Who am I? Well, not a sports fan. I’m the kind of young woman who might have gone through her entire life never caring about sport. Then one afternoon in the Covid summer of 2021, I literally drove into Formula One.
On the radio during a journey to some long-forgotten destination, a drama was unfolding at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. A crash between rivals Lewis Hamilton (who I’d heard of) and Max Verstappen (who I hadn’t) brought F1 out of the sports bulletin and into my world.
It was enough to get me thinking: should I watch that Netflix show everyone was talking about, Drive to Survive? I got past the awful name to binge three series in one week. What got me was the pace of the storytelling — fast and uncomplicated, perfect for my social-media-ravaged attention span.
Soon I too was calling it DTS, and loved its insights into the crazy world of F1. It homes in on the human element: a soap opera that centres on two drivers in each episode, delving into their backstories, their struggles and insecurities. That makes it sound depressing, but of course it is much more than that.
After one sad tale, the show cuts to the Oxfordshire mansion of Christian Horner, the boss of the Red Bull team. He is waving goodbye to his wife, Geri Halliwell, aka Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, hopping on a helicopter to somewhere important.
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My star of series one was Guenther Steiner, the erratic and foul-mouthed German-speaking Italian who runs Haas, the smallest team on the grid. We are introduced to Steiner when the Sky commentator Martin Brundle says to him: “Mercedes have more people on holiday at one time than you have in your whole team!”
Later we see him on the phone to the team’s owner, Gene Haas, having to explain how mechanics failed to properly screw the wheels on to both of their cars, squandering their best qualifying result in the first race of 2018. It’s excruciating.
From the Netflix series, I was keen to move on to the real thing. The next race in the season was in Hungary. No F1 fan will need to be reminded: it was bonkers. Valtteri Bottas slammed his Mercedes into the back of Lando Norris, driving for McLaren, at turn one in the opening lap in the rain. Carnage ensued.
Esteban Ocon claimed his first grand prix victory for Alpine — but not before Hamilton found himself all alone for a restart when everyone else pitted, and hared back from last position to third, and a place on the podium. After that I was all in. I’m told the season-long duel between Verstappen and Hamilton was one of the best yet. I loved it.
I’m not the only 24-year-old woman to have been converted by DTS. The show has been credited with breathing life into a sport that was in the doldrums just a few years ago. The average age of F1 fans has fallen from 36 before the series first premiered on Netflix in 2018 to 32 last year, according to the Motorsport Network.
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Female fans accounted for 10 per cent of the fanbase in 2017, but that has now climbed to 18 per cent, according to the F1 Global Fan Survey. Most sports have struggled to recruit female supporters and Drive to Survive has provided Liberty Media, the owner of F1, with the secret code to unlocking half of the population. Kerching!
Other sports are now signing up for the Drive to Survive treatment but I’m not sure they have what it takes. The production team’s next target is American golf.
Bernie Ecclestone, the former owner of F1, said he has never watched an episode of Drive to Survive because he had heard that “lots of it [is] made up” and the “live coverage today is so good”. Ecclestone, 91, also revealed that about seven years ago, when he controlled the sport, he was in discussions with Apple about creating his own behind-the-scenes series, which was to be called From the Grid, that was “complete reality… how it happened”.
The billionaire was often urged by advisers to try to attract a younger generation, especially in the largely untapped American market, without much success. “People said I should be looking for the younger generation. The younger generation, good, but a lot of them are terribly fickle,” said Ecclestone. “I was always looking for people who wanted to watch F1, not watch it because they happened to be doing nothing with their time or hadn’t seen it before. I was always happy when people that knew exactly what was going on [watched].”
Ecclestone once said he did not chase younger viewers because they were uninterested in the blue-chip sponsors that were a source of F1’s vast riches. “Young kids will see the Rolex brand, but are they going to go and buy one? They can’t afford it,” he told Campaign Asia-Pacific magazine in 2015.
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Horner has been flamed on social media for telling talkSPORT: “F1 is bringing in a young generation. It’s bringing in all these young girls because of all these great-looking drivers.” It was a pretty lazy piece of stereotyping. Millionaire drivers living in Monte Carlo can afford to keep a personal trainer in the basement, I suppose. But F1 drivers tend to be built like string beans with unnervingly large necks.
What’s more, race day consists of three hours of these “great-looking drivers” covered up in fire suits and helmets. For bodies, rugby and football are a better bet.
Horner’s comments went down badly with “young girls” and I reckon members of the F1 establishment would be wise to respect their new cohort of fans.
It sounded to me as if Horner might have been the one turned on by the “great-looking drivers”. In series four of DTS, he completely lost it when talking about Norris, the 22-year-old British-Belgian with a winning smile.
“He’s a good-looking young lad, he’s driving the wheels off the car and he’s funny.” OK, Christian, I thought, calm down.
