A modest Netflix series showed Formula 1 how to survive in America.
It was never more clear than on October 24, 2021. The United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, an event once at risk of cancellation, was a sellout, boasting 400,000 attendees over three days. A few states north, in Kansas, NASCAR’s third-to-last race of the season struggled to draw a crowd. In Austin, the talk of the weekend was how Formula 1 had become so big so quickly in the U.S. In Kansas, the conversation was also about how big F1 had become—and how NASCAR had failed to keep pace.
While NASCAR’s total audience is still bigger, the trend is clear: The balance of power in American auto racing has shifted. For the first time since NASCAR’s boom in the Nineties, a racing series is growing like wildfire in the U.S.
This is a direct result of a bold new strategy by F1’s owner, Colorado-based Liberty Media, focused on building a younger, more enthusiastic, and more stable fan base for “the pinnacle of motorsport.” The previous regime, led by the imperious Bernie Ecclestone, put the brand’s image above fan interest at seemingly every turn. On social-media platforms, for instance, official accounts did little more than report results and share official releases. Under Liberty, there has been a thaw. The series started sharing in-car audio and race-weekend highlights across Instagram and TikTok. That strategy has paid off: According to F1’s internal measurements, social-media interactions doubled from 2019 to 2020. And after a generation of championships that rewarded teams that were already good, the series introduced a budget cap in 2021. Even running the same cars as the year before, this past season the long-struggling McLaren team won its first race in nine years.
Now there’s an added ingredient that would have been absolutely unthinkable under Ecclestone’s snooty, tightfisted regime: After defining itself from the beginning as a sport of exclusivity and prestige, F1 opened its doors to fans with the Netflix docudrama Drive to Survive.
This story originally appeared in Volume 9 of Road & Track.
The show has been nothing short of a cultural upheaval in motorsport. By introducing the major players from each team as the protagonists in a high-stakes reality show, Drive to Survive has made celebrities of not just the drivers, but also executives like Red Bull Racing’s Christian Horner and Hass F1’s Gunther Steiner. In a sport where most teams have no shot at a given week’s podium, the show has a particular knack for amplifying the drama taking place on the grid far behind Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. It allows subplots to become main stories. Pierre Gasly—promoted to Red Bull for half of the 2019 season only to be dropped back down to AlphaTauri in favor of Alex Albon—became a sympathetic figure in the 2020 season, when he overcame his demotion to win the Italian Grand Prix.
Drive to Survive accomplishes all of this without dumbing down what’s actually happening on the track. Casual Netflix viewers looking for something to watch after dinner are suddenly engrossed in the outcome of a race weekend that revolves around the topic of tire-compound selection. The show takes new fans seriously while still focusing on the race outcomes, telling a near-real-time sports story on a compelling, deeply personal level. It is the Last Dance of racing, built on the foundation laid by ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentaries.
“We are hitting the right audience now,” notes Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi. “We’re bringing in way more people than just the traditional petrolheads. Suddenly we’re like actors in a show putting their best foot forward to entertain more viewers. It’s a recipe for a great show and great entertainment.”
While Netflix does not share audience data about its shows, McLaren executive Zak Brown claimed in October that 50 million people watched Drive to Survive in 2021. The number seems outlandish until you look back at those 400,000 spectators who showed up in Austin. ESPN’s race broadcast ratings rose 50 percent from 2019 to 2020. Celebrities, like NFL players JJ Watt and Josh Allen, have become F1 superfans overnight, the kind who will happily wake up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday for a chance to see what Verstappen has in store for Hamilton in Belgium. And that United States Grand Prix, which has struggled to find a lasting home for its entire history, was the highest-attended F1 race in any country. Ever.
Formula 1 has been trying to break into the U.S. since 1950, when it attempted to stake a claim to the Indianapolis 500. Remarkably, this Netflix show is F1’s first significant breakthrough here. Few people understand that better than Otmar Szafnauer, CEO of the Aston Martin Racing F1 team and an F1 fan since the Eighties, when he was growing up in Detroit. As he sees it, Drive to Survive’s crucial strength is its ability to welcome new fans into the sport.
“The show has driven a much wider and diverse crowd than just motor-racing fans,” he says. “Our product is so entertaining and enticing once you get a flavor for it, once you understand it. From there, the audience for F1 in the States can grow significantly. If a household likes Formula 1, then the children like it, and that grows. Many of my friends who are now in their fifties like me started watching Formula 1 because their parents enjoyed it back in the Seventies. If we can get that momentum, I think that growth could happen very quickly.”
As for Rossi, while he appreciates Drive to Survive itself, he sees it as a success only because it leads new fans to something that’s worth their attention.
“What people discover is that the sport has changed,” he says. “It’s not just Netflix. You need to have something real behind it. Otherwise people will see it as a scam. The sport is catering to more of society at large. It’s trying to be greener, more sustainable, inclusive, diverse. It’s also understood the need to be more entertaining, outside the politics. It’s not just the spirit of racing, ‘Who cares if it’s not fun to watch?’ They understood that it’s important. They also understood the need to monetize the sport better and push forward the capping of costs.”
But that entertainment element can be off-putting to some within F1. Max Verstappen, the 2021 season’s winningest driver and controversial champion, made waves when he told the Associated Press in October that he had chosen not to participate in interviews for the next season of Drive to Survive. He believed the show had used his quotes to manufacture rivalries that did not exist.
