At first glance, an F1 race could be a music festival. Friendship bracelets are exchanged like currency, outfits are coordinated, and signs are lovingly crafted by hand. The air hums with the kind of giddy, nervous energy usually reserved for pop idols. Outside the circuit gates, fans cheer as drivers pass, hoping for a wave, a glance, or, for the lucky ones lined up at the barricade, an autograph. Inside the fan zone, merch lines snake like they’re selling limited-edition tour tees, and the roar of engines is matched only by the screams when a driver steps onstage.
This is Formula 1, but the energy crackling through the grandstands feels more like the front row of a stadium concert.
Over the past few years, Formula 1 has undergone a transformation. Once viewed as a niche, male-dominated sport for hardcore motorsport purists, it now commands the kind of emotionally charged fan devotion more commonly associated with K-pop groups and boy bands. Women currently make up 41 percent of F1's 750 million global fans, with a significant surge among young women aged 18 to 24, many of whom discovered the sport not through legacy TV broadcasts or traditional media, but through the online spaces they already inhabit.
In many ways, F1 has evolved from a legacy motorsport into something that feels more like a multimedia pop franchise. F1 drivers are no longer just elite athletes behind the wheel; they’re fashion muses, meme material, and, in the eyes of a growing Gen Z fanbase, idols. It's no surprise the sport has drawn fans from other hyper-engaged fandoms.
"Before, in Formula 1, it was mostly like people just punching each other in the grandstands because McLaren went over Ferrari," jokes Ghia Hong, a longtime fan of both F1 and K-pop. "But when I went to the Singapore Grand Prix last year, there were OOTDs upon OOTDs, fits upon fits, and the fan experiences on track were similar to the stuff we do for K-pop."
Even in the sweltering heat — "I almost got heatstroke on the first day," she says, laughing — the parallels were hard to miss. From immersive photo zones and merch hauls to fans dressed in team colors, the vibe felt less like a legacy sport and more like a K-pop tour stop. "It was very close to my experience watching NCT 127 in Indonesia," Hong adds. “Fans go all out with official merch, and that’s exactly what you see now at a Grand Prix. It's head-to-toe Ferrari, or Red Bull, or Mercedes.”
Among the throng of celebrities and influencers in the paddock, K-pop idols are showing up, too. At last year's Miami Grand Prix, BLACKPINK's Lisa became the first K-pop idol to wave the checkered flag to signal the end of a race. This year, she returned alongside bandmate Rosé, who spent her weekend hanging out in the Mercedes garage — fitting, since she's featured on the soundtrack for the upcoming F1 feature film starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris.
From Grandstands to Stan Accounts
If there was a turning point in the way people perceived Formula 1, it was Drive to Survive. The glossy Netflix docuseries focused on the humans under the helmets. It spotlighted rivalries, heartbreak, and behind-the-scenes drama in a way that resonated far beyond traditional motorsport audiences. Viewers followed Daniel Ricciardo's risky departure from Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton’s dominance and vulnerability as a seven-time world champion, and the scrappy underdog narratives of teams like Haas. (Hamilton, in particular, had already been expanding the sport’s cultural footprint long before Netflix came along.) For a generation raised on reality TV, YouTube vlogs, and boy group dynamics, it was a perfect entry point: emotional, digestible, and easy to binge.
"We've always had intense levels of fandom around Formula 1," says Bradley Lord, chief communications officer of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team. "It’s a world that encourages immersion." But now, he adds, that intensity is coming from a broader audience. The show's timing, coinciding with the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, was a key factor: “I have a bit of a personal theory: people ran out of things to watch on Netflix, then stumbled across it and went, 'Wow, this sport’s really cool.'”
Tiffany Larson never expected to get into Formula 1. A K-pop fan from South Carolina, the only racing she’d ever really heard about growing up was NASCAR. But when her K-pop group chat started buzzing about F1, she couldn’t ignore it. "It got to that point where you see something too much, and it starts to annoy you — like, I don't get this, why is everyone obsessed?"
Then her roommate suggested she try Drive to Survive. "They told me, 'Watch three episodes. If you don’t like it, you can stop.' I was huffing and puffing…and then I finished the entire first season in one night." What hooked her wasn’t just the racing, but the drama, the personalities, the storytelling. "I had never even thought about F1 before. And coming from the South, NASCAR was all I had to compare it to. But culturally, it’s so different."
For her, part of the appeal is how simple it is to follow. "It’s just 20 guys driving," she says, "and the way you win is by crossing the line first. I've had football explained to me a dozen times and still don't get it. But with F1, it clicked almost immediately." As a K-pop fan, memorizing names, teams, and rivalries came naturally. "I've done harder things before," she laughs.
