The $8 Billion Handshake
In January 2017, an 86-year-old man walked out of the only job he had ever truly held.
Bernie Ecclestone — son of a Suffolk trawlerman, former used-car dealer, a figure whose net worth Forbes pegged at $4.2 billion and whose physical stature (five foot three) bore approximately zero correlation to his gravitational pull on global sport — had just been relieved of command by Liberty Media, the American conglomerate that had acquired Formula One for $8 billion. Ecclestone's departure was dressed in the euphemistic finery these things always are: chairman emeritus, a consultancy, gratitude for decades of service. The reality was blunter. The man who had single-handedly transformed a minority enthusiasm for petrolheads into the third-most-watched sporting spectacle on Earth — trailing only the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup — was being shown the door because his mode of governance, conducted from a tiny Kensington office with a handful of staff and sealed by handshakes rather than governance committees, no longer fit.
The transaction itself was as layered as anything Ecclestone had ever structured. Liberty Media, controlled by the cable billionaire
John Malone, completed the acquisition through a tracking stock — Series C Liberty Formula One common stock, trading under the ticker FWONK — in a deal that valued the entire F1 enterprise at approximately $8 billion, inclusive of debt. The shares were offered at $31.00 per share in a May 2017 underwriting led by Goldman Sachs,
J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley, raising roughly $1.24 billion in aggregate proceeds. Liberty acquired the equity from CVC Capital Partners, the private equity firm that had bought a controlling stake from Ecclestone's own web of entities back in 2005, and from other minority holders who had profited spectacularly from what was, at bottom, a media-rights arbitrage disguised as a sport.
What Liberty bought was, in a sense, the negative image of what Ecclestone had built. He had created an enterprise of extraordinary revenue concentration — nearly everything flowed through broadcast deals negotiated personally by one man — and equally extraordinary revenue leakage. Ecclestone had never seriously pursued digital distribution, had actively dismissed social media (telling reporters in 2014 that he didn't care about young audiences because they "can't afford" Rolex watches), and had treated the American market, the world's richest advertising pool, as an afterthought. Liberty looked at this and saw what a private equity firm sees in a well-run but under-optimized asset: margin.
Eight years later, Formula One's enterprise value has tripled to approximately $24 billion. Total revenue exceeded $3.65 billion in 2024, up from roughly $1.8 billion in the last full year of Ecclestone's reign. The sport generated more than $2 billion in direct team sponsorships alone. And the U.S. Grand Prix, once a lonely event on the calendar's fringes, now occupies three slots — Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas — drawing combined weekend attendance that dwarfs any single NFL regular-season game. The sport's audience has grown to nearly half a billion unique television viewers per season. Top F1 teams are valued at more than most NBA franchises and European soccer clubs. Mercedes recently transacted at a $6 billion implied valuation on a 15% stake sale to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. McLaren, which nearly collapsed into insolvency five years ago, posted a $61 million profit in 2024 and just signed a Mastercard sponsorship reportedly worth around $100 million annually.
This is the story of how a used-car dealer's instinct for television rights became the scaffolding of a global entertainment monopoly — and how an American media conglomerate, armed with Netflix and a conviction that exclusivity is the enemy of growth, dismantled the old regime and built something worth three times as much. It is also the story of what happens when a sport becomes a platform, when engineering becomes content, and when the most technically advanced competition on the planet learns to let people touch it.
By the Numbers
The Formula One Machine
~$24BEstimated enterprise value (2025)
$3.65B+Total F1 revenue (2024)
$2B+Direct team sponsorship revenue (2024)
~500MUnique TV viewers per season
10Competing teams per season
24Grand Prix races on the 2024 calendar
$8BLiberty Media acquisition price (2017)
400,000U.S. Grand Prix weekend attendance record (2021)
The Trawlerman's Son and the Television Bet
To understand Formula One's commercial architecture, you must understand the person who built it, and to understand that person, you must appreciate how profoundly an entire global sport was shaped by one man's appetites — for control, for deals, for the thrill of extracting value from a counterparty who hadn't yet realized they were the counterparty.
Bernard Charles Ecclestone was born on October 28, 1930, in Ipswich, Suffolk. He completed two paper rounds before school each morning; the proceeds went toward buns he resold at a profit to classmates. This is the founding myth, and like most founding myths it is both too neat and fundamentally accurate. The essential characteristic — an instinct for identifying the spread between what something costs and what someone will pay for it — never changed. It merely scaled.
