How F1 Exploded

perhaps nothing better demonstrates the Colossal scale of Formula 1 than the newest addition to its five continent calendar the Las Vegas Grand Prix starting in 2023 F1 was going to race down one of the most iconic roads in America the Las Vegas Strip but in order to facilitate that they needed a padic the facility serving as temporary home to the 10 teams during race weekend and specifically they'd need a padic close enough to the strip the street with some of the highest commercial land values in the ENT entire world but it was no issue for Formula 1 management who paid $240 million for this Square plot just 1300 ft or 400 m long on each side but that was just the start then they needed to actually build the paddock the fast-tracked construction of the facility reportedly cost upwards of a100 million then they had to build a racetrack this was to be a street race taking place on otherwise public roads but the conventional pavement did not even come close to meeting the standards necessary for the world's fastest racing series therefore F1 spent 6 months and many many millions more resurfacing the roads much to the annoyance of Las Vegas locals who had to endure endless delays on the already congested streets and construction ramped up even more around 2 months out as assembly of the grand stands pedestrian Bridges and other temporary facilities began requiring the relocation of trees the draining of the bagio iconic fountains and plenty of other drastic changes to the strip Allin former one is reported to have spent upwards of a half a billion dollars developing its Vegas Street circuit so that's to say they spent more than a small nation's GDP to build the facilities for one annual 90minut race to put that in perspective just a few blocks to the South is the fourth most expensive Stadium ever built in the entire world it's called alion stadium and it cost about $2 billion its primary purpose is to host the Las Vegas Raiders the 11th most valuable sports team in the world the Raiders Of course play in the NFL the highest revenue Sports league in the world allegion stadium also hosts college football and wrestling and concerts and more but if you ignore all that and just focus on the Raiders dividing $2 billion in construction costs by Eight Annual regular season home games brings you to a construction cost of $250 million per annual event so that means at minimum F1 spent double as much much in facility construction costs for its annual Las Vegas event but of course they don't just race in Vegas a similar degree of distruption and devotion happens each year in Singapore where the iconic streets of Marina Bay are shut down for its now legendary Grand Prix and most iconically the entire country of Monaco transforms into a racetrack each spring leading up to its late May Grand Prix and on top of that the series stops at a half dozen other Street circuits along with more than a dozen dedicated circuits dotted around the world each year each pulling in three four sometimes close to 500,000 fans across race weekend few Motorsports events pull in crowds even close to those of f1s meaning these circuits have large portions of their infrastructure parking lots Grand stands buildings that only ever get used once a year for that 90-minute F1 race despite this terrible inefficiency plenty of these races actually turn a profit for the circuits and promoters not all but enough that F1 now has far more venues Vine host a race than they can reasonably accommodate in an annual calendar they've eliminated some less lucrative races and expanded the number of races each year but still then F1 is starting to schedule certain races only every two years to cope with demand and develop new markets but just one decade ago such thunderous growth would have seemed unimaginable throughout the 2010s F1 was in a state of decline its viewership Figures were shrinking year after year and by 2015 this summed to a third of its audience gone in just 7 years proposed races were failing to get funding existing races were cancelling out of unprofitability from audience figures to revenue F1 was just failing on all fronts and while marketing was poor and digital strategy was bad and Leadership was weak the largest explanation for the state of F1 in the mid-2010s was remarkably simple Formula 1 was unequivocally and objectively just plain boring you see much of their viewer experience is wrapped up in the contribution of each race towards the season-long battle for drivers to score the most points and maintain the lead of the drivers's championship the grand prize in the 2015 season reigning Champion Lewis Hamilton won the very first race in Australia meaning he started the season in first place of the drivers championship at the second race in Malaysia Contender Sebastian vettle won but Hamilton's second place earned him enough points to stay in the lead of the driver's championship two weeks later in China he won again keeping him in the lead in fact throughout the 19 races of the 2015 season Hamilton never left first place in the driver Championship from the audien's perspective there was no Struggle No uncertainty it was just pure dominance Hamilton and his Mercedes teammate Nico rosberg led a collective 82% of all laps while the top three drivers combined LED 97% by the end of the season Merc meres had won all but three of the 19 races racing was rarely tight the Mercedes cars often finished dozens of seconds ahead of first place for a casual TV audience it was just plain boring and 2015 was hardly unique in its boringness over the past 20 Seasons the driver's Championship has only been fought all the way till the final race eight times in all other Seasons a driver has mathematically clinched it earlier sometimes by as much as six races and a mathematical clinch always happens long after