Hey everyone, Logan from FanAmp here with some VERY exciting news for all of you!
Introducing our newest FanAmp Base… Mania Onboard!!
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Manon and Maia, to learn more about why they started Mania Onboard and to give you all some insight into their Red Bull obsession, how they got into F1 and what it’s been like since joining FanAmp.
Please give a warm welcome to Mania Onboard!
Manon: Like a lot of people when we were bored in the pandemic, we got interested in new sports. But the sport we got into was not Formula 1… it was American Football! We were pretty obsessed with it, but then my friend from France got into F1. She watched Drive to Survive and got very into the statistics of it and basically got me and my other friends interested in it. Maia was really resistant at first…
Maia: Yes because I didn’t have time to watch another sport!
Manon: I ended up throwing watch parties here in this very flat and made her cook country themed dinners
Maia: You didn’t make me, I think I used the cooking as a way to stay sane but I didn’t really watch it or care who was winning at the time. Then as Manon kept watching it, I realized that the science behind it was actually really interesting and now we are both basically living and breathing off of it. Ultimately we’re very new fans… sometimes we get people slamming others in the comments calling them ‘Drive to Survive’ fans, and we’re like oh no… that’s us!
Manon: It’s a weird thing because technically we are ‘DTS’ fans, but Maia didn’t like it and really didn’t want to watch it.
Manon: That series is my baby. At the start of the season, I decided to make a recap of one video that kind of summarized the weekend of the team. Obviously I mainly focus on Red Bull because they are the team I support, so I thought this would be a way for people to see what happened in practice or qualifying, because a lot of the time, those after session qualifying interviews aren’t shown or they are at a bad time when people can’t watch them. Some of the interviews are so boring too where Max will just repeat the same things over and over, but I started to notice that Checo and Max will give some funny sarcastic answers or comments. I thought that it was actually funny without them trying to be funny, like their jokes are so lame that they are funny. So I basically thought I would just make a comedy club to kind of poke fun at them and then it just became something I wanted to challenge myself to do each race weekend. It’s become so interesting too because people who don’t like Red Bull will come to make fun of them, but the people who do like Red Bull come to laugh with them. I also think with Red Bull having a sort of ‘bad reputation’ makes it work even more because it’s harmless fun and its content that every fan can enjoy.
Maia: We haven’t gotten behind the scenes stuff or access to different things yet but the coolest time we experienced was when we were in Zandvoort. That is kind of where the core of our audience is there because they’re all Max fans, so people were really invested in our content and wanted to see what we were up to. We even bumped into people who knew us and that was really cool. It just felt like everyone was invested in us being there…
Manon: We also got to Zandvoort last minute and didn’t have tickets for the pitlane walk but because we have this awesome audience, we basically posted saying we don’t have tickets and want to find some and one of the girls who followed us messaged us and said that she had extra ones that we could buy off her. This is where we felt our community the strongest, and we didn’t get any access of any sort but our community was all there and it felt like a reminder of this is why we do this.
Maia: We were at a bar on a beach in Zandvoort and this girl comes up to us and is like, “This is really weird but do you guys make TikToks?” And it just felt so weird being recognized and she kept saying she would leave us alone but we wanted her to stay and talk because we just loved meeting somebody from our community.
Maia: If Daniel technically counts as a Red Bull driver than I think we’ll obviously take Max because we want to win.
Manon: And then I think we’d take Oscar Piastri because we feel like he would make a good number 2 for Max. If next year you told me who was going to be the other Red Bull, obviously I'd want Daniel, but if he wasn't available, I would think Piastri would be a good choice.
Maia: He’s so talented but also young, I think if you put Lando in the seat, he would want to be the number 1 driver and it would cause some chaos. Then, I think for our principal we would choose James Vowles. He seems like he would put Max in his place.
Manon: We also just really liked how he handled Logan in Qatar and we think he would be a good nurturing team principal. He is also quite new but he has also really separated himself from the rest of them and he is an interesting character. We also thought we would love to have Cyril back, and maybe it’s just because I’m French but we would love to see him in the paddock again.
