Yahoo Autos A strong start: Reactions to and lessons from ‘100 Days To Indy’
IndyCar’s long-awaited entry into the world of modern motor racing docuseries content reached its conclusion earlier this month when the finale of the six-part “100 Days To Indy” project aired on The CW.
Filmed and produced in partnership between VICE Media, The CW, and Penske Entertainment, 100 Days To Indy arrived four years after the ground-breaking Formula 1 docuseries “Drive To Survive” first appeared on Netflix in 2019. Devised as a project with a narrower scope than the season-long Drive To Survive series, 100 Days To Indy focused on pre-season activities through the first six races of the 17-race 2023 calendar, ramping up to its centerpiece, the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500 held on May 28.
Like Drive To Survive — now in its fifth season — which set the standard for fan engagement and has been credited globally for creating legions of new F1 fans who learned about the championship after consuming DTS via the streaming giant, IndyCar and its parent company Penske Entertainment sought to achieve the same effect with 100 Days To Indy, albeit several years later than desired, in a bid to develop new and younger fans.
“I thought they did an excellent job of finding and telling stories,” Penske Entertainment CEO Mark Miles told RACER. “And in a particularly challenging format where they really didn’t have a lot of time, had to edit as they went, as opposed to put everything in the can and then go back months later and decide what survives. They quickly got a handle on many of the personalities in the sport, and did a great job of telling the stories. We didn’t ask them to be politically correct. We wanted them to tell the stories they thought were most compelling, and so the cast of characters ended up being pretty broad, which I think was helpful.”
According to ShowBuzzDaily.com, Episode 6 of 100 Days To Indy — the payoff to the buildup to the Indy 500 won by Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in a dramatic one-lap battle with 2022 Indy winner Marcus Ericsson — attracted 186,000 viewers on The CW, the country’s fifth-largest television network.
Episode 1, run on the same April 27 night as the NFL draft, had more viewers than the finale, with ShowBuzzDaily reporting an audience of 189,000. Episode 2 on May 4 showed promise with an increase to 210,000 viewers. Episode 3 on May 11 continued the upward trend with a rise to 214,000, but Episode 4 on May 18 took a sharp and surprising downward turn with just 142,000 viewers.
Episode 5, featuring qualifying and the harrowing crash caused by Katherine Legge that took Stefan Wilson out of the event and inserted the bumped Graham Rahal into the field, achieved a series high of 220,000 viewers on May 25, and after a week’s pause, the Indy 500 grand finale aired and delivered the audience of 186,000.
Altogether, the six episodes generated 1,161,000 viewers during their premieres on The CW, averaging 193,500 views per episode. For the sake of comparison, the Detroit Grand Prix — the most recent IndyCar race aired live on NBC — was seen by a nearly identical audience of 1,047,000 people. Sunday’s Road America IndyCar race, shown on NBC cable affiliate USA Network, attracted 385,000 viewers.
Based on the Nielsen ratings information provided for each CW debut, 100 Days was not burdened with excessive viewership. But with all the other airings factored in, including reruns on The CW, repurposing on VICE’s cable channel one week after each premiere, and consumption via The CW’s streaming app, Miles says each episode generated a larger audience that left the series feeling pleased with the project’s outcome.
“We didn’t have any set benchmark for ‘above this number is a success and below is not,’” he explained. “We’re very pleased with the cumulative audience. We averaged over 500,000 viewers per episode, and it’s important to note that those numbers keep growing. So the numbers will keep piling up, and I don’t know how high they’ll get, but if you look at north of 500,000 per [episode], and you’ve got 500,000 times six, that’s over 3 million. That’s a nice addition to our total number of eyeballs that would normally watch just the races.”
100 Days To Indy targeted an audience beyond IndyCar’s traditional fan base. Motorsport Images
With IndyCar’s primary demographic composed of males near or over the age of 60, 100 Days To Indy was meant to do far more than entertain the series’ existing fan base. Introducing the grandchildren of IndyCar’s primary followers to the series was the project’s top priority, and with the data in hand, a series representative told RACER that “more than half of the viewership for the show was composed of core CW/VICE audience members,” and “this is a younger audience with very little to no previous exposure to IndyCar.”
Nielsen data for the six network premieres on The CW showed 100 Days To Indy had the lowest share of men and women watching between age 18-49, which suggests the gains in building a more youthful demographic through the series were not found on the network, but rather, through users of The CW’s app and reruns on VICE’s cable channel.