Ecclestone entered motor racing in the 1950s as a mediocre driver and the manager of a promising British racer named Stuart Lewis-Evans. When Lewis-Evans died in a fiery accident in 1958, Ecclestone vanished from the paddock for nearly a decade. He resurfaced in the late 1960s managing Austrian driver Jochen Rindt, already wealthy from property and used-car dealing — though the precise alchemy of that wealth remained characteristically opaque. ("Property," he would tell anyone who asked.) In 1971 he bought the Brabham team on terms, as his biographer Tom Bower notes, "typically favourable to himself."
What Ecclestone saw at Brabham was not merely a racing team but a market failure. Formula One in the early 1970s was a popular sport run on a commercially amateur basis. Broadcasting was haphazard — individual circuits sold television rights piecemeal, often for negligible sums. There was no unified product, no centralized negotiation, no one capturing the full value of the spectacle. Ecclestone, with the legal assistance of Max Mosley — a qualified barrister, former driver and team owner, and son of the British fascist Oswald Mosley — moved to fix this. In 1974, alongside team principals Frank Williams,
Colin Chapman, and Ken Tyrrell, Ecclestone formed the Formula One Constructors' Association (FOCA) to represent the teams' collective commercial interests.
What followed was the most consequential power consolidation in the history of professional sport. Ecclestone effectively persuaded the teams to let him negotiate television rights on their collective behalf. Then he leased the commercial rights from the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), and assigned them to his own company. Broadcasters were told they had to take every race or none — the championship was a single package. Exposure followed airtime, sponsorship followed exposure, and the money followed everything. In 2001, Ecclestone purchased the commercial rights from the FIA for 100 years at a price that, by any standard, was grotesquely below fair value: $360 million. Two years after that acquisition, the sport's annual income was $729 million. By 2015, it had reached approximately $1.8 billion.
The genius was structural. Ecclestone had inserted himself — and his entities — as the central node through which all commercial value flowed: race hosting fees, broadcast rights, trackside advertising, and the Paddock Club hospitality program. He ran what was functionally a bilateral monopoly: the sole seller of F1 broadcasting rights to networks, and the sole buyer of race-hosting services from circuits and governments. Countries queued to pay escalating fees for the privilege of staging a Grand Prix — Russia agreed to $280 million over seven years for a race in Sochi, concluded in a private 15-minute meeting between Ecclestone and Vladimir Putin — because the reputational economics of hosting an F1 event operated on a logic detached from gate receipts. For aspiring nations, a Grand Prix was a signal of arrival.
His power is absolute and questioned only by those with no regard for their future in the sport.
For deeper biographical detail, Terry Lovell's
Bernie's Game and Max Mosley's own
Formula One and Beyond: The Autobiography offer complementary views from inside the machine — Lovell from the journalist's perimeter, Mosley from the governing-body seat that helped ratify Ecclestone's accumulation of power.
But the same instincts that built the empire contained the seeds of its calcification. Ecclestone's Kensington headquarters contained a handful of staff. He distrusted the internet, had no interest in building a digital audience, and structured the broadcast deals to maximize short-term revenue over long-term fan development. He sold exclusive rights to pay-TV operators because they paid more per household, even as this decision steadily eroded free-to-air viewership in key markets. Global F1 audiences, which had peaked at approximately 600 million in the early 2000s, began to decline. By the time CVC sold to Liberty, the sport was generating massive cash flows from a shrinking, aging audience — the precise profile of a business ripe for a regime change.
The American Takeover
John Malone's Liberty Media is one of those companies whose organizational chart resembles a tax attorney's fever dream. A sprawling holding company with tracking stocks for SiriusXM, the Atlanta Braves, and Formula One, Liberty operates less as a conventional conglomerate than as a permanent capital vehicle for media and entertainment assets that Malone and his longtime president, Greg Maffei, believe are under-monetized.
Maffei — Harvard MBA, former CFO of Microsoft, a dealmaker who speaks in the measured cadences of someone who has read every page of the proxy statement — saw in Formula One exactly what Ecclestone's critics had been muttering about for years. The sport was an unmatched global content platform being operated as a private fiefdom. Its digital presence was negligible. Its American market penetration was embarrassing. Its youngest demographic cohort was graying. And its governance model — one man, one office, handshake deals — was a compliance liability.