Maia: Ok so, we’re lucky in the fact that we are based in the UK so we could realistically go to any of the European races. So at first I initially thought of how I really want to go to Singapore, but I don’t think that's necessarily the dream race. So the answer is Melbourne… somebody would have to send us there for us to go because it is so far and expensive.
Manon: Yes, it’s so far and if we’re traveling 30 hours to get there, I would need to be guaranteed that we would have a good weekend.
Maia: When Melbourne was on in April, I just kept thinking about how I wished we could be there and how it is definitely on the bucket list. The racing is good too and it just seems like such an awesome Grand Prix.
Manon: The atmosphere looks so cool, everything about it seems great. It’s just hard to justify because the money we would spend on Melbourne would be how much we could spend going to four Grand Prixs in Europe.
Maia: So, it’s definitely a dream race because at the moment it feels slightly unattainable.
Maia: I really like having everything in one place, so having access to the timing and race sessions in my time zone makes it so much easier.
Manon: I also love the Fast Five facts and getting that notification because as a creator, you need to be on top of the news and be reactive to when things happen. Sometimes when we’re busy with work, we can’t always check Twitter or other news sources so we really like getting those articles and knowing that we’ll regularly get those updates from you guys.
Maia: I think it’s cool that we can look at other peoples faces and see what people are chatting about and doing on a race weekend.
Manon: The chatting platforms are great because I find the other social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, the character limit in the comments is horrible and when you make video content, it’s a lot of talking at your audience and not with your audience. When you have a chat, everyone feels equal and people can talk to each other as well as get to know each other. So, I’ve always wanted a chatting platform and I think having one that’s dedicated to F1 with stats accessible makes it so easy. If someone asks a question about stats or news it’s like, well go check the other tabs because it’s all there.
Manon: We’re really trying to not call our fans, fans, if that makes sense because we don’t like the hierarchy and it’s a weird thing of asking people if you want to talk to me, download this app and everything you’ll get out of it is just talking to me. It feels weird whereas with FanAmp, it feels more like, guys, you get this app that has all the stats, all the times, all this information AND you can also talk to me if you want! So it has this feeling that I’m actually inviting you to join a thing that will enhance your experience with F1 and not making it about me. I know everyone is always out of storage on their phone so I don’t want them to download another app, but I felt like it was an exchange because I get to talk to you guys, but then you also get all the information you need, all in one place.
Maia: We thought it would be better for us to have more channels to categorize some things. If our base does become super populated, we really don’t want to lose things or for the chats to get too crazy so having it more organized made sense to us.
Manon: We have our introduction channel because it was important for us to have a place, kind of a door you can knock on, that’s like welcome to FanAmp and welcome to our community. We came up with the introduction template because it’s important for us to have an understanding of who is in our community and who people support because we want to be respectful and mindful that people have their own opinions. Then we have the Fanzone channel which is kind of the general chat for people to talk about absolutely anything, it doesn’t have to necessarily be about F1. Then we have the Pit wall which is dedicated to race coverage so when FP1 is on or any session, we will talk about the things happening there.
Maia: It also means that you can still go on to our base and the other channels and not have things spoiled if you can’t watch one of the sessions live.
Manon: Then we have the Arcade, which is our gaming channel. We don’t do actual racing gaming but it’s where we’ll talk about the F1 Fantasy Leagues, and we do questions of the day as well to get conversations going. It’s just a fun and chill channel. Then our last one is Silly Season which is what we use for everything gossip or rumor related. If you want to send a picture of a driver and talk about how hot he looks, you could do it there! It’s the channel that I know some people want to avoid but then others love, so we kind of wanted to have this chat separate. We wanted the Silly Season chat to be the place where people don’t have to be technical or know everything about the sport. Ultimately, we are female fans and a lot of our audience is made up of male fans, but we don’t want the male fans to just assume that the chats are going to be ‘girly’ I guess you could say and then we don’t want our female fans to feel like they can’t talk about the fun side of the sport either. So we wanted everyone to feel welcome and feel like they have a space in our community.
We are so honored to have Mania Onboard join FanAmp, and we can’t wait to welcome all of the new faces into this community!
