They are dressed in colored uniforms, they wear a number painted on their backs, they fight among themselves in exchange for a burst of millions, they are gradually eliminated from a leaderboard, there are commissioners who regulate everything, a general manager who puts order , some morbid spectators who even bet money and have their favorites … and the moment comes when you no longer know if it is Formula 1 or the Squid Game.
What you have no doubt about is that the popularity of both narratives has grown exponentially thanks to a common nexus, a global benchmark when it comes to storytelling: Netflix. And if Netflix has certainly not changed the life of squid, it is changing that of the Formula 1, and there are several reasons to think so. In this 21st century, just as a teenager in pajamas with a cheap smartphone can mess it up brown in the New York Stock Exchange, the digital butterfly effect unleashed by Drive to survive it is modifying the DNA not of competition but of how it is perceived, consumed, influenced and grown.
The small team of the Box to Box Films production company that goes to the circuits and factories of the formations is made up of just four people. They sneak like a cat into the pits, trucks and inside Formula 1, bringing bits of F1 life home to each of the more than 200 million subscribers in Netflix. Its purpose is not to show sports, which is what the international signal of FOM TV and the different networks are for, but internal life, things that escape the eye of those who observe the merely sports. This space that began to be broadcast on the binary platform on a day like March 8, 2019 shakes the souls of both its passionate followers and that of furious detractors. His language does not portray reality as much as a hyper-realistic painter would portray it, but is often exaggerated for greater dramatic effect.
F1 is diverse, atomized and customizable
This audiovisual hyperbole has upset a Max Verstappen who refuses to participate after seeing how his phrases were misused and recycled to create highly sought-after theatrical impacts. The Dutch are very master of whether or not to lend themselves to participate in these spaces, and in reality they do not have the need to do so either; Another thing is what your team or sponsors might say. The proof that this is more good than bad is that Ferrari and Mercedes Well, they regretted not having participated in the first season, and recoiled in their idea before the extraordinary media window full of possibilities that was opened to them.
Yes it’s correct, Drive to survive It does not accurately portray the realities of Formula 1 but it generates something extremely valuable in this third decade of the XXI: emotionality, passion and fanism (what fanaticism is something else) When they get down to business the pilots get on their cars wrapped in Nomex , and cover their head with carbon helmets that in turn camouflage with the Halo. Their only capacity for expression is limited to the wiggling of their cars in the attempts to overtake if they are very aggressive, or the highly celebrated phrases that come to us through the radio, highly modulated by the audio censorship of FOM TV. To this must be added that the teams strap their recruits with a strap so that the speeches are aligned with political correctness and what is desired.
For all these reasons, his public image and his personal charge is reflected realistically in very few exceptions. All this leads to the cold, mechanical and inanimate of the figures and little else. We are in a time when a lost provincial councilor can unleash the advancement of national elections based on the emotionality that all this unleashes. Therefore it is easy to think that Drive to survive In this sense, it contributes something that for many the competition has not been able to generate for a long time: passion, whether false or not, has hooked hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fans. Purists complain about “That’s not Formula 1 and we don’t care about those fans”, but being right within their speech at the same time they are wrong … because that is also Formula 1. In fact, according to various studies, radical fans, purists, and staunch followers of the specialty are barely twenty percent of the total.
Trailer for the third season of Drive To Survive, set in the 2020 season.
There are the casual ones, the followers of a specific pilot, those who follow a fad, the accidental ones, and all of them end up adding to the numbers that make the same engine turn; like it or not, they all count. The specialty is so great, so wide, and so rich that it is suitable for all of them. There is stuff for the stat freak, for the wannabe engineer, for the couch expert, for the adolescent in love with Kimi’s eyes, for a Karting team manager, for the bored millionaire on weekends, for the nutty wonderful that broadcasts each race in a chat between friends, or for the one who has a channel on Twitch and it racks its brains in sweeping analyzes that half a dozen people see… F1 is diverse, atomized and customizable. It is a world, a complex planet that satisfies many looks and many experts forget that one day they were some maligned buy hats who accessed their favorite sport because they were excited in the same way that today many are running into it thanks to Drive to survive.
