00:00I have now watched every race so far this season twice, even though I have great problems with the formula.
00:07You know, it's a 50-50 formula, so half gas, half battery.
00:11But because they don't put a big enough battery in the car, the electric power can't make it all the
00:15way around for one lap.
00:17So they have to constantly slow down, put on the brakes, not drive as fast as they otherwise would to
00:23harvest energy and fill up the battery again
00:26for this artificial boost that they use to push themselves past other cars.
00:30It's like Mario Kart.
00:32Like, you eat a mushroom and all of a sudden you're faster.
00:34And it doesn't, to me, feel like real racing.
00:36Okay, I'm going to draw back and set this lean a little bit bigger here.
00:41Let's draw out.
00:42We've got three new teams racing this season.
00:45We've got Cadillac, which is very exciting, and Audi, who is also new to the grid.
00:50And we've got four giving engines for Red Bull.
00:52So this is a very big deal to have these new teams involved.
00:56We do have some new rules and regulations, which arguably are making the racing more interesting because now it's really
01:04a toss-up.
01:05It's not just going to be Red Bull dominating.
01:07It's not just going to be Ferrari, obviously, dominating.
01:10Mercedes is doing really well.
01:12But in past years, we had seen years and years and years of the same people winning races.
01:17And actually, this year, it's kind of interesting because there are a lot of unexpected surprises happening.
01:25And it's also, it's not just about...
01:28I mean, look.
01:30Go ahead, Matt.
01:31Well, my point was going to be, I am much older than all of us here.
01:36So I started watching Formula One in the 90s, and back then when you had Ayrton Senna, right, versus Prost
01:44or Schumacher versus Hackenden, it was about limit driving.
01:48The drivers are giving 10 tenths, and it was about really the pilot as much as or more than the
01:54machine.
01:54And now it's a competition about managing resources best.
02:00I mean, you have to have the best tire strategy, the best lap strategy, the best battery strategy.
02:05There's a virtual safety car.
02:07Like, there's so many different things that it takes away from that kind of man-to-man, wheel-to-wheel,
02:13nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat competition that I love.
02:17So we had this movie, the Formula One movie, with Brad Pitt.
02:20There is interest in broadening the appeal.
02:21I know whenever I travel overseas, enthusiasm for Formula One is so huge.
02:26Yes, there are the old gray beards like Matt, who have been following this since the 1990s.
02:30My word.
02:31But how much growth potential is there?
02:33How much has that movie kind of reset things for not global interest in this sport, but U.S. interest?
02:39And the Netflix series.
02:41I mean, that's how I started getting into Formula One.
02:42I'd never heard of it before.
02:44And then I got into, like, the driver drama in the Netflix series.
02:47I think when you look at the kind of deals being done around F1, that deal with Apple, IBM, the
02:55deal with LVMH, which is, like, a $1 billion deal, that, these are the indicators of the kind of growth
03:02we're seeing, the kind of platform Formula One offers.
03:05And maybe overexposure of the brand, I think, is a concern.
03:08Look, Netflix is really what set it off here in the U.S.
03:11Drive to Survive is what made this sport, again, extremely popular in America.
03:15It's always been huge overseas.
03:17Like, if you go to a race at Silverstone, there's going to be half a million people that go there
03:22to watch it.
03:23You know, there's going to be 90, maybe 100 million people watching it on television.
03:27So it's always been huge overseas, especially in the U.K.
03:31It's very big in Asia.
03:33But here in the U.S., Drive to Survive set it off.
03:36The Brad Pitt movie, I think, was pretty good.
03:38He's always been into racing.
03:39Summer blockbuster, Academy Award nominated.
03:42I would rather watch a race, frankly, than that movie.
03:44But the Apple partnership is what I'm watching most closely because it makes it so accessible for almost anyone to
03:51watch.
03:51And they do incredible coverage.
03:52If you look at your Apple maps and zoom in on the Hard Rock Cafe here, stadium here in Miami,
03:58you can see they've actually put the track, including, like, the start-stop line and pit lane and all of
04:04the different places to watch the race, on the map.
04:08So Apple is doing an incredible job of delivering this.
04:10You don't have to watch the whole race.
04:11You can watch it encapsulated in 30 minutes.
04:14And we should say, these are all interconnected because the Apple partnership came out of the F1 movie.
04:20Apple actually created special cameras to help film some of the racing scenes for the movie.
04:25And this whole thing has emerged as sort of a growing universe that really is all tied in together.
04:31The other thing I think we should point out is a lot of the viewership and the fan growth is
04:35among young women, which is a really big deal.
04:37I understand that you talked with Susie Wolf at the F1 Academy.
04:41I'm assuming she's related to or married to Toto Wolf, the Mercedes guy, about how they're trying to get more
04:46women behind the wheel of the sport.
04:48Yeah, F1 Academy is a really interesting project that they've done to try to build a feeding structure, a system
04:56that can get women drivers into the channels to eventually become F1 drivers.
05:04This is, you know, it's a whole process.
05:06There are different levels of formula racing.
05:07So F1 Academy is basically a feeder.
05:12It's like a school that really tries to bring some of these very young, I mean, teenage women drivers up
05:18to speed, no pun intended, to eventually get to the F1 level of driving.
05:24And there are actually F1 Academy races at the beginning and during some of these F1 weekends, too, which is
05:30great.
05:31Susie Wolf is the perfect ambassador for that.
05:35She herself has driven 20, I think it was 25 laps in a Formula One car.
05:40She was the first woman to do that in many decades.
05:43Yes, married to Toto.
05:45And she's a great ambassador for it and wonderful to talk to as well.
05:48It should be said, she married Toto after her racing career had already started.
05:52And she was herself a successful driver.
05:55Hot Pursuits, the name of the podcast, Hannah Elliott.
05:57Matt Miller, thank you very much.
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