“The audience was much younger than our typical race audience,” Miles said. “We’re still waiting for final numbers, but I believe it’s going to be something like 25 percent of the people who saw us first on The CW tuned into one or more IndyCar races. It’s clearly a nice crossover. I think it made the paddock happy. And I thought it was very, very positive and gave us a lot of momentum in the first half of the year.”
IndyCar also says an immediate impact was made within the 4.716 million viewers who tuned into NBC to watch the Indy 500.
“The show added up to a quarter of a million viewers to the Indy 500 broadcast,” the series’ spokesperson noted. “These are individuals who found 100 Days To Indy before finding IndyCar or the Indy 500.”
Currently restricted to viewing in North America, the next step for Season 1 of 100 Days To Indy is to make it available to the rest of the world.
“It will at some point have international distribution,” Miles said. “VICE has the rights to distribute it internationally. They’re working hard on that and believe that they’re quite likely to get an international partner before long. So they told me it’s not unusual, they weren’t surprised by the notion that it would air first in the States, that streaming services would watch to see what happens.
“It’s conceivable that there could be another platform involved, particularly if it is part of making an international deal. I don’t know how probable that is, but I do think it’s quite likely that international distribution will occur. And even here in the States people continue to go back, as is often the case with series that are streamed — they’ll go back and binge in multiple sittings.”
Tracking 100 Days To Indy’s influence on the Twitter and Instagram accounts for the series, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and some of the key drivers involved in the six episodes offered another window into whether the series was delivering new followers.
At the moment Episode 1 began at 9pm ET on April 27, IndyCar had 458,005 followers on Twitter (T) and 488,514 on Instagram (IG). Twenty-four hours later, +109 (T) and +258 (IG) were recorded, and 48 hours later, +281 (T) and +992 (IG) were seen. One week later at the 9pm start of Episode 2, gains of +1265 (T) and +4001 (IG) were made. Just over one week after the series was completed, IndyCar’s Twitter followers had reached 468,432, +10,427, a 2.2-percent rise from Episode 1.
Instagram is where the greatest inroads were made, with 524,776 followers, 36,262 more than at the series’ onset, up 6.9 percent over its April 27 baseline. For IMS, +3357 (T) and +9604 (IG) were its gains during the project, and among drivers, Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward — who already serves as IndyCar’s most popular driver — led his rivals with +6455 (T) and +18,080 (IG).
Social media provided further opportunity for the likes of Pato O’Ward to spread the word about 100 Days To Indy. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
From a standpoint of percentages, Indy 500 winner Newgarden led all drivers, due in large part to his victory at the world’s largest single-day sporting event. As one of two primary characters spotlighted in Episode 1, Newgarden had a modest bump in followers one week after the series debuted with +152 (T) and +246 (IG), but after the Indy 500 and the project’s finale, he’d achieved a 5.6-percent gain in Twitter followers (+5533) and a sizable 10.9-percent spike on Instagram (+14,237).
Benchmarking the growth of Colton Herta’s social media accounts after the Andretti Autosport driver was featured in Episode 2 also revealed the fickle nature of assigning newfound interest created by 100 Days To Indy to the series’ drivers.
Herta opened Episode 2 with 42,704 Twitter followers and 64,013 on Instagram, and at the same post-docuseries date used to measure the increases for IndyCar, IMS, O’Ward, and Newgarden, Herta was +1632 (T) and +1971 (IG) over the same period. Scott McLaughlin, Newgarden’s Team Penske teammate and co-star of Episode 1, fared slightly better, but like Herta, his social media increases of +2932 (T) and +2497 (IG) were among the lowest percentages — +3.5-percent (T) and +1.6-percent (IG) of those who were tracked.
Altogether, the series, its most popular driver and its newest Indy 500 winner received the largest number of new followers during 100 Days To Indy’s run.
Looking to 2024, Miles is confident a second season of 100 Days To Indy will go into production.
“I think it’s very likely that a Season 2 of 100 Days To Indy will be made and released,” he said in a separate interview with RACER.
Based on what the stars of Season 1 had to say after the project ran its course, many have the same opinion on what needs to be carried over into a Season 2, while views begin to vary on the subject of what needs to change.
“I thought it was a very good, quality show,” said 2016 Indy 500 winner Alexander Rossi from Arrow McLaren. “It was well shot, I thought the trajectory throughout the season of the different episodes was great. I wouldn’t have changed really anything except for having more episodes.”
Rossi’s teammate is of the same opinion.
