Formula 1: The GOAT

▶ Bahrain Pre-Season Testing Vlog

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📺 Fatih Yıldırım • 17M Subscribers

🕒 Uploaded 14 hours ago

👁 1,247,893 views

👍 98,412 👎 1,203

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Elena Petrova could be seen looking at the YouTube dashboard for the latest video on Fatih’s channel, uploaded just 14 hours ago after their team of editors worked on it as soon as they received the footage from the team in Bahrain.

The hype around Fatih kept getting higher with each passing day as the season got closer, to the point that a vlog video took less than fourteen hours to break past the million-viewer mark.

She looked at it with slight relief in her eyes, as it projected the likely reaction to the massive event they had been working on since the start of the year.

After a moment of looking at the video’s data, she returned to reading the documents related to the event.

As a consequence of Fatih being expected to be the first Turkish F1 driver, the level of interest in his debut was nothing but extraordinary. The public showed their interest clearly through the ratings his docuseries was getting on TRT Sports, along with some of his licensed YouTube videos reaching a point where TOSFED and Fatih’s side decided to capitalize on it. As a result, they approached Red Bull, along with TOSFED, to host the 300km test at Istanbul Park.

After a short negotiation between TOSFED, Fatih’s side, and Red Bull, who saw the big advertising opportunity, it was agreed, and the three of them immediately got to work preparing the event to be as spectacular as possible to etch Fatih and Red Bull into the minds of Turkish fans.

When news of it spread within professional circles, large sponsors reached out to TOSFED, wanting to participate. They had an even higher fervor when TRT was decided to be the broadcaster of the event, and the event moved into a higher gear. With each passing addition, the event got bigger, and the cherry on top was the government, through the Ministry of Youth and Sports, also joining the organizing members.

But things were yet to be announced to the public since the number of attendees was yet to be locked in, as the organizers were now doing the final assessment of how many they could handle.

A few days later, the announcement finally went out, both online through Red Bull and in the domestic market. TOSFED broke the news through a press conference broadcasted by nearly all news channels.

"We would like to announce that due to high interest in the upcoming 300km test of our expected first Turkish driver to enter the F1 grid, we, as TOSFED, in cooperation with Red Bull and Fatih’s family, are going to be doing the 300km test at Istanbul Park in a free event.

However, due to the need for public safety, despite the event being free, it will unfortunately not be open to everyone. The tickets will be distributed in a lottery system that will take place a month from today.

To enter the ticket lottery, you can go to Sonadım.com (Finalstep.com) starting at midnight today. There are only going to be fifty thousand lottery tickets for the event, as each ticket will have a plus-one attached to it for the event set for Sunday, May 16, 2021. We would like to thank Turkish Airlines, which is the title sponsor of the Turkish Airlines Final Step event, along with many sponsors who made it possible for the event to be free to the public.

However, for those who enter the lottery but end up not getting a ticket, you don’t have to be saddened by missing the event.

With collaboration from TRT and the Red Bull broadcast team, the event will be broadcast for the world to watch live as it happens, with TRT being the broadcaster in Turkey and Fatih Yıldırım’s YouTube channel being the online livestream source..." Yılmaz Göktürk, the Senior TOSFED Representative, went on detailing the plans for the event, providing as many details as possible to ensure as much hype was built from today until the day of the event, as the build-up was paced to start and grow with the beginning of the 2021 Formula season.

Due to the coordinated effort of the planned promotion, the announcement of the event went viral not only in Turkey but in the wider F1 community. As with anything, the reactions were mixed. His fans were excited as they got the chance to see him in an F1 car a week ahead of his F1 debut, but then there were the critics, who made up the majority of the wider F1 community.

@F1Yukifanatic: Isn’t Red Bull overcompensating and creating a mountain out of a molehill? Or does he have blackmail material on Red Bull to make them do this? I mean, come on, why the heck would a test that is just rudimentary be turned into such a big event planned to be televised nationwide and waste all of that money?

@Redballs: I can understand Red Bull, since he is the biggest talent they are going to be introducing since Verstappen, after multiple talents didn’t live up to expectations. So why pull the punches? But this is nothing but a giant pressure cooker and might harm him if he fails to deliver after building this much expectation.

@Faithonfatih: This is something major in our country, and it is understandable with the hype, considering he is going to be the first F1 driver to come from the country, so I’m definitely registering the moment the registration portal opens up.

The back and forth, some cordial, some confrontational, and some outright toxic, between casual fans, fans just because of Fatih having the same nationality, fans who discovered him from YouTube, F1 purists, and many other groups erupted as they reacted to the announcements. Many said this was Red Bull overestimating themselves and the hype their driver had and that it was going to bomb.

The answer arrived a few hours later when the registration portal opened; it crashed three minutes later due to the number of people trying to register for the lottery. Since it wasn’t limited to just Turkish citizens, the foreign registrations were nearly ten times the Turkish registrations, but even that in itself was in the millions.

The crash acted as the largest indicator of how much interest the event, or Fatih specifically, had. The announcement being timed perfectly before the start of the season but just after the pre-season testing, when F1 fans were the hungriest and most open to registering for any F1-related event, multiplied the interest.

The crash did nothing but increase the interest in the event’s sponsors, but also validated the forward-thinking nature of those who had secured their positions ahead of time because, before he even sat in the F1 car’s cockpit, he was already showing that he was a massive ticket attraction in Turkey.

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