F1 vs NASCAR | F1 Roars Into the U.S. | 4

0:00Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

0:11From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

0:34Let's go back in time, shall we? It's August 30th, 1998, and a nine-year-old is at home in the UK watching the Belgian Grand Prix on TV. He can see it's raining hard as the race begins. Soon after the start, there's a massive pile-up with 13 cars, parts flying everywhere. Here's the race commentator, Murray Walker.

0:58Alex Jacques:Great start by Eddie Irvine, Fieldhouse! Look at Fieldhouse! And in the wall! Who was that? Coulthard, Coulthard in the wall! Amy Coulthard in the wall will stop the race! They'll have to red flag this. Oh, this is terrible! Oh, this is quite appalling! This is the worst start for a Grand Prix that I have ever seen in the whole of my life! The nine-year-old watching is thrilled by the drama of the crash. That boy is Alex Jakes, and at that moment, well, he knew he had found his sport. It would take years, but eventually he'd become the voice of Formula One on F1 TV and Channel 4. And today, Alex is our guest.

1:38You might recognize his voice from the Netflix series Formula One Drive to Survive. He's also the author of Grid to Glory, 75 Milestone Formula One Moments. Alex explains how F1 finally secured a solid foothold in the U.S. market during the pandemic, and how it's gaining on NASCAR, especially with younger fans. We'll also talk about the epic 2021 F1 season, the 2026 season, of course, and, oh yeah, we'll talk about Max Verstappen. All that's coming up.

2:13Alex Jacques:This message comes from Betterment. Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment's Tax Impact Preview tool can help you make smarter investment decisions. Tax Impact Preview is a preview of what taxes you would owe if you sold out of a position today. Often, when individuals are investing, there's a disconnect between when they sell something and when they pay the taxes on it. You might sell it in February and the IRS comes calling in April. What we wanted to do was make people aware of the consequences of their decisions before they made them. People might forget that short-term capital gains are taxed at a higher rate than long-term capital gains.

2:51Alex Jacques:We wanted to make that information salient and give it to them at the point in time so they can make more informed decisions before they go through with them. Learn more about Tax Impact Preview and all the other helpful investment tools at Betterment.com. The Tax Impact Preview tool provides an estimate of tax implications. Betterment does not provide tax advice. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed. Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic series.

3:27Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on. Or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at$8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

4:02Alex Jakes, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real joy and honor. What is it about F1 that makes you love it so much? that nine-year-old watching the Grand Prix now as an adult is that what it's all about there's definitely a connection I think there's a simplicity to it that you just put elite athletes in wonderfully advanced technology and then you race them out on the track around the world the cars are painted in vivid colors and it is just one of the most exciting spectacles in sport and exciting spectacles full stop I always say you know people go to air shows around the world and they're very exciting.

4:40Imagine them racing. That's basically what Formula One is. And I love it as much as I always have. How did you become the voice of F1 TV? Did you start in go-karts, work your way up through F3, F2, F1, like rookie drivers? Nearly, very nearly. Yeah, I started working for the Formula One group in 2015 on the third tier and the second tier, then called GP3 and GP2, now called Formula 3 and Formula 2 to simplify it. But these are the junior ladders. These are the rungs on the ladder before we get to the top of Formula One. F2 is like the college football, if you like, or college basketball stage of the sport.

5:17The great advantage of that was that I met a lot of the drivers when they were in their really young, formative years. I always liken it to seeing a band that goes on to be big in a pub. But yeah, as a result, I got a lot of races in. These championships tend to have multiple races a weekend. Formula One just has the Grand Prix, the main event. and as a result of that I got lots of reps in, built a reputation and relationships with the people who put on the main show and eventually I got a tap on the shoulder and they said, do you want to have a go on Formula One? I was reading somewhere Nielsen Sports was saying Formula One now has something like 800 million, what is it, 800 million people in their global fan base?

6:00I guess some of those are probably US fans, But I'm curious why you think it took so long for F1 to break into the U.S. market to begin with. It's an interesting one. Formula One used to be run really by one man. It was one group and it was a sporting body. But realistically, a chap called Bernie Eccleston called the shots. And he had a very key ethos that he would keep all the Formula One footage under lock and key. I'll give you a great example of this because it makes no sense in the era that we're now in. But the biggest chat show in the UK is the Graham Norton show. So whenever you'd have a British driver on the Graham Norton show, any other sports person would have a clip to share.

