Formula 1, every mention

Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired Mar 5, 2026 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 0:01 David Rosenthal I was just listening to the F-One theme song to get pumped up.
• ▶ 18:48 David Rosenthal There's another very different founding pillar number two of F-One taking place in Monaco, which is that in 1956, the sovereign Prince Rainier III of Monaco, as we talked about at great length in our Hermes episode, married the American…
• ▶ 19:13 David Rosenthal All of the old world luxury and heritage and legitimacy of Europe with the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood and the new world in a way that's still very much part of F-One today.
• ▶ 20:12 David Rosenthal Eventually, many, not most of the F-one drivers start moving to Monaco and becoming stars themselves.
• ▶ 21:13 David Rosenthal This was so far ahead of its time back in the 19 fifties and also totally by accident, which leads us then to the third Italian founding pillar of F one Ferrari.
• ▶ 21:26 David Rosenthal Undeniably the most important team company and person of this first age of F one.
• ▶ 21:52 David Rosenthal Ferrari itself didn't start making cars until after World War II, but of course, when the F-One championship series starts in 1950, Enzo has to join.
• ▶ 22:04 David Rosenthal Only team that's been part of every single F-One season going all the way back to the beginning.
• ▶ 22:10 Ben Gilbert There's a funny thing here where you might think, oh, Formula One, that's the big established series that legitimizes an automaker by being a part of it.
• ▶ 22:22 Ben Gilbert Ferrari participating in Formula One legitimizes the series.
• ▶ 22:27 Ben Gilbert Ferrari, if they ever decided to stop racing in Formula One, would make people go,
• ▶ 22:35 David Rosenthal Formula One is actually the marriage of two separate things, the teams and the racetracks.
• ▶ 22:59 David Rosenthal Formula One the organization is doing is they are bringing this set of teams and this set of racetracks on the calendar, this set of Grand Prix together.
• ▶ 24:23 David Rosenthal Because, as he's participating in F-One,
• ▶ 24:25 David Rosenthal Enzo's also hand-making cars for all the European royalty and all the American movie stars that are flowing through F-One.
• ▶ 24:33 David Rosenthal And so, just like the equestrian heritage kind of serves as the, like, legitimizing soul of Hermes, motor racing in F-One serves as the legitimizing soul of Ferrari.
• ▶ 24:57 David Rosenthal For the purposes of F-One, they really were that unifying factor that pulled together the glitz and the glamour and the luxury and the hardcore racing.
• ▶ 25:51 Ben Gilbert In the fifties, Mercedes actually was a major player in Formula One and auto racing, but while they were racing one of their cars in Le Mans, it actually crashed and killed 82 people.
• ▶ 26:06 Ben Gilbert They actually pulled out of, I think, all racing, and they didn't return to Formula One for another 40 years.
• ▶ 26:19 Ben Gilbert I mean, you had 14 deaths in F-I alone, not even counting other racing series or audience attendees across this first decade.
• ▶ 27:44 David Rosenthal There's a great quote from another team owner during this era and it goes, Formula One is Ferrari and Ferrari is Formula One.
• ▶ 28:16 David Rosenthal Bernie Eccleston, the, uh, supremo, impresario, owner of F-One.
• ▶ 28:25 Ben Gilbert Owner of some part of F-One, but controller of all of F-One.
• ▶ 34:10 David Rosenthal Formula One.
• ▶ 34:11 David Rosenthal So in the mid-sixties, Bernie starts hanging around with F-One drivers, and being the wheeler-dealer that he is, he pretty quickly becomes the agent for a few of his pals, negotiating better deals for them with their teams for their…
• ▶ 34:51 David Rosenthal He's on top of the standings in F one.
• ▶ 35:56 David Rosenthal Today, I think every single F-One team is worth
• ▶ 48:36 David Rosenthal Of protracted negotiations between Bernie and the Constructors Association and the FIA that finally get hammered out in 1981 with the first Concorde Agreement, which is still the name of the roughly every five-year agreements that govern…
• ▶ 49:40 David Rosenthal It's not just Formula One.
• ▶ 49:42 David Rosenthal It's just that Formula One is the pinnacle of racing.
• ▶ 50:34 David Rosenthal And two, Bernie and the Constructors Association will control all rights and income from any future televising of F-one races for the next five seasons.
• ▶ 53:07 David Rosenthal National public broadcasters, including the BBC in the UK and says, Hey, you have a lot of F one fans in your respective countries.
