The sports section on Netflix is getting busy. Docuseries such as Drive to Survive, Break Point, and Full Swing have started to dominate the platform’s non-fiction real estate – but none of them have shaken up a sport’s following quite like Drive to Survive.
I asked fans what they thought the impact had been on the sports they love. From the lowlights of unearthing a nasty misogynist streak, to the more heartening outcomes of reaching previously uninterested demographics, there are certainly consequences of Drive to Survive which fans (new and old) needed to get off their chest.
Drive to Survive (2019-)
Drive to Survive was a runaway hit when it came out in 2019. It gained popularity during the 2021 season, when the drama on track seemed to finally match the drama pedalled in the 10-episode seasons. With a controversial decision handing Verstappen the win, it was almost natural that a docuseries, padded with dramatic moments and snide comments in one-on-one interviews, became such hot property.
As time has worn on, and Drive to Survive has continued to clock up the seasons, it seems that the docuseries is a little passé. With the derogatory label of a ‘DTS Fan’ and accusations of manufacturing controversy for the sake of a juicy episode being commonly-cited byproducts of DTS, its ‘wow’ factor has somewhat dwindled, though its impact on the makeup of Formula 1’s following remains strong.
A New Demographic
A unanimous response from those I interviewed was that DTS has diversified the demographic of F1 fans. ‘FP’, who was a fan before seeing DTS, specifies that the newfound popularity of F1 has extended its appeal to “women, LGBTQ+, and people of color.”
F1 has had to recalibrate itself in order to accommodate its new user base, so to speak. Has it done so adequately? Certain events this year would indicate not. There was the poorly-handled allegations of sexual misconduct against Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. And then there is Susie Wolff, a powerful operative in the world of motorsport in her own right, who was assumed to be the recipient of confidential information from an F1 team principal solely because she is married to one (Toto Wolff). The complaint lodged never suggested it was the Wolffs – and yet Susie Wolff was investigated over a conflict of interest anyway.
The birth of a new kind of F1 fan has laid bare F1’s ongoing struggle to accommodate women into the world of motorsport – and many of those I interviewed do not think it is just those within the corporate side of F1 who are struggling to adapt to the change.
The DTS Fan
This new demographic is also thought to have altered the way in which fans engage with the sport. “[F1] is no longer just ‘a sport that people follow’, now it has a fandom in spaces where it probably didn’t exist before,” Edwina, who became a fan after watching DTS, says.
Since its peak in the past few years, Drive to Survive has gone off the boil, in part because long-standing fans of F1 have drawn a firm line between themselves and ‘DTS Fans’.
“The F1 fandom is absolutely toxic,” Avery, who holds a somewhat unique identity in all of this, having gotten into F1 at the same time as many DTS Fans, but never having watched the series, tells me.
In what way? “There is this dichotomy on social media where ‘real’ F1 fans from before DTS have this superiority complex about ‘DTS fans’,” Avery explains.
Nat, who was a fan before DTS, tells me, “DTS fans are not inherently bad, everyone started somewhere, and it is usually used as an insult to thinly veil misogyny.”
Nat hits on something important, here. If you venture far enough into online fan spaces you rather get sense that the hostility towards new fans might not be predicated on the fact that they came from Netflix, but rather on assumptions some long-standing fans are making about the profiles of newcomers.
Barby speaks to her experience with increased sexism in the motorsport community post-DTS. “Before DTS, my fan legitimacy was never questioned,” she says. Barby has been a fan of the sport for over a decade, first watching it in 2014. However, upon asking in the comments section of a MotoGP Instagram Reel if she should give the sport a try as an F1 fan, she was reduced by a male commenter to a “trend hopper.” When another commenter came to her defence, the man retorted: “ask her about Alain Prost, she probably doesn’t know anything.”
“People – men – cannot accept that women have been F1 fans since the sport started,” Barby says. “It’s an unfair phenomenon where female F1 fans now have to ‘prove’ themselves to be ‘real fans’.”
Barby is not the only fan to notice the unearthing of sexist attitudes amongst the male-dominated fanbase of a male-dominated sport in the wake of a new demographic tuning into race weekends.
“Drive to Survive has done a fantastic job of bringing new fans into the sport, but it’s also met with criticism from previous/current fans as well,” Lola tells me. “The community-wide dislike for DTS has led to the dislike and bullying of these new fans. They often get the reputation of being stupid, new – mainly female – fans.”
While older fans might find the focus on drivers and their personal lives disturbing, or perhaps unnecessary, it is certainly an aspect of the docuseries that has given F1 its wings. Hannah, who started watching DTS to learn more about the sport and drivers, directly attributes the sport’s growing popularity to the humanising angle of the show, as she believes “younger and female fans” are more likely to be drawn to “the personalities of the drivers and behind-the-scenes elements that you don’t see watching races.”