6:40Bernie Eccleston would charge an enormous amount of money for said clip. So you can even show it to promote an appearance on a chat show. It shows you how under lock and key it was. It shows you that he had an idea of who should be watching and who shouldn't be watching. and he very much had it in his head that this was an exclusive product meant for a defined audience and not a mass market sports league. Let's dig a little deeper into Eccleston here. You think there's any sort of parallel between the hold he had on F1 and the France family's control of the NASCAR brand? I mean, you have individuals trying to control this product that so many people have a real personal attachment to, you know what I mean?

7:26It's interesting. When people love something, and I think you always have to remember with sport, this is people's weekends. This is what people look forward to for a really long time. So when you have one individual controlling things, that's a lightning rod, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent, whether it's the Dallas Cowboys, whether it's NASCAR, whether it's Formula One in the old days, you know, for all of the change that Formula One has gone through, it is essentially still a huge sport for enthusiasts and for people who you can love Formula One for a number of different reasons. You can love it for the drivers.

8:01You can love it for the tech. You can love it for the jet set lifestyle around the world. There are so many different ways in so that when one person's at the wheel, that person becomes a target and it's very easy to be partisan for or against them. Hey, make the case here. Why do you love F1? What is it about F1 that appeals to you so much now? I love sport in general, but the thing that has always elevated Formula One for me is the fact that we have these young athletes who have devoted years of their life to getting where we are. So many try for decades to get close, we don't hear their name.

8:36If you're a good football player, you've got a big chance of making it. There are 22 Formula One drivers. It is such a rare thing to get there. So when you get there, you are guaranteed to be the very best of the best. And I just think it's the greatest combination of sport that we have. We have a thousand people working for each team. We have these drivers who are at the spearhead of it. And ultimately, it just comes down to that raw instinct to race. There are lots of very exciting things in sport. For me, the most exciting thing you can have is a chase for the lead late on in a race that means something.

9:10That is high stakes. And I love that as much as I did when I was a kid. Yeah, you know, see, this is the gospel of F1. You know, just for years wouldn't catch on in the US. And yet something happened in the business world long around 2018 or so. Wasn't that about the time that Liberty Media Corporation acquired Formula One Group? Yeah, it was a sea change in the way that the owners saw it. Eccleston had had a lot of sway for a long time and had basically been fully in charge since the late 80s, early 90s.

9:45Alex Jacques:Yeah. But there were so many undeveloped pathways. The digital channels basically didn't exist. It's unthinkable now. They weren't utilizing social media. They weren't utilizing digital media. They weren't putting race highlights out in an accessible way. So there was only one way to watch it. That was through traditional linear television. the nice thing about the current role is that you know we're the voices and my colleagues that i broadcast with we're the voices on social media so you can discover us in 10 second clips and then you can watch the youtube highlights and see it's an eight minute highlights and then you can see slightly more in the featured highlights and then you can maybe take out a subscription to the streaming service and you can watch the whole thing live and that progression just wasn't there The ability to get this brilliant sport in front of eyeballs just wasn't there.

10:35That was one part of it. The other part of it, Drive to Survive. Drive to Survive. Yeah, this was the Netflix series you're talking about. Yeah, the Netflix series that just hit perfectly. It was a phenomenally fortuitous piece of timing that they had already decided to film behind the scenes in Formula One. A senior executive called Sean Bratches, he had decided that, Formula One needed a behind-the-scenes documentary. And all the big teams in Formula One decided that they wanted nothing to do with it. I was going to say, aren't they a little sniffy about this stuff? Everyone in Formula One is sniffy unless they've seen results.

11:14But initially, this first series had only got the buy-in from the midfield. Teams that wouldn't always get the same amount of air time suddenly spied, yeah, I fancy a documentary camera pointing at all of my sponsor logos. as a result the midfield is just full of characters you've got to be so good to make it in this game but you've also got to have street smarts and the the personality that i feel broke it open a person that i don't think many would have known the name of if it had not been for this documentary gunter steiner a racer through and through unbelievably charismatic italian even though it sounds like he's got an Austrian accent.

11:54And he was so honest and open in a way that because of Eccleston keeping it under lock and key, because of that restrictive hand on the rights, not only had new audiences not seen that before, traditional audiences hadn't seen that before. So suddenly here was this brand new side of things that had not been available to Formula One fans. And it created a completely different genre of sports documentary. Yeah, much more of the human side of the sport that I think for some reason has always felt like it was behind a glass wall for a lot of fans. Yeah, the cars were always front and center. The personalities at the front were front and center.

