F1 Is in Its Streamer Era
I don't know how or when it crept up on me. Maybe it was staring down another F1 season where Max Verstappen had every chance to win nearly every race on the (longer than ever) calendar. Whatever the reason, it's as clear as it has ever been: Streaming has taken over F1, and I'm not talking about “Drive to Survive.”
It's funny—Verstappen is the perpetual heel of the Netflix show, all-but avoiding the TV cameras and the limelight of streaming television as he racks up win after win. At the same time he is running stream after stream in simracing.
“I don’t think a lot of people realize how big the streaming world is,” longtime e-sports reporter Greg Leporati tells Road & Track in a phone interview, “...particularly for a younger audience. If you’re under 25 you know a lot of Twitch celebrities that other people don’t know.”
While “Drive to Survive” brought F1 drivers to a new TV audience, it’s on Twitch where the top drivers in F1 present themselves to an even bigger arena of livestreaming. “I think Twitch is 140 million active users, 30 million daily users,” Leporati explains. “It’s a massive world.”
Streaming is also a bigger and bigger part of an F1 driver’s life. Verstappen’s Team Redline keeps him busy. The weekend after he clinched his second championship, he was doing an endurance sim race. He has been setting up his own GT3 racing team with a stated goal to provide a ladder for sim racers into real cars. He told his own Verstappen.com website, “Using Verstappen.com Racing, we sponsor and support the racing activities of various people close to me via consultations and advice. It all started with the sim racing of Team Redline.”
“Many people still think that sim racing is not professional, but it’s a serious sport, and I invest a lot of hours into it, to prepare and defeat everybody else.”
His most memorable moment streaming, however, if it wasn’t rage-quitting when a server issue knocked him out of the lead of the virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans on iRacing, was hopping off a stream to attend his stepdaughter’s tea party. It was one of the only humanizing moments the public had seen of Verstappen, who presents as more machine than man in F1 media.
Here is a cute highlight reel of Penelope hopping on stream:
And it’s not just Verstappen. The entire generation of top driving talent coming into F1 streams. Mercedes’ George Russell and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc (whose girlfriend famously bought a subscription to Twitch to comment on a stream that she was locked out of their apartment) both stream, as does Williams’ Alex Albon, though none do so as religiously as Verstappen, and none of them are as online as McLaren’s Lando Norris. “He was the top celebrity streamer for a while,” Leporati notes, pointing out that he has his own simracing team and an esports team, Quadrant, that he launched off the back of, well, being an F1 driver, but also from getting tens of millions of viewers on Twitch. Norris’ streaming presence is a big part of his career, part of the reason why he is at a top team, and why he is seen as a key figure in the sport, even without a Grand Prix win to his name. There’s something more to the guy, and it’s streaming. “It was crucial to Lando being as big as he’s become,” says Leporati.
Part of the charm of F1 drivers on streaming is that the physical sport of F1 translates so well to an e-sport. We see Verstappen on race weekend, in his racing seat, driving. And when we see him on a stream, there he is, seated, at his steering wheel, driving. Other sports like baseball also had streaming moments, particularly in the depths of the pandemic, but they didn’t catch on like these F1 streamers. “There’s nothing there that’s captivating about watching Blake Snell mash on his D-pad,” Leporati notes.
These drivers aren't just streaming racing, either. Here is, for instance, Lando Norris complaining about his smelly feet while playing Monopoly on Twitch.
Again, it’s the personality of the F1 drivers on these streams that makes them successful.
Indeed, for all his success on track, Norris’ biggest moment on a stream wasn’t about his driving.
“I don’t know if he was streaming any racing, but he ordered 17 spring rolls for takeout,” motorsports author and Road & Track contributor Elizabeth Blackstock recalls. “And was eating 17 spring rolls.” It was all live streamed, a glimpse into the private life of this driver, who plays both roles of jockey and racehorse. “They’re very minor things, but since these dudes are so straight-laced, because everything that comes out of their mouth in a professional setting is so boring, anytime they get behind a computer, they can show some of their personality that they have buried down deep inside,” Blackstock says. “That’s why people love these things.”
F1 stars drive cars so physically demanding that they are constantly in the gym, building neck muscles so strong they can crush a walnut on their shoulder. What “Drive to Survive” showed the world is that people are craving to learn more about these drivers, learn about them as people. But even DTS has lost some of its original hook. As the show grew big, it felt more scripted, and viewers lost that sense of peeking behind the curtain into a high-speed soap opera.
“I didn’t feel like I was getting an authentic representation of the driver,” Blackstock notes. “I was getting curated representations. Danny Ric is a good example. He’s doubling down on the memes and the jokes. That doesn’t feel authentic anymore.”
Of course, streaming can go wrong as well as go right. We can’t forget in 2020 NASCAR’s Kyle Larson said the n-word on a stream and was suspended by the series. Larson was later reinstated after sensitivity training, won a championship, and seems to have rehabilitated his image and career. These slips keep happening. In 2022, Red Bull suspended its rising star in F2, Juri Vips, after the Estonian used the n-word on a stream, and then fired him. (In that video you can see the other person on the stream laughing. It was now-current Williams F1 driver Liam Lawson.) It doesn’t look like Vips’ career will ever be the same. This is just the double-edged sword of streaming platforms, and the newfound transparency offered to drivers.
“Sometimes they turn out to be shitheads,” Blackstock explains. “Sometimes they turn out to be cool dudes.”
You Might Also Like
