If you’ve ever been close to a Formula One race car, you’ll know you can feel it before you even hear it. The best way to describe it is vibrating pressure that moves through your chest and reaches the back of your eyes. An F1 car nowadays can peak at about 140 decibels.
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, exposure to 85 A-weighted decibels can cause hearing damage if prolonged. To put things into perspective, 85 decibels is roughly the level of noise you can expect at a busy restaurant or from a hair dryer. At 140 dBA, permanent hearing damage can occur within seconds.
Formula One drivers spend a lot of time exposed to that level of noise during race weekends, but they’re not the only ones. Pit crews work within inches of loud engines during practice runs, qualifying races and race day, not to mention the thousands of fans who stand along the track, often over multiple days, and many of whom have no hearing protection at all.
Before heading to Miami for this weekend’s Grand Prix, this is how doctors recommend attendees prepare their ears. Plus, how F1 drivers protect their own hearing.
The cumulative noise risk of a Grand Prix weekend
Motorsports is one of the loudest sports. While a car at full throttle ranges between 130 and 140 dBA, according to a study published at Science Direct, the noise you’re exposed to extends beyond the engine — it’s also the cheering crowds, the loudspeakers and the music sustained throughout the weekend. A fan attending will be exposed to this noise during Friday’s practice, Saturday’s qualifying and Sunday’s race.
The cumulative exposure to that type of noise is where the real risk lies. In traditional exposure models, noise at 85 dBA should be limited to 8 hours or less, safe exposure drops to 2 hours for 91 dbA; and at 100 dBA, safe exposure drops to 15 minutes or less.
The type of noise you’re exposed to at an F1 race is well outside any safe exposure window.
“The more time someone spends around loud noise, the greater their likelihood of developing noise‑induced hearing loss,” Tricia Ashby-Scabis, senior director of audiology practices at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, tells CNET. “While it is uncommon, it is still possible for someone to sustain damage from a single, very loud exposure — especially if they are close to the noise source. Proximity and duration are key risk factors.”
What happens to your ears when you don’t protect them?
Most people will leave a concert or live sporting event with ringing ears (tinnitus) or muffled hearing and assume that everything will be fine later. In some cases, that may be true, but not always. Ashby-Scabis says these symptoms are often associated with a temporary threshold shift, such as temporary hearing loss or tinnitus. In many cases, the ringing subsides and hearing returns to baseline, but that recovery is not guaranteed.
“With repeated or prolonged exposure, individuals are much more likely to experience a permanent threshold shift, meaning their hearing doesn’t return to previous levels, and permanent hearing loss occurs,” Ashby-Scabis explains.
The compounding effect of noise exposure over time means that even if a single event causes only temporary symptoms, your ear’s ability to recover declines with each subsequent exposure. The constant exposure to loud environments, such as listening to music through headphones and attending live events, builds a cumulative debt of damage that can lead to permanent hearing issues much sooner than in previous generations.
Jorge Rey, audiologist at HearUSA Miami Beach, tells CNET that “noise-induced hearing loss from live events is more common than people realize, and we are seeing it more frequently in younger patients.”
“What’s changed is not just how often but also how long people are in these environments,” Rey says. “Between sporting events, concerts and everyday headphone use, there’s more cumulative exposure than in previous generations.”
What makes this dangerous is how easily early damage can go unnoticed. “In some cases, people may not notice immediate hearing loss, but damage to the inner hair cells can occur, and noise‑induced hearing loss may emerge years later,” says Ashby-Scabis.
You can walk out of a race weekend feeling completely normal and still have started a process you won’t be aware of for years.
How McLaren protects its athletes and team
Formula One’s approach to protecting its team’s hearing health starts with regulation. The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of world motorsports, mandates the use of hearing protection for all pit crew and athletes during races. Most pit lane workers wear custom-molded in-ear monitors, which protect against dangerous noise levels and carry radio communication.
Custom-molded IEMs, fitted by an audiologist to each team member’s ear, provide protection and acoustic clarity that over-the-counter options can’t. And they’re designed precisely for the noisy environment the team is continuously exposed to.
