More than Just Drive to Survive: The Online Culture of F1’s Newest Fans

When Samrya Cury opened her computer on that December day, she wasn’t expecting to watch the end of a hard-fought championship battle. But through a live stream on YouTube, by some streamer she had never even heard of, she caught the end of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Hooked, she watched as Lewis Hamilton, a seven-time world champ, fought against Max Verstappen, a young up-and-comer, for the title. It was the final race of the season, and the two were tied on points, a feat that Formula One had never seen before.

As Max Verstappen crossed the line to take his first world title, in a race that became infamous amongst F1 fans due to complaints of corruption, Cury found herself in love with a brand new sport.

“After that race ended and he [Verstappen] celebrated… I started going into like this deep surge and I looked into Max,” said Cury. “I saw, you know, like how his childhood was all about his dad kind of pushing him to F1 and I started watching all those races.”

Cury’s obsession with F1 grew to the point where she, alongside her friend, Quinn Olson, decided to start an F1 club at Northeastern, where she’s studying criminal justice. 

Cury isn’t the only fan who found herself obsessed after just one race. Natalie Cooper, a communications and sociology major at Northeastern, started watching after her girlfriend introduced her to the Netflix show Drive to Survive. Even after the two broke up, Cooper found herself invested.

“I’m just not really a sports gal,” said Cooper. “F1 as a sport feels more adjacent to, like, being invested in a Tumblr fandom in 2014 than it feels like following a sports team. Because there’s so much, it’s so much about the interpersonal drama.”

The sport has seen a major surge in American fans. In just the past year, F1’s US fan base has grown by 10 percent. This isn’t because of a new presence in the US– F1 has always been in America. The Indy 500 was previously considered part of the championship from F1’s inception in 1950 to 1960, and the US has hosted 70 races since 1950. 

The growth is because of the online presence of teams and the drivers.

“Seeing the marketing teams is like one of my favorite parts,” said Katie Bauer, a Northeastern student.

F1 is easy to market. Each team only has two drivers each, which, in the current year, means there’s only 20 drivers to keep track of. With such a limited pool of athletes, each athlete is highly-researched and highly-marketable. 

“You can experiment with that brand identity with different drivers,” said Maeve Brackett, a Northeastern student who previously worked with Aston Martin Formula One’s marketing department. “Especially in Boston, when I meet different people and I hear what team they love, you can tell it’s because they like, identify with something about that team and those values or the specific drivers themselves.”

Cury latched onto Verstappen due to that 2021 race. Isabelle Ng, a molecular biology student at Northeastern, became an Oscar Piastri fan since she started watching in Australia, Piastri’s home country. Bauer’s favorite driver is George Russell because she thinks he’s a hilarious diva.

Every single driver has fans, for some reason or another – whether it’s because they think Lewis Hamilton is a legend, or because they love Yuki Tsunoda’s dream of opening a restaurant. In an interest form, Cury’s newly-formed F1 club asked people who their favorite driver was. Every current driver, including the sport’s newest rookies, received a vote. No single driver drove away in the popularity vote, like what might’ve happened in larger sports like the NFL, where only there are only a few faces in the forefront.

“You could follow their social medias and everything and like, you know, who’s gonna be racing,” said Bauer. “I feel like all the teams are so prevalent on social media.”

Teams are a huge part of why drivers’ personalities have been placed into the forefront. Each team has grown in their social media content throughout the years, beginning to become more authentic and driver-centric. Vish Cash App Racing Bulls (or VCARB for short) has become well known by the fans for their lip-syncing videos starring their drivers.

“I love whenever I see videos of Isack and Liam [VCARB’s drivers] and they’re doing all the memes and stuff,” said Brackett. “You’re connecting with this fan base, but it’s not something that’s super out of touch from other generations as well.”

Teams are learning how to market their drivers to the younger generation by appealing to their identities.

For instance, Spanish driver Fernando Alonso, a two-time champion of his own right, is being pushed by the Aston Martin marketing team in Miami, with their Spanish-speaking population. Thai driver Alex Albon has a huge fanbase down in Singapore, due to both his heritage and the fan events Williams Racing holds in the country.

This is a generational shift. Up to 2017, F1 did not have these strong social media connections. However, in 2017, F1’s media was bought by Liberty Media, which turned the entire sport on its head and underwent a giant marketing change. Importantly, this included the release of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which introduced drivers and the sport to the general American public.

“I think Drive to Survive with how it made F1 easier to consume and track with the human aspect and familiarizing with the drivers, that definitely helped,” said Brackett. 

