Spotlight On: The Australian Grand Prix

The Australian Grand Prix is my home race. Well, I’m a Sydney-sider so it’s home as in “in my country/hemisphere” rather than my actual city, but you get what I mean.

2024 was my third year attending the race in person, after becoming a fan at the beginning of 2022.

I’m a mid-March baby and grew up on the Victorian border, so I have a lot of memories from my childhood and early teen years of being in Melbourne for my birthday at the same time as the Grand Prix and not really getting why it was a big deal. We used to stay in an area with a strong Italian influence, and I distinctly remember what must have been either 2004 or 2007 (or it could have been both!) when Ferrari won and the city went wild. But until the magic of DTS caught me just before the 2022 season started, I had no desire to actually go to Albert Park and check it out for myself.

My friends and I buy GA (“ground pass”) tickets for the event, which is both the cheapest ticket, and easiest to secure. We all dream of getting a hospitality ticket, but with those starting at over a thousand dollars a day (and some into the five digits!), we may need to win the lottery. Or just be invited by a team or sponsor, if anyone’s keen?

But still, with enough sunscreen and a picnic blanket, a ground pass isn’t a terrible way to spend a weekend.

Other than enjoying the race (and enjoy we did!), my main quest for the weekend was to see what fan engagement was happening on the ground. Now, as I’ve mentioned before, this project is not looking for sponsor activations and things that contribute to the fan experience, but rather the direct ways teams and drivers are making an effort to connect with their fans.

So. What did I discover?

Table of Contents

• Pre-Race Comms

  • Williams

  • McLaren

  • Visa CashApp RB

• On the ground

  • Williams Fan Zone

  • Melbourne Walk

  • Fan Forum Stage

  • Misc

• Conclusion

Pre-Race Comms

Not every team asks you for your country of residence when you sign up for their newsletters, but I thought I might receive more localised content than I did from the ones who do (Aston Martin; Haas; McLaren; Red Bull; Williams).

It was only Williams who sent me anything specifically Australia-related prior to the Thursday of the race (aka the first actual day of the event), although McLaren did send a sales newsletter about their Oscar Australian merch collection.

Williams

I’m a big fan of the “you’re invited” messaging Williams used here, and I’m also a fan of the “See you soon?” Follow up that came a day later. The targeted messaging and clear CTA encourage fans on the ground to get involved. Although they really should have changed the messaging in the second email, as the meet and greets with Alex and Logan had already been and gone by the time it was sent.

The Williams app also had an “Australia” section that allowed you to RSVP to the fan zone, featuring the info you needed about the event, as well as the tools you would need once there to engage with the activations.

McLaren

McLaren was the first of the two teams with Aussie drivers having a home race, however outside of social media, little messaging played up that fact. Prior to their regular “race weekend” email, the only communication sent was advertising an “Australia” merch collection.

As much as I dislike purely-sales newsletters, this collection was actually very nice and I did buy one of the shirts on the ground. You won’t see me paying the crazy shipping prices - sorry McLaren sales trackers!

Visa CashApp RB

Visa CashApp RB were the second team with an Aussie driver.

While they don’t ask you for your country of residence, I still thought it was a big missed opportunity for them to not send out any messaging about it being Danny’s home race prior to the start of the event. They sent their regular pre-race newsletter on Friday, and while it had a “home race” image when you opened it, it felt very unremarkable when you consider what they could have done.

On the ground

Williams Fan Zone

Everyone probably knows by now that I’m a big fan of Williams’ fan engagement, so I was very excited when they announced they were bringing their Fan Zone to Melbourne.

Because I have to do things like “work a day job”, I wasn’t able to arrive in Melbourne until Thursday night, meaning I missed the appearances of Alex (Tuesday afternoon) and Logan (Wednesday lunchtime). But they were handing out tokens for a M&G with Team Principal James Vowles on Friday morning, so I adjusted my plans and went down to check it out first thing. I arrived about an hour before they began to hand out tokens (and an hour before the zone officially opened), and there were at least ten people in line ahead of me, showing that people are very keen for this kind of engagement.

There were a number of activities at the activation, including a Batak reaction wall that I was absolutely terrible at, and a set up with their e-sports rigs (which were very popular so I didn’t wait around to try them).

