I love F1 so when I saw this book I knew I had to get it.
I loved how the story played out. Such a fun and enjoyable read, from a place that doesn't get written about a lot.

Red White and Royal Blue meets F1!? Sign me all the way up! This was so cute!

Kian is the golden boy of his team. He wins championships, has his head screwed on, and is more committed to motorsport than most.
When his teammate has an injury and can't compete, Kian is paired up with rookie Harper James. Harper is loud and energetic, and his reputation as a party animal and lover boy precedes him. He's the opposite of Kian in every way. There's no getting away from him, but does Kian really want to? It's getting harder to deny how unbelievably attractive Harper is and how his heart feels safer racing around a track than it does when he's in his presence.

I had such a fun time with this rivals to lovers, grumpy x sunshine romance. I absolutely adored Kian and how caring his nature is. My heart melted as he tended to Harper when he was sick. The banter between the two was absolutely on point, and I loved the will they won't they element to the story. I will say Harper frustrated me at times as although I understand he has trauma, him running away every time even a serious conversation was had felt a bit much. I'm glad he got his shit together in the end, though, because they are perfect together. The sexual chemistry between the two sizzles off the pages and, of course, there are spicy scenes that I personally loved!
It's not just a fluffy romance, though there's great depth to both the main characters, and both are dealing with big things. There's Parkinson/dementia, grief, parental loss, foster care, and alcoholism as trigger warnings to give you an idea. I thought the issues were dealt with sensitively.
Overall, I absolutely loved this book and would definitely recommend.

I absolutely loved this book. It kept me on the edge of my seat, and I loved the racing aspects within the story as well. Thank you so much Netgalley for an arc of this book. I apologize for the delayed post.

I guess I’m not the target audience for this. I know nothing about Formula 1 racing but I was excited to read another mlm sports romance. This missed the mark for me as I didn’t really buy into the chemistry of this couple nor did I care too much about their plot lines.

please note that the trigger warnings and topes/themes may contain spoilers
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
HEA: HEA
POV: dual 1st person POV
spice: a few open-door spicy scenes
TWs: abandonment, alcoholism, anxiety, cancer, cheating, death of a loved one, foster system, homophobia, panic attacks, parental neglect, Parkinson’s
Kinky Content: 69, anal, anal play, frotting, grinding, oral, rimmingstandalone: yes
final thoughts: I loved this story! It was an almost 5 star for me except for a few scenes that I didn’t feel were necessary and didn’t contribute to the story for me BUT other than that there was a lot of plot, great side characters, and great friendships.
I loved the work rivals to lovers, forced proximity, and found family tropes of this book and couldn’t put this book down. I also love a sports romance that isn’t a “typical” sport and both MCs are in the sport!
I’ll definitely be checking out more books from this author and hope this book turns into a series since there were plenty of openings for next couples and some loose ends that I would love to see tied up.
The epilogue was so cute and I love to see a broken boy MC heal ❤️

read this book if you love

🔢 age gap (25/34)
😬 angst
🍿 celebrity
💞 childhood crush
💬 epistolary
😳 forbidden lovers
🏝️ forced proximity
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 found family
😎 good boy/bad boy
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 great side characters
🤫 hidden secrets
🩹 hurt/comfort
🌈 LGBT+ representation
💞 mutual pining
💤 nightmare comfort
🔀 opposites attract
🤐 secret relationship
💓 slowburn
🏎️ sports romance (racing)
💼 workplace romance
🌍 world building

Nope! This didn't work for me. It read like fanfiction that needed a lot more editing and a few sensitivity readers. Neither of the MCs was in any way relatable and neither felt fully fleshed out. One is a player who just can't read a room and should have been reported for sexual harassment in the workplace. The other is slightly more mature, but then has sex with his completely drunk and hence unable to consent teammate (the aforementioned player).

The descriptions of racing sport and the terminology used felt off too - and I'm saying this as someone who only has faint layman's knowledge.

This is exactly what I needed in the midst of all the thrillers/horror books I’ve read recently.

A super quick, cute, queer romance! I’ve never read anything from this author before, but I definitely will be again.

I don’t know much (anything 😂) about Formula One or car racing in general so can’t speak to the accuracy, I’m just glad it wasn’t OVERLY done & complex.

I did find the dubious consent a major ick - one character being sober and the other being absolutely wasted when they share their first kiss ect, it just took the cute, swoon worthy moment away. Not a fan.

