Formula One teams are fine-tuning their new cars right now in pre-season testing, but many fans will be thinking all about last year.
That’s because season five of “Drive to Survive,” the Netflix docuseries, premieres Friday. The new series sheds new light on the biggest F1 stories of last year, including Fernando Alonso’s shock move to Aston Martin, the contract saga between Alpine and McLaren over young gun Oscar Piastri and outrage in reaction to Red Bull’s breach of the budget cap in 2021.
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At its heart remains the formula that not only made the show a global success but helped remake F1 in and for the United States by opening the high-speed drama, personalities and politics to everyone with a Netflix account.
A show for all-comers
Following the success of sports docuseries like “All or Nothing” and “Last Chance” in the past decade, Liberty Media — which acquired F1’s commercial rights in 2017 — quickly saw an opportunity to give motorsports the same treatment.
Accessibility was always the priority. F1 preferred a series that covered the whole grid, not the “All or Nothing” approach of focusing on a single team (in that case, the Premier League’s Arsenal) over the course of a season.
F1’s an innately secretive sport, and teams were hesitant at first about taking part — Ferrari and Mercedes sat out Season One. But they soon realized this wasn’t going to be a show about front wings, telemetry analysis and tire degradation. It was an opportunity to engage with fans who had no prior knowledge of motor racing, by focusing on the characters.
That approach broke F1 away from its traditional older, male audience. Last year, a global survey by Motorsport Network found the average age of F1 fans — not just “Drive to Survive” viewers — had fallen from 36 to 32 since 2017. Female participation had doubled.
“This has resonated with a different demographic, a younger demographic, a female demographic,” Ian Holmes, F1’s director of media rights, said in an interview last year. “Your avid fan will 100 percent hoover through the series. But what is particularly exciting for us is how non-fans have become fans.”
The shift in fan base even surprised Netflix. “The audience that Netflix thought was going to come and watch it was very different from the audience that has shown up,” Paul Martin, the executive producer of “Drive to Survive,” said at the Season Five premiere last week. (That was held in New York, another sign of the series’ significance in the United States.) “It’s reignited people’s passion for the sport, and has brought this whole new audience as well, which is just phenomenal.”
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People like people
The show has led to the coining of the phrase, the “Drive to Survive effect,” the highlighting and use of personalities to tell the story of a sport, away from its traditional mediums.
That has been the “secret sauce” to the success of “Drive to Survive” and why it has resonated so strongly with the American audience. Viewers have come to love Daniel Ricciardo’s random singing, for example, and Guenther Steiner’s colorful language (in the very first episode, the Haas team principal said his team looked like “f—ing w—ers”). They’ve seen drivers celebrate first wins and 100th wins, grapple with crushing defeats and, at the series’ rawest points, handle the deaths of friends and loved ones.
Like never before, American fans have been able to understand the drivers as human beings, as well as celebrate them as athletes. It has meant the drivers they come to root for aren’t just the biggest names fighting for wins or championships. Which helps, because unlike most sports, few in F1 actually get the chance to win anything. Last year, only five drivers won at least one race.
Indeed, the storytelling in “Drive to Survive” has helped change the definition of a “winner” for American F1 fans, and expand the definition of what matters in the sport. Viewers can see what a shock pole position in Brazil means to Kevin Magnussen, or why an eighth-place finish in Hungary left George Russell in tears.
“We want to make people fall in love with Kevin Magnussen as much as they’re in love with Lewis Hamilton,” said Martin. “The athletes are really the heroes, and if you put them at the heart, you can make audiences fall in love with them, then they’ll fall in love with the wider sport as well.”
Turning new fans into avid fans
The challenge F1 has faced in recent years is to convert those who are hooked on “Drive to Survive” into fans who never miss a race on TV, and insist on getting there in person to get up close with the cars, drivers and teams.
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The timing of the new season’s release, a week ahead of the Bahrain GP, helps. But even when there wasn’t racing right off the heels of the release — the show really took off when the pandemic hit in 2020 — viewers stayed hungry. Once fans could attend events again in 2021, they quickly snapped up tickets. The United States Grand Prix in Austin has sold out both years since returning to the calendar, and demand for tickets remains so fierce that race officials keep searching for new ways to add seats.
But the drivers and teams have also leaned into the added acclaim and fame that has come their way. Ricciardo, arguably the biggest star of the show, has been a yearly fixture on prime-time U.S. talk shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Teams have turned notable moments into merchandise and started to embrace social media as a way to connect with fans all year round.
“What I’ve noticed lately is pretty much everywhere I go in different parts of the world, I can see the popularity of the sport growing so much,” said Red Bull driver Sergio Perez, when asked about the impact of the series. “It’s great for F1 to finally make it in the U.S. market.”
(Photo illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Sem Van Der Wal, Dan Mullan / Getty Images)