With access to the drivers on a more personal level being facilitated by a platform as mainstream as Netflix, fans indoctrinated into F1 such as ‘amialoneinparkferme’ found themselves seeing a side of the sport that they didn’t know existed.
“I saw a post about Charles Leclerc and thought – wow, that kind of person is a race car driver? I thought they were all like Nigel Mansell.” She says that DTS has “opened up a new fan base because being able to see the drivers’ personalities and what goes on in a team made it interesting.”
“Wait – We Can Make Money From This!”
While DTS has been touted as a net positive for diversifying its viewership, some fans have identified problems in how the corporate side of F1 has engaged with this influx of attention.
If you want the abbreviated version, Nat puts it rather succinctly: “They milk it dry.”
Lily agrees. “Any corporation involved tries to get as much money out of fans as possible,” she says. “In F1, ticket prices to races are often not affordable for those with an average income.”
In trying to navigate the influx of attention on the sport, F1 and the various corporate bodies orbiting it have gotten stuck in a familiar thought pattern: how can we make more money from this?
As indicated by Lily, true fans are getting the short end of the stick. Despite clear indications that it is this huge crop of new fans fuelling the sport’s rejuvenation, the thanks they get are ticket prices which reflect the social standing of F1’s preferred audience, rather than the dedicated fanbase they already have.
Ali sums it up perfectly, I think. “Because of the amount of new fans coming in, they think they can make ticket prices more. They want to get even more people [to be fans], instead of actually nourishing the connections between those who already love F1 and the sport.”
Break Point (2023-2024)
This is a funny one. In my attempt to pin down tennis diehards (or even casuals) for their thoughts on Break Point, I received a fairly ubiquitous response: “I refuse to watch it.”
Break Point did not see the success which graced its motorsport equivalent. It ran for two seasons, following the events of 2022 and 2023, and was cancelled shortly after the release of its second season.
While it seems that Break Point was discontinued as it did not generate the interest which propelled Drive to Survive to the mainstream, some tennis fans gave alternative views as to why Break Point failed to inspire enthusiasm for tennis.
“The biases are clearly visible, and when you know uglier parts of the story you just can’t even try to like some players since you feel it’s fake,” Lennyallen suggests.
One might consider such “uglier parts” to be the frankly terrible optics of positioning Nick Kyrgios as Break Point‘s season one protagonist, and Alexander Zverev as season two’s main character.
For context, Zverev, at the time of airing, was facing fines related to physical abuse. Kyrgios, though not convicted, pleaded guilty to assaulting his ex-girlfriend. To position these players in the light of protagonists while failing to address the allegations against them is a disservice to those involved in the charges, now having to watch the rehabilitation of their aggressors. It certainly rubbed fans the wrong way, too. As Lennyallen suggests, it is hard to find merit in Break Point as a fan of tennis when it fails to acknowledge broader contexts.
Hindrance
One of the lowlights of the series is the second episode of the first season, ‘Take the Crown.’ Half the episode is Ajla Tomljanović and Matteo Berrettini arguing dully in their hotel room. They are playing the Australian Open, one of four major tournaments in the year – and they are reduced to bickering about whether or not Tomljanović is going to be able to get a room in the hotel for ten minutes while Berrettini gets some rest? Whether or not a movie is a comedy or a romantic comedy? Who will fall asleep first? Why their room is in such an unconscionable mess? Oh, my God – I don’t care!
Both Tomljanović and Berrettini are tennis players with their own on-court stories just begging to be told. Nowhere is it more clear that Break Point‘s biggest failure is a lopsided focus on off-court narratives than when the players are misused for petty ‘drama’ in the middle of a Grand Slam.
Iga Świątek (the No. 1 women’s player in the world, so you sort of have to think that a docuseries would have liked to keep someone of her calibre onside) also complained of the lack of control the players featured in the series had over the editing of their segments and the misrepresentation of certain events, such as a player serving from the deuce side, and the shot landing in the advantage side. As Świątek commented, “I think anybody who knows tennis is going to notice.”
In trying to highlight the behind-the-scenes elements of tennis, Break Point stumbles on its insistence on a soft focus. They waste minutes cycling through awkward interactions between players and their team, trying to crack the surface, but ending up with a hollow depiction of the players as athletes and as people.
It is hard to pinpoint what made Drive to Survive excel compared to the immediate fall of Break Point. Perhaps we are over the docuseries, and DTS is remembered fondly as the first of its kind. Either way, it is clear that DTS inspired an F1 renaissance through its novel access to athletes beyond their on-track identities. Break Point tried to strike while the iron was hot – but striking gold with the Netflix cash cow is, as it turns out, not for everyone.