They had very cleverly gamified sponsor engagement in the space, where if you collected all of the digital badges on offer by scanning QR codes you could get a small prize. Of course, collecting the badges involved signing up to the relevant sponsor’s mailing list, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Komatsu diggers send me in the future, ha!

Williams fan club membership comes with an additional option to sign up for a “grid pass” through their Web3 sponsor Kraken. I’m really not a fan of Web3, and am yet to see a fan engagement functionality with a Web3 sponsor using Web3 that does anything groundbreaking, but this is a clever partnership nonetheless. While you have to sign up for a Kraken crypto account to join, the actual grid pass is fully functional within the existing Williams app, and gives you perks like 15% off merchandise (which I definitely made the most of when grabbing a shirt for the weekend!), and also gave you free coffee at the Fan Zone, which is the ultimate key to my heart.

After securing my wrist band, buying some merch, and collecting all of my badges, I finished the first part of my Fan Zone visit, and was set to return that night for the event with James. Now. Williams did not have a good day on Friday (…understatement), so I was almost expecting the event to be cancelled. But James arrived on stage as scheduled and gave a really open explanation of how the team had come to the difficult decision of giving Alex Logan’s car to drive after crashing his own. He then stuck around to meet somewhere in the realm of 30-50 fans (…I am very bad at estimating sizes!).

James’ team were clearly trying to get him to hurry up (as someone who has just finished up a long career stint as a publicist in meet-and-greet heavy situations, I know their pain!), but he took his time to have a brief conversation with every fan, sign something, and take a photo.

If you’re wondering, I used my ten seconds to thank him for his super open and clear communication with fans, and sharing that it’s one of the things that made me start supporting Williams.

Melbourne Walk

Moving from Fed Square to Albert Park…

Melbourne Walk is a zone at the event where fans can queue along barriers where the drivers enter the grounds to walk into the Paddock. The drivers (or at least most of them) briefly stop for selfies and to sign the hats and programs fans shove in front of them.

As a rule, I don’t take part in Melbourne Walk. To get a spot on the barrier (aka the only place worth being for any shot at an interaction), you have to arrive at the event before the gates open, and then basically run over to the zone. The drivers don’t arrive at a standard time, so you then have to wait there for hours in the hopes that you will be randomly chosen by a driver to have your selfie taken or object signed, usually while they’re being interviewed or otherwise engaged. Which is all to say: it’s a lot of effort for no guarantee of a reward, and I’m pretty lazy.

Apparently, in years gone by (aka before the DTS craze), you could belong to a loyalty program that came with a special zone along the barriers, and I really think they need to bring it back. In fact, I think the whole system needs an overhaul as it’s a mess, but as long as the social teams can keep getting their videos of fans sprinting through the gates for a spot, and shots of crazy crowds yelling for drivers, I doubt we’ll see any real change implemented any time soon.

I wrote a bit of a thread on Twitter about some of the changes I think they should make, and I’ll probably expand upon it in a future edition of the newsletter.

Fan Forum Stage

The fan forum stage is held at every (?) Grand Prix. In teams (although oddly, Williams and RB seem to always be paired together), the drivers go on stage for ten minutes to briefly speak to the crowd and answer a couple of questions. For the vast majority of attendees, this is the closest they’ll get to the drivers, and other than the drivers’ parade, may be the only time they see them outside of their cars.

The fan forum is split over two days, with half of the teams appearing on Friday morning, and the other half on Saturday morning. Because of my visit to the Williams Fan Zone on Friday morning, I missed the first half of the fan forum appearances (although I did catch Team Principals Zak Brown [McLaren] and Toto Wolff [Mercedes] on stage Friday lunchtime), but by the time we made it to the event and through the crazy crowds on Saturday, we were in time to catch the final three teams (Haas, Mercedes and Alpine) on stage.

This year, they moved the stage from an area near Melbourne Walk to their main stage in the middle of a bigger area. I don’t know if that’s the main reason for the huge increase in crowd size versus what I’d experienced in 2022 and 2023, but oh my god, the crowds were ENORMOUS. Most of the drivers (and Toto!) called it the biggest crowd they’d ever seen at a fan forum, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that were true. We ended up so far back we could only really see the stage when standing on our tip-toes, especially when the drivers sat on the couch. Lewis, god bless him, acknowledged that it wouldn’t be fair to the people at the back of the crowd if he sat, and stood for the whole time he was on stage to try and let as many people as possible actually see him.