She’s not glued to every free practice session, but the sport has stuck. "When I woke up [this morning], the first thing I texted my roommate was 'Charles podium,'" she says, referencing Charles Leclerc's second-place finish in Monaco this past weekend.
For Tiggy Valen, founder and host of Paddock Project, Formula 1 isn’t just a hobby. "It’s my whole life now," she says. She also discovered the sport through Drive to Survive in the depths of the pandemic in 2020. "I couldn’t have told you the difference between NASCAR, F1, and IndyCar before I hit play." At the time, Valen was working in investment banking, with a background in engineering and an obsession with data. "Drive to Survive was this unexpected gateway into a sport that lives on the thinnest margins — engineering, logistics, 1,000-person teams building a single car." But what hooked her was the emotional side. "The show made it feel personal. I wanted to understand everything."
She also realized something else: "There just weren’t that many women talking about it.” So she and her friends, who were all watching and all equally obsessed, decided to change that. "We figured, why not just start learning and press record? Take people along the journey with us."
Around the same time of this surge of curiosity within the sport, Formula 1 relaxed its historically rigid licensing rules, giving teams and drivers more freedom to speak directly to fans through social media, meeting a new generation of fandom exactly where it lived: online. "We now have a much more vibrant, much bigger direct dialogue with the fanbase," Lord says. "That allows us to bring more aspects of the sport to life — not just the racing, but the cast of characters behind it."
Fans aren’t just watching the races; they’re narrativizing them. They track every podium finish, every team radio message, every glance exchanged in the paddock — compiling and remixing them into TikToks, fan edits, and threads that could rival any K-pop stan account. "F1 is hot people in high-pressure, high-intensity situations, who have complex interpersonal relationships with each other," LV Frazier tells Teen Vogue from their home in Los Angeles. They're sporting a self-made t-shirt that features two of their favorite idols: Felix Lee from Stray Kids and Ferrari driver Leclerc. "And it’s a team sport, like a K-pop group. They have to work together, but they also care about themselves as individuals. It’s very similar." (Funnily enough, Felix himself is also a fan of Leclerc.)
That sense of narrative immersion is familiar to anyone who’s ever followed a pop group like BTS or One Direction. And F1 teams are beginning to take notice. "We spend time watching fan-made edits and memes and sending them around the team like, 'Have you seen this? This is brilliant,'" Lord says. "F1 is an intense sport, and sometimes we take ourselves very seriously for something that’s ultimately about cars going around in circles. So that humor, that fan creativity, it helps us see the lighter side and also informs how we show up online."
It also shapes how teams engage with fans directly. Take Mercedes' recent campaign with team sponsor WhatsApp, tied to the release of The Seat, a short documentary about 18-year-old driver Kimi Antonelli that premiered on Netflix. As part of the promotion, fans could win an exclusive WhatsApp call with Antonelli. Many likened it to a K-pop fan call: a brief, yet deeply intimate fan experience.
"We are always looking outside of our sport, and even sport in general, to understand how we can engage with our fan base," says a Mercedes spokesperson. "We’ve understood that creating authentic opportunities for fans to engage with our team members, including our drivers, helps deepen that relationship with our fans and vice versa."
Of course, the end goal remains the same: winning championships, both for the constructors and the drivers. However, strategies like Mercedes' mark a shift. Formula 1 is no longer just a motorsport. It’s an experience, a fandom ecosystem, and increasingly, a place where emotional investment is cultivated with the same care as on-track performance.
The comparisons between F1 and K-pop aren't just metaphorical. Sometimes, they’re strikingly literal. Fancams? F1 has onboard footage taken from the driver's seat. Official fan colors? McLaren’s papaya orange and Ferrari red are as recognizable in the grandstands as Seventeen’s rose quartz and serenity is in an arena. Pre-race meet-and-greets often include games of giant Jenga or challenges, not unlike the variety show antics that introduce K-pop idols to new fans. And of course, there’s the online discourse: fans defending their favorite driver with the same intensity as someone arguing for their K-pop bias.
"I feel like F1 stan Twitter and K-pop stan Twitter are the same," says Francesca Verceles-Zara, a fan of both K-pop and Formula 1. "If you're going hard for a driver or a particular constructor, it's the same type of shit that you see when it's a BTS stan versus an EXO stan, or like a HYBE stan versus an SM stan."
There are only 20 F1 drivers on the grid, just six short of the 26 members in the sprawling NCT collective. Both are global groups of young men in designer fits, flying from city to city, delivering synchronized performance under immense pressure, and fans are tracking every move. "The fact that there are more NCT members than F1 drivers in the world is hysterical," Larson laughs.
"F1 fandom is literally the modern-day boy band fandom," Valen explains. "Unlike other sports where only two teams compete at a time, the entire F1 paddock is together every weekend. It’s a tiny ecosystem, and the constant interaction makes it feel like a fishbowl. That makes for entertaining content."