Liberty completed the acquisition on January 23, 2017. FWONK shares traded at $28.89 on the Nasdaq the day before the deal's final prospectus supplement was filed. The transaction structure was complex: Liberty offered 12.9 million new shares and facilitated the sale of 27.1 million shares by existing stockholders at $31.00 per share, generating approximately $388.7 million in net proceeds for Liberty and $816.3 million for the selling stockholders after underwriting discounts. The total deal valued F1 at roughly $8 billion, including the assumption of approximately $4.4 billion in debt — leverage of roughly 5.6x EBITDA, near the target range of 5.0x to 5.5x that Liberty would maintain in subsequent years.
Ecclestone was immediately replaced as CEO by Chase Carey, a media executive who had previously served as president of 21st Century Fox and vice chairman of News Corporation. Carey's mandate was transformation, not preservation. He arrived with a specific thesis: Formula One was under-distributed, under-marketed, and under-Americanized. Within months, the new regime began dismantling Ecclestone's approach.
The most visible early move was the reversal of Ecclestone's social-media blackout. Under Ecclestone, teams had been restricted from posting race footage; the logic was that free highlights cannibalized broadcast rights. Liberty took the opposite view — that social-media exposure was a top-of-funnel growth engine that would ultimately drive broadcast and sponsorship value. F1's official social channels grew from negligible followings to among the largest of any global sports property. Short-form video content, behind-the-scenes access, and driver personality pieces flooded Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. The sport stopped treating its own fans as a piracy risk and started treating them as a distribution network.
But the single most consequential decision was one that didn't happen inside Formula One at all. It happened inside Netflix.
The Netflix Inflection
Drive to Survive premiered on Netflix in March 2019. The ten-episode docuseries, produced by Box to Box Films, followed the 2018 F1 season with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access — team principals arguing in the paddock, drivers processing failure in their hotel rooms, radio communications crackling with real-time strategy calls. It was, in the parlance of streaming, a breakout hit.
What made it transformative was not the viewership figures alone — Netflix does not disclose per-title data with precision — but the demographic it reached. Drive to Survive brought Formula One to an audience that had never watched a Grand Prix: American millennials, women who had no prior interest in motorsport, casual sports fans who responded to the interpersonal drama more than the engineering. The series turned team principals like Toto Wolff, Christian Horner, and Guenther Steiner into recognizable television personalities. It turned mid-grid rivalries — the kind of battle between a sixth-place team and a seventh-place team that traditional F1 coverage would have ignored — into narrative arcs with emotional stakes.
We were a very exclusive sport, 'look, don't touch,' and Liberty brought a new way of thinking. We figured out how to let people in the tent to engage with the sport.
The American effect was immediate and measurable. ESPN's F1 viewership in the United States surged, with average race audiences roughly doubling in the years following the series' premiere. The 2021 U.S. Grand Prix at Austin's Circuit of the Americas set a record as the largest race in F1 history, with total attendance of 400,000 over the three-day weekend. By 2023, the calendar included a second American race in Miami and a third in Las Vegas — the latter representing F1's most ambitious event launch in decades, with the Las Vegas Strip itself converted into a circuit. Countries that had never previously hosted races were suddenly in negotiation; the American market, which Ecclestone had treated as optional, became the sport's fastest-growing revenue source.
The structural genius of the Netflix partnership was that it converted an opaque, technically complex sport into character-driven entertainment without dumbing down the actual product. The racing didn't change. The engineering didn't simplify. What changed was the frame — viewers were given a reason to care about outcomes before they understood the aerodynamics. And once they cared, the aerodynamics became fascinating.
For a comprehensive visual history of the sport's evolution,
Formula 1: The Official History offers a richly illustrated counterpoint to the Netflix-era narrative.
The Economics of Scarcity
Formula One's commercial model rests on a paradox that would make most media executives uncomfortable: the product is deliberately scarce. There are exactly 10 teams, 20 drivers, and — as of 2024 — 24 races per season. There is no relegation, no expansion franchise process (until very recently), and no minor league. The barriers to entry are not merely financial but regulatory: a prospective new team must be approved by the FIA and pay a substantial anti-dilution fee to existing teams.
