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Someone approved the list.

During Naomi Osaka’s first-round match inside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the 2026 US Open, chair umpire Kader Nouni stopped play after people in a hospitality suite moved around and filmed with a bright light while Osaka prepared to serve. A separate ring-light incident followed elsewhere at the tournament. Players, including Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, called for clearer etiquette and greater respect for the match, according to the Associated Press.

The United States Tennis Association told Axios that the people who interrupted Osaka’s match didn’t hold official US Open content creator credentials. They still entered a premium suite with cameras and enough access to disrupt a four-time Grand Slam champion. The access system extends beyond the media credential desk. Brands, vendors, agencies, and hospitality hosts all control pieces of it.

At the same tournament, the USTA approved close to 100 official creator credentials, almost twice the 54 issued in 2025. Its stated goal was to reach the “broadest possible spectrum” of audiences. Last year’s creator group generated 5.5 million social engagements, according to Front Office Sports.

The US Open’s owned social channels generated 3.1 billion interactions in 2025, up from 2.3 billion in 2024. The event already had enormous distribution before nearly doubling its creator list.

That number sounds impressive when you’re staring at a recap deck. It tells you little about who paid attention, what they learned, or what they bought.

The US Open has become the latest example of a sports business habit that motorsport already knows well. Properties want creators in the room. Sponsors want proof of relevance. Agencies want large numbers they can place on a slide. The selection process starts with reach, then searches for a reason.

When the resulting content amounts to an outfit check, a credential flex, and a few clips about the vibe, everyone blames the influencer.

Someone approved the list.

Reach ≠ Strategy

The creator economy gave sports properties a practical way to reach people who may never watch a full match or race. That work has value. The mistake comes when reach becomes the entire assignment.

A creator with five million followers may bring five million opportunities for exposure. The same account may bring very few prospective buyers for a Rolex, a premium hospitality package, an enterprise technology contract, or a six-figure sponsorship. Audience size can’t answer questions about age, income, location, interests, trust, or purchase intent.

A view indicates that a screen has loaded. It can’t tell you who was behind it, what that person can afford, or whether they trust the person on screen.

Luxury brands and premium sports properties have spent decades building scarcity, status and aspiration. Formula One sells a global entertainment product, then layers it with expensive tickets, paddock access, corporate hospitality and partnerships aimed at buyers with money and influence. The US Open does similar work through suites, sponsor spaces and a social scene that extends far beyond tennis.

If you’re running one of those businesses, mass awareness can help. You still need to know which commercial job that awareness performs. A teenager watching a creator tour a suite may become a fan. A procurement executive watching a technical creator explain a partner’s role may become a lead. Those outcomes belong to different strategies, time horizons, and budgets.

Collapse them into “engagement,” and you’ve made weak planning easy to defend.

You can see the difference in the USTA’s own results. Grey Goose turned the Honey Deuce into an event ritual built around a product people could buy, photograph, and carry through the grounds. More than 700,000 were sold in 2025 at $23 each, producing about $17 million in revenue, according to Sports Business Journal. The drink generated social content because the product, the audience, and the behavior aligned.

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Beyond Follower Counts

Years ago, racing driver and broadcaster Justin Bell saw the same distinction during a Michelin creator event. As he explained on Business of Speed, Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, has built a following of roughly 10 million, largely around Minecraft. The video reached hundreds of thousands of people, a small return relative to the creator’s scale. Another attendee, Sean Lee, had roughly 30,000 followers, primarily Japanese car enthusiasts. His audience trusted his judgment about cars and tires. He sold more product.

The smaller account had greater commercial value because its audience fit the job.

We’ve known this for years. Brands continue to pay for scale, hoping relevance will appear later.

I’ve seen the same thinking in motorsport. An organization told me it wanted to reach a more mature audience with the means to buy premium products. Then I saw the creator list. It was full of huge accounts shaped by MrBeast-style entertainment, with young viewers who didn’t match the buyer we’d just described.

I’ve helped brands and racing series build these lists, and I know what happens when the objective stays vague. You end up defending the most recognizable name in the room because it’s easier than explaining why a smaller creator’s audience fits the buyer.

But we should’ve started with the buyer.

Follower count provides an easy answer during a planning meeting. Audience fit requires work. You have to study the creator’s viewers, understand the subject matter, define the desired action, and defend a smaller name to an executive who recognizes the larger one.

Access as Currency

Sports properties don’t always understand what they’re giving away.

A credential, suite invitation, or paddock pass functions as production access. It also carries social status. If you’ve held one, you know the signal it sends. The creator can use the event to create a work and leverage proximity to athletes, celebrities, and restricted spaces to raise personal standing.

When a brand offers access without a meaningful assignment, status becomes the assignment.

The resulting post shows the wristband, the outfit, the free drinks, and the view from the suite. The sport appears as a backdrop because the brief treated it like one. The creator fulfilled the incentive that the host designed.

This dynamic gets worse at properties built around exclusivity. A creator doesn’t need to understand tire strategy, serve placement, or sponsorship economics to recognize that a paddock or courtside suite signals importance. If the host asks for only a few posts, the easiest content will center on the creator’s presence.

Brands then complain that they didn’t get depth.

Depth requires selection and preparation. A book creator could ask players what they read on tour, build a tournament reading list, and give guests books matched to their interests. A food creator could work a shift with the event’s culinary team and show what it takes to feed tens of thousands of fans. A motorsport creator could learn how a pit wall makes decisions, how a tire partner supports a race weekend, or how a sponsor turns hospitality into sales meetings.

Each idea gives the creator room to create. Each also gives the access a job.

Carte Blanche is Lazy

Brands often describe a loose brief as creative freedom. Real creative freedom needs a clear commercial boundary.

If you’re the brand, you own the objective, audience, assignment, access, and rules. If you’re the creator, you own the execution. A useful brief can fit on one page.

Etiquette belongs in that document. Remain seated during points. Move during changeovers. Keep flashes and production lights off. Don’t block a paying guest’s view. Silence the phone. Respect restricted areas. These instructions now appear in creator guidance circulated at the US Open because hosts learned that familiarity with social media doesn’t equate to familiarity with tennis.

The same standard applies in racing. If you’re inviting a first-time paddock guest, you can’t assume they know when a garage is open, where cameras are prohibited, how grid access works, or why a team needs clear space during a live session. Explain it before arrival. Build the rules into the agreement. Give an on-site contact enough authority to enforce them.

Once you’ve stated the assignment and conduct clearly, responsibility shifts. A creator who ignores those terms owns the behavior. If they don’t like the rules, they can decline the invitation.