When F1 Drivers Become Idols
For many new fans, the emotional connection to F1 begins not with lap times or qualifying results, but through memes, Twitch streams, and perfectly chaotic YouTube videos. Drivers like Lando Norris, Leclerc, and Yuki Tsunoda have emerged as personalities as much as competitors, drawing in viewers through their off-track personas as gamers, jokesters, and Kardashian impersonators.
"I just wanted to learn their names," says Verceles-Zara, who became an F1 fan during the so-called "streaming era" of Norris and Leclerc’s Twitch days. "And then 10 hours later, you know everyone's backstory, their whole dating history, and you’re like, 'Why am I so invested?'" For her, it wasn’t the races that first pulled her in; it was the content. "It was the McLaren content — Carlos [Sainz Jr.] and Lando when they were paired together. Also, the Red Bull stuff with Max [Verstappen] and Daniel Ricciardo. They were chaotic as a pair. That was what really drew me in."
That kind of chemistry is precisely what fans latch onto. On any given grid, you’ll find archetypes that feel straight out of a boy band: the golden boy, the rebel, the soft-spoken one, the goofball, the one you want to hand a juice box and tell them they’re doing great. It's no surprise, then, that teams are leaning into this.
Mercedes, for example, has embraced what fans have dubbed the "family dynamic": George Russell as the unintentionally funny older brother, rookie Antonelli as the eager little brother, F1 Academy driver Doriane Pin as the ultra-focused middle sister, and reserve driver Valtteri Bottas, back on a development deal, as the unpredictable but beloved "crazy uncle." At the helm is Toto Wolff — team principal, father figure, and, increasingly, an icon in his own right thanks to the occasional thirst edit posted to Mercedes' socials. ("I'll tell him you said that," Lord jokes. "He'll be thrilled.")
While the family dynamic wasn’t an official branding strategy, it’s become a fan-fueled narrative the team has embraced. "It grew out of what fans were saying," Lord explains. “There’s no space to be anything but authentic. A modern fan can smell inauthenticity a mile away.” Another Mercedes spokesperson agrees: "Our frames of reference have completely shifted. Five years ago, no one would’ve suggested we make Mean Girls TikToks or reference Pride & Prejudice. But that’s what resonates now."
That philosophy shapes everything from TikToks and behind-the-scenes footage to merch design and even partnerships. "We try to tell authentic stories and present the drivers as they are, not as a brand construct," Lord says. This fan-first approach extends to platform-specific storytelling, like giving Russell his own "mini mic" interview series or letting Bottas lean fully into his unfiltered persona on TikTok.
And the boy band metaphor is one F1 insiders increasingly recognize. Lord points to Alex Albon, Norris, and Russell, who came up together on parallel tracks, from their karting days as children to the F1 grid. "You see different sides of personalities when you follow them like that," he says. That internal familiarity has allowed Mercedes to lean into moments that feel less scripted, more human. "Kimi [Antonelli] and Ollie [Bearman] are the latest to join the band," Lord jokes.
Like any good idol group, the emotional engagement isn’t just about charisma; it’s about vulnerability and access. Whether it’s a post-race interview, a silly TikTok trend, or a low-res selfie from a simulator, fans see every gesture as part of a larger character arc. At the end of the day, Norris and Oscar Piastri may drive for the same team, but only one can win the World Drivers' Championship. That tension? That's compelling. On Tumblr, Formula 1 began appearing on its Week in Review lists in 2020. By the end of 2024, Lestappen — the ship name for Leclerc and Max Verstappen — ranked No. 30 on the platform’s list of top 100 ships of the year. Over on Archive of Our Own, the internet’s largest fanfiction database, Formula 1 now boasts nearly 50,000 fanworks, a testament to just how deeply fans are invested.
There’s also an element of skill. In K-pop, few trainees ever make it to debut, and even fewer go on to fill arenas. Formula 1 is even more extreme. That sense that you’re watching someone live out an almost impossible dream is part of the appeal. It's as much about precision and performance as it is about charisma, and for many fans, that’s where the real devotion begins.
For Clara, a fan from Brazil who runs a Leclerc fan account, being online is about legitimacy, pushing back on the perception that women only watch F1 “for the drivers' looks.”
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"People love to act like we’re not real fans," she says. "But there’s so much to this sport — the strategies, the pit stops, the rules. And there are so many different ways to be a fan. That’s what makes it exciting." As for the online community? "It's very chaotic," she adds. "It's a competitive sport, so there's always going to be fights between fans of each driver, especially during race weekends. Everyone’s trying to prove their favorite is the best." But she insists it’s also a fun way to share the experience in real time and find people to talk about races with.
