Those of you who tweet will surely at some point have seen the #Welcomechallenges hashtag used by everything from Audi's Le Mans team, its DTM outfit, various drivers and a few dealers here or there.
The Ingolstadt firm has certainly shown itself to be welcoming of challenges, going so far as producing an advert 'welcoming' Porsche back to the World Endurance Championship (WEC).
At Le Mans this year Porsche responded in the best way possible. When the winning drivers of the #19 Porsche 919 hybrid - Nico Hulkenberg, Nick Tandy and Earl Bamber - mounted the rostrum having completed 395 laps of the famous 13.6 kilometres of Circuit de la Sarthe their t-shirts were emblazoned with the words 'Challenge accepted'. WEC gets social media.
In a recent interview F1 supremo Bernie Eccelstone was asked about the decline in TV viewing figures and the likelihood of the brand embracing the likes of Twitter and Facebook. “No. We're commercial... If they find people to pay us to do that then I will be happy."
"I'd rather get to the 70-year-old guy who's got plenty of cash. So, there's no point trying to reach these kids because they won't buy any of the products." F1, most certainly, does not get social media.
Now Bernie, by his own admission, is an old man - not au fait with what has been called web 2.0, but somewhere within his company, Formula One Group or CVC Capital Partners (the investment company that owns Bernie's company) there must be someone who does. Not that you would know it from the official F1 twitter account. It's one of those horrid corporate accounts that tweets pictures of past masters and asks fans what their favourite memories were. Yet not once does it respond to those same fans. It is stand-offish, aloof. This is despite the fact that recent studies have shown that 80 per cent of adults (yes Bernie, adults) are likely to interact with social media during a sports event.
Should we be surprised? F1 has become more stand-offish and aloof in recent years with PR-managed drivers afraid to speak their mind, technological advancements made behind closed doors and classic race tracks such as Magny Cours and Monza dropped in favour of oil-money funded ones in Azerbaijan and Bahrain. Then there is the corporate hospitality culture that is endemic in F1, meaning only the most diehard or moneyed fans can actually get to the circuit. WEC has corporate hospitality too but out on the campsites that ring the circuit you will find clapped out Metro owners camping beside Bentley Arnage drivers without a care in the world for, despite their differences, they are race fans.
By its sheer nature the WEC - and Le Mans in particular - is not viewer friendly; cars have to be 'managed' rather than driven flat out to ensure they make the chequered flag, with so many different classes on circuit (LMP1, LMP2, GTE Pro and GTE Am) it can be difficult to keep track of what's what and then you have the dominance of Audi with 13 Le Mans victories in 15 years - makes F1's Schumacher years look like a blip. And yet an estimated 265,000 people attended the event this year, millions listened in to coverage on Radio Le Mans and such was the furore Stateside for TV coverage that viewers boycotted Fox TV when it switched from racing to show a penalty shootout from an U20 international football match.
F1 has many, many problems. From the farce that was double-points at Bahrain last year to the reintroduction of fuel pit-stops next year to bring back some excitement and unpredictability to the series, but alongside changes on-track F1 also needs to change off track.
It needs to embrace livelong fans with both arms rather than just dipping into their wallets, it needs to remember that its core viewers are European based and not in some far-flung oil-rich state and it needs to wake up to the world of social media. If not it is going to be left even further behind the Tweeting, Periscoping, Facebook and Instagramming world of WEC and Le Mans and that will be a sad day.