“It was already decided in the preseason. I had decided not to do anything,” Verstappen said in a Zoom interview. “I gave them a bit in 2020, but that’s it. That’s all I gave them because I’m not agreeing with how they’re putting on, faking, a lot of the show. I watched [the first season] because I wanted to watch what they did, but my opinion is still the same.”
The Netflix series puts drivers in a strange position, painted as reality-show protagonists in addition to their actual jobs as Formula 1 competitors. For Verstappen, this is unpalatable. It was also a point of concern for Alfa Romeo’s Antonio Giovanazzi, who says he’s watched only the episodes he appears in, entirely out of curiosity over how he’s portrayed. The show was less of a concern for Giovanazzi’s retiring team-mate: Kimi Räikkönen has told Road & Track that he simply had not bothered to watch.
The Drive to Survive storytelling angles create a cohesive narrative with impact, even if that impact is sometimes unflattering or overemphasized. While Rossi shares the drivers’ concerns about how the show controls the way these stories are told, he sees it as a necessary element of dramatization that becomes an issue only when lines are crossed and exaggeration becomes fiction.
“To say you don’t like it and are not going to be part of it—you can’t have it all,” Rossi says. “Where I would agree with Max is that there is a fine line. You should not dramatize too much, not twist facts, and I know that can happen here or there. I find he has a point about rivalries that might have been created for the show that in real life are not there. I think the onus is on Netflix not to break the toy, but I find it exciting.”
Rossi does watch the show, and he seems impressed: “I was very apprehensive in the beginning when my friends who are not F1 fans said, ‘You should watch it.’ I said, ‘I watch the events.’ But I watched it, and I was like, nicely done, guys! This is entertaining.”
And that is the key to the whole enterprise. Drive to Survive is good television first and foremost, not an ad for F1. Because it can stand alone as a dramatic product that draws multiple generations of new fans into a famously arcane and confusing sport, it has become a bonafide hit with the same people who made Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Tiger King into sensations. It creates new F1 fans by showing the most fascinating aspects of the ultimate racing series. A previous version of F1 might have simply taken advantage of Netflix’s platform to advertise races. Drive to Survive is something altogether different, more nuanced—and far more compelling to everyday people.
The result is millions of new, engaged, invested fans, already up to speed on how Formula 1 actually works on a week-to-week basis. In an era when almost every racing series has tried to spice up the on-track competition with gimmicks—something F1 has done with DRS zones—fans who come in via Drive to Survive understand the complicated, patient nature of the sport as part of its core appeal. At a track where the Mercedes may be faster than the Red Bull thanks to Mercedes’s low-rake design philosophy, a previous generation of casual fan might see a boring race decided in the off-season. These new fans see a continuation of a narrative, a story they’ve watched on-screen turned into real results in a real competition. It creates a point where sports and reality shows meet for a unique hybrid of real-world dramas—the sort of compelling storytelling every league executive in the world dreams about.
Drive to Survive also gives F1 an opportunity to obscure some of its ugliest modern realities. The sport has forged strong partnerships with oppressive states and as a result has faced some consequences during race weekends. While Azerbaijan’s active conflict with neighboring Armenia may have been swept under the rug for a week, F1 could not get through weekends in Hungary, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia without drivers like Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, and Mick Schumacher voicing their displeasure with the sport’s choice to partner with states that oppress gay communities within their borders. With Drive to Survive, F1 can completely control which of these conversations make their way on-screen. In other words, the series can not only ignore accusations of whitewashing, but actually use Drive to Survive as a way to make the total F1 whitewashing package more attractive to these partners.
This is just one step in Liberty’s quest to revolutionize Formula 1. Next comes the on-track product, which the series hopes to revamp through the cost cap introduced this season and a new generation of lower-downforce cars set to be introduced for 2022. The new car is designed to produce better racing between close cars, hopefully resolving a “dirty air” problem. Verstappen told R&T that the current cars are difficult to drive within two seconds of one another, making the setup for a pass far more challenging than in other series. The cost cap is designed to get the field closer together, making opportunities to overtake more plentiful.
While that cap is already in place, the reality of the series means progress will be gradual. Both Szafnauer and Rossi separately stressed that larger teams will still benefit from their existing infrastructure, regardless of cost controls, but what stands out to both of them is that Liberty actually wants smaller teams to be able to catch up. Previous F1 administrations made no regulatory effort to even keep smaller teams alive from season to season; the new plan gives them financial stability now and the opportunity to move up the grid later.
That strategy is the envy of the racing world. MotoGP, NASCAR, and Formula E have seen the success of Drive to Survive and already produced documentaries of their own. IndyCar is hoping to have its own streaming programming too. And F1’s television success has those other top-tier racing series questioning their media decisions. During the Kansas NASCAR race weekend, 2020 series champion Chase Elliott wondered aloud why NASCAR’s previous Netflix collaboration, a one-season sitcom called The Crew, painted the series as a punchline while portraying F1 as a serious, respectable sport. After all, every category of professional racing is contested by expert teams who compete in weekly challenges of elite mechanical engineering, design, and strategy. Would they be in a better position if organizers had spent years glamorizing that angle?
Possibly, but the growth of Formula 1 in the U.S. goes far past one (admittedly great) show. Under Liberty Media, F1 is finding its strength by becoming more sustainable as a business, more competitive as a sport, and more exciting as a product. Combine that strong foundation with the human storytelling of Drive to Survive, and you give new fans something worth a deep dive, far more than the typical reality-show binge.
Keyword: The F1 Revolution Will Be Televised