• ▶ 54:20 Ben Gilbert The way that most of the broadcasters around the world take F one is they take one main feed that is produced and then they do more stuff on top of it.
• ▶ 54:33 David Rosenthal I'll fund the investment upfront personally to create a central single television feed for each race that formula one
• ▶ 54:46 Ben Gilbert What is formula one at this point?
• ▶ 54:49 David Rosenthal What is formula one?
• ▶ 57:22 Ben Gilbert To Formula One owned entities.
• ▶ 1:05:45 Ben Gilbert So we thought a fun thing to do this segment would be to share one of the F-One tidbits that you shared with us when we were in the paddock club together.
• ▶ 1:06:02 Colin Fleming An F-One driver is operating at fighter pilot-like cognitive load for 90 minutes straight.
• ▶ 1:06:24 David Rosenthal We're talking a lot this episode about the specific technologies that were leaps forward in different F-one eras.
• ▶ 1:06:54 Ben Gilbert Now from the ServiceNow angle, I'm very curious why you decided to, uh, sponsor an F-One team in Aston Martin.
• ▶ 1:08:40 Ben Gilbert They almost look like early Formula One, the cars that were just these like long tubes, but with like little hints of what Formula One would become on them.
• ▶ 1:09:07 Ben Gilbert Crazy F-one cars that were technically within regulation when they were first tried before all these tactics were made illegal.
• ▶ 1:10:45 Ben Gilbert And what followed is the stuff of F one lore.
• ▶ 1:14:46 Ben Gilbert So engines over the years have gotten way more fuel efficient, with only 50% of energy in an F-One engine lost to heat, compared to 70 or 80% in a road car being lost to heat.
• ▶ 1:15:01 Ben Gilbert F-One teams care a lot about because if it's more efficient, you can carry less fuel, have a lighter car, go faster.
• ▶ 1:15:30 Ben Gilbert The F-One cars are that light because of all the carbon bodywork.
• ▶ 1:16:49 David Rosenthal And a lot of that technology got perfected in F one.
• ▶ 1:16:56 Ben Gilbert That came from F-one cars, but I think it's more like the technology was sort of iterated and perfected, or they would explore new material science or something in F-one cars that would eventually go into road cars.
• ▶ 1:48:32 Ben Gilbert This is important to know the CVC slash Bernie buy-in to this new F-one entity is about nine hundred million of equity.
• ▶ 1:49:27 David Rosenthal They don't pay nearly as much in race fees to F-One, but they're sort of there to build and maintain the brand.
• ▶ 1:49:44 David Rosenthal Huge fees to F-One in order to have their races on the calendar.
• ▶ 1:50:48 David Rosenthal So India is forty million a year just in race fees to F one.
• ▶ 1:50:55 David Rosenthal They commit to a billion dollar total F one investment over the coming years, including constructing a whole new track from scratch in the desert outside the city.
• ▶ 1:51:35 David Rosenthal Bernie and F-one
• ▶ 1:52:06 David Rosenthal To construct a new two hundred and seventy million dollar F-one track around the Olympic Park.
• ▶ 1:52:13 David Rosenthal And pay F-one fifty million dollars a year for seven years to host the race.
• ▶ 2:36:23 David Rosenthal Mercedes, F-One, this is what happens.
• ▶ 2:36:48 David Rosenthal Probably the best Formula One team executive in history.
• ▶ 2:39:27 David Rosenthal That is, what, twice as much as all the cash that Bernie pulled out of F-One in its entirety during his heyday?
• ▶ 2:39:38 David Rosenthal And speaking of valuations and Bernie and cashing out, in 2016, as all this is taking place, F-One finally lands in the right set of hands to shepherd the sport going forward.
• ▶ 2:40:04 David Rosenthal Reacquired F one, the league.
• ▶ 2:40:08 David Rosenthal CVC starts reselling minority pieces of F-one to other asset managers out there, including BlackRock, um, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank at increasing valuations.
• ▶ 2:40:24 David Rosenthal They also load F-one up with a bunch of debt again and pull cash out, actually put four billion dollars of debt on the league.
• ▶ 2:40:36 David Rosenthal And the cash flows are growing at F-one, like, thanks to the new races and the increasing TV contracts, et cetera, et cetera.
• ▶ 2:41:20 Ben Gilbert What is Formula One at this point?
• ▶ 2:41:50 Ben Gilbert Bernie had secured the 100 year commercial rights to Formula One from the FIA.
