Drive to Survive Has Changed How America Watches F1

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From the 1970s to the 2010s, Formula 1 had been scratching at every possible angle to find a way to break into the U.S. market. It tried three races here at one point, including a temporary race in the parking lot of a casino. None of that worked, and the events it did hold here regularly fell apart in the span of a decade. Today's United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas is the ninth race at the same track. That has traditionally been the point where a USGP begins to fade out of relevance, but the race at COTA today is sold out. Next year, F1 is adding a second event in the U.S., not under the desperate hope to create interest on the ground but to fill additional inventory teams and fans have demanded. Finally, F1 has truly arrived in the U.S., and the reason why is no secret.

Before the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive debuted in 2019, it could have been written off as a crass attempt by F1's parent company, Liberty Media, to use the massive platform of the streaming giant to draw eyes to their series by any means necessary. This may or may not have been true, but the show itself rendered that point irrelevant immediately. The first season of the show, a season that did not feature key contenders at Mercedes and Ferrari, was a revelation, a docudrama that actually captured the humanity of a series that is so easily reduced down to machines and how they are expected to perform.

It was an immediate hit. The second season, launched into a world bracing for the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, was an even bigger hit. The third has been stratospheric.

Netflix, notoriously, keeps its internal performance data close to its chest. That makes it hard to judge just how big of a hit Drive to Survive actually is anywhere, but anecdotal evidence shows the shadows of its audience. F1's arcane directly-reported audience numbers for the races themselves did not change significantly in either 2019 or 2020, but social media impact grew massively in 2020. That number was most reflected in total social engagements, a number that nearly doubled in just that one year.

A large portion of that growth is coming in the U.S., where audiences have risen by 50% in the past year. While part of this reflects a general trend of growth from a slow 2020 for all sports in America, the numbers actually being reached across ESPN networks represent a serious spike from past years, too. That point is backed up by Google Trends data for the U.S., which shows American interest in the sport was 29% higher at its peak this year than in either 2020 or 2019. That number is more consistent, too; F1 has drawn more significant digital interest than any point prior to 2021 in 13 separate weeks this season.

While not all of this growth can be placed squarely on the shoulders of Drive to Survive without a more robust data set, the correlation between the audience for that series and the audience for F1 itself appears significant from the numbers available outside of F1 and Netflix's internal systems. That has cast more attention on the series in the F1 paddock, where the drivers and team executives that act as the protagonists of the show have become increasingly aware of the part they play in the program.