The rise of Formula 1 in the US has been remarkable. And the sport’s path to primetime — their media rights deal went from $5 million per year in the US to nearly $100 million when the next deal was signed — is an illustration of how sports can develop fandom.
It’s perhaps a bit reductionist to say ‘Drive to Survive’ in summing up the league’s explosion in popularity in the States. The Netflix docuseries had a significant effect, to be sure, but it’s what happened before and after that created fans of the sport, not just fans of the show.
A milestone that preceded Drive to Survive was Liberty Media’s acquisition of F1, completed officially in early 2017, which took a sport with an air of luxury and a fanbase mostly in their 50s and older and instilled a culture and sense of urgency to reach a younger and more diverse demographic. Drive to Survive may have felt like a culmination of that increased openness and focus on content, but it was the confluence of factors that arose alongside the Netflix show that put the growth into full throttle.
“What really kickstarted a lot of this content creation and testing out new formats was around 2020 when we had free time essentially to do whatever we wanted to do, and we had time to think,” said Nirupam Singh, who has spent years working with motorsports and today helps motorsports teams and business with sponsorship development. “That gave a lot of content creators and new people who wanted to binge that show the perfect opportunity to speak about a new topic that they had no clue about, but they were interested in, and they went and created new content around it on TikTok, Instagram, all these platforms.”
The pandemic and Netflix for days, the rapid rise of TikTok, the onslaught of creators in every interest area in the world — the elements were all there for fans to discover and then dive deeper into whatever caught their fancy. And for many that meant consuming more F1 content and more creators serving that demand. The teams inside Formula 1 also seized the opportunity, emulating some of the best practices of American sports leagues that had been crushing the social and content game for years.
“Now that F1 saw what the NBA and the NFL are doing, a lot of that stuff was then copied over and translated to what we can do in motorsports,” said Singh, who also works with tech companies on their marketing and email campaigns. “So the teams will look at it, the social media admins will look at it and they’re going to try and replicate something similar.”
The F1 teams are doing their thing, too — the content is hitting and the fan engagement is growing — they’re in that upper part of the hockey stick growth. And the American way is kicking in in more ways than just content, it’s also coming in the form of monetization. It’s all flying high now, but F1 also faces a challenge that all sports leagues face, maximizing the revenue today without sacrificing the fans and opportunities of tomorrow.
“Now everyone is seeing this amazing sport, and the sport has a lot of reach and level of success that every single sponsor and everyone involved wants to capitalize on. But that’s the problem,” said Singh. “They want to capitalize on it, not maintain it. So as soon as they got the fan now all bets are off and [it’s like] ‘Okay, we made as much money from you as possible, [now] ‘Bye’.
“That’s what I want to really avoid; how can we maintain and keep these fans over a longer period of time, because you don’t just become a fan by watching one thing, you become a fan over time, seeing it multiple times, and then you start finding like-minded people…
“There needs to be better strategies and better systems in place to nurture these fans over a longer period of time. These fans, if you talk about demographics, are much younger now. The age of the fan base has shifted from being 50+ to much lower, 18-35, so these fans are going to grow up with this sport over a longer period of time. So how can we maintain that so that as these fans grow up, they can pass down this passion of theirs to their kids and to their peers?”
There’s a lot to unpack there in the impassioned plea from Singh, who can recall days growing up when being a motorsports fan put him squarely in the minority. And if fandom isn’t cultivated, it can disappear as quickly as it came. Pull out the key factors Singh alluded to — repeat exposure and reliability, finding like-minded fans — community building, and passing that fandom from parents to kids and from old to young — generational fandom. Some of that the sports leagues and teams can affect directly, but things like community building, creators and personalities leading such community, parents plopping their kid in front of a grand prix, water cooler conversations — that’s in the hands of others and all the leagues and teams can and should do is set them up for success.
The new sports fan is different, too. While those of us who came of age in the ’90s or earlier mostly came to sports from, well, the sport, there are so many more avenues to elicit interest and fandom now. Many sports leagues have embraced all these tangential interests that emanate from the platform they have — fashion, gaming, music, and even just the drama and intrigue that surrounds the sports and athletes themselves. There are more fan segments than ever and such diversity of affinities and interests can be both a blessing and a curse.
“Because the fan base is now so large, there are so many different levels of interest and personalities and people that find certain things interesting and certain things they don’t find interesting,” said Singh. “So it’s a unique challenge, that’s for sure. And I’m sure the NBA and the NFL have the same issues and they’re all tackling the main issue there — how do we keep these fans and attract more fans down the road?”
There are more types of fans and pathways to fandom than ever before, and that’s great. It’s also a challenge for sports organizations to try and wrap their head around all these unique fan segments, communities, and sub-communities — there is no single or linear fan journey. There is no single story to tell or content to create and it can be intimidating to concede that we don’t have all the answers and don’t understand the factors behind every fan’s affinity. The sports that thrive moving forward will be those that foster open frameworks, that provide a platform for an ecosystem to develop and thrive. The factors that coalesce to drive fandom will continue to evolve in the future, but what keeps fans engaged — the community, the connections, the conversations — will stand the test of time.
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