F1 targets ‘Generation Z’ in Carey’s drive to modernise
As Melbourne signals start of season, new chairman is seeking out younger fans. reports
E Oliver Brown ver since its £6.4 billion takeover of Formula One, Liberty Media has emphasised the need to promote the personalities of the 20 drivers, in all their vividness and complexity. This begs the question, then, of why Ferrari, in the week of the season’s first grand prix, have neglected in Australia to put Kimi Raikkonen up for any media work. If one ignores the fact that the Finn is about as quotable as a telephone directory, the explanation given by Maurizio Arrivabene, the Scuderia’s team principal, is intriguing.
“Define media,” he said. “What do you mean by media? Liberty have said that our digital platforms are used at only one per cent of our potential. So we were using social media to post something about Kimi. We have to make sure we keep Generation Z happy.” One can just imagine Bernie Ecclestone talking up the need to satisfy ‘Generation Z’, a label loosely applied to those post-millennials who conduct their existence through Facebook. The 86-year-old would have thought Arrivabene was talking in Swahili. Far better, as he once put it, to entice the older race-goers with plenty of cash than to masquerade as having any affinity with youth culture.
Liberty thinks very differently. Chase Carey, the twirly-moustached former president of 21st Century Fox who has replaced Ecclestone, would rather promote the contents of Lewis Hamilton’s iPhone music collection than hear him wax lyrical about the performance of the rear tyres. Although Carey has kept Ecclestone as F1’s chairman emeritus, the gesture is essentially just a salve to his predecessor’s bruised ego. There will be a radically modernised approach with this new sheriff in town.
Christian Horner, a worldly character and one in tune with the zeitgeist as team principal of ultra-hip Red Bull, approves of the change, arguing that F1 has been drowning in an obsession with engineering that caters only to a niche audience. “There is far too much emphasis on technology at the moment, and we are spectacularly bad at communicating that,” he said. “I think the average fan and viewer understands very little about the technology that is in a Formula One car.”
This is why Carey has enlisted Sean Bratches, a long-serving vicepresident at US sports giant ESPN, as his commercial guru, charged with making the blizzard of on-track data and the madness of pit-stops more accessible to the non-aficionado. Bratches, for one, has little doubt about F1’s global appeal if this often closed and cliquey world dares to be more outward-looking. “I look at it as though there are three tier-one global sports platforms,” he said. “The World Cup, the Olympics and F1.”
Sometimes, the corporate-speak can be alienating. Ecclestone was the consummate salesman, who first made his name selling second-hand cars on Warren Street, and he would have had precious little time for the boardroom bromides in which Carey and Bratches indulge. But there is no question their instincts are sound. F1 has become both bloated and stale, with Singapore, Malaysia and Brazil all threatening to pull out unless they receive healthier returns on their investment. Carey’s imperative is to ensure that each race, under his stewardship, becomes less an anonymous tour stop than a week-long mardi gras. He does not seek one Super Bowl, but 20.
Carey has been a ubiquitous presence in the paddock in Melbourne, speaking effusively about what he has seen. The Australian Grand Prix, in many ways, encapsulates his vision: a great event in a passionate sporting city, where 100,000 fans pour into Albert Park as much for the bands and entertainment as the race itself. It is over the next month, when the F1 circus rolls on to China and Bahrain, that the scale of the challenge will become apparent.
These are events closed off to any locals save for a gilded elite. They are not so much Super Bowl-esque as private parties for resident plutocrats.
The same applies to next month’s Russian Grand Prix in Sochi, a spectacle that galvanises little national interest but serves as a powerful prop to Vladimir Putin’s cult of personality.
Ecclestone, at heart, was a dealmaker, and these often soulless showpieces form part of his legacy. Carey, though, is far more preoccupied with what he calls the “destination event”. Where Monaco, Singapore and Abu Dhabi all shimmer on television thanks to their dazzling cityscapes, Carey is desperate to achieve the same effect in his own country. Recent hosts of the US Grand Prix, such as Austin and Indianapolis, are solid heartland cities, but F1’s kingpin would much prefer to develop this iconic sport against the postcard backdrop of New York, Las Vegas and Miami. He and his lieutenants are understood to be actively investigating the possibility of street races in all three.
Then, at last, an American public whose enthusiasm for motorsport extends little beyond the Daytona 500 might fall headlong for F1’s seductive charms. Especially, Carey hopes, those capricious souls who make up Generation Z.