Lily Baker traveled with her family from Illinois to Texas for the first time last fall, not to visit the beach, sample some Tex-Mex or remember the Alamo. She headed to Austin for three days for the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix. 

Baker, a DePaul senior, started watching Formula 1 as a freshman.

“When I started watching F1, I felt like I never heard anyone talk about it, and now everyone talks about it,” Baker said. “So it’s been very interesting to watch that happen.” 

In fact, since Liberty Media’s acquisition of the Formula One Group in 2017, female viewership for F1 has motored from 8% to over 40%, according to a survey by Nielsen Sports, thanks in no small part to the Netflix show “Drive to Survive.”

Baker said she watched the show and has become “completely obsessed.”

“I think it’s a very versatile thing to watch,” she said. “It’s easy because there’s only a few races, but it’s also just very dramatic, and I’ve gotten all my friends to watch it now. I’m a huge fan.”

She’s not the only one.

Gabriella Burkhead, a DePaul junior, also attributes the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive” to helping spark her super fandom. “I started watching that, and then I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s not a joke anymore. I actually like F1,’” she said.

Burkhead said her interest “snowballed” as she started to follow drivers on Instagram and watch livestreams of races on platforms like F1 TV. Baker does the same — one driver in particular stands out for her.

“I think for Lando (Norris) specifically, it was his social media presence. I think he’s a very chronically online person, and so it was easy to make a connection and understand who he was,” Baker said. “When I first started watching F1, he used to stream on Twitch.” 

Jocelyn Torres-Barbosa, a DePaul senior, first started watching F1 in 2022. Although she had followed different sports before, she had never engaged with any kind of motorsports.

“I was on TikTok, and I kept seeing edits of funny moments on the show ‘Drive to Survive.’ And I was curious,” Torres-Barbosa said.

As she watched the show and began to understand the basics of Formula 1, Torres-Barbosa realized she could keep up with the sport. She started watching races as they happened, researching more along the way with YouTube videos and podcasts, she said. Now she has “indoctrinated” her friends and family into watching with her.

When DePaul senior Lily Fisher first started watching Formula 1, she felt there were hardly any women involved at the time.

When she attended the Canadian Grand Prix in 2022, however, she felt that things had changed.

“When I went to the race, it very much had become crazy in the United States,” Fisher said. “I didn’t feel like I experienced anything … that looked down on women, and I felt like there were actually a lot more women there than I was expecting to see.”

Aaliyah Velasquez, a sophomore at DePaul and long-time F1 fan, agrees that representation among the fan base is starting to make a difference for the sport.

“It was very exclusive, and now it’s becoming a little more inclusive,” Velasquez said. “At first, you would see a post (a woman) would make, and you would see male fans being like, ‘Oh, you’re just watching this because the drivers are good looking.’”

But she said that’s not the case. “I feel like now there’s a ton of female content creators … that are getting more recognition, for sure.”

Velasquez said that former professional driver Susie Wolf’s creation of the F1 Academy, a women-only Formula 1 league, also brings more women into the world of motorsports. 

The goal of the F1 Academy is to highlight talented female drivers and encourage more women to participate in the racing industry. Velasquez said there are plans for another Netflix docuseries, similar to “Drive to Survive,” featuring the female-driven league. 

“That’s definitely going to bring in more media coverage, and more female drivers to kind of step up and be like, ‘Okay, I can do this too,’” Velasquez said.

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