• ▶ 2:42:07 Ben Gilbert The asset is the right to run the business of what FIA defines as Formula One.
• ▶ 2:42:33 David Rosenthal So in September of 2016, it finally gets announced that the American media company Liberty Media is acquiring F-One for 4.4 billion dollars of equity value and assuming all of the outstanding debt that the company has for a combined total…
• ▶ 2:43:10 David Rosenthal They initially acquire a like 18, 19% stake in F one from CVC.
• ▶ 2:44:04 Ben Gilbert F-one.
• ▶ 2:44:14 Ben Gilbert At this point, like, 90% of Liberty itself is Formula One, and the stock is actually Formula One.
• ▶ 2:44:22 Ben Gilbert It's like they spun out everything else that was left, and so the holding company is actually basically Formula One now.
• ▶ 2:44:33 David Rosenthal Is that former Fox and News Corp executive Chase Carey, who had been president and COO of News Corp, would become chairman of F-One, but that Bernie would remain as CEO.
• ▶ 2:45:29 David Rosenthal The whole thesis is that Formula One is this incredible sport, incredible fan base, incredible asset.
• ▶ 2:46:40 David Rosenthal So pretty quickly when Chase and Liberty come in, um, it becomes clear that there's not enough room for two bosses in F-One of Chase being chairman and Bernie remaining as CEO.
• ▶ 2:47:11 David Rosenthal He will become honorary chairman emeritus and an advisor to the board of directors of F-One, but not actually on the board.
• ▶ 2:47:55 Ben Gilbert What year did he sort of start becoming the steward of formula one?
• ▶ 2:48:46 David Rosenthal Thanks to Red Bull and Mercedes, teams had started to become more successful financially, more business-minded on their own, but the relationship with Formula One, the league, was still, like, highly contentious through all of this.
• ▶ 2:53:39 Ben Gilbert But the real outlier, Mercedes does an estimated two hundred million in operating income from Formula One now.
• ▶ 2:56:15 David Rosenthal The whole calendar, as we talked about a minute ago, was just designed to maximize race fee payments to F one.
• ▶ 2:56:59 David Rosenthal Anything with F one, the league.
• ▶ 2:57:10 Ben Gilbert You walk up to F one as a race promoter and say, hi, I'd like to have a race, please.
• ▶ 2:59:02 David Rosenthal When F-One comes to your country, comes to your city, it is an entire weekend that should be treated just like the Super Bowl.
• ▶ 3:00:21 David Rosenthal We've alluded to this a little bit, but, and Red Bull and Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton were starting to push the edges, but like F-One had a huge social media problem.
• ▶ 3:00:33 David Rosenthal Bernie and F-One had been doing everything they could to keep the sport in sort of the heyday state for them of the mid nineties, where
• ▶ 3:01:13 David Rosenthal Global appeal was the first real F one driver to become a legit celebrity in America.
• ▶ 3:01:19 Ben Gilbert The first superstar black athlete in formula one, like first black athlete period.
• ▶ 3:01:49 David Rosenthal That Bernie kept sending him to take down posts on his Instagram because he was quote, illegally distributing F one's intellectual property.
• ▶ 3:02:27 David Rosenthal Video game studio in the UK that had been making official F-one video games for several years.
• ▶ 3:02:33 David Rosenthal Shortly after Liberty acquires F-one, that studio gets acquired by Electronic Arts, makers of Madden and FIFA that do billions of dollars of revenue for EA and their league partners every year.
• ▶ 3:03:06 David Rosenthal Well, what's the equivalent of the NFL draft for F one?
• ▶ 3:03:20 Ben Gilbert I mean, all the sports journalists who cover F one right now can't stop writing about
• ▶ 3:15:16 David Rosenthal So if you look at F one viewership in the U S
• ▶ 3:15:29 David Rosenthal In 2021, that has doubled in three years to over a million Americans watching F-one Grand Prix.
• ▶ 3:16:09 David Rosenthal like, the idea that 3.1 million Americans would be watching an F-one race before Drive to Survive, totally insane.
• ▶ 3:16:21 David Rosenthal Globally, F-One added seventy three million new fans between 20 20 and 20 21 alone during the COVID period.
• ▶ 3:17:01 David Rosenthal But there's all sorts of other ways that fans can engage with F-One beyond the races.
• ▶ 3:17:07 David Rosenthal And then probably the most obviously directly attributable stat to Drive to Survive, the percentage of F-One audience
• ▶ 3:17:24 Ben Gilbert Of F-one fans or women.