I also feel like there was a lot of “telling” rather than “showing” of the main relationship which was disappointing.

Overall I had a fun time but I wouldn’t reread.

I received Pole Position by Rebecca J.Caffrey for free on NetGalley for an honest review. Thank you so much for my copy!

This was my first F1 romance book and now I'm obsessed!

I loved the chemistry between Kian & Harper, it was so grumpy x sunshine coded and the tension between them gave me such Jamie Tartt x Roy Kent vibes, I loved it! I raced (pun intended 😂) through this book, I literally couldn't put it down! It was such a fun romance and I really enjoyed how the author made the races feel so high stakes!

This is the perfect read for summer!

Rebecca J. Caffrey’s Pole Position is a veteran/rookie contemporary romance set in the fast-moving world of Formula 1 motor racing. It’s not a sport I see written about all that often in romances (it’s only the second F1-set one I’ve read, although I know there are more out there) which is what attracted me to it, but while I liked the way the author writes about the sport itself – the technical aspects, the qualifiers, the teamwork, the preparation and training and so on – the romance is not particularly satisfying. It hits all the right beats of a rivals-to-lovers story, but it lacks – for want of a better word – warmth; there’s no real chemistry or emotional connection between the leads and the romance feels very rushed. Plus, a lot of page time is devoted to misunderstanding and miscommunication, which made it hard to like either of the protagonists until well into the story.

Four-times World Champion Kian Walker is at the pinnacle of his career. The son of a former racing legend (whom Kian has worked very hard not to emulate), he started racing in F1 when he was nineteen and his incredibly focused, meticulous and dedicated approach to the sport saw him rising quickly to the top. But, as happens to many athletes as they age, rumours are starting to circulate that, at thirty-three, Kian is thinking about retirement. He isn’t – or not in so many words, although he has been feeling for some time that he should be stepping up to help his sister and her husband, who have shouldered the bulk of the caring responsibilities for their mother (who has Parkinson’s Disease) – and the constant speculation that this will be his final season is pissing him off. More bad news comes in the form that his teammate, Elijah, has broken his leg and will be out for the season – and things go from bad to worse when the team principal tells him he’s called up Harper James from the lower category (I’m assuming this is F2 – if so, why not call it that?) to take Elijah’s place. Kian is Not Happy. He doesn’t know Harper well -they’ve only met briefly once or twice - but he’s everything Kian dislikes, a reckless, irresponsible party-boy whose drunken exploits feature frequently in the press and overshadow anything else he’s achieved in his career. Kian worries that having to be around him constantly – on planes, in locker rooms, in pits and simulators – is going to negatively affect his performance.

Harper James almost can’t believe it when he gets the call. He’s had his eye on making it into F1 for years, and this is his dream come true. And not only will he be competing with the big boys, he’ll be driving alongside Kian Walker, his motor-racing idol and the man who fuelled quite a few of Harper’s teenaged fantasies. His enthusiasm is curbed, however, when his idol proves to have feet of clay; Kian is a judgmental prick who shuts Harper down whenever he tries to be friendly or initiate a conversation and no matter what Harper says or does, it’s the wrong thing.

Things come to a head when their first joint interview goes wildly off the rails, and the two of them are ordered to do some media training - which Harper, aggrieved and defiant, doesn’t bother to go to. Needless to say, this cavalier attitude irritates Kian even more, and the more pissed off Kian is, the more annoying Harper gets.

For the first few chapters, I wanted to bang both their heads together. They jump to conclusions about each other very quickly and then dig their heels in; although I will say that the author does a pretty good job of showing us that they’re both as bad as each other in the misunderstandings stakes. Kian thinks Harper is too undisciplined and doesn’t take anything seriously (he’s not wrong, to be fair), and Harper thinks Kian is stuck up and regimented (again, not entirely unwarranted). I admit I found Kian easier to sympathise with because chaotic personalities like Harper set my teeth on edge – he has no sense of personal space or consideration for the needs of others, and I just couldn’t believe he had the necessary mental discipline to be a successful F1 driver. Kian isn’t blameless however, because he doesn’t bother to actually tell Harper that he needs his space and quiet time. And unfortunately, because Harper thinks Kian disdains him (which he does rather by this point) he continues to go out of his way to piss him off as much as he can.

