Making drivers famous

Ignacio de Villota, one of the members of the famous de Villota racing family, provides PR for all the drivers at Emilio de Villota MOTORSPORT. We sat down with Ignacio and he told us the main things that currently have the biggest influence in the path of a good racer.

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Social racing

For me, and I feel that for a lot of us, the most important thing now is the image that the driver generates through social and live networks. That’s really the biggest part of the pie and everyone in the industry gets it. Almost everything can be quantified by way of likes and followers today and that’s a pretty crucial tool for the pilot if he wants to be a respectable and admired figure in motorsports.

Before social networks took over, you just had to spend much more time on simple PR operations. Now there are more connections than ever between various people who work in different parts of the sector in the whole world. That, of course, speeds every process.

At the very core, each pilot is a person, you can’t work your way around that.

Personal attributes

At the very core, each pilot is a person, you can’t work your way around that. Every person has very different aspects that need to be engaged or at least spotted. Some drivers are genuinely suitable for positive public relations – they feel free, talk charmingly and are able to react quickly if there is something that is of interest for them.

There are, unfortunately, the less suitable ones. Those usually focus only on single sporting aspects and that means they can miss out on opportunities to improve their career in so many ways! I believe that throughout the years the world of Formula 1 has shown us how powerful PR can change the direction of a driver’s path entirely.

The business mirror

Good PR can be tested on various levels and it definitely should be organized supremely well. Pilots must work insanely hard with their respective brands and sponsors if they want the best outcome, not to mention the money. Sports scores still are the most direct and most powerful tool to boost your career, but there are a lot of moments when the sports results simply do not matter.

I think that we may lose the person-to-person contact soon. So far I don’t know whether that’s good or bad because there is no way of telling what exact forms of communication we will use. Social networking might just absorb all this and evolve into something bigger and more flexible than it even is right now. The large size of one component may not be the best option for business on the whole, but more flexibility will only make things easier and better.