Drive to survive: How a Netflix series is growing the sport of F1

12/14/21 7:00PM

On Sunday the climactic, and controversial, final round of the Formula One World Championship took place, with Max Verstappen beating Lewis Hamilton to the finish line on - literally - the last lap of the race.‍

Drive to survive, and thrive

‍That race will very likely go down in history as one of the most watched, if not the most watched, in the sport's 70-year history - and somewhere, a Netflix executive is very quietly rubbing their hands, preparing to translate the story of this season into season 4 of Drive To Survive, Netflix's documentary series about the sport.

The on-track drama of this season would always have created a buzz on its own, but it's also hard to understate the impact of Netflix. Like The Queen's Gambit - which revitalized interest in chess, Drive To Survive has created a new legion of F1 fans - particularly in the US.

People reading up on F1 on Wikipedia is up roughly 60% since the show came out, and ESPN has reported that the average race audience this year has been up more than 40% compared to 2019.

Tom Jones5h

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.