Many brands never reach that point. They choose the largest available account, offer access, request vague deliverables, and call the absence of direction authenticity. The creator arrives ready to document a free trip because that is what the deal resembles.

Motorsport isn’t Immune

I’ve had a version of this conversation in the media center at the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway and at a luxury hospitality suite at the F1 Miami Grand Prix earlier this year. Racing series are embracing creator access, and many of the same tensions have started to surface.

I’ve been on both sides of that access. I’ve applied for media credentials as a publisher, and I’ve worked with sponsors controlling commercial inventory.

And yet, every Formula One weekend, fans can’t understand why influencers enter the paddock while committed fans remain outside.

That complaint mixes three separate systems into one argument: media accreditation, sponsor access and hospitality. A reporter receives a credential to cover the event. A sponsor buys contractual rights that may include paddock passes, hospitality inventory and exclusive experiences. Teams and brands use those assets to host clients, reward customers, build relationships and produce marketing campaigns.

A creator invited through sponsor inventory often enters as a marketing guest. Their audience and the communities they can reach are the commercial asset. Deep knowledge of the sport may have little to do with that particular assignment. The invitation can still make sense when the audience fits the objective, and the host manages the access properly.

For example, two of my friends Esme of and Stephanie of were brought in by Peroni Nastro Azzurro to cover the Italian Grand Prix. Both of their publications lean heavily on Formula One fashion and lifestyle. So naturally, their content was there to show it off and break it down. (They did a phenomenal job, btw)

Each route has its own gatekeeper. The series controls media accreditation. Sponsors control the commercial allocations they’ve purchased. Hospitality hosts control their guest lists. If you’re working in motorsport, you need different expectations for each type of access. Putting every person with a phone and a paddock pass into the media bucket doesn’t help anyone.

Wimbledon’s decision concerns media accreditation, leaving sponsor and hospitality access as separate questions. Motorsport should use the same framework to define what counts as media, what falls under marketing, and what falls under a commercial agreement. Press credentials should support editorial work. Creator campaigns need a brief and a measurable outcome. Hospitality guests need clear conduct rules.

When you see someone inside the paddock, it’s easy to assume every pass means the same thing. The business arrangement behind that access can be completely different.

Motorsport wants younger fans, broader culture and new distribution. Creator programs can help with all three. The commercial danger arises when a series recruits a broad general-interest audience while promising partners a mature, affluent, and purchase-ready one.

Those audiences can overlap. We still have to prove the connection.

Formula One teams and sponsors have better models available. Apple’s F1 coverage used different people for different forms of expertise, pairing track analysis, technical explanation, and fan-facing storytelling with creators and personalities suited to each job. Cadillac’s decision to hire a creator-focused chief marketing officer also reflects how seriously teams now treat direct audience relationships.

The next step is discipline. If you’re selecting the creators, connect each invitation to a defined audience and a defined business outcome. A large account may be the right choice for broad awareness. A smaller technical voice may be better for credibility. A business creator may help a sponsor reach prospective customers. A local food account may sell hospitality or shape the experience around a race weekend.

The job determines the creator.

“Limitations Breed Creativity”

This is a line I always tell my clients.

It’s often thought that creatives don’t like limits or guidelines. On the contrary. Give creatives a set of guidelines, and a good creator will maximize creativity.

If you’re responsible for a sports property, your creator invitations need tighter commercial logic. Before the next list gets approved, the property and its partners should answer six questions:

1. Which buyer or fan are you trying to reach?

2. What action or change in perception do you want?

3. Does this creator already have credibility with your audience?

4. What can this creator produce here that they can’t make from home?

5. Which behavioral rules will you attach to the access?

6. Which result will matter to you after the engagement report arrives?

These questions will remove some famous names from your list. You might have to defend a smaller name to the room. Recognition inside that room doesn’t guarantee influence with the customer.

If you control the guest list, access, the brief, and measurement, you own the outcome. You’ve built an incentive system that rewards creators for showing where they are instead of explaining why anyone should care. You can rebuild it around expertise, audience fit, and work that serves a commercial purpose. If you’re signing off on the list, you don’t get to blame the platform afterward.

Every credential should come with a job. Remember, someone approves the list.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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On July 31, 2014, incorporation papers were filed in the UK for a company called Lando Norris Promotions Limited. Lando Norris was 14 years old, and the name would become greater than the operation.

That same year, he won the CIK-FIA Karting World Championship in the KF category, racing an OTK chassis for Ricky Flynn Motorsport. He was moving quickly, powered by talent, family backing, and the kind of support required to keep a child climbing through motorsport’s expensive junior system.

Twelve years after his incorporation, the reigning Formula 1 world champion has returned to the system that made him. On September 2, Norris announced LN4 Fusion, a new junior team preparing to race in Italian Formula 4, the Formula Regional European Championship, and FIA Formula 3 in 2027. The group has started a British Formula 4 testing program and applied for a Formula 2 entry covering the 2027 to 2029 cycle.

Norris is building the ladder beneath him.

Quadrant

Norris launched Quadrant with Veloce in 2020, one year after his Formula 1 debut. It started in gaming and esports, then pushed into apparel, content, athletes, and sponsorship.

Norris had built an audience through Twitch and YouTube while the grid’s older generation was still treating social media like a contractual obligation. Quadrant turned that attention into a company.

A January 2024 shareholder filing listed Celero Promotions with 561,000 of Quadrant’s 1,187,183 ordinary shares, or 47.25 percent. Veloce held 22.83 percent. The remaining shares were held by a group that included ADD Motorsports, United Autosports, TVS Motor Singapore, creator Will Lenney, and several individual investors.

Its 2024 accounts recorded approximately $1.97 million (£1,459,979) in new share capital and share premium. The company lost $1.22 million (£902,393) that year after losing about $806,000 (£597,679) in 2023. It averaged five employees and carried inventory, receivables, production costs, and operating liabilities. Its disclosed revenue lines included sponsorship, online shop sales, and commissions from Twitch and YouTube, although the filing did not disclose the total revenue.

Audience businesses have bills.

In July 2025, Veloce acquired majority control. The disclosed terms show how Norris handled the change.

Veloce took control, while Norris retained more than 20 percent of Quadrant as its second-largest shareholder, received an interest in Veloce, and continued to license his name and brand to Quadrant. Norris gave up control while preserving direct equity, buyer equity, and a licensing relationship.

When SEGG Media bought control of Veloce in February 2026, SEGG’s SEC filing says it paid approximately $33.9 million (£25.135 million) for existing shares and $7.65 million (£5.675 million) for newly issued shares. The seven named sellers exclude Norris and Celero Promotions.

