL Centre London  Words and images by Ken Davies 

After making its debut in Madrid, August 2023, followed by Vienna then Toronto, F1 The Exhibition opened at Excel, the international exhibition and convention center in London’s charismatic Royal Victoria Dock, on 23 August 2024, and was extended by popular demand until 2 March 2025.  Packed with great content and extremely well presented with unique exhibits expertly arranged, the fully immersive exhibition provides visitors with a 90-minute interactive walk through the evolution of Formula One racing.


Showcasing a wealth of contributions - some priceless - gathered from some of the sport’s top teams and legendary drivers, exhibits include seven iconic championship-winning cars, including Sir Lewis Hamilton’s 2018 Mercedes AMG F1 W09 and Ayrton Senna’s fabled 1988 McLaren MP4/4. There’s also access to some of Formula One’s most captivating and notorious tales together with historical and ultra-rare memorabilia. The exhibition spans six separate rooms within the capacious Excel centre, each room punctiliously crafted by skillful curators, artists and filmmakers, to portray a fresh and three-dimensional perspective on the stimulating and sometimes unreal history of Formula One.

Among the stand-out exhibition highlights and themes included are: ‘Once Upon a Time in Formula One’, Design Lab, Drivers and Duels, Revolution by Design and the spectacular finale that visitors experience before leaving, The Pit Wall. Presented in a specially darkened room, The Pit Wall is a highly effective sensorium of sound and vision taking watchers through a Grand Prix weekend in four short minutes - practice to podium - accompanied by a kaleidoscope of vivid colours and white noise! Under the heading Survival, I found the grotesquely deformed and charred remains of Romain Grosjean’s HAAS, from which he escaped almost unharmed following his accident on the first lap of the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix, frankly, macabre.


The exhibition collaborated with Silverstone Museum to honor the symbolic Home of British Motor Racing and celebrate the British Grand Prix, which also gives a nod to Great Britain’s considerable legacy to motorsport with 75 percent of F1 teams UK-based. Interactive experiences are available to exhibition visitors with the aid of headphones and a remote control to select a chosen soundtrack. In addition, visitors who purchase a race simulator session can experience what it's like to sit in the driving seat of an F1 car on a virtual lap of the Silverstone GP circuit, and these are state-of-the-art sims. In addition, participants are entered into a monthly raffle for a chance to win 2025 British Grand Prix tickets.


Launched to widespread acclaim in August 2024, and subsequent rave reviews from visitors, this show marks the most ambitious Formula One exhibition to date and capitalises on the sport’s current popularity, mainly due to the esteemed Netfix fly-on-the-wall series ‘Drive to Survive’. If you’re in London between now and 2nd March with 90 minutes to spare, I recommend this congenial experience to you.

Tickets can be bought online for between £25 and £35 depending on time and day. Children aged 5-15 - £14 and there is a VIP package available for £70 per person. The exhibition is open from 10.00 am, six days a week, and finally closes in London on 2 March before opening at its next destination, Tecnopolis Buenos Aires on 22 March.