This scarcity is the foundation of the sport's pricing power. Race-hosting fees — the amounts governments and promoters pay Formula One for the right to stage a Grand Prix — have escalated relentlessly, from tens of millions under Ecclestone to figures reportedly exceeding $60 million for premium new events. Las Vegas, Miami, and the various Middle Eastern venues operate on economics where the hosting fee is a fraction of the broader economic impact the event generates for the host city or sovereign sponsor. Qatar signed a 10-year hosting agreement in 2021. Saudi Arabia's deal reportedly runs through the 2030s. The calculus is less "will this race be profitable?" than "what is the reputational and tourism yield of associating our brand with this platform?"
Broadcast rights follow a similar logic. Liberty inherited Ecclestone's pay-TV-heavy strategy and has gradually rebalanced it toward a hybrid model that preserves premium rights fees while expanding reach. A landmark deal with Apple, reportedly worth approximately $2 billion over a decade, will see Apple TV+ become a primary broadcast partner in the United States starting in 2026. The deal signals F1's conviction that it has the content quality and audience growth trajectory to command streaming-era economics — and that the old model of selling exclusively to legacy broadcasters is leaving money on the table.
Key media rights milestones under Liberty Media
2017Liberty Media completes F1 acquisition; begins dismantling social-media restrictions
2018ESPN secures U.S. broadcast rights, initially for minimal fees
2019Drive to Survive premieres on Netflix; U.S. viewership begins surging
2021U.S. Grand Prix draws record 400,000 weekend attendance
2022Canal+ deal extended in France through 2024; multiple Asian broadcast renewals
2023Las Vegas Grand Prix debuts; F1 adds third U.S. race to calendar
2025Apple TV+ deal announced for U.S. rights beginning 2026, reportedly ~$2B over 10 years
Team economics operate on a different stratum entirely. Each team receives a share of Formula One's commercial revenue — distributed through a complex waterfall that rewards both historical success and competitive performance — but the primary economic engine for most teams is sponsorship. The sport generated more than $2 billion in direct team sponsorship in 2024. LVMH signed on as F1's global luxury partner. PepsiCo, LEGO, Disney, and Hello Kitty have entered as mainstream consumer sponsors. The sponsor mix has shifted from the cigarette companies and watch brands of the Ecclestone era toward technology firms (Oracle, AWS, CrowdStrike, Mastercard), luxury houses (LVMH), and consumer brands seeking the 18-to-34 demographic that Drive to Survive delivered.
The Concorde Agreement and the Art of Coopetition
The relationship between Formula One (the commercial entity) and the 10 teams that compete in it is governed by the Concorde Agreement — a private contract, renegotiated roughly every five years, that specifies revenue distribution, governance rights, technical regulations, and the terms under which teams agree to show up and race. It is, in effect, the sport's constitution, and like most constitutions, it is the product of decades of power struggles, threats of secession, and uneasy compromise.
The latest agreement, signed in 2021 and running through 2025 (with a new negotiation for 2026 and beyond underway), introduced several structural reforms that Liberty championed to address what had become a competitiveness crisis. The most significant was a cost cap — initially set at $145 million per team per season, excluding driver salaries, engine costs, and a handful of other items — designed to prevent the wealthiest teams (Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull) from simply outspending the field into irrelevance. Alongside the cost cap came a more equitable revenue-distribution model that reduced the "heritage payments" — lump sums paid to Ferrari and a few other legacy teams regardless of performance — and directed more money to lower-finishing teams.
The logic was straightforward and borrowed from American sports: competitive balance drives narrative tension, narrative tension drives viewership, viewership drives rights fees, and rights fees fund the entire ecosystem. The NFL had understood this for decades. Formula One was learning it in real time.
If I had to put what was top of the list, it was people and specifically our culture. It's about getting everyone to understand how they contribute to a common mission.
The cost cap's early effects were dramatic. McLaren — Zak Brown's team, which had nearly gone insolvent during the pandemic and sat at the back of the midfield as recently as 2018 — won the Constructors' Championship in both 2024 and 2025. The cap compressed the performance gap between the richest and most modest teams, making the midfield battles that Drive to Survive had dramatized into genuine championship-relevant fights. Where once three teams competed for wins and seven competed for dignity, the new economics created a world where a well-run smaller team could punch far above its historical weight — provided it optimized culture, aerodynamic innovation, and the allocation of its capped budget.
The Concorde Agreement also governs the sport's approach to new entrants. General Motors' Cadillac brand was approved in 2024 to join the grid as an 11th team beginning in 2026, marking the first genuine expansion in over a decade. The anti-dilution fee — reportedly $200 million — represents both a barrier and a signal: Formula One's franchise values have reached a level where existing teams view new entrants as a threat to their revenue share, while the governing body and commercial rights holder see expansion as a growth lever.