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The Kart

OTK Kart Group helped Norris win European and world karting titles in 2013 and 2014. Seven years later, he returned as a business partner.

LN Racing Kart launched in September 2021. Norris developed the LN Four concept and attached his helmet colors, name, and history to the product. OTK controlled design, manufacturing, and worldwide sales from its operation in Prevalle, Italy. Ricky Flynn Motorsport ran the competition program.

The arrangement put a Norris-branded product into the hands of young racers without requiring Norris to build a factory or dealer network.

LN4 Fusion follows a familiar shape, with much more capital at risk.

The Team

LN4 Fusion’s management roster outlines how the team intends to compete starting in 2027.

An investment group led by Dan Richards funded the project. The group acquired selected assets from AIX Racing, including its FIA Formula 3 entry through the end of 2027. Former Prema principal René Rosin will run the sporting program after winning more than 40 junior championships across his career. Longtime Prema engineer Guillaume Capietto joins as racing director.

Dan Hazlewood, whose Fusion Motorsport operation has spent more than 25 years in karting, will lead the British side. The team is building a new European headquarters in Veneto and running its UK operation from Cambridgeshire.

Rosin, Capietto, and Hazlewood handle the racing operation. Norris brings his name, sponsor access, an audience, and recent experience of navigating the same ladder.

The Seat Business

Junior racing has an unforgiving customer model. The driver usually brings the budget. Families, sponsors, manufacturer academies, and private backers pay teams for a season, while teams spend that money on cars, engineers, mechanics, testing, travel, facilities, and the endless replacement of expensive, short-lived parts.

A Formula 2 campaign commonly costs between $2.32 million and $3.47 million (€2 million to €3 million) per driver. Ralf Schumacher put a competitive Formula 3 seat around $1.51 million (€1.3 million) and an Italian Formula 4 season before testing and crash damage around $347,000 to $371,000 (€300,000 to €320,000).

The FIA created a $1.16 million Formula 3 prize fund for the top five drivers who advance to Formula 2. The champion can receive about $695,000 (€600,000) once Pirelli support is included. That still covers a fraction of the next season.

Running several categories allows LN4 to keep a driver within the same organization from Formula 4 through Formula 3, and potentially Formula 2. The group can share facilities, staff, sponsor relationships, driver data, and technical knowledge across those programs.

The team can also sell a longer story. A sponsor entering at Formula 4 gets several seasons of potential inventory from a single relationship. TUMI and Monster have already followed Norris into LN4 after personally supporting him. Norris said more of his partners will join.

Quadrant adds another possibility. Its audience, production capacity, apparel, and sponsor relationships could give LN4 a media operation most junior teams would struggle to build.

Legacy

Norris launched the LN4 Legacy Program alongside the team. Former Alpine sporting director Julian Rouse will lead it, with ADD Management operating the program. Norris says it will be fully funded and designed to support drivers whose financial circumstances would otherwise stop their progress.

He knows the problem. Norris has spoken openly about the family backing and McLaren support that helped him reach Formula 1. “Getting to Formula 1 takes so much more than just talent,” he said. Talent secured his future once the right people had paid for enough opportunities to make that talent visible.

Where LN4 Fusion is a race team, LN4 Legacy is the thesis.

Junior racing still sells seats to whoever can pay for them. Norris lived that ladder, and he has said he was lucky his family could keep him on it. The Legacy program is his attempt to keep a few drivers on it who otherwise would not. And it comes fully funded.

The Rest of the Portfolio

Norris has made several smaller investments around sports and media.

TMRW Sports named him as part of its initial investor group in 2022. F1 Arcade said it supported its approximately $40.4 million (£30 million) expansion round in 2023. APEX lists him among more than 100 athlete investors using its sports investment platform.

His sponsor deals put the same name across software, energy drinks, luggage, fragrance, watches, and helmets. Starburst signed him to a two-year personal ambassador agreement in August. Monster sells a Norris-branded energy drink across several European markets. TUMI has used him as a global ambassador since 2022. Ralph Lauren put him at the center of its Polo Red fragrance campaign. Richard Mille lists him as a friend and partner. Bell Racing has supplied his helmets since 2015.

The official Landostand at Silverstone bundled dedicated seating with Norris merchandise in 2026. A three-part Prime Video documentary will take his story to more than 240 countries and territories in 2027, another piece of the streaming business BoS examined last week.

Endorsement and licensing produce income outside his McLaren salary. His private shares could become more valuable over time. Forbes estimated his 2026 earnings at $60 million, with Sky reproducing the estimate as $55 million from racing and $5 million from off-track work. McLaren and Norris have disclosed neither figure, and the estimate would not capture changes in the value of illiquid private-company shares.

What Comes Next

McLaren signed Norris through at least 2030. That contract gives him years of income and global attention while LN4 absorbs the expensive early work of building teams, hiring staff, and earning results.

The first test comes in Formula 3. LN4 bought an entry that expires at the end of 2027, which gives Rosin and Richards little time to establish the new team before its place on the grid requires another decision. Formula 2 carries a separate risk because an application provides no guarantee of acceptance.

Norris’s advantage is distribution. His audience and sponsor relationships have already crossed into LN4. LN Racing Kart reaches the same customer at the bottom of the ladder. Quadrant proved that he can package racing, apparel, and media around a community.

By 2028, the results could be visible.

For now, he’s a young World Champion still at the peak of his career, lending his name and capital to building whatever is next.

Hats off to you, Mr. Norris. Hats off to you.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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On August 25, Angela Jain and Sean Doyle at Disney+ commissioned a live event centered on Max Verstappen attempting to overtake 100 kart racers at Silverstone.

Two days later, Prime Video revealed a three-part documentary about Lando Norris. The same production company behind Netflix’s Drive to Survive will make it. Box to Box can now take a character developed through Netflix’s hit and build his standalone series for Amazon.

Netflix spent eight seasons teaching a global audience how to follow Formula 1 through people. Daniel Ricciardo became the charming one. Christian Horner became the operator. Guenther Steiner became the accidental television star. Verstappen was the uncompromising champion. Norris grew from an anxious McLaren prospect into a world champion.

The other streamers can skip the introductions now. Netflix did the heavy lifting by introducing the F1 drivers as personalities and opening the door for them to become brands.

Formula 1’s 2025 Global Fan Survey found that 40% of U.S. respondents followed a driver before a team or the sport. Two-thirds of all respondents said an F1 driver or team personally inspired them. Among American Gen Z respondents, 70% engaged with F1 content every day.

The streamers are buying access to that relationship.

