Hockey Romances Are Booming. Could Motorsports Be Next Up?
The popularity of hockey romances has been skyrocketing, from books to adaptations, series like Off Campus and Heated Rivalry have taken over the internet and now suddenly non-hockey fans are participating in hockey culture.
More importantly, the success of hockey romances reveal something larger about modern sports fandom: audiences increasingly enter sports through culture first, not competition. And motorsports series like Formula One (F1) may be the next sport to take advantage.
Hockey Romances Didn’t Just Sell Books…
The world of hockey romance has expanded far beyond just a book or a TV series. Fans have now created trends, edits, playlists, fanfiction, and tons of online discourse surrounding not only the series but also the sport of hockey. Thus creating new cultural entry points for fans to discover and begin following the sport.
In my opinion, this style worked well for hockey romances because it allowed fans to peel back the curtain to a sport where players are wearing helmets and playing behind glass. Like hockey, F1 also possesses an inherent layer of distance between athlete and audience. Drivers spend much of their careers hidden behind helmets and fences. That distance creates intrigue.
Therefore these series serve to eliminate the previous emotional distance and make inaccessible athletes accessible.
But access alone is not what fuels sports growth. Access becomes powerful when it creates culture around the sport.
F1 is Already on The Right Track
While hockey romance has helped turn hockey into a cultural phenomenon online, F1 has arguably already undergone a similar transformation over the last several years. The sport’s explosive growth, particularly in the United States, has been fueled by personality-driven media and the creation of an online culture surrounding the sport.
That cultural shift is perhaps most visible through Drive to Survive. While the series is often credited with “explaining” F1 to new audiences, its real success came from something much larger… it emotionally translated the sport. Viewers were not just learning about tire strategy they were becoming invested in rivalries, team politics, friendships, pressure, and vulnerability. The drivers became characters as much as athletes.
That distinction is important, as modern sports fandom thrives on emotional connection with many newer F1 fans entering the sport via TikTok edits, paddock fashion, driver friendships, and the larger aesthetic culture that now surrounds F1.
Importantly, that access does not simply create fandom, it creates culture. Once audiences feel emotionally connected to athletes, entire online ecosystems begin forming around them. The culture surrounding F1 then becomes its own form of marketing, pulling in audiences who may have never initially cared about racing at all.
What Does Narrative Adaptation Looks Like For F1?
Well, F1 lends itself to narrative storytelling. The sport is built around global travel, wealth, rivalry, danger, media scrutiny, and in an environment that feels intentionally exclusive as drivers exist as both celebrities and competitors.
Much like hockey romance transformed the mystery behind the helmet into emotional storytelling, F1 thrives on the appeal of exclusivity and access. That appeal has already begun translating into publishing and online fandom spaces. Books such as Throttled have found success by combining the aesthetics and emotional intensity of Formula 1 with the relationship-driven storytelling popularized on BookTok.
With competitors like HBO Max and Prime Video already capitalizing on sports romances and fandom driven storytelling, this kind of storytelling seems like a natural next step for AppleTV who already produced F1: The Movie in 2025 and have since acquired the exclusive US streaming rights to F1.
So whether it be F1 or a different motorsports series its already clear how emotional storytelling can transform a sport into a cultural movement. The question is, are they ready to capitalize on it?
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