12:35But the human being, the backstory, the journeys that they'd been on, the fact that they are essentially ordinary people stuck on a conveyor belt very, very early in life. And that just had to be put in front of new audiences. For the reasons that you've heard me get excited about this earlier, it's an incredibly compelling product. The full extent of the story had just never been told. And the great thing about having 10 episodes was at a time where the world had shut down for the pandemic, everyone was binging as much as they possibly could. And here was this incredibly visceral, exciting, multifaceted sport where the drivers were charismatic, incredibly talented, and the team bosses were downright mean to each other.

13:26You know, this is, I think, what you're referring to. And correct me if I'm wrong, but in your book, Grid to Glory, you talk about how Drive to Survive was a sort of docudrama with an emphasis on the drama. Was there a specific story that comes to mind from the series that kind of gets at that? I think there's just lots of honesty that you would normally get brushed up by the PR departments in the past. For example, Liam Lawson, a really solid pro behind the wheel, gets this unbelievable chance to drive for the championship winning Red Bull team. He then gets demoted after two weeks in the job, two race weekends, and they sack him and they send him back to the junior team.

14:06They promote Yuki Tsunoda, very, very popular driver. It doesn't work out for either of them. But, you know, you ask anyone in any form of life, how good were you two weeks into your big promotion? I don't think anyone's doing their finest work 15 days into the job. So to be able to show the brutality of if you do not perform, you are out. And yet here was the show displaying that front and center that that was actually true in Formula One. This gets to how Drive to Survive has grown the Formula One audience. We can take a lot more of this stuff for granted. I think DTS has a cumulative audience of around, what is it, 800 million viewers across its seasons.

14:45And interestingly enough, it's not just brought in a lot of younger viewers, but the audience is diversified. I'm really stunned by how many women watching F1 has grown. Does it feel that way to you on your side of the microphone? It does. And it's the biggest change since I started attending Grand Prix as press. I started covering the support races in 2015, but I've been on site for a lot of races in the last decade or so. And the composition of who's sitting in the grandstand has changed. And to reach an entirely new demographic with the sport is pretty rare. Let's be honest, very few sports leagues or sports in general get a chance to reinvent.

15:28Formula One always reinvents. That's part of the DNA. They're changing the cars all the time. They're changing the power units all the time. But a chance to bring in a new demographic, that is so rare. And it's given the sport so much more energy. And I'm delighted it's had that effect. You know, I can remember, I'm in Austin, Texas, and we have a big F1 track here. but I can remember right around, I don't know, it must have been 2010 or so, maybe 2011. It was a lot of talk and a little bit of excitement. I was talking with friends and I was of the opinion that we'd never see it happen, that we'd never actually get an F1 track.

16:04But then when it started to come together, began to hear a lot more people really, really excited and enthusiastic about it. And I guess there have been several new tracks that sort of reflect this interest and that has sort of fueled the monster, hasn't it? It has indeed. I mean, if you look at America's Formula One history, and there have been more venues for Formula One Grand Prix in the United States than any other. The problem is, none of them ever stuck until we got to Austin. It's just an incredible thing to see the popularity explode. And I think the interest has grown with Formula One growing the calendar.

16:41If you were sceptical about getting a race in Austin, you can only imagine how people felt about racing down the strip in Vegas and the scepticism that abounded with that. And yet, logistically, that was an amazing feat for them to pull off. Miami too, right? Yeah. One of the, you know, just cinematic backdrops for Formula One. That's very emblematic, isn't it? To go for three races in the States when for so many years there wasn't any U.S. Grand Prix just shows where the attention is market-wise. And those are three great events on the Formula One calendar. We're talking with Alex Jakes. And when we come back, we're going to be talking about the epic 2021 F1 season.

17:21Don't touch that dial. There's a whole lot more business wars just ahead. Stay with us.

17:30Alex Jacques:I'm Leon Nafak, best known as the co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco. I had, of course, heard of OnlyFans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism. A silent judgment, you might say. Who is actually using this platform? Um, I am. Hi, I'm OnlyFans creator and comedian Gracie Kanan. I work from home now. I'm on OnlyFans. and in case you guys don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an OnlyFans account. I'm not his sister, just to clarify. It turns out a lot of what I thought I knew about OnlyFans was wrong.