This push-and-pull does eventually settle down as the season gets underway and Kian and Harper find themselves turning to each other through their various ups and downs. A tentative camaraderie begins to develop – which swiftly turns into a sexual relationship, but there's so little build up I thought I must've missed a few chapters! It’s clear Harper has a bit of a residual crush on Kian but it takes a long time to see anything like reciprocal attraction from Kian, so when they hook up for the first time it feels like it happens out of the blue. And then (a few weeks on in terms of the timeline of the story, but actually in the next chapter or so) we find out they’ve fallen into a pattern of sleeping together every night (they’re sharing a trailer at this point), spooning, cuddling, sometimes having sex, sometimes not – but we never see any of this, we’re just told it’s become their routine.

Thing is, I did quite like them as a couple once they’re actually together. Harper starts getting his shit together and behaving more responsibly, and Kian gets to know more about why Harper is the way he is, that his tendency to self-sabotage stems from a childhood bouncing around foster homes after his parents abandoned him. Harper’s struggles to believe anybody could want him lead to the main point of conflict in the romance when Kian wants to talk about where they stand with each other and Harper just freaks out. His inability to communicate with Kian and his blow hot/blow cold behaviour becomes repetitive fast, and then he does something really horrible to get Kian to break up with him for good. By that point, I was starting to think Kian would be better off with someone else - which is never what I want to think when I’m reading a romance.

The other thing that bothered me is the number of plotlines that are introduced and then just dropped, never to be seen again. Someone from Harper’s past crawls out of the woodwork with video evidence of a foursome he had a couple of years back; Harper worries about it for a bit and then it just… goes away. Kian’s father seems to make an appearance with the sole purpose of saying something homophobic about his son, but the biggest plot hole is Kian spending almost all the book insisting he has no plans to retire – only to suddenly decide he’s ready to retire after all and eh, it’s no biggie.

All this is so frustrating, because the parts of the story that work – the races and everything that goes into them, the team camaraderie, the quieter, more intimate parts of the relationship between Kian and Harper, and the brief sections dealing with Kian’s family situation – work well, and the story itself has good bones. But the execution is off – there are big time jumps and wobbly transitions, and there is ultimately too much telling and not enough showing in the romance.

I suspect there may be a story in the works for Harper’s best friend Johannes and another of the secondary characters in this book, and if there is, I might pick it up. Pole Position is one of those books that has me on the fence; I can’t quite recommend it for the reasons I’ve stated, but I might be prepared to give the author another try to see if she can iron out some of the bugs that have tripped her up this time round.

Possibly one of the best Formula One romance books I've ever read! It truly is RWRB meets The Hating Game but in F1 and I've never loved anything more.

Give me rivals to lovers, age-gap mixed with F1 all day long. Especially if it's Kiana and Harper! Harper is a season rookie who’s been brought in to be Kian’s teammate. Kian is a driver who's been around circuits since Harper was in school and they don't have too much in common. However once they stopped hating each other their banter was incredible.

A massive addition of brownie points for ACCURATE F1 INFORMATION. My biggest pet peeve is incorrect info surrounding sport and you can tell Rebecca is a fan! I have already pre-ordered the audiobook, it comes out in July! Can't wait to re-read Kian and Harper's story.

Wow, just wow.

Pole Position has wormed its way into my heart and has lived rent free in my mind for a good while now since getting this as an arc. Many thanks to @onemorechapterhc for allowing me to read this through @netgalley

This MM F1 romance had a beautiful blend of sports and romance in that one didn’t trump the other. There’s some incredible banter and overall it felt really cute and fun to read!

I do have little critiques about this, such as the miscommunication was a bit too much and almost borderline infuriating. The spice level for me was a bit low and the one scene we did get felt a little rushed.

However those critiques are purely personal preferences and come from a place of love because I really did enjoy sitting reading this.

⭐️⭐️⭐️.75/5

I had so much fun with this one. It was a great pride month read! Formula 1 is a genre I am here for. And the tension was *chefskiss*

I'm a huge Formula 1 fan, so I couldn't pass up Rebecca J. Caffery's debut romance. I fell in love with the cover of this book. I've been looking forward to reading this story, thanks to NetGalley and Rebecca J. Caffrey for the ARC.

Kian Walker is a Formula 1 legend. Harper James is a Formula 1 newcomer. They are complete opposites of each other. I liked how their relationship didn’t work out at the beginning, they constantly bickered and competed. But in difficult moments, all hostility disappeared and they took care of each other. At these moments, attraction and tension were very strongly felt. However, I didn’t have time to notice how their relationship suddenly began to develop. I couldn’t feel when their feelings and love began to arise.

