Great subject, great responses. Thank you Frank - and everyone else. Within the past couple of months, I watched both the Williams and Ferrari racing documentaries from 2017, and this video and Frank's comments in this thread are a nice addition to fond memories of my race spectator experiences.
My introduction to auto racing was a bit less sophisticated than F1. When I was young, there were many
racetracks in the Chicago. I remember the three racetracks that I visited in the summer of 1960 to watch the stock cars prepared and driven by local "guys and their buddies" just after graduating from high school and before headng off to college.
My first race was at the 1/4 mile Santa Fe Speedway in Willow Springs, a clay track that they would wet down before the races. I still remember an old Buick with its famous inline straight-eight engine losing a tire, and the steel wheel rim carved up big chunks of wet clay and tossed them over the fence into the crowd. Ironically, the pop "rock - death" song "Tell Laura I Love Her" was beginning its climb to #7 on the U.S. charts, and they played it over the PA system as we left after the races. (The same song by another singer reached #1 on the UK charts later that year.)
The second was Raceway Park - a 1/4 mile flat asphalt track if I remember correctly, near Ashland Avenue in Calumet where I watched one forgettable evening of stock car racing. This track was where future Indy 500 great started his career racing open-wheel midget racers.
And finally, I went to another forgettable evening of racing at O'Hare Raceway, a banked 1/4 mile oval track just south of the current lcation of O'Hare Airport. Fred Lorentzen, future NASCAR star, got his start there.
Starting few years later during my Navy days while stationed at the SF Bay Area's Oakland Naval Hospital - and over the next 40 years in that region, I attended many auto races, starting with a small time drag race event at the Half Moon Bay Airport. Just local racers with up to AA Gas class dragsters and no AA Fuel class cars. Later, I started going to the Fremont Drag Strip where I once met and spoke with the legendary Don Garlits. I also once drove to Southern California for a weekend an all-Corvette drag meet at the old Orange County Dragstrip with over 400 Corvettes at the event. I always spent the extra for "pit-passes" when they were available to enjoy wandering around watching the racing crews do their work and occasionally talk to drivers and mechanics.
One Sunday in the eary 1960s I drove to Sonoma County to attend a local SCCA club-type sports car road race at a little decomissioned WWII military training air field near Cotati, and after that I was hooked on road racing for life. Even my only Nascar race was a road race - at Riverside Raceway in 1965 where AJ Foyt in the 00 Ford lost his brakes near the end of the race, flipped end-over-end several times, and was almost killed. But by the time of the accident, we had left to return to Northern California, because I was still in the Navy and had to "on duty" at my hospital job at 7am. Many years later, I went to the Long Beach Indy Car Race and was able to speak with Dutch driver Arie Luyendyk in the pits, an event that was held on a vourse laid out on the beach parking lot, and not up the hill on the Long Beach city streets.
During the 50 years that I lived in California, I attended both historic and contemporary road races at Sears Point and Laguna Seca, and many autocross events with the Northern California Corvette Club, although I did not race myself. In the 1990s I watched a couple of seasons of live Formula One events on cable TV, and had to be up before five AM. I've always enjoyed British race announcers, who would typically say something like "lets stop talking for a bit, and you can turn up the volume as we start the race." But their turn-by-turn descriptions, and the interviews with drivers and pit personnel, were usually far more relevant and intelligent than American auto race commentators.