Photo credit: USF Pro Championships PR

After a few seasons of producing the docuseries ‘The Climb,’ USF Pro Championships TV is back in 2025 with a new project, ‘DRIVEN: Chasing the Apex.’

Only two segments into the first episode, it’s clear to see that if the goal of the series is to sell the product the USF Pro Championships is putting on as one of the top open-wheel development ladders in the world, it is doing a fantastic job.

The shorter parts within episodes are packed with cinematic shots, clean interview cuts, and most importantly, on-track action. It’s shot at a quality rarely seen in racing and resembles top-level documentary storytelling in major American sports. It feels like you’re immersing yourself into a hype video for a SEC college football game, and while ‘The Climb’ had a narrative element to it that caught you in the midst of the action, ‘DRIVEN’ takes the fireworks of a racing weekend and propels them right in your face.

As always, the most important thing with these documentaries promoting junior series racing is going to be the reach. There’s many benefits to this: not only to bring eyes to current drivers but also reach perspective ones. As drivers detail the path forward up the ranks with stars in their eyes, ‘DRIVEN’ makes it easy to get excited about the USF Pro Championships’ future.

Early audience data of ‘DRIVEN’ shows that the series is having some pull on non-conventional platforms. While ‘The Climb’ shined on YouTube with 10,000+ views per episode, ‘DRIVEN”s numbers on Instagram and Facebook have towered over those, with the trailer for the first episode amassing a staggering 38,000 across those two platforms alone, being the most viewed piece of multimedia content on the USF Pro Championships Instagram since September 2023. It shows the power on those platforms of reaching audiences quickly with bite-sized content.

If anything, the only thing missing is TikTok. USF Pro Championships has a strong foothold there, and repurposing even a 30-second interview clip with race footage could pull in loads of new viewers. While editing it to vertical format would be an additional challenge, a 30-second interview clip with racing cut from an episode would pull loads of new viewers into the series.

But in its current state, ‘DRIVEN’ has a level of polish which is unseen in other forms of documentary storytelling in racing. It’s clear to see the upgrade in production quality with each year USF Pro Championships TV has done this, and if they can continue to buy into new media platforms even further than they are now with the product they already have, it could elevate itself from being a step forward to a game-changer for the series.

To watch ‘DRIVEN,’ check it out on the USF Pro Championships YouTube channel or the USF Pro Championships app.