Max Goes Beast Mode

Max vs 100 will put 101 karts on the Silverstone circuit on September 16. Verstappen starts at the back and tries to pass the other 100 drivers. ESPN and Disney will carry it live through the ESPN hub on Disney+ in participating markets, while ESPN Unlimited subscribers can watch in the United States. ESPN2 will air it later that day.

Disney is getting the pure Max Verstappen: racing anything, anywhere, against an unreasonable number of people. The format needs little Formula 1 knowledge and no season-long commitment. A viewer understands the premise in one sentence.

It also looks like a useful test for Disney+. The event is broadcast inside a subscription many already have, while being a global event and giving ESPN a live property during an F1 season whose U.S. race rights now belong to Apple.

Lando’s Closeup

Prime Video is buying a different product.

The working title is Lando. The three episodes will follow Norris through the summer of his 2026 championship defense, including time with friends and family, and will launch in more than 240 countries and territories in 2027. Norris said he has been heavily involved in the production and will give viewers more access to his life away from racing than he has shared before.

Box to Box Films, creators of Drive to Survive, will produce it.

Norris already understood this world. He founded Quadrant as a gaming and content brand in 2020, years before winning the championship, and built a direct audience through streaming, YouTube and social media. BoS has tracked how drivers such as Norris helped move F1 deeper into American culture. Prime Video adds premium distribution to an existing audience business.

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Sports Gives Streamers Time on Platform

A streamer needs a reason for viewers to open the app next week. Sports can provide that, and the major services are now building around that supply.

Nielsen’s Gracenote found that Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Netflix carried 92% of the sports programming available across the five global services it tracked in May 2025. The category included live events, highlights, news and documentaries. Sports titles across those services grew 7.8% in three months, faster than either movies or television programming.

Although live events are what will ultimately pull in new subscribers (à la Apple x F1 US rights), something like a documentary gives the service something to recommend before the next event and after the season ends.

Sports has become critical to streamers because it creates the appointment and fills the weeks around it.

That second job has become more important as viewers move between subscriptions. Deloitte reported that 90% of U.S. consumers had at least one paid streaming service in March 2025, with the average household paying for four. More than half of Gen Z respondents canceled at least one service during the previous six months. (I’m not Gen Z, but I’ve leaned into the start/stop nature of streaming services as well)

The audience for the offseason programming has tripled. Nielsen measured 16.9 billion minutes of sports documentaries watched on streaming services in 2024, up from 4.7 billion in 2021. The 2025 total was on pace to finish around the same level. Deloitte found 40% of surveyed Gen Z and millennial consumers wanted more documentary-style sports content during the offseason.

Because the schedule renews, the production cycle does too. During the season, cameras follow the rivalries, the failures, the wins, and all the drama. But the offseason adds contract moves, testing, recovery, and access to personal life. Archives support a second track built around retired athletes and legends.

Think about this for a second. For a streamer, one sport can supply live events, weekly studio shows, a current-season documentary, historical films, podcasts, and social clips. Those products give the recommendation engine several routes into the same audience and create advertising inventory on different days.

Streaming Loves Motorsports

F1 supplied the model, and it has been carried across racing.

Netflix released the second season of NASCAR: Full Speed in May 2025. Prime Video followed with the four-part Earnhardt, then brought Formula E: Driver back for a second season. Fox Nation carried the third season of 100 Days to Indy. Those products cover a current playoff, a dead champion’s archive, an electric series and the run toward the Indianapolis 500.

IMSA built its own distribution. Its Win the Weekend docuseries returned to YouTube for a fourth season in February. IMSA says the first three seasons generated more than 50 million views, with more than 60% of viewers new to its channel. The series also reported that those viewers went on to watch or attend races and follow drivers or teams, although IMSA did not publish conversion rates for those actions.

IMSA is running the same funnel at a different scale, using free episodes to recruit viewers, driver stories to give them somebody to follow, and the next race to test whether the relationship sticks.

The Content Flywheel

Calling this a content glut misses the point of the business. Each format handles a different job.

Drive to Survive turned a championship into an ensemble drama. Lando sells intimacy. Max vs 100 sells a live stunt. Apple’s F1 The Movie sold the sport as a Hollywood spectacle, then Apple bought the U.S. race rights and built a full product system around the weekly broadcast.

Formula 1’s own YouTube strategy covers the free end. The first season of Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Passenger Princess generated more than 289 million views, according to F1. A six-part second season launched in July, putting Charles Leclerc, Alex Albon, Kimi Antonelli and three other drivers into a creator-native format built around personality.

Nobody expects a short YouTube interview to perform the same job as a three-part Prime Video documentary, although that’s up for debate. Both make it easier to care about a driver before Sunday.

The strategy follows the way fans now enter the sport. F1 reported a global fanbase of 827 million in 2025, up 63% from 2018. Its own survey finds that younger fans discover the championship through social media, streaming series, and shared content, and then form identity-based connections with drivers.

F1 has built a content ladder around that behavior. Free creator video creates familiarity. A documentary deepens the relationship. Live racing gives the relationship somewhere to go.

Apple has already connected those steps in the United States. Drive to Survive Season 8 streams on Apple TV as well as Netflix. Netflix carried the Canadian Grand Prix, and Apple holds the rest of the live U.S. season. We called the broadcast the least interesting part because Apple can keep an F1 viewer engaged with Sports, News, Maps, Music, and Fitness+ apps all week.

Prime and Disney own narrower pieces. Their ability to move a viewer into regular Grand Prix consumption will depend on links, promotion and data-sharing arrangements that none of the companies have disclosed.

What’s Missing?

F1’s commercial terms for these productions remain private. So do the measurements that would show whether a viewer of Lando or Max vs 100 becomes a regular race viewer.

The public numbers reward the platform first. Prime can count starts, completions, new subscriptions, and churn. Disney can measure how many people opened ESPN on Disney+ for Verstappen and what they watched next. YouTube can report 289 million views.

Formula 1 needs to see whether that attention moves people toward the championship.

Liberty Media told investors in its 2025 annual report that F1 wants deeper fan engagement and more access to monetizable fan data. Content commissioned by several external platforms generates reach while splitting viewing data across Netflix, Amazon, Disney, YouTube, and Apple.

F1 should judge every production against four numbers: how many viewers were new to the sport, how many watched a Grand Prix afterward, how many returned for another race, and how many engaged with an F1-controlled product, such as F1.com, ticketing, or merchandise.

It’s important to connect it all together. Views without that handoff are just views.

