483,934 attended the first F1 race of the 2026 season
Shift Happens #17 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
Thank you for being here. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Idée Fixe, the newsletter for curious minds. I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past five years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, and technology of motorsports.
⏳ Reading time: 4minutes
Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. The great thing about the internet is that we have access to almost everything. But that’s also the issue. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.
The lead lap
Is Drive to Survive (DTS) still relevant? This is the question that has been top of mind for the past few weeks, ever since DTS S08 launched, and I still haven’t finished the season. I’ve written about Drive to Survive at length over the past six years, and the broken record that I keep spinning is the following. Drive to Survive was merely the spark, not the fuel for F1 that everyone thought and said it was. DTS merely kick-started conversations and interests that actually grew online - on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads and Twitch. As I mentioned previously in one of these newsletter pieces:
While the docuseries’ storytelling was masterful, it might have remained a niche success were it not for the serendipitous timing of its release, something that F1 and many motorsports pundits seem to continuously forget to mention. Season 1 premiered in early 2019 to modest attention. But as Season 2 and 3 rolled out, the world was hit by COVID-19 – and suddenly millions were stuck at home, thirsting for fresh content. The pandemic “transformed the mildly successful Drive to Survive series into a full-on sensation” in the United States.
Eight seasons in, and Drive to Survive is still showing up. But the real question isn't whether the show is good - it's whether it's still necessary. When DTS launched in 2019, Formula 1 had a discovery problem. The sport was spectacular but impenetrable, its paddock famously closed off, its politics illegible to outsiders. Netflix didn’t just document F1 - it translated it. For a new generation of fans, the show was the door. That door is now wide open.
F1 in 2026 is one of the most culturally fluent sports on the planet. It has three races in the United States. Some of its drivers (and even Team Principals) are global celebrities with millions of social media followers and brand deals that rival pop stars. The F1 movie just spent a summer dominating the box office. TikTok creators, YouTube explainers, and a now decade-deep community of English-language F1 content have made the sport more accessible than it has ever been. The new fan funnel no longer runs exclusively through a Netflix series, and I would argue it never really did.
The show’s original superpower was access like never seen before - the sense that you were seeing things you weren’t supposed to see. But F1 has industrialised its own content machine since then. Every team has a media department. Driver personalities are carefully managed and meticulously distributed. The paddock that once felt secret now feels like a studio lot. When everything is content, “behind the scenes” loses its meaning. And I’m also being told that the DTS production company also has exclusivity on long-form “BTS” content (aka everything that happens off-track and in the Paddock).
There’s also the question of who DTS is actually for at this point. The show was built for newcomers - people who needed characters before they could care about results. But the newcomers it recruited in 2020 and 2021 are now seasoned fans. They’re very much watching qualifying on their phones and debating tyre strategies in Reddit threads. DTS hasn’t evolved with them, and yet it has had plenty of opportunities to do so. What remains is a product that services nostalgia more than curiosity - a highlight reel dressed up as revelation, watched largely by people who already know the ending.
That’s not nothing. Plenty of fans enjoy the recap, the drama amplified for television, the season compressed into a bingeable arc. But it’s a very different cultural role than the one the show once played. It’s no longer even the spark. At best, it’s the afterglow. The sport doesn’t need Drive to Survive to grow anymore. Season 8 will have its audience, its moments, its manufactured feuds. But the question the show’s producers probably don’t want asked is a simple one: if DTS launched for the first time today, in a world already fluent in F1 - would anyone notice?
The number of the week
483,934 is the record crowd number of people that attended this year’s Australian Grand Prix, in Melbourne. This number covers the four-day event. According to the Australian GP, they saw individual day records on both Thursday and Friday before the second-highest figures for Saturday and Sunday. It’s also worth sharing that this is the Grand Prix with the highest number of female fans - a number that kept rising in the past decade. Last year, 45% were female fans, and that number is expected to be closer to 50% thsi year, although we are still waiting on the exact number.