"There’s a One Direction-to-F1 pipeline; a Taylor Swift-to-F1 pipeline; a K-pop-to-F1 pipeline," Zoe, co-host of Fan Behavior: An F1 Podcast, says. "And it makes sense. F1 is for people who are obsessive fans. The kind who want to know everything.” She describes her own entry point: binge-watching Drive to Survive out of curiosity, then spiraling into TikTok edits, Reddit theories, and YouTube wormholes. “Once I’m into something, I’m in for life. F1 was no different.”
In this version of fandom, every press conference side-eye becomes a reaction meme or headcanon storyline. Clara points to what Aston Martin has been doing with two-time champion Fernando Alonso on socials as a perfect example: "They’ve given fans a new perspective of him — I see that many people like him now for the memes." Every race weekend is a comeback. Every driver pairing or separation is analyzed like a band lineup change.
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"Fans love when idols have friendships that predate their debut because it feels like a success story they built together," explains Hong. "F1 has that same appeal. So many drivers have prior relationships that fans can trace: Zhou [Guanyu] and Charles were in the Ferrari Driver Academy together; Carlos and Lando stayed close even after their time as McLaren teammates; Max and Charles were rivals back in their karting days. Even Lewis and Nico [Rosberg] were childhood friends before their infamous fallout during the championship — we used to call them 'Bro-cedes.' These real, long-standing relationships give fans a built-in storyline. It’s canon, which makes it easier to invest in."
The Girls Are Gearing Up
The rise of emotionally engaged fandom has coincided with a surge in young female fans, and with it, a growing desire to see themselves reflected not just in the crowd but on the grid. Formula 1 remains a male-dominated sport, with no women in its current lineup. But that absence has only amplified interest in the women racing just outside the spotlight, and in the people working to change the system from within.
Enter F1 Academy, a relatively new initiative led by former driver Susie Wolff, now its managing director. Launched to give young women a clear path to the top tiers of motorsport, the series is doing more than preparing future champions — it’s telling their stories. F1: The Academy, a new Netflix docuseries premiering May 28, aims to offer the same narratively rich, personality-driven storytelling that made Drive to Survive such a fan gateway.
"The whole fact that F1 Academy exists is something I’m not sure I thought I’d see in my lifetime," Wolff tells Teen Vogue. "It’s about challenging the preconception that this is a man’s world… As a sport, we need to be thankful that we have such a new, young audience and so many female fans because that didn't exist when I was racing."
For drivers like Bianca Bustamante, that visibility is both an opportunity and a weight. "I’ve been financially independent since I was 16," she says. "Every flight, every hotel, every meal — it’s all from my marketing deals. So I have to work hard to survive. I work hard for my career." The pressure to perform extends beyond the track. "Having a big following [on social media] is incredible, but it’s also scary, especially when you’re still a teenager just trying to become a better driver."
Abbi Pulling, 2024's F1 Academy champion, has felt it, too. "There’s definitely pressure to put yourself out there," she says. "I started a vlog, kind of like Netflix, but I control the edit." She’s careful, though, to maintain boundaries: "You don’t want it to seep through and affect your performance. That’s why I have people around me to help manage the balance, so I can focus on the driving."
Fandom, too, looks different here. Pulling has received fan-made books filled with letters, and she keeps a drawer full of friendship bracelets. Bustamante’s fans have crocheted dolls in her likeness. "Some of it’s jarring,” she laughs. "You just want to scroll, and suddenly you see a meme of yourself. But I appreciate how much time people put into it. It shows that we mean something to them, whether it’s for our personalities or what we’re doing on track."
For Wolff, that's the point. "We’re not trying to create a mini F1. We’re something different, and we don’t shy away from that," she says. "We brought on partners like Charlotte Tilbury to reach fans who’ve never followed racing. We want to show the next generation and their parents that there’s a tribe of women making their mark in what’s always been perceived as a male space."
F1 Academy may be small now, but it represents something powerful. In a sport that has long lacked visible representation for women, this initiative offers something more than promise. It’s giving young fans, especially girls, a grid of their own to believe in. "I always push our social team to make sure we’re creating content that’s inspiring for the next generation," Wolff says, "that's not just about racing cars, but about the humans behind the story.”
Because, for all the stats, strategies, and split-second decisions, the emotional engine of F1 today runs on connection.
"At the end of the day, it’s the drivers that keep me invested," says Frazier. "If I don’t see Charles Leclerc win a World Drivers' Championship at one point in his career, I’m gonna lose my frickin’ mind. With Stray Kids, I parasocially care about them so much that their success is my success. And I feel the same way about Charles. About Alex Albon. I want to see them succeed. And until that happens, I’m gonna be a ride-or-die."