I had high hopes for this book, and perhaps my expectations were too high, as I didn’t particularly like it, because at some moments the characters behaved like children, their relationships began to develop too quickly. I would really like more moments about Formula 1, I love it when sports novels pay a lot of attention to sports.

Pole Position review

Rating: 3.75/5

🏁 MM romance
🏁 grumpy x sunshine
🏁 F1 romance
🏁 anxiety rep, childhood trauma, healing
🏁 (slight) age gap

this was a RWRB meets F1 MM romance and ngl, it wasn’t perfect, but it was just okay!! It was an overall cute storyline, with the right blend of sports and romance, with touches of anxiety rep, childhood trauma (check TW’s!) and healing from this. However, the miscommunication trope is STRONG in this one (so maybe avoid if you don’t like that) and even I felt myself getting triggered at times but it dragging on the storyline unnecessarily!

*I received an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review*

*4.5

I always love a good f1 romance, especially when they are both drivers. Both of them were asses at the beginning but I grew to love them. Harper had a lot that he had to work through in order to be in a relationship with Kian. The two of them were really cute together. I did want to see how Harper found out about Kian's dad not being great because we didn't know that he knew until he yelled at him in the airport.

I received an arc through netgalley.

My dad has always loved F1 and I work within the car industry so I was eager to dive into this book. But boy was I disappointed. I was looking forward to a mix of high-speed racing and romance, but this felt more like a romance novel with a sprinkle of F1 racing. The racing scenes were sparse.

The characters were mediocre. Kian, who is supposed to be in his mid-thirties, came across as a teenager. His lack of maturity made it hard to connect with him or believe in his supposed experience and depth. Harper, being younger and more immature, made more sense. Regardless, I still didn't connect or like either character. I usually enjoy two POVs, but Harper and Kian often sounded so similar that I had to check the chapter headings to remember who was speaking (or use context clues).

The relationship between Harper and Kian lacked depth. They had no chemistry and seemed to have nothing in common. Their interactions were driven by physical attraction rather than genuine connection or passion. The lack of communication and the constant hurt they inflicted on each other made their relationship feel forced and unhealthy.

The pacing of the story was all over the place. Just as I was getting into one part of the plot, the story would abruptly jump to something entirely different in the next chapter or even in the next paragraph. This inconsistency made it hard to stay immersed.

Overall, Pole Position missed the mark for me on several fronts. The characters weren't my favourite, the integration of Formula 1 was superficial, the pacing was weird, and their relationship lacked chemistry and depth. While the premise had potential, the execution left much to be desired. If you're looking for a F1 racing romance, this book might not be it.

As an F1 fan, I was thrilled about this book because I will always read an F1-related book. Pole Position follows Kian and Harper, who become teammates after Elijah's injury. The chemistry and angst between them were palpable, and their relationship development was captivating. The spicy scenes were well-written, highlighting their passion for each other.

I enjoyed the racing aspects and appreciated the additional plot elements, such as their friendships with other drivers and their families. Despite the numerous characters, each one was distinct and memorable. I hope other characters in this book get their own story in a future book!

Overall, Pole Position was an engaging read with a well-flowing narrative and high emotional stakes. I’m giving it 3.5 stars and can't wait for Rebecca J. Caffery’s next work!

Thank you to One More Chapter for the opportunity to read Pole Position by Rebecca J. Caffery via NetGalley!

This was the cutest book, it’s definitely got me into F1/racing romances and I’ll certainly be looking out for more from Rebecca in the future!!

In the beginning, I really favoured Harper over Kian, but as the story went on and the two characters became more vulnerable, I ended up adoring them equally.

The way they fell for each other, going from rivals to lovers and accepting all their flaws was not only beautiful, but believable. Both characters felt so real and their development was just a pleasure to read.

Overall, I was hooked, I felt all the feels and I got the happily ever after I was rooting for. Fab read!

Would have preferred this just to be a romance without the F1 aspect because it felt a little hamfisted and incredibly inaccurate and as a fangirl that was tough. Otherwise very cute!

this just didn't really work for me - too much miscommunication and the dual-POV was more repetitive than insightful. i was so interested in the build-up of the relationship but the actual moment they finally got together was so lackluster, i actually thought "this is it?"

i don't even like f1 but i feel like this could have been so good exploring how their relationship would impact the sport but nothing really happened there.

overall, this was just meh