Three stories that need to be on your radar
Cadillac honoured Mario Andretti during the Melbourne GP. As I was waiting to board my flight home to SFO from Melbourne on Monday morning, I smiled as I noticed the 1978 Formula 1 World Champion standing next to me waiting to board his flight. It reminded me that I haven’t yet spoken about the kind gesture from the Cadillac team this past weekend. They announced that their inaugural Formula 1 chassis will carry the designation MAC-26, for Mario Andretti Cadillac 26. As the team put it, “The chassis name recognises Andretti’s legacy while establishing a standard of excellence that guides the organisation as it prepares for its debut season.” As a reminder, Red Bull did something similar in honour of their late owner, Dietrich Mateschitz.
Apple and Netflix say ‘What streaming wars’. I joined a product overview and briefing a few weeks back with F1 and Apple, where they announced they had struck a deal with Netflix. This one move reminds me that Apple didn’t just buy F1 broadcast rights in America. They bought the future of how we watch sport. And there is so much more to this deal than meets the eye. I’ve been told by multiple well-informed people that this was one of the easiest deals Apple has ever done. And this doens’t surprise me - this was a no-loose situation for all parties involved. I broke this down further here.
The Middle East crisis and its impact on sports. We are reminded yet again that politics and sports are tied at the hip and continuously impact each other. In motorpsorts, this means that the WEC season opener in Qatar has been cancelled and both the Prologue and season opener will take place in Imola mid-April. For Formula 1, this means we may have two fewer races this season, with Bahrain and Saudi GPs most likely to be cancelled. This is also a reminder of the logistical complexity of this sport - we can’t just host a GP in Imola as the freights with the garage kits are on route to another destination as we speak, asking the Melbourne GP to take everything down in Albert Park merely to put it all back up in a few weeks with little time to sell tickets and actually make a profitable event is not going to happen…
One video worth your time
A nail-biting moment during the Australian Grand Prix, and a reminder of the exceptional reflexes these drivers have.
One [event] that caught my eye
The team behind the Australian Grand Prix extended an invitation to Glamour on the Grid - and it turned out to be unlike anything I’d experienced at a race weekend before. Part of that was the setting: the circuit at night, stripped of its daytime urgency, used purely as a backdrop for extraordinary gowns and the kind of people who wear them well. For some guests, this may be their one and only time standing on an F1 grid, close enough to touch the garage infrastructure. For others, the entire point was the surprise of it - that something this cinematic could exist inside a motorsport venue. I had (and have always had) mixed feelings about motorsports being used as a backdrop for fashion, style and culture. I don’t think it bothers me - more so, I notice myself taking note of the feelings that come to the surface.
What struck me most was that this event belonged to Melbourne. I barely recognised a single person on the grid, and the handful of F1 faces I did spot were very much in the minority. I kind of loved it. It was a useful reminder that every race weekend contains multitudes - several completely separate programming worlds running in parallel, rarely intersecting. There’s the race itself and everything that orbits it: the stakeholder dinners, partner receptions, sponsor activations. There’s the fan-facing world - the fan zones, the festivals, the public fan-focused moments built for the people who saved up to be there or who could only attend the free events (making them that much more special and impactful). And then there’s a third layer, often the least visible from the outside: the lifestyle programming aimed at local celebrities and influencers, usually anchored by a brand that wants to be seen in the same frame as Formula 1 without necessarily being of Formula 1. These worlds occasionally overlap, but they’re mostly built for distinct audiences with distinct purposes. It feels like a necessary reminder when I hear the distant cries of fans lamenting that yet another celebrity who knows nothing about Formula 1 took a VIP ticket away from them - the loyal die-hard fan. Not only were those VIP passes never meant for fans and fall under teh marketing and editorial bucket, but it’s sadly just another form of gatekeeping.
The second thing I kept coming back to: this was the tenth year of Glamour on the Grid. Ten years. So the next time we praise a newer promoter or partner for bringing fashion, culture, and lifestyle into the sport - and there’s been plenty of that conversation lately - it’s probably worth looking south first. The Australian GP has quietly been pushing that boundary for a decade. The innovation wasn’t imported. It was already here. And they should get some credit for it.
