Formula 1

“Since the sport began, over 100 separate teams have entered and exited the competition, mostly because they went bankrupt”

“Each car costs twenty million dollars to make and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.”

“It's actually the world's most popular annual sporting series with over eight hundred and twenty seven million viewers.”

“But there's also no chance that they would ever get rid of Monaco.”

“Ferrari is the only team that's been part of every single F-One season going all the way back to the beginning.”

“Nobody writes anything down, because Bernie never writes anything down, and when the dust finally gets settled, and many decades later, all of the books and stuff become public through a whole series of court cases, turns out Bernie's actually taking eight per…”

“Rather than you taking 30%, I'll pay you five million dollars a year, going up by one million every year, up to nine million at the end of this term, in exchange for your percentage of the TV.”

“Tobacco company advertising poured 4.5 billion dollars into team sponsorships in F one over the years.”

“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.”

“Williams team comes along and realizes, oh, This technology is finally good enough for us to try to automate some of the systems in the car in real time. Let's add software, baby. This is the early nineties. I mean, this is pre-internet. So they come up with t…”

“For a long period of time, F-One drivers actually refused to wear their seatbelts because they wanted to get thrown out of the car so they didn't catch fire after it crashed.”

“And so, interestingly, F-one racing today is not that much faster than it was in 1950. The top speed is like 40 miles per hour faster than the old top speed.”

“This continued until Liberty takes over in 2017. He had a few lawyers and finance people to make it all function, but there was no marketing department for F-one. There was no Research or data department. There was no sales department besides Bernie.”

“So at various times, Bernie was serving in a principal role in all of the major F-one stakeholder categories. Team owner, race promoter, official FIA representative, and of course, CEO and owner of FOPA and de facto the league itself. And I think at every poin…”

“By this point in time, Bernie's various companies, and there are even many more than we have talked about on this episode, just for simplicity. Collectively, they're earning about two hundred and fifty million British pounds a year in revenue, and they have 50…”

“All told CVC and Bernie for his portion spend about two billion dollars acquiring 100% ownership. They finance 1.1 billion of it with another set of debt. So they put nine hundred million of cash equity into the deal”

“Abu Dhabi is the biggest. 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.”

“So they sign a deal with Russia. And of course it's a deal with the state. You know, anytime you're negotiating with Russia, you're negotiating with the state. To construct a new two hundred and seventy million dollar F-one track around the Olympic Park. And p…”

“The top teams are spending like four to five hundred million dollars a year on their cars.”

“In 2009, eight of the 10 teams threatened to pull out of the sport. And start a rival breakaway league called FOTA, the Formula One Teams Association.”

“But by 2016, CVC is now down to a 35% ownership stake. They've pulled out a total of four and a half billion dollars of cash through a combination of the debt and equity sales. Remember, they and Bernie only put in nine hundred million to start.”

“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 enterprise value of e…”

“The average revenue per team today in 2026 is about four hundred and thirty million.”

“Mercedes does an estimated two hundred million in operating income from Formula One now.”

“I mean, when Liberty came in, there was so much mistrust with the race promoters that other than the just straight economic fee payments, none of the races shared. Anything with F one, the league. So no data on fan attendance, no marketing strategies, nothing.”

“Austin has been really smart about this, the Circuit of the Americas. They've landed Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Sting, Eminem, Garth Brooks. They really do turn it into this just giant festival.”

“F-One takes a big leap of faith and gives Netflix and box-to-box films complete creative control and Final Cut”

“Eventually, it would become the number one Netflix show in 93 countries at peak”

“In 2018, before Drive to Survive launched, about half a million Americans watched races. In 2021, that has doubled in three years to over a million Americans watching F-one Grand Prix.”

“Globally, F-One added seventy three million new fans between 20 20 and 20 21 alone during the COVID period. That's a 20% increase in fans during COVID.”

“I don't think they will pursue this model elsewhere. If I'm reading the tea leaves right now, these things take a long time to pay back. And I think they've sunk over half a billion dollars into building this out.”