Those of Liberty Media, the masters of the show, have a special interest in satisfying and seducing the North American public, and this is something that many radicals of purity throw in the face of the soap opera, docudrama, or theater racing, call it what you want. The yankees They have such a large country, with so many options and with such a massive and well-marketed entertainment market that Formula 1 is a drop in the bucket there. Without brilliant North American pilots in the last decades, nor a powerful team that has their stars and stripes painted on their backs, in theory they are as attracted to the Indian cricket league as in Spain and yet several interesting things have happened. In 2018, the last year in which Drive to survive It was still a project offered to Red Bull, attendance at the USA gepé was 264,000 pairs of eyes. Last weekend the figure provided by the organization was 400,000 visitors throughout the weekend in an increase of something more than 50% during that period. In parallel, the accumulated audience of the races through ESPN has grown by 50% since last year for this, an extraordinary increase considering that there is no local representation on the grid.
That the stands were crowded and not another soul entered, shows in practice why “there are no tickets” hanging in their lockers for weeks before the event. With tickets starting at 42 euros to see the training sessions, and up to 472 for the main stand, the role was sold out. But not only that, but the internal parking lot was filled to the brim with 60 balls per car, the helicopter service did not stop carrying people throughout the day, and if you want VIP Paddock Club services for 2022 there is already a waiting list . You would have to see the faces of circumstances that the clerks of the merchandising tents of their commercial area put when they ran out of caps but not from Ferrari … but from Red Bull. They were exhausted, not one was left. In a traditional way, it is the red caps that usually fly off shelves and displays, and there the Austrians not only left those from Maranello behind on the asphalt but also off it. It is a coincidence that the losers, the most charismatic and successful team in history, were one of the two formations that did not want to be taught in the first season of Drive to survive.
Other figures speak of the impact of this audiovisual product, such as the extraordinary growth among the universe of fans, both women and, and this is very important, children. All sports, all, are suffering with digitality, all. In the United States, the numbers for the beautiful game, baseball, are in free fall, something that is less markedly but notably being noticed in the rest of the specialties that used to roam freely. Without going any further, football in Europe has real problems to hook people under 25 years of age. Against all odds the love for Formula 1 is growing exponentially in the country of hamburgers. After the upcoming Miami Grand Prix, there are more interested cities like Las Vegas, New Jerseyans are looking to see how it works, and there is a city further north that also wants his career. The only thing that has changed in F1 from two to three years to now, basically, has been Liberty and its way of opening up to the world.
The category owes a lot, a lot to Bernie Ecclestone, but when he went out of business he was shouting and stating that “They had turned their Michelin guide restaurant into a McDonalds”. Yes, it is possible, but the world has changed. Bernie said that you had to take into account where the money that fed you came from and he was right… then. Today there are two keys to all this: the advent of the Internet and the progressive disappearance of the middle classes. Ecclestone wanted to sell Ferraris, Rolex and luxury yachts to his VIP clientele but forgot that the hard core of his income was the canon of the circuits based on the tickets sold at the box office and the payment of the televisions that paid before the number of telemirones. There the rich did not make a big difference but it was, and are, the middle classes who made the machinery work, who were the ones who paid tickets and made the audience numbers of the channels grow. On the other hand years ago all this was easy. With hardly any competition, people just looked at you, but the Internet arrived, the flat data rate, the fiber of many megabytes and now the competition is no longer other sports. It’s Netflix, HBO, Twitch, YouTube, Tik Tok, podcasts, etc; everything has been atomized, diversified, the cake to be distributed has hundreds of pieces instead of a dozen.
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Now it is not enough to set up the beach bar and wait for them to come to look at you, but you have to go hunting for your customers wherever they are, and the fishing grounds of potential fans are with their faces glued to their screens. Liberty opened his hand to social networks that Bernie detested “Because no money was moving through them” And it is that he misunderstood its basic meaning: that he is constantly talking about his business, the fate of the XXI century trade.
Drive to survive It may not portray a realistic Formula 1, but it is something to talk about, and thanks to that background noise it is one of the few sports globally that is increasing in number of fans … while those of the rest of analog sports and a of its media keys is that no other sport has a Drive to survive. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it, but the push it is giving in space to the generational renewal of fans, its commercialization, its way of reaching people, and its general perception does not detract anything from the original product and yet it helps. to grow. Don’t let the squid ink prevent you from seeing the trees … that are growing.