Drive to Survive, a documentary series following F1’s drivers through the race season, first released in 2019. Even today, it is still boosting the American fanbase, with 360,000 new viewers attributed to Drive to Survive in the 2022 season.

“Obviously, there’s fans that have been fans for years or become fans kind of before the new wave of like Drive to Survive happened,” said Brackett. “But Drive to Survive definitely, definitely skyrocketed it.”

Despite this initial popularity, Drive to Survive has a poor reputation amongst fans.

“At first it was cool,” said Cury. “I think I was definitely impacted by the fact that I didn’t know as much about the sport. So it was… I wasn’t shocked by the amount of inconsistencies and just, like, media alterations that go on there.”

Drive to Survive has been described as a “soap opera”, and has been known to portray seasons and drivers in incorrect ways, despite being a documentary. Yet, its influence cannot be understated. Even through the heavy criticism of the show, current F1 fans all admit that the show’s great at gaining the attention of new fans.

“I do think that there is something to be said about its power in bringing new people into it, and especially bringing in more diverse audiences, American audiences, women, like other people who wouldn’t even be into it. I think it’s smart,” said Cooper.

Drive to Survive did two things for F1: increased its American fanbase, and introduced a new generation of fans to the sport.

This new generation, including fans like Cury and Cooper, is different from the past. While the older generation is waiting in a line outside of Seaport’s F1 Arcade, tense with excitement to watch a race live, the younger generation is watching the race alone at their house in their pajamas, if they watch it all.

“I watch them when it’s convenient to me, which means I don’t really watch them,” said Cooper. “I’m normally either busy or asleep because I live in America. And I’m a college student.”

Due to the majority of races occurring outside of the Americas, the timing of races is very inconvenient for most viewers. Even when the races are convenient in Formula One’s American leg, the younger fans still aren’t showing up. The younger fans haven’t been to the F1 Arcade at all, often due to how far away Seaport is or even due to monetary restrictions. Events at campuses like Northeastern also aren’t highly attended. 

Cury’s interest form for her F1 club, which had 146 respondents, had 141 people say they’d be interested in live race parties. When she hosted race watches, although students did show up, it was nowhere near that lofty number.

This is unlike Europe, where fans in sports bars are readily available and readily filled. Part of this difference isn’t just the younger fanbase, but also that the actual sport remains inaccessible.

Tickets to races are already expensive, even disregarding transportation and lodging. 

“We got them pretty late, it was a pretty last minute decision,” said Ng of attending the Montreal Grand Prix. “So we got them for pretty expensive. It was like two for 500.” 

Even the F1 Arcade can be pretty pricey if you want to watch a race live. General admission is 30 dollars, and that number continues to climb with food and drink.

The online nature of America’s F1 community today could be chalked up to generational adaptation, but, at the end of the day, fans haven’t been provided that easy opportunity to watch F1 live.

“I think what could be a really interesting opportunity is really utilizing the reach that Red Bull has. I think Red Bull, they do so many pop-ups with the cliffdiving, there was the snowboarding last year, which was super cool. Doing some sort of F1 thing in Boston would be incredible,” Brackett said.

Despite this in-person inaccessibility, F1’s fanbase still grows – it just grows in a different sphere. The sport’s well-cultivated online community is growing the fanbase even further. This newest generation of fans, this recent wealth of growth the sport is seeing, is almost entirely online. 

The F1 community online is massive, full of incredibly talented content creators, fan video editors, and online discourse. You can find F1 fans everywhere from Tumblr to Instagram to X. These “Drive to Survive”-era fans are creating new points of emphasis for the subculture.

With the online community came a huge surge of focus on the driver relationships, partially impacted by Drive to Survive. Friendships like Carlando (Carlos Sainz and Norris), Lestappen (Charles Leclerc and Verstappen) and C squared (Sainz and Leclerc) all have dedicated fanbases of their own.

Whenever these drivers so much as mention each other, social media platforms go crazy. Even in person, one of the biggest reactions of the recent 2025 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was when Sainz and Norris shared a hug after Norris won the world driver’s championship.

Cury is still as hooked on F1 today as she was when she started watching in 2021, watching as Verstappen took three more championships in a row, before narrowly losing out on the victory by just 2 points this 2025 season. 

Maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a fan, just like Cury, who found a livestream of this 2025 championship decider and fell in love with the sport. Maybe it was a Grill the Grid video, a series where the drivers are all quizzed on F1 topics, that got them invested. Perhaps it was a VCARB Tiktok. But it’s almost certain F1’s newest fans will continue to be engaged through online means.