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The UK production company behind the television series Formula One: Drive To Survive is poised to announce a fundraising worth tens of millions of pounds from a US investment group to help fund its expansion, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Box to Box Films, founded by James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin, is raising about £30mn from Bruin Capital, whose founder is George Pyne, a former senior executive at sports agency IMG, the people said.
New York-based Bruin is taking a significant minority stake in Box to Box as documentary series are increasingly used to market sport to consumers.
“For decades, production companies have tried to turn insider access into storytelling that you can point to as creating value and meaningful growth,” Pyne said. “Box to Box is really the first to crack that code, which has caught the attention of the global sports industry.” Bruin and Box to Box confirmed the deal on Monday but declined to comment on the financial details.
Drive to Survive, which first ran in 2019, has been credited with attracting a new audience to F1, particularly in the US. The Netflix series has played an important role in shifting the way sports market themselves to new fans, particularly as they chase the younger viewers coveted by advertisers.
John Malone’s Liberty Media, which has owned F1 since 2017, said in an investor presentation last year that the average age of an F1 fan had dropped to 37 in 2022 from 40 four years earlier.
The series’ success, which rests on bringing sporting personalities to life for fans, has spurred demand from other sports to work with Box to Box. This has produced similar series, including Break Point on tennis and Full Swing for golf.
In a third-quarter earnings update last year, Netflix said it was “having great success” with sports programmes such as Break Point, Drive to Survive and other docuseries including Tour de France: Unchained. The streaming group said such series were “an area where we can deliver enormous value”.
Gay-Rees, who won an Oscar for a documentary on the late singer Amy Winehouse and produced a film about the life of former F1 driver Ayrton Senna, said other sports had taken note of how Drive to Survive had connected with younger fans.
“All sports are competing for the same younger audience,” he said. “Modern audiences are fascinated by what goes on with athletes behind the scenes.”
Co-founder Martin, who is known for a documentary on Argentine football icon Diego Maradona, said it was important to differentiate sports series to maintain viewer interest.
“We’ve never approached them from a perspective of: Let’s just replicate Drive to Survive on every single one of the shows,” he said.
Pyne founded Bruin in 2015 following the sale of IMG to Hollywood powerbroker Ari Emanuel’s media agency Endeavor. Bruin has a strategic partnership with CVC Capital Partners, the private equity firm that previously owned F1, and middle-market buyout group The Jordan Company.
The group’s investments include Full Swing Golf, which provides simulators to professional players, betting data provider Oddschecker and marketing agency Engine Shop.
Earlier this week, Bruin agreed to sell sports marketing company Two Circles in a £250mn deal. The London-headquartered company was valued at $42mn when Bruin bought its majority stake in 2019.
Bruin has a record of buying businesses in Europe and helping them to expand in the US and elsewhere. It sold Turin-based Deltatre for about $700mn in 2022, having acquired the streaming technology company for roughly $160mn in 2016.
