Last weekend I refused to leave the house and joined the millions of fans worldwide who were glued to the television watching the Formula 1 world championship decider and season finale at the Abu Dhabi grand prix.
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen took the chequered flag to win the race, but it was British driver Lando Norris who won the title fight for McLaren, beating his teammate Oscar Piastri and Max on points.
For complete transparency, I’m a Max fan and so I was naturally a little disappointed for him not to win his fifth world title. However, it is always nice to see a Brit come out on top and I’ve been captivated by Lando’s rollercoaster journey throughout the season. I sometimes found myself saying Lando could do with an equestrian mindset coach on his team to inject some self-belief during those tough moments, but when questions rose on whether he had the mentality to survive under the pressure and get the job done, he silenced his critics.
A Formula 1 convert
Now, while I can name every driver and team on the grid, give you a little bit of insight into hard, medium and soft tyre choices, and tell you why pitting under a safety car has huge benefits – I will confess to being a relatively new F1 fan, having been converted by my partner around three years ago.
Initially it took a bit of convincing that I would find engine horsepower as exciting as four-legged, as I watched cars drive round and round a circuit and had flashbacks to my dad hogging the TV at weekends when I was a child. But then I started paying attention, and soon I was hooked.
Formula 1 provides guaranteed drama, pressure and strategy, not forgetting driver rivalry. Dare I say, I get that same feeling watching the first corner of a race as I did watching that epic performance from Scott Brash when he lost his reins with Hello Folie, before coolly clearing that huge combination at the European Championships in the summer.
Scott Brash and Hello Folie provided thrilling action to rival Formula 1 at the European Showjumping Championships.
Aside from drama, F1 and equestrian sport have some other similarities. Both have a huge emphasis on team work – drivers rely on their crews, mechanics, engineers and strategists – as riders rely on their owners, grooms, physios, farriers, vets and sponsors. And both sports have strong women at the forefront; although there are currently no female drivers on the F1 grid, the all-female F1 Academy is developing young drivers and behind the scenes, there are women in key roles, step forward Red Bull’s principal strategy engineer Hannah Schmitz, Haas race engineer Laura Mueller, and Sky Sports strategy analyst Bernie Collins, to name just a few.
Formula 1 global fan survey: the thrill of races top motivator for new fans
What has really stood out to me however when it comes to F1, is how it has grown its fanbase. I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only motor racing convert, and a global fan survey carried out this year confirmed just that.
Of more than 100,000 respondents, 27% were new to the sport in the last five years. These new fans have become interested through friends and family (39%), media coverage (24%), social media (12%), driver interest (12%), and Netflix’s docuseries Drive to Survive (10%). The top motivators for these new fans are: “love the thrill of the races”, “fan of the drivers” and “enjoy the strategy”. The sport’s appeal to women has also grown; one in four survey respondents was female – more than double since the survey was last carried out in 2017. Another stat I found interesting was 48% of all respondents were inspired by an F1 driver or team outside the context of racing.
If you take the above and look at horse sport, the likes of Badminton cross-country or the Hickstead Derby offer thrill and strategy, we have many adored riders such as Carl Hester, Pippa Funnell and John Whitaker who fans can get behind, and equestrianism provides comeback stories and heart-filled inspiration by the bucket load, so what’s missing?
As an F1 fan I love the access you get to the drivers, from the pre- and post-race press conferences, the sometimes tense interactions between the top three in the cooldown room after the race, to the fun extras like a lie detector series Sky Sports held with drivers. Then there are the onboard radios, on which you hear the drivers’ reactions and discussions with their engineers mid-race. These radios make for interesting listening, especially when a driver is informed of a penalty as they concentrate at 200mph. Could you imagine listening to a rider talk to their horse as they are tackling a cross-country course – or hearing their live reaction if they were told by their team during their round that they had received a flag penalty? That would certainly add a different element.
It goes without saying, money and broadcasting obviously play a huge part in global reach. There are continual calls for the BBC to show more horse sport, though F1 is only shown live on Sky Sports – which requires a subscription – so I’m not sure we can blame BBC coverage. Of course, a Netflix series like Drive to Survive is going to bolster any sport, but I don’t think we can put F1’s fan growth all down to that either. And, in my case, I haven’t even seen it.
What about the Longines Global Champions Tour?
You could perhaps draw similarities between F1 and the Longines Global Champions Tour (LGCT) in terms of teams and transfers, glitzy venues like Monaco and Miami, and big money prizes. This year the LGCT has been available to a broader audience thanks to deals with the likes of Warner Bros and ITVX. But even still, I’ve yet to hear someone say, I’m staying in this weekend to watch the showjumping. As already mentioned, the F1 survey found that the biggest introduction of new fans came via friends and family, with that in mind maybe there’s work to be done on our part as horse sport fans to pull in new people. I’ll be grabbing the television remote and informing my non-horsey partner when the new LGCT season kicks off in February!
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