The Origin of Rawe Ceek
It says "Race Week." Everyone read "Rawe Ceek." This is how one Ferrari poster became Formula 1's favourite meme.
Where it started (27 July 2020)
In the run-up to the 2020 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, Scuderia Ferrari's social media team shared a stylised race-week poster. The words "Race" and "Week" were split into blocks and stacked in two colours, with "Race" in white and "Week" in black.
The trouble was the reading order. Take the poster line by line, the way your eyes naturally go, and you don't get "Race Week" at all. You get "Rawe Ceek."
We’re heading to Silverstone 🇬🇧
The original post from Scuderia Ferrari on X (then Twitter).
The internet notices
F1 fans spotted the problem within hours. Replies filled up with people asking whether they were the only ones reading it wrong, and others posted "fixed" versions of the poster. On Reddit, a post titled "IT'S RAWE CEEK!" went up on r/formula1 that same day and quickly became one of the top posts on the sub, while r/formuladank ran with it too.
The phrase stuck because it's so oddly pleasant to say. It's nonsense, but it sounds like it should mean something, in the same tradition as the classic "Don't Dead, Open Inside" sign. Fans began calling every race week "rawe ceek" whether Ferrari was involved or not.
Ferrari plays along (24 August 2020)
About a month later, ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix, Ferrari leaned into the joke itself and crossed out "Rawe Ceek" to replace it with "Race Week." Admitting the mistake turned out to be the best move they could have made: the tweet became one of the team's most-liked posts of that period.
It’s
Rawe Ceek… Race Week 😉
Every team wants in (2020–2021)
Once Ferrari had owned the joke, rival teams felt free to borrow it. Racing Point (now Aston Martin) used it to announce the 2020 Italian Grand Prix, Haas teased its return to Italy for Imola in April 2021, and circuits like Sochi Autodrom later copied the format for their own race-week posts.
The biggest moment came on 26 April 2021, a full year after the original poster, when Mercedes-AMG Petronas recreated the layout in its own colours for the Portuguese Grand Prix. Dubbed "Rawe Ceek 2.0" by fans, it collected tens of thousands of likes in a single day, far more than the original, and triggered a fresh wave of fan edits for McLaren and others.
It’s…
Timeline
- 27 July 2020 Ferrari posts its British GP "Race Week" poster. Fans read "Rawe Ceek."
- 27 July 2020 The poster hits r/formula1 and r/formuladank; the meme is born.
- 24 August 2020 Ferrari jokes about it themselves ahead of the Belgian GP.
- 31 August 2020 Racing Point calls the Italian GP week "Rawe Ceek."
- 12 April 2021 Haas trolls Ferrari ahead of the Emilia Romagna GP at Imola.
- 26 April 2021 Mercedes posts "Rawe Ceek 2.0" for the Portuguese GP.
- Today Still the unofficial name for every Formula 1 race week.
So what does Rawe Ceek mean?
Officially, nothing. Unofficially, it's the week before a Grand Prix, when the hype builds and the posters drop. If someone tells you it's rawe ceek, you know exactly what they mean.
Sources: Know Your Meme, EssentiallySports, GPFans. Quoted posts © their respective owners. raweceek.com is an independent fan site, not run by Formula 1 or Scuderia Ferrari.