‘It was for the TV of course’: How Netflix changed Formula One

It was a front-row seat Daniel Ricciardo didn’t pay for, didn’t necessarily want and knew he shouldn’t have.

Right in front of him, Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were about to engage in a last-lap shootout to settle the 2021 Formula One world championship in Abu Dhabi, a winner-takes-all final 5.3 kilometres of the season where whoever crossed the line first would annex one of the most bitterly contested titles in F1 history. And Ricciardo, a lapped 12th in his McLaren, wondered why he was watching it as it happened.

“I’m in the race and even I didn’t know what was going on – there was a feeling of ‘is this really happening?’,” Ricciardo says.

“I probably shouldn’t have been there, so it was nuts. I was kind of left speechless, but it just summed the whole year up. When you think it can’t get crazier, it does.″⁣

Good television? Undoubtedly. Between pay provider Sky Sports and free-to-air Channel 4 in the UK, 7.4 million Hamilton-supporting Britons were glued to their screens – 60 per cent of the Sunday afternoon audience. In the Netherlands, nearly five million viewers – of a population of 17 million – watched the race.

But was it sport, or a high-speed reality show with a dramatic 90-second made-for-TV denouement at 300 km/h?

Lewis Hamilton leads Max Verstappen ahead of the final-lap drama in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.Credit: Getty Images

That Verstappen won his maiden world title with a last-lap pass of the most statistically dominant driver of all time in Hamilton, who was gunning for a record eighth championship and had led the entire race, would have been the perfect way to end the season were it not for the circumstances behind it. Procedures pertaining to safety car regulations, lapped cars and race restarts were either adhered to, bent, contradicted or ignored entirely to set up the final-lap dash, and the drivers knew it.

“It was obviously made to be a fight, it was for the TV of course,” said Ricciardo’s teammate Lando Norris. “It was for the result. Whether or not it was fair … I don’t know what was said or done [in race control], but a controversial end, that’s all I can say.”

Ricciardo – who, under normal safety car protocols, would have been allowed to unlap himself from Hamilton’s Mercedes and Verstappen’s Red Bull ahead of him and re-join at the back of the pack – commented to race engineer Tom Stallard that “something seemed pretty f---ed up,” over team radio after the race’s conclusion.

The five cars between Hamilton and Verstappen on the road were asked to unlap themselves on the penultimate lap of the race as the safety car prepared to return to the pits, immediately placing the title rivals nose to tail.

A bewildered Ricciardo, sat behind Verstappen on the road, was told to hold station.

“I had no idea what they did with letting other cars through,” he says. “I saw some cars overtake, so I asked Tom ‘what do I do, do I pass?’

“And then Tom said ‘no, you have to stay here’. I don’t know what to make of all that.”

The crowd roared as Verstappen lifted his winner’s trophy, televisions were turned up or off depending on the allegiances of their owners, and social media went into meltdown over the decisions made by Australian F1 race director Michael Masi to restart the race in the manner than he did.

FIA race director Michael Masi.Credit: Getty

Masi’s tenure as race director has mirrored the advent of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive series, which was released in March 2019, just days before that year’s season began in Australia, and a week before the shock death of long-time F1 race director Charlie Whiting from a pulmonary embolism in his Melbourne hotel room.

Masi, Whiting’s deputy, was thrust into the role as the sport’s referee, administering the sport’s rules and referring transgressions to a panel of stewards during races. The underlying tenet of Masi’s philosophy is to under-penalise and “let the drivers race”, within reason, letting the combatants sort the contests out on track rather in the stewards’ room.

For Netflix and production company Box to Box Films, gathering material for its fourth season of Drive to Survive set for release ahead of the 2022 season, Abu Dhabi was a gift that will keep on giving.

For years, Formula One under the stewardship of Bernie Ecclestone was a largely closed shop, one that prioritised exclusivity and erected barriers to limit inside access to, preferably, a small group with large wallets. When American-based Liberty Media purchased the Formula One Group in 2017, things changed rapidly, notes Formula One’s managing director of motorsport, Ross Brawn.

“There was no social media five years ago to speak of, and if a driver had a photo on their social account of himself in the garage in his car, he was served a cease and desist notice. That was lunacy,” Brawn says.

“We’ve opened up all these channels which people were scared would dilute things, but it’s only strengthened them. We’ve given drivers their identities, and that’s been enhanced by Drive to Survive which has really focused on the personalities.

“A number of people who have little interest in Formula One, from their experiences with Drive to Survive they’ve seen that insight. It’s opened things up. We need a strong American driver … I think if we had an American in Formula One, it would go stratospheric.”

Brawn’s observations are backed up by research. A study by Nielsen Sports based on 10 key global markets found that 73 million new people claimed interest in F1 in the 12 months to March this year. The new fans skew young: 77 per cent were aged 16-35.

Sports Illustrated reported in October that US viewership was 53 per cent higher after 14 races than the 2020 season average, and 40 per cent higher than the first 14 comparable races in 2019.

Ricciardo, who has a house in California, has noticed the “Netflix effect” in the past three years. Ricciardo’s social media profile has skyrocketed, adding over two million followers on Instagram in the past three years alone, and his manager Blake Friend acknowledges a distinct change in Ricciardo’s commercial allure, non-F1 media interest and profile as a result of the series.

“It’s not all down to Drive to Survive, but a large proportion has to be,” Friend says. “People’s first comments when he meets them are often ‘we saw you on Netflix’ … their entry points to Formula One aren’t necessarily that he won Monaco or Monza. In North America, being on Netflix ‘legitimises’ F1, in a way.”

The release of season four of Drive to Survive – the most-watched show globally on Netflix on the day of its release in March this year – will undoubtedly be met with even more anticipation, while in Australia, the effects of the rollercoaster season, a two-year gap between races and the Netflix bump is already evident.

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen (left) celebrates with team chief Christian Horner and his crew after the victory.Credit: AP

Interest in next year’s Australian Grand Prix, the first in Melbourne since 2019, is sky-high four months ahead of the April 10 race, with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation reporting that four-day and weekend grandstand tickets were sold out within 24 hours of their release, with two additional grandstands released and fully booked within 15 minutes of going on sale.

F1 viewing figures in Australia on Foxtel, through its pay TV channels and streaming service Kayo, went up 31 per cent this season compared to 2020.

Verstappen, the beneficiary of the last lap sprint for glory in Abu Dhabi, has declared he won’t take part in season four of Drive to Survive as he is not a fan of the way rivalries between drivers were portrayed in earlier instalments.

After the most polarising and fractious season in recent F1 memory, the 2022 sequel promises much, but being able to successfully tiptoe the line between legitimate sporting contest and contrived entertainment is a tricky task.

A prominent driver manager, who spoke to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on the condition of anonymity, felt Abu Dhabi went a step too far, if only because of the perception that the show was more important than the sport.

“It’s just a poor look … it felt like someone had their Netflix soup for lunch or put on a Hollywood hat to take away from the sporting side of it,” he said.

“It’s so frustrating that it came down to that, for the sport after the season we had, for Max and for Lewis.”

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