The next round of driver contracts should get more complicated. Personal documentary rights, self-shot footage, creator appearances, and production access are becoming valuable enough to negotiate alongside image rights and sponsor obligations. My bet is that teams formalize those clauses within two seasons.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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When you see really good branding and marketing, especially as someone who has built brands for nearly two decades, you have to appreciate it and give it its flowers. But when you see really great marketing combined with an excellent go-to-market strategy that delivers on a global scale, you continue to talk about it.

I’m talking about none other than Revolut.

Revolut is a digital financial platform and licensed bank that lets you manage your money through a mobile app. It offers multi-currency accounts, debit cards, international money transfers, budgeting tools, and savings or investment options without requiring visits to a physical bank branch.

Revolut bought Audi’s Formula 1 team name to create a global distribution layer for its banking expansion, then uses local sports partnerships to sell permitted products market by market.

Three reasons explain the move:

1. The title guarantees global repetition even when Audi doesn’t perform well.

2. Operational integration turns that awareness into credible product proof.

3. Local sponsorships connect that proof to the licenses and products available in each market.

Global Repetition

Audi arrives at Monza with four straight points finishes, no podiums, and a stated championship target of 2030. Revolut chief growth and marketing officer Antoine Le Nel accepted that timeline because he wanted an asset that teams could not guarantee faster: the team name.

In an interview with SportsPro, Le Nel called Formula 1 “head and shoulders above every other sport” as a marketing platform. Within F1, he said Revolut had to be “up there” as a title partner or stay out.

The FIA entry list, broadcasters, race graphics, results pages, merchandise, team releases, and stories that use the official constructor name all repeat “Audi Revolut F1 Team”. An eighth-place finish still delivers Revolut.

Naming rights absorb mediocre results better than most sponsorship assets. Sidepod logos depend on camera angles. The team name appears whenever the team does.

That distinction matters on a grid carrying 34 financial sponsors. Audi alone has Revolut, Nexo, Libertex, and Aleph. Nexo bought visibility. Revolut sits inside the constructor’s identity.

The fee is private. Sports Business Journal reported in June that the agreement is likely worth mid-eight figures in annual rights fees. Revolut paid a top-tier price for compulsory repetition.

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Operational Proof

Le Nel said awareness already exceeds 50 percent in most Revolut markets and passes 90 percent in some. His next target is primary-bank status, which requires funded accounts, recurring deposits, credit products, and business customers.

Audi gives Revolut a way to show those products at work. When the partnership was announced, Audi said Revolut Business would enter the team’s financial operations, and Revolut would power merchandise checkout. Audi’s official language promises operational integration in key areas, although the agreement does not establish that Revolut controls every payment across the organization.

Revolut Business closed 2025 with 767,000 customers, up 33 percent, and produced 16 percent of group income. Le Nel said the Audi partnership would rebalance a marketing program that had focused heavily on consumers because Revolut Business was growing faster than retail.

Audi now serves as both a customer and a case study for corporate sales meetings, providing salespeople with evidence to back up the brand awareness it has created

Local Sponsorships

Audi gives Revolut a single identity worldwide. Local sports properties place that identity beside the products and banking permissions available in each market.

Revolut received approval to launch its full UK bank on March 11 after an application process that began in 2021. Three months later, its Audi roadshow sent the R26 show car through 14 British cities before Silverstone.

Seed, the agency behind the roadshow, reported that more than 1 million people were reached and that the on-site game achieved a 20 percent conversion rate to sign-ups. The case study provides no acquisition cost, funded-account conversion, deposit balances, or retention. A sign-up collected alongside a £20 welcome offer begins the calculation.

In Australia, the Audi-branded titanium card launched around the team’s Melbourne debut and awarded 20 times the usual RevPoints on team merchandise purchased through Revolut Pay. Revolut also placed Revolut Business inside Hawthorn Football Club’s financial infrastructure. On July 21, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority granted Revolut a license to operate as an authorized deposit-taking institution.

Italy compresses the strategy into roughly 40 kilometers. Revolut became Como 1907’s banking and foreign-exchange partner in July 2025, bringing Revolut Business into club operations and Revolut Pay into ticket and merchandise checkout. One year later, it moved onto the front of Como’s shirt. That local platform meets the global one when Audi Revolut arrives at Monza.

The sequence is an inference from announced deals and licenses; Revolut has never described it as a coordinated calendar. Regulators still decide which products regional teams can sell. The European Central Bank reportedly restricted new product launches through Revolut’s Lithuanian entity in July 2025, showing the limit of what sports distribution can accomplish.

Formula 1 supplies reach, local sport supplies the point of sale, and regulators set the product boundary. Revolut should publish the funded accounts, deposits, and business customers attributable to sport. Those numbers will show whether the most valuable word on Audi’s car is building a bank.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

In the live edition of Business of Speed, Vincenzo Landino and Lali Michelsen follow the money behind a busy week in racing.

IndyCar’s Freedom 250 averaged 3.282 million viewers on FOX, its largest audience outside the Indianapolis 500 since before the 2008 unification. The broadcast peaked at 3.482 million, while IndyCar’s season average through 15 races is up 32 percent from 2025. The result provides series-long proof that national promotion, accessible broadcast distribution, and a well-produced event can pull casual viewers into the product. INDYCAR confirmed the full audience figures.

The conversation moves to Formula 1’s first season on Apple TV. Early third-party estimates show steep audience declines, though the measurement cannot capture Apple’s full strategy across Apple TV, News, Maps, Music, Fitness+, and its hardware. Apple wants subscribers, repeat usage, and a deeper relationship with F1 fans. Formula 1 must still determine whether that system can introduce the sport to Americans who would never buy a racing subscription.

Vincenzo and Lali also discuss Formula E’s move to Disney+, the growing subscription burden on fans, and the role live sports play in keeping streaming customers from canceling.

Elsewhere, they examine the federal investigation surrounding insurers connected to Mark Walter, TWG’s exposure across five racing properties, Graeme Lowdon’s abrupt departure from Cadillac F1, and Dan Towriss’s decision to appoint Marcin Budkowski during the team’s first season.

The episode closes with the economics that keep racing accessible. Sponsors fund far more than logos. They pay for networks, emergency communications, hospitality, staffing, and the infrastructure needed to stage a modern race. The T-Mobile operation behind the Las Vegas Grand Prix shows how much sits beneath the visible product.

Highlights

• Why Markham’s opening problems should not obscure the race’s strong fan access, transit links, paddock experience, and commercial potential.

• How city circuits turn races into tourism and hospitality products.

• Why the Freedom 250 gives IndyCar a repeatable marketing case study.

• The driver recognition problem created by changing liveries, regional sponsors, and number-first promotion.

