Out of context cheerleaders and why F1 is suddenly interesting
Ellie Norman has done quite a few media interviews since becoming F1's first marketing director, so I wondered what question she's been asked most frequently. She said it was about her decision to get rid of the grid girls. Then, about a half hour later, me and Sean walked out of the F1 office straight in to a random group of NFL cheerleaders who were - for reasons that weren’t quite clear - walking down Haymarket in glittery leotards and white leather boots. They were either just about cheer on some men or on their way back from having cheered on some men. It was hard to tell, and we didn't ask them.
I’m making no great point here, other than it struck me that the idea of women as adornments to men’s sport - their relationship with the sporting occasion - is almost entirely about context. It has to be, because seeing them out in the wild, stripped of that context, is just really fucking weird.
We wanted to get Ellie on the pod because for the first time in decades I’m finding F1 interesting. It’s not the racing per se - the bloke in the fastest car still seems to win more often than not - but more to do with how they are trying to evolve.
This is taking place against a backdrop of anti-F1 lobbying on Twitter, most notably from Michael Payne, who worked for Bernie Ecclestone as a consultant in the last years of his reign and seems to have it in for Liberty Media, and Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid’s Formula Money handle which does a good job of unpicking the finances of FOM and the teams.
Yet it seems to me Ellie Norman’s inbox is a good indicator of the opportunities and dilemmas facing all sports rights holders today. And as ever this comes down to how audience behaviour is changing versus the sport’s commercial model which made everyone rich in the first place. The last time I saw Nielsen’s numbers they suggested that nearly 80% of F1 viewers come from four markets - UK, Germany, Italy and Brazil. And like me, many of them are white, male and getting on a bit, carrying all manner of assumptions and rose tinted nostalgia with them, which they project on to today’s cast of characters, complaining - as I do in the interview - that the drivers are boring and the jeopardy has been removed by tech and the health and safety brigade.
To be fair, we do get in to just how daft this position is: a bloke who never goes above 60 complaining that the drivers aren’t dying like they used to.