Stay tuned for rants about F1, Corvettes, and content ‡οΈ
Reads:
πΊ Miatas and the men who love them [Mel Magazine]
π GMβs plan to create 40,000 charging stations [The Drive]
π§ You can lease a Lightning, Bronco, Raptor, or Mach-E, but it wonβt be cheap [CarBuzz]
π£ Lucid delivers their first cars with a road rally β I like their style [Car and Driver]
π The 2023 Corvette Z06 looks, sounds, and should drive like the best Corvette ever. Compared to some of the strange angles and styling cues of the C8, it looks like they finished the design this time [Road & Track]
π Spotify has 2M people waiting on their Car Thing [Hypebeast]
π The new Mercedes-Benz SL is new, even though it looks like the old AMG GT! [Road & Track]
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This reveal video for the Z06 is so good I go on a rant about it below ^
The new Range Rover makes you wonder why other automakers even bother making luxury SUVs. Also, it will be available as a EV, PHEV, or with a big old BMW V8.
Enter the $130k Mini. Tiny car overkill? Into it.
Auction Finds of the Week:
Rant time:
Last weekend, approximately 400,000 spectators (up from 269,889 in 2016) watched Max Verstappen win the F1 United States GP. Many are pointing to the βNetflix Effectβ thanks to the excellent Drive to Survive soap opera, but thatβs just the tip of F1βs content iceberg.
Letβs call it the βContent Effectβ. And itβs not just F1 taking advantage.
Before Liberty Media bought F1, teams, drivers and fans were limited in what content they could create and share. Social media was limited, and everything within the paddock and behind the scenes stayed mostly out of sight. Not anymore.
Now F1 is a 10-part reality show with a 23 weekend live tour (24 if you include pre-season testing). All the teams and their drivers have huge social media presence, and, taking a page out of the NBAβs playbook, the official F1 account acts as an amplifier.
McLaren promoted videos of team driver Daniel Riccardioβs drive in Dale Earnhardtβs 1984 Chevrolet NASCAR around Circuit of the Americas. An auto manufacturer paying to promote their driver driving a Chevy? It happened.
Without the content ecosystem, the Netflix show would probably get great viewership (not that theyβd tell us) but it wouldnβt bring 400,000 people to Austin Texas.
The reveal of the Chevrolet C8 Z06 is another example of how brands are figuring this out. In addition to the usual live-on-stage theatrics walking around the car in an auditorium, Chevy produced a beautiful 26-minute film about the new track-ready, 8,600 RPM Z06. If you havenβt watched it, itβs worth the time.
So many performance cars are unveiled as a wall of numbers, sold out immediately, then offered to journalists to drive and make cinematic videos about how they are to drive. This approach by Chevy is all about feel, emotion, and anticipation from the start. There are engineers, special guests, and a damn world tour to comprehensively tell the Z06 story.
One of the most naive things brands do is assume that their audience will βget itβ, share it, and convert on their own. Or hope that someone else will tell their story for them, based on a fact sheet.
The brands that invest in content and focus on bringing an audience into their world wonβt need a Netflix show to break through (but it canβt hurt).
~end rant~