The Machine: 300 Sensors and 300 Milliseconds
Beneath the entertainment layer — the Netflix drama, the celebrity paddock access, the Las Vegas spectacle — Formula One remains, at its core, a technology competition of extraordinary intensity. Each car carries more than 300 sensors measuring everything from brake temperature to tire pressure to the aerodynamic force on the nose cone. During a race, each car generates approximately 1.5 terabytes of data. It takes less than 300 milliseconds for sensor data from the farthest track (Australia) to reach a team's engineering operations room in England, where a second team of 30 to 60 engineers runs real-time simulations to determine race strategy.
The cars themselves are valued at more than $9 million each. A steering wheel alone costs approximately $77,000 — packed with knobs, buttons, and paddles that control everything from brake bias to energy recovery to a hydration system that delivers liquid to the driver through the helmet. Yet for all the data the car generates, the driver sees almost none of it in real time. "We keep it to a minimum," Alan Peasland, then head of technical partnerships at Red Bull Racing, explained. "They are maxed out on their cognitive capacity driving these cars."
This engineering arms race has always been the sport's DNA, but under Liberty's regime, it has become something else as well: a marketing asset. F1's technology partnerships — with AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, and others — are not merely sponsorship deals; they are commercial agreements in which technology companies provide computational infrastructure to teams in exchange for branding rights and the ability to tell a story about their platforms performing under the most demanding conditions on Earth. When AWS runs F1 Insights graphics during a broadcast, showing predicted pit-stop strategies or tire-degradation curves, the company is advertising its cloud computing capabilities to the most affluent audience in global sport. The data layer is the product and the marketing simultaneously.
McLaren Applied Technologies, the racing team's technology-consulting arm, has exported its real-time data-analysis systems to industries far removed from motorsport. ConocoPhillips adopted McLaren's systems for use on oil rigs — environments where, as on a race track, analyzing enormous amounts of information in real time can mean the difference between safety and catastrophe. "We measure whatever we need to manage during the race, and then we model to get the predictive intelligence on how the cars are going to perform," Geoff McGrath, McLaren's former chief innovation officer, noted.
The technology story also functions as a retention mechanism. The 2026 regulation changes — the most sweeping in a generation — will introduce new engine specifications emphasizing greater electric-power deployment, along with revised aerodynamic rules designed to promote closer racing. These regulations serve a dual purpose: they create a natural reset point at which any team, regardless of current form, can leapfrog the field through superior engineering of the new package; and they provide a narrative arc for fans and media. The "2026 rules" have become a character in the sport's ongoing story, a looming disruption that every team principal references in every press conference. The regulations are content.
The Wolff Method and the Mercedes Dynasty
No team better illustrates Formula One's strategic dynamics — or its recent competitive upheaval — than Mercedes-AMG Petronas. Between 2014 and 2021, Mercedes won eight consecutive Constructors' Championships, one of the most dominant stretches in the history of professional sport. The architect of that dynasty was Toto Wolff, an Austrian-born former racing driver and investment manager who acquired a 30% stake in the team in 2013 and assumed the role of team principal and CEO.
Wolff — tall, intense, with a background in private equity and a competitive temperament that oscillates between Socratic calm and volcanic impatience — ran Mercedes with a management philosophy that borrowed heavily from high-performance organizational theory. In a 2022 Harvard Business Review profile by Anita Elberse, Wolff's approach was distilled to a set of principles: radical transparency in debriefing, a "no-blame" culture that incentivized engineers to report failures immediately rather than conceal them, and a relentless focus on continuous marginal improvement — finding hundredths of a second across hundreds of variables.
The dynasty ended, or at least paused, in 2022, when a regulation change reshuffled the competitive order and Red Bull's Max Verstappen emerged as the dominant force. Mercedes struggled with the new "ground effect" aerodynamic rules and spent two seasons mired in the midfield — a humbling experience for an organization that had forgotten what losing felt like. Wolff's response was characteristic: he resisted the temptation to blow up the engineering structure, instead treating the slump as a diagnostic opportunity. The team's recovery, while incomplete, has been steady.