For McLaren, hearing health is woven into how the team operates across an entire race weekend, not just during the race. “From travel days to race weekends, Loop plays a practical and vital role in how our team manages their focus and recovery,” says Nick Martin, Co-Chief of McLaren Racing, in a press release. “Loop’s approach to precision design aligns closely with how we operate as a team, and it continues to resonate with our fans as well.”
Over the years, there has also been a change in the engines used in F1. The long-gone V8 and V10 engines of the early 2000s produced that nostalgic screeching noise many fans still miss, and have now been replaced by V6 hybrids, which have reduced average full-throttle decibel levels from 145 dB to roughly 110 dB.
For years, the kind of hearing health care McLaren and other F1 teams have access to, like the medical-grade protection and constant monitoring, existed exclusively for professionals. It wasn’t accessible to fans who attended the races in person. And while that level of access isn’t necessarily available to others outside professional sports, consumer technology has slowly begun to close the gap.
The tools available to fans today aren’t medical grade, but they’re closer to the professional standard than anything that’s ever existed, and most people already own them.
Consumer tech is bridging the hearing baseline problem
Formula One professionals have something the average fan doesn’t — a medical team that tracks and documents their hearing health throughout every season. It’s important they do so because, without a baseline, you can’t measure change.
Intervention when noticing even small changes can be enough to prevent temporary damage from becoming permanent. But most fans have never had a hearing test, so they don’t know where their baseline is.
Consumer tech is starting to close that gap and make hearing health insights more accessible.
For example, Apple’s clinically validated Hearing Test, built into the Health app and accessible to anyone with AirPods Pro 2 or 3, runs a pure-tone audiometry screening in about 5 minutes. The results are saved in the Health app and can be downloaded and shared with your health care provider. This is the type of baseline that audiologists wish more patients had.
It’s important to note that the Hearing Test’s “clinically validated” status generally means it meets accuracy standards, but it’s still a screening tool intended to identify patterns and changes, not a full, professional diagnostic audiology exam.
Similarly, Samsung’s “Adapt Sound” feature acts as a built-in, 5-minute hearing test to create a personalized sound profile.
These types of hearing tests can help consumers learn about hearing patterns and changes when they previously had no insight into them. This gap is precisely where hearing loss happens.
Most people don’t undergo baseline hearing testing and typically don’t see an audiologist until they suspect hearing loss. A baseline taken before a loud event is priceless the next time you want to understand whether anything has changed in your hearing. It’s also valuable to the audiologist you might eventually see, since they’ll have a starting point to look at.
For knowing how your hearing is affected in the moment, the Apple Watch Noise app lets you enable real-time alerts when environmental sounds reach risky levels. During a race weekend, I can only imagine those alerts would fire often, but that kind of insight is crucial for understanding how to protect yourself.
How live event fans are protecting their hearing now
Walk the grandstands at an F1 Grand Prix, and you’ll notice a subtle change. The foam earplugs are still there, but right there with them is something else. Something a little sleeker and more modern — hearing protection that also serves as an accessory.
I like to think of this shift as similar to what happened with sunscreen decades ago. For a long time, sun protection was reserved for those who burned easily and was viewed as slightly uncool. Then the science caught up, and SPF became an integral part of outdoor activities.
Hearing protection is somewhere in the early stages of that same arc. Live events like F1 races and concerts are places where that shift is most visible.
Rey recommends that anyone attending an event like the Miami Grand Prix bring and use hearing protection. “Earplugs are a simple, inexpensive way to reduce sound levels without taking away from the experience — you’ll still hear the engines, announcements and atmosphere, just at a safer level,” he says. “If you want to take it a step further, you can add noise-canceling headphones over the earplugs for even more attenuation [reduction in volume].”
For fans who want to experience live events without the muffled sounds while protecting their hearing, filtered earplugs have become a middle ground.
Nasha wearing the Loop Experience at a concert.
One of the ways I personally protect my hearing daily (during my commutes, concerts and live events) is with my Loop Switch 2. I like these better than foam earplugs because foam ones tend to leave you with an underwater or muffled sensation.
