I recently attended the leaving drinks for an emigrating friend. We met through another friend and have few others in common, so I knew I would have to deploy my best small talk. Gulp.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I found the main topic of conversation wasn’t a subject I knew nothing about – politics, religion, finance – but Formula 1, a sport we were soon analysing as casually and knowledgeably as the pundits on neighbouring tables were discussing football.
I think we have the Americans to thank for the sport’s significantly broadened appeal and enhanced accessibility. Later, my friend introduced me to a group of women in their twenties, and I was pleased to discover they were also huge F1 fans.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but could you imagine reading that sentence even just a decade ago?
I couldn’t imagine writing it were it not for the Stateside influence in the sport. Our friends from across the pond have made the sport I love, frankly, more palatable for ‘normies’.
Every aspect, from the design to the engineering to the driver interviews, seems so much more visceral than it ever was; somehow much clearer and within grasp. And it all started with a fairly innocuous rule change.
In January 2017, Liberty Media bought the Formula 1 Group for close to £3.5 billion. This seemed momentous: no more Bernie. Changes were initially small – but they had a snowball effect.
The first was the most significant, in my opinion: the relaxation of social media rules.
Contractual restrictions around posting video content in and around the paddock area were lifted and F1 teams and drivers began to gain huge digital followings.
Then Netflix got involved and that snowball became absolutely enormous.
I thought the first series of Drive to Survive was pretty good, and while I also feel that it has since become slightly naff and contrived, that doesn’t matter: the effect has taken.
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Forgive me, but I couldn’t disagree more. The American buying up of European sport is no good thing. Liberty Media bought F1 in 2017. The media landscape was very different in 2017. The question is what has been added to F1 through American impresario talent, and what has just been a wider shift in the way we consume media. I find it hard to imagine, if Bernie hadn’t cashed-out and was still running the show today, that we wouldn't have all the Youtube highlights packages and extra ‘content’ that has exploded across all sports. Outside of the Netflix show, we have pre-race shows like at Miami and vegas, Super Bowl esq razzmatazz - the defacto American aesthetic - To quote Max Verstappen “99 per cent show, one per cent sporting event.” We have interviews as the driver gets out of the car after qualifying and the race. We have more ‘content’. We have slogans. We have more street racers (which aren’t really motor-racers where overtaking is much harder). Has this made the sport better? There’s much better access to F1. Being able to see a free highlights package on YouTube is great. But what innovative American mind did it require to come up with that idea. Lead by Ross Brawn, there has been sustained regulatory effort to make the racing more competitive. But again, wouldn’t this have happened anyway? F1 was the pinnacle of European automotive manufacturing and home to the most prestigious names in the industry. It is a tremendous failure on the part of the Europeans that they were not able to own and stage their show of industrial achevement. The great fallacy, that American business knows how to package the thing. American business knows how to turn you into an American. Does Ferrari feel as special now? Does the idea of Williams work now? American sports don’t do silence. They don’t do reflection. They don’t do taking in the moment. The moment has to be soundtracked. It's a screenplay. Look at how Americans stage their homegrown sports. Look at American entertainment. Look at the way America does Tennis. The US Open, or Indian Wells playing as I write. Huge LED hoardings around the whole court, day-glow graphics for every point ‘JUST OUT!’, Taylor Swift booming at every change over. On court interviews after every match, “How do you feel?” The worry is that the American aesthetic is becoming, or has already become, the standardised vocabulary. The mono culture. The entertainment complex where you own Youtube and Netflix and F1 and the Premier League. Where you diversify and grow. And grow. Where everything has a similar edit and trailer. This is the ‘pop culture vibe’ that the writer speaks of. But there is also no emigrating from this space. There are no cultural icons in this space. There is too much of everything for anything to be iconic. It can’t resonate with any real sense of meaning, because you can’t sit with it long enough. It’s all just content. This is not an accident. This is hypercaptlism. To watch the UEFA champions league final you see how the aesthetic has shifted towards a superbowl sensibility. And yet it feels off. it doesn't mean anything anymore. If the Americans bought Autocar, they’d sack Matt Prior, change the logo, hire an influencer to front the video reviews and change it to a subscription model that would start at a very reasonable rate that would quadruple in 5 years. They would kill the very soul of the thing they owned. But a lot more normal people would talk about Autocar.
I think Liberty and particularly Stefano Domenicali have done a great job in opening up F1 to a new global audience and beyond the nerds that can make a sport the obsessive interest of a minority of fanatics. Bernie was of his time but had just become focused on making money (largely for himself) and ingratiating himself with the Middie Eastern states. I just wish that the FIA would look at themselves and stop all thier meddling and control. A starting point would be the removal of Mohammed Ben Sulayman.
Just another sport ruined by the americans. F1 has always been about big money and sponsors but it has now been turned into a celebrity event and feels more like WWF than motor racing.
Hate it.
That's the way Americans like it and, they have the money to do what they want with F1. I stopped watching F1 years ago, just lost interest.