The recent sale of a 15% stake to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz — valuing Mercedes' F1 operation at $6 billion — represents a new phase in team economics. F1 teams are no longer merely competitive ventures funded by wealthy enthusiasts and sponsor revenue; they are appreciating assets in a rising market, with valuations that now rival top-tier North American professional sports franchises. Wolff, who still holds a significant personal stake, has executed one of the great value-creation plays in sports history — buying into a team for a reported low nine-figure sum in 2013 and presiding over a roughly 20x increase in valuation over 12 years.
The McLaren Resurrection
If Mercedes illustrates the challenge of sustaining dominance, McLaren illustrates something arguably harder: rebuilding from near death.
When Zak Brown arrived at McLaren in 2018, the team was in existential trouble. A failed engine partnership with Honda had produced years of humiliating results. The team's commercial revenue was declining in lockstep with its on-track performance. The broader McLaren Group — which included the supercar business and applied technologies division — was hemorrhaging cash. By 2020, the pandemic pushed McLaren to the brink of insolvency, requiring emergency loans and the sale of the team's historic Woking headquarters in a leaseback arrangement.
Brown — an American, a former motorsport marketing executive, a man who collects racing memorabilia with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loves the sport rather than merely profits from it — took an approach that was culturally antithetical to McLaren's historical self-image. McLaren had been aristocratic, insular, convinced of its own superiority even as results contradicted that belief. Brown opened the doors. He hired aggressively from rival teams. He invested in culture — not the performative kind, but the operational kind, the kind that means an engineer in aerodynamics understands how her work connects to the race strategist's decisions and the commercial team's ability to sell sponsorship.
While we have let's call it a thousand people, 600 of those touch the race car. It's the other 400 that are equally as important that add performance to the racing team, because without them doing an excellent job, we wouldn't be able to put the team together.
The results have been staggering. McLaren won the Constructors' Championship in 2024 and again in 2025 — back-to-back titles for a team that had been fighting for survival five years earlier. The team went from facing insolvency to posting a $61 million profit in 2024, with a new Mastercard sponsorship reportedly worth approximately $100 million annually. Drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have become two of the sport's most marketable athletes. The McLaren turnaround is, in miniature, the Formula One turnaround: a legacy brand that found a new audience by dropping the pretense of exclusivity and embracing accessibility without sacrificing competitive intensity.
The Geopolitics of the Grid
Formula One's calendar is, in a very real sense, a map of global power and ambition. The sport races in 24 locations across five continents, and the composition of that calendar tells you as much about the state of the world as any diplomatic summit.
The Ecclestone era established the template: emerging economies and petrostates paid premium hosting fees for the legitimacy a Grand Prix conferred. Bahrain (since 2004), Abu Dhabi (since 2009), Singapore (since 2008), and Russia (2014–2022) all joined the calendar through sovereign economic calculus rather than organic fan demand. Saudi Arabia entered in 2021, Qatar in 2021 with a 10-year extension through the 2030s. The hosting fees these nations pay — reportedly $50 million to $65 million or more per event — represent a form of soft-power expenditure that the sport's commercial entity has been happy to facilitate.
Liberty has continued this approach while adding a layer of corporate responsibility rhetoric that Ecclestone never bothered with. F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali has stated the sport's commitment to upholding human rights and employs independent auditors to assess conditions in host countries. Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion, has been less diplomatic: "I can't say whether or not I know if it has got worse but I am not sure it has got better while we have been coming all these years," he said of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in 2023. A group of 20 cross-party UK MPs, in concert with the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, have called for an independent inquiry into the sport's activities in countries with questionable human rights records.
The tension is structural and unresolvable within the sport's current economic model. Sovereign hosting fees from the Middle East and Asia represent a significant share of Formula One's race-promotion revenue. Reducing the calendar's exposure to these markets would require either finding replacement revenue at comparable rates — unlikely, given that European circuits operate on thinner economics — or accepting lower overall revenue. Liberty, as a publicly traded company with tracking-stock obligations, faces the same constraints any corporation faces when ethical concerns collide with shareholder returns.
The calendar also contains a built-in geographic tension between heritage and growth. Monaco, Monza, Silverstone, and Spa-Francorchamps are the sport's spiritual homes — circuits with decades of history and passionate local audiences — but they generate a fraction of the hosting fees that Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia pay. Every calendar slot given to a heritage race is a slot not given to a higher-paying sovereign client. Liberty has navigated this by expanding the calendar itself — from 21 races in 2017 to 24 in 2024 — but there are limits to how many weekends teams and personnel can absorb, and the logistical and environmental costs of the traveling circus are nontrivial.
