People do watch F1 and Nascar though, and those get more viewers than running or cycling typically.

All of those sports make intuitive sense to me, I really don't get why we make such a big thing of balls though.

I'm not really into either F1 or Nascar, but my impression from the outside is that those sports are still primarily about the drivers

F1 is somewhat about which company can build a better car. But any real improvements seem to invariably lead to a rule change that bans that improvement in future seasons. So you are back to drivers being the most visible differentiator