i was curious about the breakdown of ships/characters/etc. on the rpf tag, and then i made a couple graphs. and i thought maybe someone else might be interested in them, so here they are:
indycar ships:
I noticed that most ships had at least one person who was affiliated with F1 in some way (Marcus Armstrong, Callum Ilott, Alexander Rossi - though I’d argue his popularity is because of the podcast/Arrow Mclaren Socials). This makes a lot of sense, because F1 has a much bigger fandom than Indycar.
characters:
F1 affiliated drivers made the top characters list - no surprise there. Alexander Rossi and Pato O’Ward are both pretty high on the list, which I think is due to both of them putting effort into marketability/social media, along with the fact that they worked with Arrow Mclaren, which has an incredibly competent social media team that shows their drivers personalities (big personalities = very rpfable guy). I am surprised that Marco Andretti is a popular driver, because I do not think many writers have written him. But there have been 3-4 writers in the fandom that have written him in several fics. It’s not about breadth, it's about depth.
additional tags:
The amount of additional tags is much lower than the other tags I looked at. The highest additional tag is used in just 16% of fics. This could be because additional tags are not required by AO3. Many writers do not use additional tags simply because they do not care to, or because additional tags would be spoiling the work.
the indycar tag throughout the years:
As you can see, there has been a dramatic increase in fics in the past couple years. This is probably due to the fact that motorsports has become more popular among women and young people (the two groups that i think probably create/interact with fan-made works the most)
thanks for reading! i'm sure that i made some mistakes, so please be nice!