The Adrian Newey Question
If Formula One is, at its deepest level, a technology competition, then the sport's most valuable asset is not a car, a driver, or a broadcast deal. It is a human brain.
Adrian Newey — bespectacled, soft-spoken, a trained aeronautical engineer who designs racing cars with a pencil on a drawing board in an era of computational fluid dynamics — has won 14 drivers' championships and 12 constructors' championships across three teams: Williams, McLaren, and Red Bull. He is, by any reasonable measure, the most successful designer in the history of the sport. His departure from Red Bull in 2024 and arrival at Aston Martin in early 2025, on a five-year deal reportedly worth up to £30 million per year including bonuses, triggered an immediate restructuring of Aston Martin's technical hierarchy. By November 2025, Newey was named team principal — Aston Martin's fourth in four years — displacing the recently appointed Andy Cowell.
The Newey situation illustrates a peculiarity of Formula One's competitive structure: individual talent can disproportionately determine outcomes in ways that have no analogue in other team sports. A single engineer's intuitions about aerodynamic philosophy can be worth tenths of a second per lap — an eternity in a sport where races are decided by hundredths. When Newey left Red Bull, the team's performance declined almost immediately. When he joined Aston Martin, the team's valuation and sponsorship pipeline surged before he had touched a single drawing.
Lawrence Stroll, Aston Martin's billionaire owner — a fashion-industry veteran who made his fortune distributing Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors in Canada before acquiring the Aston Martin automotive brand — has bet heavily on Newey as the centerpiece of a multi-billion-dollar investment in facilities, Honda engine partnership, and personnel. The 2026 regulation reset, which will render all current car designs obsolete, is the fulcrum: if Newey can design a superior car for the new rules, Aston Martin could leapfrog the field. If he cannot, Stroll will have spent approximately £150 million on a designer's salary alone during a period of uncertain returns.
The Cadillac Gambit and the 11th Team
For decades, Formula One operated as a closed shop. Ten teams, no more, and prospective entrants were quietly discouraged by a combination of regulatory barriers, anti-dilution fees, and the resistance of existing teams who saw each new entry as a threat to their share of commercial revenue. Ecclestone was particularly effective at keeping the gate shut; he understood that scarcity protected pricing power.
Liberty's decision to approve General Motors' Cadillac brand as an 11th team, entering in 2026, represents a philosophical departure. The anti-dilution fee — reportedly $200 million — is steep, but GM is not a wealthy hobbyist. It is the largest American automaker, and its entry brings with it the possibility of factory-backed American engineering competing at the highest level of global motorsport for the first time since the 1970s. The marketing implications for F1's American expansion are obvious: an American team, with an American car brand, competing in three American races per season, broadcasting on an American streaming platform (Apple TV+).
The existing teams' reactions have been mixed. Some see the dilution of their revenue share. Others, like Brown, have cautiously welcomed the expansion as a signal that F1's franchise values justify the entry cost — a rising-tide argument. The more interesting question is whether 11 becomes 12, and whether Formula One's deliberate scarcity begins to erode under the pressure of a sport that is suddenly, for the first time in decades, too popular for its own supply constraints.
The Strip at Night
On a Saturday night in November 2023, the Las Vegas Strip was closed to traffic and converted into a Formula One circuit. The cars screamed past the Bellagio fountains, through a section of parking lot behind the casino, and down a 1.2-mile straight that is, in normal life, Las Vegas Boulevard. The grandstands were packed. LVMH-branded hospitality suites charged six figures for the weekend. Lewis Hamilton's collaboration with Soho House — a pop-up experience called House 44 — offered an elite tier above the already elite Paddock Club. American Express cardholders sampled artisanal caviar. Hello Kitty had a branded activation.
Ecclestone had dismissed Las Vegas. He had dismissed the American market. He had dismissed young audiences, social media, Netflix, and the very idea that Formula One should try to be accessible. Liberty had taken his sport — his creation, his monopoly, his handshake empire — and tripled its value by doing exactly the opposite of everything he believed.
In October 2023, the man who had built all of it pleaded guilty to tax fraud at Southwark Crown Court in London. He was given a 17-month custodial sentence, suspended for two years, and ordered to pay HMRC £652.6 million, plus £74,000 in prosecution costs, after admitting to failing to declare £400 million in assets. He was 93.
The cars kept racing.
