How Online Communities Are Shaping a New Culture Around Motorsports and Racing Events A group of Formula 1 Motorsports fans on Reddit in 2021 (an example of an Online Community) started a campaign to save the Belgian Grand Prix after Liberty Media announced it might be dropped from the calendar, and within two weeks the thread had over 400,000 upvotes and was being quoted in press releases from the Belgian tourism board and discussed in meetings at the FIA. The race stayed on the calendar. The fans who had never met each other, who lived in dozens of different countries, who had gathered around a shared interest in a specific corner of motorsport, had done something that sponsors and lobbying firms had failed to do. That was the moment many people in the sport began to pay attention to what online communities were actually capable of. What F1 75 Did to a Whole Generation of Motorsports Fans Drive to Survive launched on Netflix in March 2019. By the end of that year, Formula 1 had its fastest-growing fan base in the United States since the 1980s, with ticket sales for the inaugural Miami Grand Prix in 2022 selling out in hours. The average age of a new F1 fan dropped by almost a decade compared to surveys from five years earlier. None of that happened because of traditional broadcasting deals or print advertising. It happened because the show created communities of people who wanted to talk about what they had just watched. Those communities lived on Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and Discord, drawing in other people. By 2025, the r/formula1 subreddit had over 10 million members, making it one of the largest sports communities on the platform, and the conversations there were shaping what broadcasters covered, what sponsors activated around, and