Part 2 - The Tradeoff - Drive To Survive: To Grow, You Have to Let Go
Hardcore fans don’t scale. They retain, and retention is not the same as expansion.
This is the problem that has plagued series like WRC and IndyCar. Their fans are knowledgeable, passionate, and loyal, but they’re not the future (if they were, there wouldn’t be nearly as much hand-wringing about where these series are headed).
Designing your product (your broadcast, branding, social content, format) to please them is like designing a smartphone for flip phone users.
You’re locking yourself into yesterday’s potential.
This isn’t always intentional. In many cases, the issue is that no one has clearly defined what growth looks like and where it should be headed.
So the default becomes: “Let’s not upset the base.”
But if you haven’t identified who your growth audience is, and what they expect, then you’re not just failing to attract new fans. You’re actively reinforcing the ceiling above you.
Part 1 - The Scorecard - Drive To Survive: Is Your Favorite Motorsport Series Ready For the Global Spotlight?
When people think of racing, they think of Formula 1 and increasingly, even among casual viewers, they know the teams, the drivers, the rivalries.
That didn’t happen by accident.
It happened because of Drive to Survive, a Netflix series that didn’t just document Formula 1, it transformed it, from a niche European sport into a worldwide luxury media property.
Since then, every struggling series has echoed the same line:
“We need our own Drive to Survive.”
But here's the truth: a docuseries won't elevate, or even save you, if your series isn’t ready to be saved.
And most aren’t.
Of course, producing good content is not a given, but it’s more straight-forward than being ready for the spotlight.
In other words, the real difficulty is having the structure in place to capitalize on that eventual good content.
The $3,000 Helmet: An IndyCar Case Study in Compliance-Driven Cost Inflation
With so much talk today about the rising costs of competing in top-level racing, I realized this was a golden opportunity: a chance to do a real apples-to-apples comparison between 1977 and 2025 safety equipment.
Even better: the vendor featured, Simpson Safety Equipment, still exists under the name Simpson Race Products. This meant I could go straight to the source, nearly 50 years later, and uncover some surprising insights about how costs have shifted, where the pain points really are, and what this says about the evolving economics of racing today.
10 Truths About Motorsports Hiding In Plain Sight
These ten truths won’t fix everything but they may explain why so many motorsports teams struggle, why sponsors hesitate, and why certain series are quietly pulling ahead.
If you're in the ecosystem, whether you’re representing a team, brand, or platform, this is what you're up against.