“I thought it was a very good, quality show,” said 2016 Indy 500 winner Alexander Rossi from Arrow McLaren. “It was well shot, I thought the trajectory throughout the season of the different episodes was great. I wouldn’t have changed really anything except for having more episodes.”
Rossi’s teammate is of the same opinion.
“I think I think that’d be good for the series to continue, but I do think they should be doing the whole year,” O’Ward said. “I don’t agree with it being just up to the 500 because we also need to put out that there’s 17 races, there’s not six races in our championship, and there’s a championship that’s gonna get fought until the last race, which is different to any of the championships in the world. And sadly, we’re not going to be able to show that this year.”
Chip Ganassi Racing’s Ericsson had a different take on expanding the docuseries.
“The last episode could have been a bit longer after a lot of build-up; the 500 episode was quite short, I thought, so maybe it could have been two episodes,” he said. “I think there was more to tell around the race, so if we’re going to do all those episodes getting to the 500, I think we should have told that story properly.”
Newgarden was sympathetic to the challenge faced by the production and editing team, but would also welcome a deeper and wider version of the Indy 500 final product.
“I would imagine just even the month of May, there was more storytelling there than they realized,” he said. “And maybe that brings a more robust schedule for next year. That’s what I would like to see, because when I think back to May, I know my own story there. But I also am aware of the 1000 other stories that deserve the spotlight and so I hope that they’re able to maybe layer it a bit better and just give more to the audience.”
Rossi echoed the sentiments of many drivers who spoke on the first 100 Days To Indy experience.
“I would think the VICE partnership and the people who are involved from the production standpoint, you’d want to keep them because they fell in love with the sport,” he said. “We all trust them, right? And they didn’t do anything to try and put us in a bad position. So I think you’d really want to keep doing this with them.”
Drivers were united on one front, and that was fixing the limited reach of 100 Days To Indy if future seasons come to fruition.
IMSA, for example, commissioned a docuseries of its own which debuted in January with its “Win The Weekend” project that features its new hybrid GTP cars. Presented on its YouTube channel, the five episodes to date have delivered between 1.2-2.1 million views apiece through the free and borderless video platform.
Filmed, and produced by TangentVector, the five episodes have generated 7,800,000 views, with a per-episode average of 1,560,000, and at least two more episodes are planned this season. On whatever platform it might be, the primary people being filmed for 100 Days To Indy want to see it succeed on a grander scale.
“The next thing is to better the audience or the outlet, however you do that,” said Ganassi’s Scott Dixon, the six-time IndyCar champion and 2008 Indy 500 winner. His teammate shared in the sentiment.
“I think it’s great to get it on a TV network, but today, one of the biggest reasons why Drive To Survive is successful is that it was on Netflix, and it was so easy to be accessible for people,” Ericsson said. “That, for me, is the biggest thing. I think the product of 100 Days was really good, but it just didn’t really get out there.”
Rossi, like the rest of his competitors, understands that if placing the show on Netflix or another large streamer was readily available, it would have already been done. Nonetheless, when a project like 100 Days To Indy is commissioned to build a new and younger audience, the only metric that matters is the size of the audience.
“The struggle that IndyCar as a whole has been fighting for a while, right, is how do we get more eyeballs on the sport from a TV standpoint?” he said. “I think in a lot of ways, that’s been improving, and I think this was an effort to continue improving that. The hope is that one day, Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or whatever, picks it up and wants to feature it on that platform. That would be the dream for any sort of show. So hopefully that can be the case. But first, we need a second season.”
For Newgarden, who did the majority of 100 Days To Indy’s advance promotional work on behalf of IndyCar and the docuseries, the results have been encouraging. The two-time champion is confident the project can do more for IndyCar if some of the ideas for adjustments and continuity are carried into the future.
“I heard from people in Nashville that I’m friends with who aren’t big IndyCar people that are like, ‘Hey, it was great to finally see something that was more illuminating for what the series is.’ Like, ‘I didn’t know how you got here, or how your racing championship really worked,’” he said
“So there was definitely interest that I saw from across the board, whether it was in my own town, or at race weekends, where more people felt like they got to know us. I thought that was really nice to hear. I didn’t get one negative criticism. And I genuinely mean that no one, to my face, said they didn’t like the documentary, or thought it was off the mark. I didn’t get one comment from anybody, which was really surprising.
“I expected someone to be like, ‘You know, I didn’t like it so much.’ Everyone was just overwhelmingly positive. So I think they must have done something right for people that never had seen that content before to really love it the way they did. And now, I think we just need to look at getting our stories in front of larger audiences. We just need to learn from it and lean into it more.”