Just like Melbourne Walk, the fan forum stage is always a bit of a mess. I have no idea what it’s like in other countries, but I’ve never seen it done well here. This year, they tried to be “quirky“ and rather than doing a straight interview with the drivers, had various activities. With the exception of Mercedes, who I’m assuming did a straight interview because of something in Lewis’ contract (or they just lucked out!).

Rather than actually getting to hear Kevin Magnussen from Haas speak (also, Nico Hulkenberg just didn’t show up?), they brought out AFL player (and Grand Prix ambassador) Josh Daicos who taught him how to bounce a footy. Which, sure, a novelty, but when you come to hear the drivers speak for five minutes, it’d be nice to actually hear from them. As I mentioned, Mercedes had an actual interview which was fun, but then Alpine did a quiz that Pierre Gasley seemed to completely disassociate through.

Thankfully, they got rid of the audience Q&A that has been a part of the stage in previous years. Some people say it’s great for the audience to have a say, but I have sat through way too many Q&As in my time (across a number of industries) to know that the questions are always terrible, badly moderated, and more awkward than anything else. The only way they work is with some kind of pre-moderated online system, but then you often lose the personalisation of the fan actually getting to ask the question…so honestly in these huge crowd scenarios it’s best to just leave them out. (Another solution would be to have a list of pre-selected questions, and to run a lottery for fans to win the chance to ask them. I’m just full of answers, guys, come hire me!)

I’m not sure what happened in the appearances I missed, but it also felt like a missed opportunity for the teams I saw to not throw merch into the crowd. Kevin signed the footies he was kicking for the audience, but I was surprised the other teams didn’t have some hats on hand to give to fans. It just feels so low cost, high reward that it should be a staple! Maybe there’s a rule I don’t know about, but again, I’d love to know why.

Misc

We didn’t spend a significant amount of time in the “Fan Zone” (read: food truck and sponsor activation) sections of the event as there’s not actually that much to do there, and we wanted to stake out a spot on our picnic blanket to actually watch the track (…mostly via a big screen). So, I’m sure there are some miscellaneous examples of fan engagement that was going on that I’ve missed (let me know if you heard of/saw any!). But the following crossed my Twitter feed:

1. Aston Martin staff were out and about meeting fans dressed in their merch for video vox pops. What was fun, though, was that they had custom packets of Aston Martin Tim Tams to offer the fans they spoke to.

It always surprises me that you don’t see/hear about more teams using these events as prime ways to engage with their fans on the ground. Like, grab some signed driver cards and go and collect some real data! Fan engagement should be all about “surprise and delight”! Go find your fans, have a chat, and give them a souvenir - they’ll love you for it!

2. On Saturday night, Red Bull tweeted that they would be giving away paddock passes to the winner of a “best mullet” competition on Sunday morning. While a bit (okay, a lot) limited in scope of participation, it’s still a fun gimmick, personalised to the location.

A video posted to Instagram showed Liam Lawson hosting the comp, which is an additional layer of fun for fans.

Conclusion

So, there was enough happening across the weekend that I managed to write over 2,500 words, however, if we took Williams out of the equation, there would actually have been very little going on. There are ten teams on the grid, and while I don’t expect all of them to host a week-long, pop-up fan activation in the heart of the city, I do expect…something.

You can see from the huge crowds that there’s a real hunger for opportunities to see the drivers in the flesh, and we need to overhaul some of these systems to help meet that demand. It may seem chaotic right now, but there are so many ways celebrity-centric engagement can work if time and attention is given to it. After all, if Taylor Swift can do it, nobody else should have an excuse.

I overheard a worker in the Williams fan zone telling someone that they were told by the drivers’ teams that “they don’t get paid to meet fans”, and I would hate for that to remain the framework the grid works under. The drivers are constantly being trotted out to meet big-wig sponsors, but would sponsors want to stick around if the fans disappeared? Without fan support, a team is nothing, and I think it’s helpful for organisations to remember that as much as a big sponsor brings in big dollars and needs to be courted, a lot of dollars from a lot of fans can equal the same amount. But we can’t take fans and their support for granted, and a lot of teams currently risk not realising that until it’s too late.