Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 2: The NFL Films Playbook For Turning Motorsport Races Into Legends
This is part 2 of a 4-part series, you can catch up on part 1 via this link: Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 1: Why Motorsport Racing Teams Must Move Beyond Sponsorship
There are few things I remember more vividly about growing up in Texas in the 90s than watching NFL on Sundays with my dad (or at the very least hearing the day’s games on TV while I was off doing other things). Football is intertwined with life in that state and my dad, an eager immigrant from Europe, took to it immediately and I’d be lying if I said the constant exposure to American culture via football didn’t shape part of who I am today.
Now I’m back in France, where motorsport takes up most of my leisure time. But those early memories came flooding back recently when I watched an eight-part Netflix documentary about the legendary Dallas Cowboys of the mid-1990s.
Granted, I have a personal connection to that team and era, but even a non-fan would be hooked by the opening minutes: dynamic, cinematic, and set to music that evoked the most epic Western movies.
Sure enough, when the credits rolled, there it was: NFL Films.
Depending on where you grew up or live, this may mean nothing to you but to me, it is intensely evocative. I speak about their work with a deep familiarity that I take for granted, but outside of the US NFL Films are largely unkown, yet this division of the NFL holds the key for motorsport to unlock enormous value today and far into the future.
So what exactly is NFL Films, and why is it potentially so important to motorsport?
In Part 1 of this four-part series on building the next motorsport business model, I explained why today’s motorsport teams are stuck in a fragile sponsorship model, while other sports have proven you can build cultural capital through storytelling and influence.
This second part dives deeper: why storytelling is foundational to moving away from sponsorship as a primary revenue driver, why the NFL is the best in the world at storytelling, and how NFL Films elevated every run, pass, and catch into legend.
To borrow a football term, NFL Films is the blueprint for motorsport.
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In less than 500 words.
The NFL Itself Is Setup to Tell Captivating Stories, And So Is Motorsport
Humans love stories, and this affinity for captivating tales is what makes storytelling such a powerful sales tool: a good story gets, and keeps, people interested, even if they would otherwise not care at all about the subject matter.
A good story has two foundational elements: the narrative itself and the way in which it is told.
The NFL, as explained in the YouTube video “What the NFL Understands That Other Leagues Don’t” is uniquely structured to create a compelling narrative.
The league has engineered its structure to create a rhythm that feels more like a TV series than a sports competition. Every week is an “episode” that pushes the story forward:
Sunday delivers the drama.
Monday is devoted to recaps and analysis.
Tuesday looks at the big picture, rankings and season-wide narratives.
Wednesday and Thursday pivot to previews for the upcoming match-ups.
Friday builds anticipation with predictions.
Saturday is more buildup before the cycle starts all over again.
This cadence keeps fans engaged daily, even though games are only played weekly (and none of this so far even references the vast world devoted to fantasy football, which is another means of getting fans even more invested).
Each result cascades into the next, creating season-long and career-long arcs. Add in rivalries, playoff rematches guaranteed by the schedule and divisional formula, and you have a finely tuned storytelling engine that no other league, with its numerous and often inconsequential games, can touch.
Sunday in America is largely for two things: church and football. Truly, Sundays (and, incidentally, Thanksgivings) spent in front of the TV or at the game are about as close to a “monoculture” as you can get nowadays, and that is completely deliberate.
The result is that the NFL is now the US’ most popular sport, and though many may see this fact as a purely US matter, this has significance on a global scale because of how gigantic a market the country is (consider that the Dallas Cowboys are consistently ranked as the world’s most valuable sports team).
Yet, as explained in the video, because on paper, the NFL shouldn’t dominate American culture the way it does. It has the shortest season of any major league, its biggest stars often play in small markets, and the action itself is in short bursts, and constantly interrupted.
Nevertheless, the NFL does dominate because it takes what could be perceived as weaknesses and turns them into strengths by channeling them all into creating a narrative.
Motorsport, believe it or not, already has the same building blocks:
Plot: Each race weekend is its own “episode” in a season-long battle for a championship.
Characters: Drivers, of course, but in F1 at least, team principals and engineers also enjoy some notoriety today (thanks to the storytelling in Drive To Survive, we’ll get back to that).
Stakes: A single crash, penalty, or mechanical failure can swing the outcome of a race, or indeed a season.
The seasonal structure in motorsport is also very similar to that of American football’s. Races take place periodically (usually on a Sunday for the major series), followed by analyses, which set up the rivalries that create the build-up and anticipation for the next round.
To an extent, motorsport knows this and exploits this, because every pre and post-race YouTube video you’ll see talks about some aspect of this cycle.
But it’s not systematized, and it’s not epic.
Remember, a good story is about the narrative and how it’s told. The NFL has done so well because it has the story, and it has NFL Films.
NFL Films is America’s best kept sports secret
America itself is built on story telling and mythmaking. From the “American Dream” to “Top Gun”, you can trace almost all of America’s cultural hegemony to its ability to turn the most mundane occurrence into a tale worthy of the history books.
NFL Films, founded in 1962 by Ed Sabol (originally as Blair Motion Pictures) and later led by his son Steve Sabol, is the film and television production arm of the NFL, and it is very much the league’s extension of, and contribution to, American mythmaking via American football.
Timing and vision played a part in what is itself an illustration of the American Dream.
