F

"With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high."
- Ayrton Senna

F (Nobaru Rokuda) is quite possibly one of the most exciting and thrilling manga about the road to F1. If you came from Capeta, this will be a full polar opposite from the calm and composed atmosphere of Capeta and into the gritty*, harsh reality of Gunma Akagi's journey into Formula 1.

For about the first 20/28 volumes the story is a dark, harsh reality of Gunma Akagi growing up in a dictatorship of a household having no proper fatherly or motherly figure and a mix of feelings for his younger brother Yuuma and older brother Shouma. Gunma faces a number of tribulations on his road to Formula 1 and many accompany to encourage or rival his efforts as Gunma keeps pushing ahead.

Story: 9

This is a very unique story and uncompromising in the sheer grittiness* you can encounter in early volumes and so on. The story of Gunma Akagi's journey into Formula 1 is met with a great detail about joining teams and the perseverance needed to keep pushing forward. Any fan from Formula 1 will definitely appreciate how far this manga goes to show the difficulty of entering the highest level of motorsport.

The story is told from Gunma's perspective, a distraught child having no mother or fatherly figures willing to guide him forces Gunma to escape his family and seek out his path for himself encountering many great instructors and a faithful childhood friend mechanic that stood by him since day one. Gunma is an incredibly careless person who is willing to risk everything to win and has little to no regard for the value of life. (Think of Ayrton Senna's devotion to the sport minus his warm loving personality) Gunma's sole purpose is to prove to his family and especially his father that he could achieve the impossible.

Art: 10

For a late 80s manga, the art is phenomenal featuring beautifully drawn real world cars such as the Porsche 911 and Honda NSX and various other references not found anywhere else besides Initial D. The setting of F takes place around the years 1987-1990 and while alongside some real cars we become introduced to the native Formula 1 teams of that era such as McLaren, Williams and Ferrari as well as legendary drivers such as Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet with notable visits to grand prix's of Monaco and Silverstone and loads more!

Of course you came here for the open wheeled race cars and boy are there a lot of different and visually real-world accurate renditions of F3000 cars from 1988 all the way to accurate portrayals of 1989 F1 cars. There is not much visual clutter during the heat of races and everything is mostly organized and very ahead of its time.

Characters: 8

Gunma is a carbon-copy of his father Souichirou and faces a great deal of hostility from him and a mixed relationship from his brother Shouma and Yuuma. As you read Gunma's path to Formula 1, at the same time you are entertained with a side-by-side story of his family's history and all the internal politics and conflicts that slow down and/or support Gunmas determination.

The arrival of Junko Komori and long term influence on Gunma later along the manga is where he is forced to observe a different view of appreciation on the value of life. Junko reflects that of a mother, something Gunma never experienced in his life and its easy to infer that change would be inevitable for Gunma.

The character development is plentiful and excellent. Gunma's realizations where he needs to make changes in life add a very satisfactory tone to the story. As a precaution, in some instances the emotions* can be very heavy but expect to be rewarded when you finish.

*There are many tragedies and immoral instances throughout this manga*

Enjoyment: 10

I have been an F1 fan from when I was a child in the olden days of watching Hakkinen and Schumacher battle it out on the front row and I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories diving deep into someone's path to Formula 1. The fact that this author included real world legendary drivers really added to the atmosphere and made it very exciting and unexpected! The added events of Gunma's family and relationships is a bonus. Rather than enjoying it I was deeply fascinated by a fictional illustration of what sheer determination means despite every possible odd against you. I look forward to reading this again with great interest!

Overall: 9

Rather than me listing some negatives about this manga, I would rather like to note that the manga community has extremely few instances of mangas like this in motorsport so I will not list any negatives and rather show appreciation that certain authors out there have a fascination for this sport and delivered a very touching, complicated and beautiful story about Formula 1. Any anime/manga fan coming from Formula 1 would greatly enjoy/appreciate this. A shame these are hard to find.

If your interest does spark to read F (Nobaru Rokuda), prepare for the ride of your life.

It's a good racing manga. It captures what racers go through mentally and physically during their careers. But there's too much rape and murder in it, it's ridiculous at this point. I just got to a point where the main girl is letting a fucking like 8 year old rape her. 99% of the main women get raped and something bad happens to them so they get written off, they're either killed or put in prison. I get it was a different time back when this was written but I just personally can't stand it. I came into it expecting a racing novel with the normal drama happening off track since there wasn't any tags about physiological or drama for it. But there's rape or murder every few chapters it's horrible.