Drive To Survive’s latest season debuted just over a month ago and, according to Motor Sport Broadcasting, a whopping 4.14 million people worldwide watched the show’s fourth season during its opening weekend.
This is unsurprising though considering how popular the first three seasons of Drive To Survive were; so popular that the docuseries – which, in case you’ve been living under a rock and aren’t familiar with Drive To Survive, provides viewers with a behind-the-scenes look at the drivers and teams competing in the Formula 1 (F1) world championship – is responsible for making F1, the sport, more popular.
According to The New York Times, after Drive To Survive was initially released on Netflix in 2019, ticket sales to the first US Grand Prix event after the show launched rose by fifteen per cent. Plus, ESPN revealed that the number of average viewers per F1 race had risen from 547,000 in 2018 to roughly 928,000 in 2021.
While F1 was already the most popular motorsport prior to Drive To Survive, it’s become much more popular as a sport in general thanks to Drive To Survive and it seems that other sports that are less ‘mainstream’ than sports like football and tennis are trying to copy this success.
For example, earlier this week Apple TV+ released a trailer – which you can watch below – for its upcoming docuseries, Make or Break, which will take viewers behind the scenes of the World Surf League Championship Tour.
Similar to how Drive To Survive features interviews with some of F1’s best racers such as Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, Make or Break will feature interviews with surfing legends Kelly Slater, Stephanie Gilmore, Gabriel Medina, Tyler Wright and more.
It’s pretty obvious that Make or Break is trying to become the Drive To Survive for surfing, and is hoping it’ll be responsible for making surfing, the sport, more popular; especially considering it’s being produced by Box To Box Films – the same company behind Drive To Survive.
Box To Box Films is also set to produce another upcoming (but unnamed as of yet) docuseries that’ll focus on golf and its four major championships, the Masters Tournament, PGA Championship, US Open Championship and The Open. Again, it seems the series is wanting to be like Drive To Survive but with golf.
And hey, Drive To Survive worked and brought the awesome sport that is F1 to the forefront. And as huge surfing and golf fans here at DMARGE, we’re hoping that these copycat docuseries work too.
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