Ed Sabol started recording his son’s games in 1961 and, boosted by his own self-confidence in his work and seeing an opportunity, formed Blair Motion Pictures (after his daughter) a year later, and was able to bid on the filming rights to the 1962 championship game ($5,000 at the time, equivalent to about $54,000 today).
Sabol’s approach to filming football was visionary and he took a gamble, but that gamble might not have paid off were it not for the NFL’s shared vision. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozell, liked Sabol’s work and by 1965, Sabol’s company was owned by the NFL and renamed to “NFL Films”.
The story itself is remarkable but for a business point of view, what’s crucial here is the timing, and how everything lined up for NFL Films to exist right alongside the very beginnings of the league as we know it today.
From even before the modern NFL’s inception, NFL Films began capturing and owning all its footage, and turning that into legendary moments. The compounding effect of that is almost impossible to calculate, but qualitatively it gets us to the present day where the NFL owns American Sundays.
Crucially, its style today looks very similar to its style in the 1960s. This consistency has led to videos that are instantly recognizable if you have turned on a television in America on Sundays, and unique among other sports if you are just discovering NFL Films’ work for the first time: slow-motion, audio from the field via mics placed around the field and even on players and coaches, immersive ambient sound, and deep narration that has gravitas.
NFL Films often overlays orchestral scores, dramatic cuts, and intimate close-ups to turn ordinary plays into mythic moments; this cinematic signature has been key in creating NFL’s cultural memory. This is hard to describe but once you see it, you are absolutely hooked; my wife, not a football fan, not familiar at all with the 90’s Dallas Cowboys, still happily watched all eight episodes.
Producing an 8-hour documentary on such a niche topic is so antithetical to today’s dopamine-driven, TikTok video entertainment cycle that it’s a wonder that it even made it past the pitch phase, but if a story is good, and it is well presented, people will watch.
This pitch was greenlit, and NFL Films continues to exist, because they are very, very good at what they do. NFL Films is so good at this in fact that Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for Salon.com has called the company "the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history...an outfit that could make even a tedious stalemate seem as momentous as the battle for the Alamo.”
Motorsport has the stories, it has the history, it has the drama, but it needs an NFL Films.
What about Drive To Survive?
Drive To Survive has been a rocket ship for motorsports and its place in Liberty Media’s marketing push for F1 will likely be a Harvard case study if it isn’t already, however, Netflix are not the same as NFL Films and any of its own seasonal recaps (which, let’s be clear, is what a season of Drive To Survive is, a seasonal recap).
The latter is timeless and captures almost all of the history of one of the world’s biggest sports leagues, while the former’s style captures about 10% of F1’s chronology only and possesses a style that may look very reminiscent of the 2010’s in about 50 years.
There have been some very well-done videos about motorsport (some of which you’ll find listed in the Vaucher Analytics Motorsport Content Directory), but there exists nothing as systematic and inspiring as what NFL Films have done.
And will continue to do, because whereas Drive To Survive may not be around in 20 years, NFL Films will be.
One media organization that needs to be mentioned in this discussion, and that very likely will be around for decades more is Red Bull Media House. While the content they produce is indeed very slick, it falls mostly under the category of “cool stuff caught on film”.
Could they pivot towards a more narrative style of storytelling over a period of years to cement its own motorsport myths? Absolutely, but for now, that doesn’t seem to be the artistic direction and even if it were, it would likely serve only “content from the world of Red Bull” (their words from the website) than the broader motorsport ecosystem.
So what’s the way forward on a motorsport equivalent to NFL Films?
Undoubtedly, just trying to set up a structure similar to NFL Films would be a monumental undertaking, if only because the NFL is one league, whereas motorsport encompasses endurance racing, rally, open-wheel, and so many others. Nevertheless, we can still suggest a few possible ways forward to begin down this path of mythmaking in popular culture.
Given the FIA’s oversight of so many of these motorsports disciplines, an FIA Films with a mandate to preserve and manage the footage of all its series makes sense, but at this stage, just like Ed Sabol creating a niche that didn’t exist in the early 1960s, almost any team in motorsport could step up and take the lead in this effort to elevate motorsport’s stories.
Thinking back to how the NFL turns a short season into an asset, IndyCar’s calendar is also concentrated on only about 6 months of the year and that’s a series that, for all its recent momentum, still needs as much of a boost as it can get.
Given that Fox (an NFL broadcaster) recently acquired a third of IndyCar it would seem that the series is in a perfect position to tell its incredible history and current on-track battles in a more cinematic fashion; could it not at least experiment in a small-scale, high-impact way such as producing something similar to the NFL’s “Mic’d Up” segments?
And if you’re a small team or smaller series?
Yes, you’ll still have to make an investment that may take time to pay off, but at the moment, it’s almost completely blue-skies for you and if you create work that is inspiring and focuses on telling stories that anyone, not simply motorsport fans, can latch onto, you will be a long way ahead in the journey towards creating a brand for yourself and ultimately taking some of the sponsorship pressure off.
That’s the power of storytelling.
Storytelling builds attention, and ownership of those stories turns that attention into fans which in turn leads to greater independence.
If the first step is learning to mythologize motorsport itself, the next is ensuring the people inside it, drivers, team principals, and even small privateer squads, can channel that myth into their own brands. Every highlight, interview, or collaboration becomes an asset they control, not a favor they owe to sponsors.
In Part 3, we’ll explore how teams and drivers can apply this playbook, building recognizable identities, partnerships, and products that generate steady revenue so they no longer have to chase logos to stay on the grid.
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Main image credit: Lucas Andrade via Unsplash