How streaming and social media have helped build the modern F1

Enzo Ferrari famously said, "If you ask any child to draw a car, they'll draw a red one." When she was a child, Sofia Valente Pierini was the prototypical example.

"Every Sunday that we would go over, my maternal grandfather, my Nonno, would have his little early 2000s tube TV perched on the kitchen counter," she recalled. The Formula One Grand Prix would be playing, and Valente Pierini's eyes would naturally be following the Ferraris.

In 2025, Lewis Hamilton, Valente Pierini's favourite driver, stepped into the iconic red uniform for the first time, and in June 2026, he won his first Grand Prix as a Ferrari driver.

"It hasn't been easy, emotionally, to be a Hamilton fan and a Ferrari fan," Valente Pierini admitted. She's made F1 content under the handle @formulasofia since 2022, much of it capturing the highs and lows of Ferrari fandom. "Seeing him at the top step of that podium was amazing, it was like a homecoming."

Valente Pierini is part of a new generation of content creators helping to redefine the F1 media ecosystem for a younger, more diverse audience — one whose association with the sport might have otherwise been a faded Ferrari flag hanging in their grandfather's living room.

Along with the smash-hit Netflix reality show Drive to Survive , user-generated content is helping to engage a new F1 audience, in much the same way that radio acted as a catalyst to draw in baseball and hockey fans.

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Every new form of broadcast technology has had peculiarities that perfectly suited them to certain sports. F1's online content is just the latest instance of media synergy powering a sport to cultural ubiquity, according to Stacy Lorenz, vice dean at the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus and a professor specializing in the sociology and history of sport.

For example, Lorenz noted how radio helped turn baseball into America's pastime and firmly entrenched hockey to the Canadian identity. Radio's play-by-play and colour commentary were particularly well-suited to baseball's sequential nature.

"The pauses where you can tell stories in between the pitches and everything? It really does suit that kind of narrative style and the storytelling," he said.

Similarly, Lorenz notes how fluid sports like basketball and football thrived on television, using multi-camera broadcasts to capture whole-field action for the living room.

In Lorenz's eyes, F1's relationship with short-form video and streaming is the next logical step in this lineage. Specifically, he calls out the importance of the "placeless consumer," that is, fans who aren't tied to a sport geographically the way a Leafs fan living in Toronto might be.

"I think F1 is probably the highest developed form of that experience that we have now," he said.