Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population

It is possible to construct a sentence in which the growing American audience for Formula 1 motorsport and the growing wolf population of the Northern Rockies share a cause, but the sentence will sound suspicious from the beginning. Between 2017 and 2022, both quantities rose together with the steadiness of a tide coming in (r = 0.962). Wolves returned to Yellowstone; Americans returned to Lewis Hamilton. Neither party was consulted.

Both are, charmingly, stories of comeback. F1's American viewership doubled after Drive to Survive landed in 2019, finally breaking the sport out of its reputation as the thing your uncle fell asleep watching. The Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf, meanwhile, was reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 and has grown from a handful of animals to more than 2,700 across the region by 2022 — a conservation success story substantial enough that the species has cycled on and off the Endangered Species list multiple times. The two are united only by decade and by the strange American habit of simultaneously reviving motorsport and apex predators.

A wolf howls somewhere near Cooke City. A pit crew changes four tires in 2.1 seconds. Both are patient in different ways.