The Switch 2 uses acoustic filters to reduce volume while preserving sound quality. They have a dial that moves between three modes: 20 dB reduction, best for conversations in loud spaces; 23 dB for events like concerts or other live events where you still want to hear with clarity; and 26 dB for maximum noise reduction. You can switch between modes without removing the earplugs.
“For a long time, that [foam earplugs] was the only choice. Either you suffered through it [live event], or you used foam plugs and felt completely disconnected. Loop is for everyone who wants to be there. Fully there,” Maarten Bodewes, Loop Earplugs’ co-founder, told CNET.
For F1 fans or those attending the Miami race this weekend, Loop partnered with McLaren on a limited-edition color in McLaren’s signature papaya orange and anthracite. “We’re also F1 fans,” says Bodewes. “McLaren already uses Loop inside their team. Trackside, helping their team to stay focused in all that noise. Fans in the grandstand are in that same wall of sound. This partnership is about giving them the same thing: control over the noise, without taking away the experience.”
What Loop is doing is turning something seen as uncool into something people want to use. Something so simple as design can make an awkward earplug look like a nice piece of jewelry.
How F1 fans can protect their hearing during race weekend
While the McLaren team is headed to Miami with custom-fitted protection, fans can’t necessarily replicate that. But they can arrive with a plan. If you’re attending the race in person, or even watching it with a group of friends from a beer garden with loudspeakers, these are the steps you can take to fully enjoy the race while also taking care of your ears.
Take a baseline hearing test before the race
If you own a pair of AirPods Pro 2 or 3 or a Samsung phone, you can take a hearing test within a few minutes. You can save the results for reference after the weekend. This will give you a better understanding of any changes that might have occurred.
Choose your preferred method of hearing protection
For maximum protection, Ashby-Scabis recommends wearing hearing protection with the highest noise reduction rating available. Ideally, this would mean double protection — inserting foam earplugs with a high NRR into the ear canals and wearing over‑the‑ear hearing protection on top of that.
Ashby-Scabis notes that proximity is one of the key risk factors for hearing damage. So, depending on where you’re seated at the race, you’ll need different levels of protection.
Here’s a quick guide on choosing your hearing protection based on where you’re seated:
|
Protection Type |
Key benefit |
Best for |
Noise reduction range |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Foam earplugs |
Most cost-effective, readily available, maximum NRR |
Those sitting at the start/finish and main grandstands. |
High (25-33 dB) |
|
Filtered earplugs |
Preserves sound quality and clarity |
Those sitting near the mid-track grandstands and elevated seating. |
Moderate (16-27 dB) |
|
Double protection (foam plus over-the-ear protection) |
Highest possible safety |
Those sitting nearest to the trackside and pit lane. |
Maximum (30-40+ dB) |
It’s important to note that children’s ear canals are even more sensitive to hearing damage. If you plan to bring little ones to the Grand Prix, the best approach is to use double protection, regardless of where you’re seated.
Monitor noise levels in real time
If you have an Apple Watch, you can turn on the Noise app. It will alert you when you’re in environments that have unsafe noise levels.
If you don’t have an Apple Watch, you can download apps like the NIOSH Sound Level Meter (iOS) and Decibel X (iOS and Android) to turn your smartphone into a sound level meter for measuring environmental noise, ranging from 30 to 130 dBA.
The bottom line
The hearing you have today is the best hearing you’ll ever have. “Once hearing is damaged, it cannot be restored,” says Ashby-Scabis. “There is no medication or surgery that can reverse noise-induced hearing loss.”
Bodewes adds, “Hearing damage is permanent. Every loud event without protection adds up, and the bill comes in years later — tinnitus, hearing loss, a constant ringing that a lot of people accept as normal. It’s not normal. It’s preventable.”
The stakes are pretty clear. Protecting your hearing is imperative for everyone — from F1 drivers and pit crew to fans in the grandstands. The power to prevent permanent, irreversible damage rests on consistently using the right protection.
