When Charles LeClerc wrecked during the formation lap at the Brazilian Grand Prix in November 2023, it was peak Formula One drama.
The Ferrari driver suffered a mechanical failure before the lights went out for the start of the race. Formula One fans were buzzing. Across the world, we can assume, group chats lit up. Wagers were ruined. In pockets of the sport’s growing worldwide fan base, a giddy group totaling 15,000 checked over to Twitch for a live reaction.
There, on the live-streaming platform whose audience has ballooned over the past half-decade, Matt Gallagher was in shambles. The loyal audience of Gallagher’s podcast P1 rushed to see how the host would respond to his favorite team crashing out.
“The spike in viewers is something that I’ve never seen before in my entire life,” Gallagher said. “It genuinely spiked by about 15,000 people just purely because there was this eagerness to see what my reaction was at the time.”
This wasn’t a eureka moment so much as confirmation. Since splitting from their previous outlet WTF1 and going it alone in early 2023, Gallagher and co-host Tom Bellingham have cashed the bet they made on themselves and then some. With a boost from the release of Drive To Survive on Netflix and major headlines like Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari, P1 is a huge success.
The show boasts more than a half-million subscribers on YouTube and nearly 700,000 followers across social media. It has become the destination for the most rabid, diehard F1 fans. Gallagher and Bellingham cover the sport relentlessly, reacting to qualifying and predicting each race. They satiate the modern sports fan’s insatiable appetite for content and give their audience no choice but to become F1 geeks themselves.
Based on the platforms they’ve succeeded on, one can assume their audience is younger as well. Most early Stirling Moss fans aren’t logging onto Twitch.
P1 has 165,000 followers on the streaming platform, where young people increasingly flock to experience live content. The audience interacts with the hosts and one another in the Twitch chat, all while watching their favorite creators play video games, travel the world — or watch F1 races. It can be a thrilling way to watch, but it’s also communal.
“It’s also the ingrained feeling like you’re part of something,” Bellingham said. “You’ve got the Twitch chat flying, people are sort of commenting and having their own conversations in there. It just feels like they are part of something, which I think people really value.”
Sports creators are increasingly taking notice of the potential of live-streaming. Soccer watchalongs are common online in the United Kingdom. In America, from the Barstool Sports empire to Shannon Sharpe’s Nightcap, these streams are proven to build fan communities.
Someday soon, big leagues like F1 might take note as well. While ESPN and Sky Sports own rights to F1 broadcasts in English-speaking countries for now, Gallagher and Bellingham know they have an audience so engaged and loyal that even the big networks would drool over it.
“The audience that we’ve built and that we’re so lucky to have is something the networks could only dream of having to the lengths that they (will) go for that creator,” Gallagher said.
They don’t expect to be able to afford a jump from second-screen watchalongs to an actual alt-cast or online telecast in the near future. But they believe it would work.
In the meantime, they will settle for pioneering in other ways. Their predictions, preview coverage and driver ratings were new in F1 circles and have been a hit. And they go to great lengths to bridge the gap between all types of F1 fans.
There are the Drive to Survive disciples who are still newish to the sport; the lifers who know every term and trend; and the casuals who are just along for the ride. The P1 boys try to be approachable but informative to keep everyone coming back.
“We don’t fly out loads of technical information where we’re kind of alienating loads of new fans,” Bellingham said. “But equally, we’re not talking to people like they’re stupid. We’re kind of that middle ground there of making it like, ‘Formula One’s really fun and we’re talking about it and this is what we like.’”
As a result of Netflix striking gold with Drive to Survive starting in 2019, the U.S. is now P1’s biggest audience base. It’s a far cry from when they grew up in the UK hearing that Americans only liked NASCAR. They ran a successful North America tour last fall across six cities.
Gallagher and Bellingham channel something in their content that is supremely basic and yet inimitable. They are motorsports geeks whose affinity for their favorite racing teams and passion for the sport seeps out of them at every turn. It’s impossible to watch them and not get hyped about the next race or the big story.
“When they’re on the starting grid on Sunday for the grand prix and the anticipation of waiting for a standing start, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Bellingham said. “I’m literally back to being 10 basically.”
So is their audience.
We can chart out the future of sports streaming, the business of building an online community, or whether the Formula One fanbase is on the way up or down. But the basis of sports content — and all content — remains simple: Delight me. That’s true for a sport like Formula One, even when fans are spread across the globe.
Thousands of fans might log on to see a one-off reaction to an historic crash in Brazil, but they keep coming back because they connect with the hosts and their personality.
Gallagher and Bellingham went independent with a belief that they could channel their inner child onto the right platforms and into the right cracks of the internet to connect with an audience that loved motorsport as much as they do. They were correct.
It’s a clinic in how to build a sports community online, but it’s also further evidence that not much has really changed.