the audience considers the championship of foregone conclusion so that's to say F1 has a particular propensity for this style of boring dominance as an entertainment business it's potentially its fatal flaw but the explanation for why Formula 1 can be boring is right in the name it's the fault of the formula the word formula in this context is a reference to the set of rules and regulations that govern what teams are allowed to change in a car's design and what they aren't essentially any Motor Racing Series has some equivalent set of rules and regulations but f1's is uniquely open-ended it's supposed to be a battle of driver skill and Engineering press this is in comparison to something like NASCAR where all teams are given the exact same car are allowed to do little Beyond setup changes and the sport is intended to be fundamentally a battle of driver skill even in Indie Car f1's closest equivalent teams are given limited freedom to modify the vehicles while there certainly are other Motorsports serieses that allow for open-ended development with the exception of Moto GP they don't tend to have large audiences because it often comes at the expense of entertainment they often end up with scenarios where one car is just so dominant that driver skill can't make up for the difference what's most exciting for a TV audience is to watch close racing won or lost by the drivers the secretive development happening behind the scenes clearly does not translate into very exciting television the sport attempts to make mitigate the downsides of this system by dramatically revamping the rules every five or so years which tends to shake up the hierarchy of performance as teams must find new Technical Solutions to achieve superlative performance it was such a revamp that ended mercedes's era of dominance in 2021 in fact but sometimes these shakeups only perpetuate dominance as wealthier teams are able to devote more of their budget to developing the new era of cars years in advance whereas smaller teams must concentrate their spending on improving the car for the current season so the solution to fixing f1's decline in the 2010s was never going to be to change what makes Formula 1 Formula 1 but it's not like they had a whole lot of other good ideas either for all that former CEO Bernie eckl did for F1 over more than 50 years in the sport after founding the Formula 1 group in 1987 and captaining it as CEO for 30 years there is one interview that's come to Define f1's position in the 2010s one critical Miss that's come to encapsulate the dying days of his leadership of the sport speaking with the campaign asia-pacific magazine eckleson articulated that he saw no value in reaching out to a younger generation of fans or building out the brand social media presence why invest in pushing content over Facebook and Twitter his logic went when young people won't have the money required to interact with the sports sponsors like Rolex or UBS sure total viewership worldwide was plummeting year over year but there was no point in trying to address that with viewers and fans with shallow Pockets so a sport historically defined by a lack of parody whose most interesting aspects were shrouded in esoteric design details seemed destined to remain on the fringes then in late 2016 the sport entered a quiet Revolution as Liberty Media well versed in sports television and sports media generally agreed to purchase the floundering Formula 1 group for $4. 4 billion the vision was simple Liberty Media had little intention of overhauling rules so core to the sport and so difficult to alter but rather overhaul how the sport was consumed as this pitch deck relayed the opportunities were in promotion of F1 as a sport and brand in digital distribution and in more strategically developed events essentially in widening the sport out from its narrow core audience but at the simplest level the problem standing in the way of growing the audience as they saw it was that the race at the front of the pack was not always very interesting therefore the solution was also simple make people care less about who was going to win the race the transformation began at the circuit of catalunia in Barcelona Spain where preseason testing was taking place in late February 2017 first a letter circulated to the teams stating that existing social media restrictions on filming and sharing photos and videos from The Paddock were being lifted then this post a video tweeted out by Red Bull following the daily routine of its star driver Daniel Ricardo what he eats for breakfast and with whom how he stretches and prepares for the testing and him getting in the race car itself a day later came another behind the- scenes video but this time from the Mercedes team showing through time lapses how the team gets a car ready through the night for the eventual Champion leis Hamilton the following day with the restrictions lifted it was a race between teams to start building out their own content and notably in both Red Bull and mercedes's efforts neither the car nor the testing was the focus rather it was the people who drove them and built them that took Center Stage fans it turned out wanted to know more about who was under the helmet and F1 obliged soon came this video on the Mercedes YouTube page one of its earliest videos to break a million views and while premised around doing what was never allowed before by touring the hospitality setup in Melbourne the top comments have far less to say about the paddock and more on the character Charisma and confidence of Ls Hamilton viewers said they hadn't seen this side of him and now they wanted more similarly empowered Daniel Ricardo Hamilton's rival on the racetrack saw his profile begin to grow as the sport his Red Bull team and he himself pushed his brand and offered an entrance into the daily life of F1 from 