“I think I think that’d be good for the series to continue, but I do think they should be doing the whole year,” O’Ward said. “I don’t agree with it being just up to the 500 because we also need to put out that there’s 17 races, there’s not six races in our championship, and there’s a championship that’s gonna get fought until the last race, which is different to any of the championships in the world. And sadly, we’re not going to be able to show that this year.”
Chip Ganassi Racing’s Ericsson had a different take on expanding the docuseries.
“The last episode could have been a bit longer after a lot of build-up; the 500 episode was quite short, I thought, so maybe it could have been two episodes,” he said. “I think there was more to tell around the race, so if we’re going to do all those episodes getting to the 500, I think we should have told that story properly.”
While the drivers felt the stories were told well as far as they went, they noted there are plenty of post-Indy 500 IndyCar tales to be told too. Gavin Baker/Motorsport Images
Newgarden was sympathetic to the challenge faced by the production and editing team, but would also welcome a deeper and wider version of the Indy 500 final product.
“I would imagine just even the month of May, there was more storytelling there than they realized,” he said. “And maybe that brings a more robust schedule for next year. That’s what I would like to see, because when I think back to May, I know my own story there. But I also am aware of the 1000 other stories that deserve the spotlight and so I hope that they’re able to maybe layer it a bit better and just give more to the audience.”
Rossi echoed the sentiments of many drivers who spoke on the first 100 Days To Indy experience.
“I would think the VICE partnership and the people who are involved from the production standpoint, you’d want to keep them because they fell in love with the sport,” he said. “We all trust them, right? And they didn’t do anything to try and put us in a bad position. So I think you’d really want to keep doing this with them.”
Drivers were united on one front, and that was fixing the limited reach of 100 Days To Indy if future seasons come to fruition.
IMSA, for example, commissioned a docuseries of its own which debuted in January with its “Win The Weekend” project that features its new hybrid GTP cars. Presented on its YouTube channel, the five episodes to date have delivered between 1.2-2.1 million views apiece through the free and borderless video platform.
Filmed, and produced by TangentVector, the five episodes have generated 7,800,000 views, with a per-episode average of 1,560,000, and at least two more episodes are planned this season. On whatever platform it might be, the primary people being filmed for 100 Days To Indy want to see it succeed on a grander scale.
“The next thing is to better the audience or the outlet, however you do that,” said Ganassi’s Scott Dixon, the six-time IndyCar champion and 2008 Indy 500 winner. His teammate shared in the sentiment.
“I think it’s great to get it on a TV network, but today, one of the biggest reasons why Drive To Survive is successful is that it was on Netflix, and it was so easy to be accessible for people,” Ericsson said. “That, for me, is the biggest thing. I think the product of 100 Days was really good, but it just didn’t really get out there.”
Rossi, like the rest of his competitors, understands that if placing the show on Netflix or another large streamer was readily available, it would have already been done. Nonetheless, when a project like 100 Days To Indy is commissioned to build a new and younger audience, the only metric that matters is the size of the audience.
“The struggle that IndyCar as a whole has been fighting for a while, right, is how do we get more eyeballs on the sport from a TV standpoint?” he said. “I think in a lot of ways, that’s been improving, and I think this was an effort to continue improving that. The hope is that one day, Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or whatever, picks it up and wants to feature it on that platform. That would be the dream for any sort of show. So hopefully that can be the case. But first, we need a second season.”
For Josef Newgarden, the insight into the drivers offered by 100 Days was invaluable: “There was definitely interest that I saw from across the board, whether it was in my own town, or at race weekends, where more people felt like they got to know us.” Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment
For Newgarden, who did the majority of 100 Days To Indy’s advance promotional work on behalf of IndyCar and the docuseries, the results have been encouraging. The two-time champion is confident the project can do more for IndyCar if some of the ideas for adjustments and continuity are carried into the future.
“I heard from people in Nashville that I’m friends with who aren’t big IndyCar people that are like, ‘Hey, it was great to finally see something that was more illuminating for what the series is.’ Like, ‘I didn’t know how you got here, or how your racing championship really worked,’” he said
“So there was definitely interest that I saw from across the board, whether it was in my own town, or at race weekends, where more people felt like they got to know us. I thought that was really nice to hear. I didn’t get one negative criticism. And I genuinely mean that no one, to my face, said they didn’t like the documentary, or thought it was off the mark. I didn’t get one comment from anybody, which was really surprising.
“I expected someone to be like, ‘You know, I didn’t like it so much.’ Everyone was just overwhelmingly positive. So I think they must have done something right for people that never had seen that content before to really love it the way they did. And now, I think we just need to look at getting our stories in front of larger audiences. We just need to learn from it and lean into it more.”