“So the LVMH deal is a hundred million dollars per year, and that's the Louis Vuitton banners everywhere, Tag Heuer being the official timekeeping sponsor, the LV trunk, and of course they spray Moet all over each other on the podiums.”

“If you bring a client to an F-one race, like ServiceNow brought us, you spend three days together, and the race is only like two hours, and actually in the race there's not that much you need to pay attention to most of the time, that there's some really excit…”

“Right after Liberty takes over in 2017, they do a deal with ESPN, much like Bernie's original European Broadcasting Union deal. Liberty says, will you please show all of the F-one races on the calendar on ESPN? We will give it to you for zero dollars.”

“US viewership is only 1.3 million people actually watching any given race with a peak of 3.1 million at the Miami Grand Prix. That is half of what NASCAR averages. Like this is not even the number one motor sport in the US and actually quite far from the numbe…”

“Cadillac is shelling out four hundred and fifty million dollars in a, like an expansion fee effectively just to join the grid.”

“Whereas Ford is coming in with Red Bull, one of the top teams, like they're going to be on the podium from season one.”

“During the 2019 season, the logistics operation, moving these cars in the circus around, accounts for 64 times the emission of the cars themselves, even when you include practice, Qualifying and races.”

“This is holding the sport back. In my opinion, you get a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop at the top and the bottom, and so we're sort of stuck in this world right now where the teams on the front four or five of the grid stay there and the …”

“Every team is now north of a billion dollars with the least valuable team Haas at 1.5 billion.”

“Liberty bought in 2017 the company for eight billion with 4.4 billion of that being equity value. Today in 2026 it is a market cap of twenty two billion with an enterprise value of twenty five billion.”

“The percent of F-one management revenue that goes to teams, which was 50% back in 2018 and has shrunk to about 37% last year.”

“In other words, the teams are already making 72% of what they would make if they owned the league, because there's just not that much profit left over after all the costs to run the league, after selling all the sponsorships at the league level, general overhe…”

“And so the thing that I would throw out here is I think skill or operational excellence is actually more important in building a successful F-one team than strategy, because a lot of these ways that you can win via strategy have a short window that closes When…”

“So there are eight hundred and thirty million global F one fans for a league that does 3.4 billion and teams that generate another two billion or so on top of what the league pays them. So that's About five and a half billion dollars gross total revenue across…”

“I think there's a related bull case of a champion or champion level female driver emerging in the coming years. It feels like that's. Gonna happen. Has to happen. Should happen.”

“A lot of the low hanging fruit that was available for Liberty to do is levers that they have pulled. So everything from here is going to be a little bit more of like a multi-decade slog than some easy, quick fixes.”

“Well, we'll do some of those actually. So you'll see some of them coming. Already in the works.”

“Netflix pays F one a pittance for rights, apparently single digit millions for that”

“Female fans now account for three in four new fans.”

“It is certainly true that when we set a show in a context, and then the show works, as Drive to Survive did then it popularizes that thing, but if we, it doesn't, like, bother us that they profit from it any more than If we did a show that was set in farming a…”

“You know, they're used all the time now for public safety at large-scale events, right? F-one, we, these drones are up, buzzing around all day, all night, covering such a vast area checking rooftops, looking for, you know, potential snipers or people that don'…”

“F-one today is more tech than it ever has been. And you look at the sponsors, it's the likes of Juniper, it's the likes of Salesforce, AWS, Oracle, like every other sponsor is a giant tech sponsor.”

“Basically running a Formula One team for a brand like Red Bull. It's just the marketing spend. It's their advertising.”

“And yet the merchandise that they are selling is definitely not for this cohort of people. The merchandise is definitely for your middle-aged white man who loves logos on a t-shirt.”

“There is something very Unique and bizarre in formula one that the journalists are very rarely, very skeptical of formula one or will never say anything too heavy about formula one for fear of losing their credentials.”

“Drive to Survive was so great, not because of the production value or anything they were doing. It was because they put fucking faces Behind these cars.”