Before Drive to Survive
Before 2018, Formula 1 was a global sport with a very European heart. The vast majority of fans were in Europe, South America, and parts of Asia. In the United States, F1 was a niche interest — known to car enthusiasts and casual viewers of the occasional Monaco or US Grand Prix, but nowhere near the cultural footprint of the NFL, NBA, or even NASCAR.
Liberty Media's acquisition of F1 in 2017 changed the commercial strategy, but it was the partnership with Netflix that changed the cultural one.
What Drive to Survive did
Drive to Survive premiered in 2019, and it did something no F1 broadcast had ever done: it put cameras in the team garages, the driver briefings, and the private conversations that fans had never been allowed to see. The result was a behind-the-scenes drama that made F1 accessible to people who had never watched a race.
The series created storylines. It turned drivers into characters. It made the politics, the rivalries, and the pressure visible to an audience that had previously only seen cars going around in circles.
The numbers tell the story
The impact was immediate and measurable. In the United States, F1 viewership grew by over 50% in the first two years of Drive to Survive. By 2024, the US Grand Prix at Austin was one of the highest-attended races on the calendar. Miami and Las Vegas were added to the calendar, both driven in part by the American audience that Drive to Survive created.
Globally, F1's social media following grew from millions to hundreds of millions. The sport became a cultural phenomenon, not just a sporting one.
The controversy
Not everyone loved Drive to Survive. Some drivers refused to participate, arguing that the series manufactured drama and misrepresented reality. Max Verstappen was the most prominent holdout, declining to be interviewed for several seasons. Some teams felt the series favored certain narratives over others, giving more screen time to midfield battles than to the championship fight.
But even the critics could not deny the results. Drive to Survive brought millions of new fans to F1, and those fans stayed even after they discovered the real sport behind the drama.
What it means for F1's future
Drive to Survive proved that F1's story is its greatest asset. The racing is spectacular, but it is the human drama — the rivalries, the pressure, the politics, the emotion — that makes people care. The series taught F1 something it had not fully understood before: the sport does not just need to be seen. It needs to be felt.
In 2026, with a new generation of drivers, new teams like Cadillac entering the grid, and a global audience that spans continents, F1's story is bigger than ever. Drive to Survive opened the door. The sport is now walking through it.