2015 to 2017 the driver's Instagram profile took off garnering hundreds of thousands of likes rather than the customary tens of thousands pulled in years prior and while both drivers happened to be towards the front of the pack race in race out it wasn't only their success that garnered The increased attention while Ricardo's race results dipped from a high water Mark in 2016 to losing a seat entirely in 2024 one can argue that he's never been as famous as he is now as an Ever available equally fun-loving and emotionally open athlete that the most casual F1 fan recognizes and to an extent feels as though they understand while that required only a simple change in policy F1 quickly identified the opportunity of growing the off trck profiles of its drivers and started to play a more active role in it this is a sampling of the official F1 Twitter page from January 19th 2015 there are only three posts on that day and all are using the app to push users to read old school journalism content on f1's website 2 years later January 19th looked like this more posts seven in total a link to an article some news reported right there on Twitter a birthday wish to a driver an old image and a trend post now F1 wasn't just using Twitter to push to its website's content it was using Twitter as a home for Content itself and most notably not all the content was about on track action a lot was just about the drivers as people by January 19th of 2025 this transformation was complete over 20 posts all of it content for the fan to consume without leaving the app a similar investment is visible with f1's YouTube page as videos published in the year prior to this all-important interview outlining a bold new future for the sport number just over 250 while those posted after this video Until the beginning of the 2018 season cleanly double that count numbering in the low 500s the effect of these shifts F1 hoped was that people would care more about say watching Daniel Ricardo make his way from 10th to e8th place and therefore be able to focus Less on Hamilton maintaining a 10-second lead in first place but that required them to get them to watch in the first place and then keep them watching if the sport was now to emphasize the driver as much as the car and the characters as much as their positions across the field it needed to match the social media push to get under the helmets so more cameras not just on the race course but within the paddock as well and more live microphones too by 2018 the broadcast began to include the communications between drivers and their teams and then Communications between team principles and the FIA and the race directors now what the viewer could not see in a standard race the Strategic communication the high stakes high stress decision-making and the occasional argument over rules they could experience through the audio this along with increased focus on investing more on ear time to the Midfield rather than just the leaders made a race more engaging for the less engineering inclined viewer other moves made the races easier for casual viewers from revamping the broadcast theme music for the US audience to adding an everpresent leaderboard so anyone flipping channels could understand the rac's status immediately these strategies seemingly worked in 2018 for the first time in a decade f1's unique viewership Rose and most promisingly they made the biggest Headway in the one market that's always been f1's white whale the one viewer base that up until that point remained uncharming by Formula 1 America so they doubled down on the strategy and turned the F1 grid into a format Americans were more used to a reality TV show it was called drive to survive debuting in 2018 this Netflix show gave audiences unprecedented levels of access into particularly the drama and personalities of the sport viewers were immediately captivated by Daniel Ricardo and team principal gter Steiner and with an American audience that hit 1. 2 million and a global audience that reached 7 million almost a third of which were under 30 plenty were tuning into the series having never watched an actual race F1 was going mainstream the timing was impeccable particularly for the US audience f1's evolving digital strategy was already giving it momentum but drive to survive launched just one year after F1 secured distribution rights in the states with ESPN at the time the sports network signed on for a steal being granted the rights to air F1 races for free by 2020 the company was paying a meager $5 million per year but in the following two years the US audience outright doubled and so ESPN's license fee soon exploded two to upwards of $75 million annually the drive to survive effect equaled big business for Formula 1 besides the licensing from ESPN it increased viewers followers advertisers and attendance now the on Euro luxury car race that merely raised eyebrows in the States became one of the nation's most talked about events with Formula 1 Breaking records in Austin Texas by not only doubling its attendance from 263,000 in 2018 to 444,000 in 2022 but by becoming the most highly attended iteration of the race in its history and one of the most attended Grand Prix in the sports history outright Liberty Media didn't stop there however they tripled out on America and expanded host cities to include two of the United States's most iconic and campy locations Miami and Las Vegas here money is flamboyant and Formula 1 crowds flocked to the Oceanside palm tree lined Avenues of the Florida coast starting in 2022 demand was high with 242,000 people attending over 3 days more than 2.

6 million tuning in on TV and secondary Market tickets reaching $32,000 and then in 2023 the company added that casino lit asphalt of the Nevada desert and some 315,000 people attended over the weekend with the race starting at 11:00 p. m.