• What the investigation surrounding Mark Walter could mean for Cadillac F1, Andretti Global, Spire Motorsports, Wayne Taylor Racing, and Walkinshaw TWG Racing.

• Why Cadillac’s midseason leadership change raises questions about authority, timing, and internal stability.

• Where Samba TV’s estimates fall short in measuring F1 audiences on Apple TV.

• How streaming services use live motorsport to reduce subscriber churn.

• Why sponsors subsidize the infrastructure and access fans expect at race weekends.

• How Stefano Domenicali’s comments risk alienating the educated fans who will remain after the current cultural cycle cools.

• What Formula 1’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system means for Mercedes, Audi, Ferrari, Honda, and Red Bull.

Timestamps

00:33 Going live and meeting the LinkedIn audience
04:07 What is coming on the first Business of Speed Live
05:53 Lali’s report from IndyCar’s first Markham weekend
10:49 What Markham can teach Formula 1’s Madring project
16:34 The next market for premium race hospitality
20:10 Inside The Concours Club’s Miami Grand Prix experience
24:29 The Freedom 250 delivers 3.282 million viewers
30:12 IndyCar’s marketing and driver-recognition problem
39:15 TWG, Mark Walter, and the pressure around its racing assets
50:21 What Formula 1 cafeterias say about team culture
55:07 Why Cadillac replaced Graeme Lowdon midseason
1:05:17 Reading F1’s early Apple TV audience data
1:13:14 Formula E, Disney+, and subscription fatigue
1:25:32 Who pays for the infrastructure behind a race
1:34:17 Stefano Domenicali’s growing fan problem
1:43:31 Attention spans, sprint races, and the quality of the product
1:51:28 Milwaukee, Laguna Seca, and Monza
1:53:26 Formula 1’s ADUO engine catch-up system

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Show Summary

The Freedom 250 provides IndyCar with clear evidence that distribution and promotion can create demand for the series beyond the Indianapolis 500. FOX put the race in front of a national audience, sold the event as a major American spectacle, and drew 3.282 million viewers. IndyCar now needs to convert that attention into driver recognition and weekly viewing habits.

Formula 1 faces the opposite distribution question. Apple can place F1 throughout its operating system and use the sport to acquire and retain subscribers. That commercial logic does not guarantee broad discovery. The early audience estimates are incomplete, though the friction for casual fans is real.

Both cases point to the same commercial reality. Racing series need media companies, sponsors, and host cities to fund their growth. Those partners also shape where fans find the sport, what access costs, and which audiences remain visible in the data.

Governance sits beside distribution. TWG’s financial exposure and Cadillac’s abrupt leadership change show how ownership pressure can reach the sporting operation. Formula 1 has a related trust problem with its audience. Educated fans understand the technology and the economics. Talking down to them weakens the group most likely to keep watching when cultural attention moves elsewhere.

Related Reading

• “I Thought It Was an F1 Event”

• Apple’s New F1 OS

• What the Walter Investigation Does to Motorsports

• Nobody Is Interested in How You Drive Your Car

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At the end of Candide, after the shipwrecks and the earthquakes and the endless philosophizing, Voltaire lets his hero arrive at a conclusion that is so modest, it almost reads like a shrug: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” We must cultivate our garden. Stop chasing grand theories. Tend the ground in front of you. Grow something.

Fred Vasseur has spent three decades doing exactly that. He never chased the headline fortune. He patiently tended the ground in front of him, on his own terms.

His fortune carries no single defining deal or acquisition, no rich-list number anyone has ever managed to pin on him. His is a sprawling, patiently cultivated garden: a constellation of companies he founded one by one over 30 years, across nearly every layer of motorsport. Engine preparation, race teams spanning a dozen championships, driving simulators, electric and hydrogen chassis manufacturing that supplies entire FIA global series.

Vasseur took his time planting many seeds, and perhaps he has a green thumb, because most of them grew.

Today, he runs Scuderia Ferrari, the most valuable team in Formula 1, worth somewhere around $7 billion. He is paid a fraction of what his rivals earn and has no shares in the team. His businesses are private and mostly unknown to the layman. He built these companies himself, and their worth has never been disclosed.

Draveil

Frédéric Jean Henri Vasseur was born on May 28, 1968, in Draveil, a quiet commune in the southern suburbs of Paris. He is not the son of a champion. He is not the heir to a family business. The only clue to what became of him lies in his schooling. He studied at ESTACA (the École Supérieure des Techniques Aéronautiques et de Construction Automobile), graduating in 1995 with a degree in aeronautical and automotive engineering.

Vasseur entered motorsport through a workshop, not through money. He is, first and foremost, an engineer. He believes in the slow accumulation of small correct decisions. You can describe his entire competitive philosophy in five words he used when speaking of Hamilton’s 2026 form: “small stone after small stone.”

RPM

While still a student, Vasseur founded his first company, RPM. It prepared Formula 3 engines for Renault. Without a team or a track record, his first move in the sport was to build engines others could win with.

Vasseur’s instinct was to supply, not to drive or invest. RPM shouldn’t be a footnote in his story. It’s a scale model of the entire Vasseur operating system that he established when he was still in his mid-twenties: identify the unglamorous, indispensable layer, build a business around it, and let everyone else chase trophies and glory.

The Nursery

In 1996, a year after graduating from engineering school, Vasseur took over a small Formula 3 team called ASM. He ran it for a bit, and then pretty quickly bought the whole thing and renamed it ASM F3.

ASM won the French Formula 3 title in 1998. Then, working first with Renault and later with Mercedes, the team moved up to European F3 and basically stopped losing. They won four straight continental titles from 2004 to 2007. But the trophies weren’t the point. The real point was that ASM became the place talented kids went to get made.

In 2004, he went bigger. He teamed up with Nicolas Todt, the son of then-Ferrari boss and future FIA president Jean Todt, to start ART Grand Prix, aimed at the brand-new GP2 Series (what’s now Formula 2). Todt handled the commercial side; Vasseur ran the racing. ART grew into something much larger than one team. Today it races in Formula 2, Formula 3, Formula Regional, the all-female F1 Academy, and GT endurance. Vasseur has made a permanent imprint on the junior ladder.

Here are some of the names that came through his teams: Nico Rosberg, GP2 champion in ART’s first season. Lewis Hamilton, F3 champion under Vasseur in 2005, GP2 champion in 2006. Charles Leclerc, GP3 champion in 2016. Others over the years include: Sebastian Vettel, Romain Grosjean, Valtteri Bottas, Stoffel Vandoorne, Jules Bianchi, Paul di Resta, Kamui Kobayashi, Pastor Maldonado, Sébastien Buemi.