18:08Alex Jacques:I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for something that wasn't real. What happens when connection comes with a price tag? Listen to OnlyFantasy wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes of Only Fantasy ad-free right now, only on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app or on Apple Podcasts. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation.

18:47or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting at$8.99, you'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at$8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

19:37Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. We're talking with Alex Jakes, F1 TV commentator known far and wide. Alex, you call the 2021 F1 season the gladiator season. Can you set that up for us? Why was it so epic? You had a young pretender in Max Verstappen who had been waiting for his chance up against the statistical greatest driver in Formula One history, Lewis Hamilton, most wins, most pole positions, most podiums, and you very rarely get an opportunity to see a future great up against the current great. And yet in 2021, right off the back of the pandemic, when so many fans had discovered Formula One through the digital channels and through Drive to Survive, suddenly the second shoe drops and one of the greatest seasons that Formula One has ever seen.

20:33It was gladiatorial. It was physically painful for both drivers. It was aggressive. They were constantly side by side, wheel to wheel, on the edge for the entire season. Not just a phase, not just a race, not just a moment. Nine months around the world, high speed. And these are the two of the greatest to ever do it, fighting for the titles. It happens so rarely. And it happens straight after Drive to Survive had caught fire. Good Lord. And you are in the driver's seat in a sense for British TV, right? This is your first season calling it for British TV. Is that right? Yeah. Channel 4 do the network program.

21:11So there is a live program on Sky Sports, which is your ESPN. And then in the network program airs slightly later, but full highlights of the race. That's a coveted job in British sport. And it's the one I'd always wanted to do. And so did you find yourself taking a side? This would be really hard to maintain a kind of neutrality, I would think. You've got to maintain a neutrality. That's the gig. Your job as lead commentator is to tell everyone the stakes and the order and the importance and the details. And then I have racing drivers next to me that year. Mark Webber, David Coulthard, they've been there.

21:53They've done it. They've risked their necks. my ethos in the commentary box is always, if you haven't risked your neck, you're not giving an opinion. That's not how it works. And that was the season to test the neutrality because it was partisan in a way that Formula One rarely is. The lovely thing about going around the world is that there is great respect for everyone risking their life out there for our entertainment. But because it was such a combative season, because these two were so good, this championship meant more. And as a result, it just got dialed up and up and up. There was a lot of buzz.

22:28How did Max Verstappen come onto the scene in that 2021 F1 season? Did he surprise everyone? He was a prodigy and there was a arms race to sign him. Ferrari wanted him, Mercedes wanted him, but Red Bull had a trunk card that no one else had. They had two teams in Formula One. Formula One was not always the popular product that it is today. And at one point, Red Bull were invited to buy a second team, basically to prop up numbers on the grid, and they'd kept it to train up their junior drivers. It meant that when Ferrari offered a seat in Formula 2 and Mercedes offered a seat in Formula 2, Red Bull could go, you know what, he's good enough.

23:06It doesn't matter if when we sign him, he's 16 years of age and he's had one season in a single-seated car in Formula 3, let's just stick him in Formula 1. And so he was the chosen one to reach the front from the youngest age anyone has ever been allowed in Formula One to the point where they changed the license rules to try and stop anyone coming through that young at all. They changed the dimensions of the cars to try and make them more difficult to drive. That is how unusual a talent like Verstappen being allowed in so young was. So the fact he eventually made his way to the front to be a championship contender, not a surprise at all, because Red Bull went all in.

23:48The people in charge of the team at the time, Helmut Marko and Christian Horner, staked their reputations on it. If he'd been dangerous and crashed in to people time and time again, it would have been an enormous embarrassment. So they put a lot of faith in and he was downright sensational, basically, from the word go. So you have this generational component and then you turn over to the rival, right? Verstappen's rival in that 2021 F1 season, the British driver Lewis Hamilton. Many people consider Hamilton the goat, I suppose. He and Verstappen, as you were describing, just fought wheel to wheel, collided on more than one occasion.

24:24I think Verstappen's car actually ended up on top of Hamilton's car in one of those wipeouts. so as those two went tire to tire in 2021 was the fight friendly how would you describe it no i would describe it as the most intense title battle i've ever seen i didn't really think it could get ratcheted up to the level that it was really uh yeah it went way beyond any expectation and you know these are some of the fastest ever cars in the history of the sport and they were they were brawling isn't this beneath f1 to be brawling like this was there some feeling that, oh, this isn't civil or we're just people all in on this?