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It was certainly a fun experience going into ep. 1 not knowing the synopsis or anything at all, then being hit with the plot twist at the end, which only works if you haven't read the synopsis. The concept of having to hide your gender is interesting but it's not exactly well executed. Even so, it goes quite hard into the romance for most of its runtime and gives more into the BL. Unfortunately with Mito being a girl and how the anime handles their relationship, it really doesn't feel much of a LGBT story for the main characters. Mito isn't a crossdresser because she ... wants to, she's forced herself to because of her past. Involuntary crossdressing is a part which irked me more and more as the episodes went on.

Another issue that many romances suffer from are dense characters. But this also suffers from stupid characters too and one with an absolutely foolish plan. This isn't good when this story progression goes into a common trap where the feelings the MCs have for each other have gone too far too early into the season, and it ends in this typical limbo where no progression happens so there needs to be drama interjected to keep the runtime going. So the story just ends up stagnating just before it should've taken its moment as the buildup was getting to its peak, because the characters just don't realize because they're too dense or too stupid to take action. But the anime takes it a step further in the wrong direction, which is the main reason for giving my rating. This was supposed to be just a simple 9, just a completely inoffensive and warming romance, with some of the typical drama and tropes you see in many other romances. But no. It might work better for someone else, though you'd almost need to somehow treat this like a slice of life. It just ended up as a bitter disappointment for my enjoyment.

Light spoilers ahead.

As a huge Formula 1 fan over the past 11 years and have watched F1 as early as 1999, this anime is more distracting than it's worth. The anime's premise is very clearly an attempt at a futuristic version of Formula 1, it borrows a lot of similar elements. Because most racing series are quite similar in their foundation, it more closely resembles F1 because of, but not limited to: 3 different options of tyres, pit stops are only for tyres, standing starts, short races of around 350km, racing mostly on known F1 circuits around the world and many races are so boring ... the FIA are calling to get them back. All of these features combine into being the most similar to F1. Not only that, they also reference directly to certain famous F1 quotes. Then it's quite easy to look at this and assume it follows the rules of F1 while watching it. Oh boy it really doesn't at times, but that's not the show's issues.

The characters. If I could even consider the show had characters, as there's barely any development, other than Rin for seemingly arbitrary reasons become faster and faster. It also doesn't help that Rin is just a plain unlikeable ignorant and entirely spaced out fool. It took almost no time at all to be completely disconnected from thinking that she actually could even get into that position to begin with. Not only is she insanely slow, but she also doesn't know ANYTHING AT ALL. Flags? What are those. Pit stops? Why do I need to change tyres? It's so ridiculous they couldn't find another way to explain these things, other than making Rin a complete idiot. And that doesn't change. Close to the end of the season, she STILL doesn't know everything. Every other character is honestly just a plank of wood who just have their roles to do things. And they just immediately like Rin for some reason. Also, I don't even want to start on Rin's backstory and the basis on her character development, as it makes almost no sense and feels so inconsequential that the anime have to keep reminding you about that "actually this is important". (it's not)

The animation. If you don't like 3D anime, you won't like this. Especially if you're triggered by Fast and the Furious runway length straights. These tracks seem to either have the longest straights in the world, or the longest corners in the world. The cars most of the time look very slow. Apparently they're supposed to go at 500km/h on the straights. Most of the time they look no faster than F3 cars. The rare moment the animation quality goes drastically up, the cars actually look as fast as they should, and if that was consistent, it would make the anime more enjoyable. For the character animations, there's not much. I might as well have watched a low budget 2D anime where only the mouths move most of the time, as then I wouldn't have that uncanny 3D feel to it.

The voice acting. The biggest issue I have is with the race commentators. Most of the time their excitement for the races really describe most races themselves. Lifeless. I have heard how Japanese commentate Super Formula and when things happen it's QUITE something. Here, I can only imagine the VAs had absolutely no direction other than just "read this". Not only that, because their sentences are so long for certain moments, the animation often stagnates completely by just becoming an endless straight or an endless corner. It feels like the race grinds to a complete halt just to let the commentators finish what they're saying.