ART won multiple team titles across GP2 and GP3 and turned out champion after champion.

Instead of betting on one kid and hoping for a Hail Mary, Vasseur built the machine that turns out the kids and charged for the seats. That’s the business behind it. Junior single-seater racing is brutal, low-margin work. Think of it as the restaurant industry of motorsport. He ran it and won at it for twenty years, while the drivers he developed went off to earn tens of millions further up the grid. He was the sport’s talent supplier. (He ran ASM until 2015. Nicolas Todt sold his ART stake in 2018, and the team still races today under Sébastien Philippe.)

But the teams were only half of it. The other half he built out of pure engineering.

Picks and Shovels

There’s an old line about the Gold Rush: the people who got rich weren’t the ones panning for gold. They were the ones selling the picks and shovels. Vasseur did that twice.

In 2010, he started AOTech, which builds driving simulators and does the aerodynamic design work that no serious team can exist without. Simulators and aero are where lap times are gained or lost, and AOTech sold those tools to the people chasing the margins that make a difference.

Then in 2012 came the big one. Vasseur set up a company called Spark Racing Technology, right as the FIA and promoter Alejandro Agag were putting together something nobody had seen before: a world championship for fully electric single-seaters, called Formula E. Everyone else looked at the new series and asked the obvious question: How do I win it? Vasseur asked a different one: How do I supply it?

He’d been preparing. Back in 2010, his ART operation had built an electric prototype, betting on an all-electric series. So when the FIA put the contract out to tender, Spark was ready. By November 2012, it was named the sole supplier of cars for Formula E’s first season. Spark then built forty identical chassis — every car on the grid — for every team, pulling together Dallara, McLaren, Williams, and Hewland to do it.

You don’t have to win a single race to make money. You don’t need a driver, a sponsor, or a lucky strategy call on race day. You keep building the cars; the whole championship is required to buy from you.

And the hits kept on coming. Spark won the contract for Formula E’s second-generation car in 2017, the third in 2020, the Gen3 Evo after that, and it’s now signed on for the fourth-generation car coming in 2026–27. Spark also built every car for the off-road Extreme E series, and when that wound down in 2025 and gave way to the hydrogen-powered Extreme H, Spark built the chassis for that.

For more than a decade, entire FIA world championships have run on chassis built by a company one French engineer set up to sell picks and shovels…it might be this story’s smartest single move.

So by the time Vasseur got a real Formula 1 job, he’d built an engine shop, a racing team that grew into a junior empire, a simulator-and-aero firm, and a manufacturer that supplies whole world championships, far more than some salaried manager with a couple of side projects. That’s the garden. What all of it is worth today and how much of each he still owns have never been made public. This is why nobody has ever managed to put an exact number on Vasseur’s net worth.

The Other Side of the Pit Wall

By 2016, Vasseur had proven he could build teams and businesses. What nobody knew was whether he could run a Formula 1 operation from the inside. Renault, coming back as a full works team, gave him the chance. They named him racing director first, then team principal by July.

It lasted one season. Vasseur clashed with Renault’s managing director, Cyril Abiteboul, over how the whole thing should be run, and rather than fight a political war he wasn’t going to win, he walked away at the end of 2016. It tells you something about him. He’s an operator, not a politician. He wants clear lines and room to build. He didn’t have them, so he left. And he found somewhere that would give them to him almost immediately.

In 2017, he took over Sauber, the small, perma-broke Swiss team that spent much of its existence as a privateer doing more with a lot less. He became CEO and team principal and did what he always does: he fixed it. He steadied the money, rebuilt the technical side, and landed the Alfa Romeo title deal that rebranded the team. He also brought in a Ferrari junior that he knew very well. In 2018, Charles Leclerc made his Formula 1 debut for Vasseur’s Sauber. Mentor and mentee, one rung higher up the ladder.

For six years, he turned Sauber from a backmarker into a regular points-scorer on a fraction of the top teams’ budgets. As it turns out, that was the exact résumé Ferrari was looking for when its house caught fire.

Maranello

At the end of 2022, Ferrari pushed out Mattia Binotto after a year in which the car was often the fastest on the grid but was repeatedly undone by botched strategy calls and a string of engine failures. On January 9, 2023, Fred Vasseur walked into Maranello to run the most scrutinized, most passionate, and least forgiving team in the sport.

“Ferrari has always represented the very pinnacle of the racing world to me,” he said when he arrived. The team hadn’t won a drivers’ title since Kimi Räikkönen in 2007. The pressure at Ferrari comes from all directions: the tifosi, the Italian press, a century of expectation. It has broken plenty of capable men.

It must have been a proud, full-circle moment for Vasseur. He had developed Lewis Hamilton in 2005 and 2006, and Charles Leclerc in 2016, and now he was running the most mythical team in F1, with Leclerc as its star and, from 2025, Hamilton alongside him. Two of his old students, driving for him at the top of the sport.

The results have come slowly. 2023 was mainly about clawing back respect. In 2024, the team won five races, three for Leclerc, including a huge home win at Monaco and the win at Monza, and two for the departing Carlos Sainz. They lost the Constructors’ Championship to McLaren by just fourteen points at the final round.

Then Vasseur made his boldest call yet: he signed seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton away from Mercedes for 2025. The driver he’d first put in a winning car nearly twenty years earlier was set to finish his career in red. Hamilton said flat out that Vasseur was the reason he went to the Scuderia.

Then 2025 almost ended him.

The Fire

It was a miserable year, no way around it. Ferrari didn’t win a Grand Prix. It finished fourth. And Hamilton, one of the greatest drivers who’s ever lived, went a whole season without a single podium for the first time in his career. It’s jarring to even write that.

The Italian press did what the Italian press does. Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera reported that Ferrari’s management was ready to fire Vasseur. Over the Canadian weekend, Vasseur, who is normally the calmest guy in any garage, hit back hard, saying the speculation “hurt” the team and calling the reporting around his staff “disrespectful” and “very harsh.” Hamilton backed him publicly, calling the rumors nonsense, and repeating that Vasseur was the reason he’d left Mercedes.

Ferrari’s answer came just before the Hungarian Grand Prix at the end of July 2025. Instead of firing him, they gave him a new multi-year deal, reportedly running through at least the end of 2027. “Today we want to recognize what has been built and commit to what still needs to be achieved,” said CEO Benedetto Vigna. The speculation died. Vasseur had survived the chaos. It seems insiders at Maranello knew the total rules reset in 2026 would settle it.

