The 2022 edition beaten
The crazy bet of Squeezie, one of the most famous French YouTubers, consisting of having the cream of the French “youtube game” compete in a real Formula 4 race, had already been a success in 2022, with 40,000 spectators.
The GP Explorer 2 organized this Saturday September 9, 2023 beat the 2022 edition with 60,000 spectators, who had snapped up tickets in just a few hours. The race also established a new record on the Twitch platform, with 1.3 million spectators behind their screen. In addition to well-established YouTubers, the set also welcomed music stars, notably Marseille rappers Soso Madness and SCH
Depielo victory
The race saw the same protagonists compete as last year, but this time the roles were reversed. Depielo, one of the best F1 and motorsport specialists on Youtube (almost 340,000 subscribers), second last year, took pole position and dominated the race from start to finish, winning ahead of Sylvain Levy, who hosts the Vilebrequin channel . The two drivers competed on the first braking but Depielo kept his lead and was never seen again. Note the 5th place of the first female, “Ana on Air”, Depielo’s teammate in the team supported by Alpine. The collision between Maxime Biaggi (Le Mouv, n°57) and Manon Lanza (Alpine, n° 11) from the second loop caused the safety car to come out for four laps before finally forcing the deployment of a red flag.
A sign of the importance of the event, Alpine put on a show and offered a nice surprise to the public, since Esteban Ocon and Pierre Galsy performed a few laps and “donuts” on 2012 Lotus V8s restyled in the colors of the current A523. If most of the teams were sponsored by brands with a strong presence on social networks (Nord VPN, Rhinoshield), the manufacturers Cupra and Alpine were there.
New generation of fans
Some will undoubtedly deplore an event which exposes motor racing to a cocktail of influencers and rappers, and more generally to all this “culture” unknown or ignored by purists and “old hands”, but the GP Explorer 2 also has merit. , in the same way as video games or Netflix, to bring a new, younger audience to automobiles and motorsport. Certainly, it is a safe bet that part of the public mainly came to see their favorite influencer or rapper, more than the race itself, but the success of this GP Explorer demonstrates that France is not the country autophobic that we like to describe. It also confirms the increasingly strong interaction between the world of sport and web platforms, in an exponentially growing market.
