Why F1 drivers aren't as popular as you think

Lewis Hamilton is, by whatever metric you choose, the biggest superstar on the 2017 Formula 1 grid.

Using social media numbers - not the only way to measure this, but still a meaningful guide - he is well ahead of second-best Fernando Alonso in terms of followers on Twitter (4.11m v 2.45m), Instagram (3.7m v 1.2m) and Facebook (3.9m v 1.8m).

But when Hamilton announced on Monday that more than 8000 people had entered the competition to design his 2017 helmet livery, it felt a little underwhelming. What a fantastic competition... could no more than that apply?

After all, this is a driver of the highest quality, one of the all-time greats, who has just enjoyed the three most fruitful years of his career. The most active driver on social media, who certainly puts a lot of effort into engaging with his fans, and was the subject of a concerted effort to build him into a global brand, should surely draw more than that?

This leads to the obvious question of just how popular are F1 drivers in the grand scheme of things? Hamilton is, justifiably, regarded as the one grand prix driver that truly transcends the sport, but what does that 8000 figure tell us about his place in the world?

ESPN's 'World Fame 100' of sportspeople attempts to rank the most famous athletes in the world using a clear metric. This is based on a combination of their pay, social media following, Google search popularity and endorsement value. And F1 doesn't come out well.

Ten sports have at least one entry before someone from the world of motorsport - football, basketball, tennis, golf, cricket, athletics, mixed martial arts, boxing, American football and swimming.

Hamilton is, inevitably, the first F1 driver to appear. But he's ranked down in 59th place overall. He's not even the highest-ranked from the world of motorsport, as the two places ahead of him feature NASCAR aces Dale Earnhardt Jr and Jimmie Johnson (although it should be said that they appear only to outperform Hamilton on endorsement revenue, even taking Google searches into account).

The only other F1 drivers to make the 100 are Fernando Alonso (75) and Kimi Raikkonen (97). That means no place for four-times world champion Sebastian Vettel, who very deliberately avoids social media and shuns the idea of himself as a star and doesn't feel the need either to build a brand or over-share. As he said in an interview with Die Welt last year, "I'm not better because I can drive faster than other people. I'm not a hero. I do not save lives."

Interestingly, Raikkonen has a similar approach, but still breaks into the ESPN 100 list. You could argue that's because his popularity was rooted in a time before the ubiquity of social media; the same goes for Alonso and another strong performer, disregarded from the 2017 figures because he isn't on the grid, Jenson Button.

It's interesting to ask whether Raikkonen could have built up the same profile without social media were he a decade younger. Unfortunately, it's an untestable hypothesis.

Below are the top 10 rankings for the 2017 F1 drivers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook:

TWITTER

1 Lewis Hamilton 4.11m
2 Fernando Alonso 2.45m
3 Sergio Perez 1.6m
4 Felipe Massa 1.03m
5 Daniel Ricciardo 990k
6 Romain Grosjean 667k
7 Nico Hulkenberg 617k
8 Max Verstappen 314k
9 Kevin Magnussen 314k
10 Valtteri Bottas 299k

INSTAGRAM

1 Lewis Hamilton 3.7m
2 Fernando Alonso 1.2m
3 Felipe Massa 907k
4 Max Verstappen 797k
5 Daniel Ricciardo 719k
6 Sergio Perez 314k
7 Romain Grosjean 294k
8 Valtteri Bottas 273k
9 Nico Hulkenberg 201k
10 Daniil Kvyat 164k

FACEBOOK

1 Lewis Hamilton 3.9m
2 Fernando Alonso 1.8m
3 Daniel Ricciardo 762k
4 Felipe Massa 758k
5 Max Verstappen 561k
6 Sergio Perez 293k
7 Romain Grosjean 264k
8 Valtteri Bottas 214k
9 Nico Hulkenberg 164k
10 Stoffel Vandoorne 78k

All those rankings would have been very different last year, for in Button and Nico Rosberg, F1 has lost two strong performers. Button has 2.69m Twitter followers, 611k on Instagram and 932k on Facebook; Rosberg's equivalent numbers are 1.83m, 961k and 2.6m.

Comparing Hamilton directly with other global sporting stars is illuminating. Real Madrid footballer Cristiano Ronaldo topped the ESPN list, and has 49.8m followers on Twitter, 89.4m on Instagram and a mammoth 119,557,394 on Facebook. Just take a look at Hamilton's numbers by way of comparison.

Also from the world of football, there's Lionel Messi, who was fifth in the ESPN list. Interestingly, through sponsor Adidas he ran a competition in 2012 that's very similar to the one held for Hamilton's helmet design. Fans were encouraged to design the colours for the boots Messi would wear in the La Liga fixture against Atletico Madrid in December that year.

It attracted "over 14,200" entries, compared to Hamilton's 8000. To that must be added the caveat that it required people to register to use the 'mi adidas' function on the Adidas website, creating a higher barrier to entry.

Hamilton's competition had to be entered using Instagram (attracting, it has to be said, a high quality of entry). What's more, depending on whose figures you go with, the number of active social media users has risen by approaching one billion worldwide since then, so the Messi/Hamilton comparison is also skewed by that.

While Hamilton is clearly a global star, he's not in the same league as the likes of Messi and Ronaldo. And the drop-off is quite rapid within F1 drivers, many of whom are pretty anonymous. That's no great surprise - after all, how many Real Madrid reserves might the proverbial man on the street name? But it shows there are few bankable quantities in grand prix racing commercially.

It's interesting to consider why this is the case. The transformed landscape means it's impossible to do a meaningful comparison of the relative star power of, say, Michael Schumacher at his peak compared to Hamilton today. The world is very different.

And perhaps that's something that must be taken into account when it comes to reshaping F1 for this new world - something we are consistently told Liberty Media is going to do.

We'll have to wait and see what happens. But given that Hamilton, for all his genuine star power, can't hold a candle to some of the leading athletes in other sporting endeavours, you have to ask whether F1 is quite the true global commodity everyone keeps saying it is.

Teams, cars and the personalities off track remain central to F1, but for the majority of those following worldwide it's the drivers who are the true stars. And the regulations, justifiably, have led to them being increasingly cocooned in the protective shell of the car to the point where it's impossible to see any of their body language.

If someone like Hamilton, for all his efforts and qualities, is only able to achieve what might be termed modest superstardom (albeit still enough to be hugely recognisable, massively popular and enormously wealthy), then that's perhaps the true indicator of where F1 sits in the popular consciousness.