The plot. If it existed before halfway into the season I'd tell you about it. But there are no stakes before the 2nd half. No serious motivation from the MC. And sometimes the anime directly contradicts itself in the same episode.

How to enjoy this anime as an F1 fan (but you really shouldn't watch): Watching the first episode is basically just one entire F1 race condensed into 20 minutes, so try and find every similarity. Including how boring the race is. The show also uses existing F1 tracks, but changes one sector of the track to not be a direct ripoff. Try and not to be upset by these track changes (impossible challenge). Try to find every single direct F1 reference or rule, and find everything else that doesn't make sense or is really stupid. And there are some rules that are beyond stupid. And some rules that don't exist at all. Also safety seems to just not exist. When cars crash, there's barely any damage or they somehow just don't crash when they lose complete control in a corner.

I'm happy that this is over. I committed to watching this, because I love F1 and was wondering how much was directly F1 related. I had some fun writing down every rule and reference to F1 through the episodes but I'll not rewatch this and will not watch a 2nd season. I would rather give a recommendation to Overtake! to any F1 fan, as it's much more grounded in reality, being directly based on, and using the FIA Formula 4 Japanese Championship name.

I can't recommend this to anyone, and my rating is based on the overall quality. It's just overall bad. At best it's a 7 momentarily, but most of the time it's around a 3-4. I've watched worse than this anime, and the worst thing this anime does is that nothing interesting or exciting happens. It's mostly inoffensive.

I'm almost going straight to the point why I absolutely can't stand this anime and why I really, really don't recommend this at all.

I enjoyed this anime as the ecchi harem it was the first 10 episodes, not taking itself very seriously and just being quite goofy with its characters. But suddenly it decides that it wants to have this big serious story all of a sudden, where it takes a RIDICULOUSLY dark tone. There's nothing wrong with sudden changes like this, some of my favorite stories have done this type of sudden tonal shift. But this one, it messes up basically everything in the ... span of a single episode by creating massive contradictions and horrid character writing.

Early on we're very specifically told that it isn't possible to use magic to resurrect people, so this puts the stakes somewhat high for a magical isekai world. This doesn't really matter for 10 episodes. But episode 11, we end up getting the most ridiculous and painful torture scene I have ever seen. It is to the point where literally anyone would look at the victim, who is in an entire room covered in their own blood with a lot of stakes sticking out of them, and say "yep, they're 100% dead". But no, this anime decided that they are in fact, not dead. That in fact, a potion is enough to heal them, even though they basically stopped breathing for a very long time. This torture scene happens so suddenly, and it is so grotesque and agonizingly long, that it completely removed all and every enjoyment I had of what should've been a silly isekai harem.

BUT, I'm not done yet with the absolute retardation of the character writing. We get to know this one girl, who seems innocent, but of course is the biggest sadist ever and a mass murderer of civilians, to the point you could call what she does ethnical cleansing. She's seemingly some leader in a cult, dead set on summoning something which basically entails the end of everyone, and to summon that, she has tortured and killed THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. So with this in mind, you might wonder, this person is just a terrible villain who's probably going to get punished heavily and killed by the end. BUT NO, how can you be so foolish to think that? This absolute unit is going to get a redemption arc! All of the people she tortured and murdered? Yeah, all will be resolved in a grand redemption!... Actually, no, she just says that she regrets what she's done and apparently all is fine, even by the person that got tortured nearly to death. And then she's also a part of the growing harem in this anime. No joke, the mass torturing villain becomes a part of the harem and episode 12 ends up with literally every girl in the harem taking all their clothes off and smothers the isekai protagonist in lots of oppai. Of course this isn't rated R+ so don't get your hopes up.

It has been a while since I've watched this, but I had to write a review because I have never seen any piece of media going from a solid 8/10 down to a 0/10 in a single episode. And that's the only reason my final score isn't a 1, it's just fine until it's not. For the love of god, if you want to watch this anime, skip episode 12 and 11, maybe even 10 for that matter as it does build up to the garbage ending. Or just don't watch it at all. I would rather watch a vending machine isekai than watch this pure garbage.