Small Stone by Small Stone

2026 is the season that matters, and as I write this, it’s only half done. But so far it’s looked a lot like Vasseur being proven right.

Formula 1 threw out the rulebook for 2026. New engines, lighter cars, a clean slate that reshuffled the order. Ferrari’s new car, the SF-26, has a clear personality. The chassis is good: balanced, easy to drive, one of the most developable cars Maranello has turned out in years. The engine is the problem. Ferrari went with a smaller turbo, which makes the car quick off the line but leaves it down on top speed. Leclerc puts it at four or five tenths a lap short of Mercedes, and it qualifies around half a second slower.

There’s a Sunday catch, too. The SF-26 is hard on its rear tires in the heat, so a stint that starts on pace can quickly slide away. On a cool day, it can win. On a hot one, it’s managing a problem. Vasseur has acknowledged as much. He’s not here to sell us a fantasy.

But the results have come anyway. Leclerc opened with a podium in Australia. Hamilton got his first Ferrari podium in China, then at Barcelona in June, his first win in red, on the same track where Michael Schumacher scored his first Ferrari win thirty years earlier. At Silverstone, Leclerc took his first career win at the track, Ferrari’s 250th in F1, with Hamilton third. Nine rounds in, the driver who didn’t manage a single podium in all of 2025 has five. “It’s small stone after small stone,” Vasseur said.

It hasn’t been a coronation. The man leading the championship into the summer break (50 points clear of his rivals) is 19-year-old Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli. He’s the youngest points leader the sport has ever had. Mercedes has been the team to beat, with eight wins in the first eleven rounds. Even Lando Norris, the defending champion, didn’t win until Hungary, the last race before the summer break.

Ferrari’s closer to the front than any of that suggests. Hamilton sits second in the drivers’ standings. But second isn’t first.

Last weekend in Hungary, Ferrari topped Friday practice and looked good for the win. Then came Sunday, and it all fell apart. Leclerc fourth, Hamilton fifth after a pit-lane speeding penalty. The car keeps surprising the team by being quick where it’s supposed to struggle and slow where it’s supposed to shine. The Scuderia is competitive again, in the fight, but not quite there. The World Drivers’ title drought still runs back to 2007 and Kimi Räikkönen…

and the pressure at Ferrari never lets up.

The Numbers

The thing Fred Vasseur runs is enormous. Ferrari is the most valuable team in Formula 1. Sportico puts it at about $7 billion, ahead of Mercedes and McLaren, on roughly $725 million in revenue and $152 million in operating profit. It’s owned by the publicly listed Ferrari N.V. (NYSE: RACE); the Agnelli family’s Exor is the biggest shareholder, and Enzo Ferrari’s son Piero Ferrari holds about ten percent. It’s the crown jewel of the grid.

The man running it gets paid a fraction of what his rivals do. Vasseur’s Ferrari pay is estimated at $7–9 million per year, well under Mercedes’ Toto Wolff (reportedly north of $16 million, and himself a billionaire co-owner) and under former Red Bull boss Christian Horner. His own drivers make him look cheap! Hamilton’s 2026 base salary is reported to be around $70 million, and Leclerc’s around $34 million. The two guys in his cars out-earn their boss roughly ten-to-one, the same two guys he first strapped into winning cars when they were teenagers and he was running a team out in the French countryside.

The net-worth sites list Vasseur at a few million dollars. Take that with a big grain of salt. Those trackers can only see what’s visible, and what’s visible is a salary. They can’t price RPM, ASM years, ART, AOTech, or Spark, the private company that’s held an exclusive FIA World Championship supply deal for over a decade. None of those businesses have a posted value anywhere, and Vasseur has never said what any of them are valued at or how much of each he still owns. So nobody outside his accountant knows what Vasseur is worth.

The Garden

Voltaire’s line is often read as a sign of giving up. Candide, worn out by the world, retreats to tend a little plot. But I find the alternate interpretation the better one: tending a garden is an honest way to make progress, not surrender. You can’t argue a garden into bloom. You work it, season after season, and you accept that the payoff comes slowly, and maybe sometimes not at all.

That’s Vasseur’s whole career. He never had one big fortune to throw around, so he grew a lot of small things instead: an engine shop, a race team he bought and turned into a title machine, a junior empire spanning a dozen championships, a simulator company, a manufacturer that builds the cars for an entire world championship, generation after generation. And running through all of it, a talent pipeline that produced two of the drivers now sitting in his Ferraris. He’s tending the most valuable, most demanding patch of ground in the sport, trying to grow a championship out of soil that hasn’t produced one in almost twenty years.

Vasseur is fifty-eight. He never chased a fortune. Instead, he built his businesses one stone at a time. The tifosi (yours truly included) hope it’s time now to decorate his garden with some hardware.

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Billionaires play the same games as us normies, they just do it on a much bigger scale. We play fantasy sports, they do it with real teams.

The NFL’s New York Jets owner, Woody Johnson, now owns a minority stake in Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team and will join its board as vice chairman. The team says his focus will be commercial growth, especially in the United States.

Johnson owns the New York Jets, holds a stake in Crystal Palace, and served as the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom. Aston Martin needs him to open commercial doors.

The United States has become Formula 1’s most contested commercial market, with races in Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas, Cadillac on the grid, and American brands trying to turn F1 from a media buy into a broader customer and hospitality platform. Johnson understands those buyers because he has spent decades selling access to sports properties.

In July 2025, Aston Martin Lagonda sold its 4.6% stake in the F1 team for £110 million. The transaction valued the racing operation at roughly £2.4 billion, or about $3.2 billion. Bloomberg reported the sale, and Business of Speed previously broke down the gap between the F1 team and the struggling road-car company that shares its name.

Stroll bought the Force India operation out of administration in 2018 for roughly $120 million. Seven years later, even with the team yet to win a race under the Aston Martin name, its value has risen anyway. A small stake in the same team holds a multibillion-dollar valuation.

The asset carries a global media audience, a limited number of grid positions, premium hospitality, sponsor inventory, and a cost structure that gives investors more predictability than the sport had in its old hand-to-mouth era. The car still needs to perform. The investment case can rise ahead of the results.

Commercial access has a hard limit because somebody still has to build a fast car.

Aston Martin has Adrian Newey, a works partnership with Honda, a technical relationship with Aramco, and a new technology campus. Johnson can improve the conversations around the team. He cannot design the floor, calibrate the power unit, or put the car on pole.

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Verstappen’s New Deal

Did we really think this was going to end up any other way?

The money is hard to ignore.

The reported deal is worth between $107 million and $134 million. That would make Max Verstappen the highest-paid driver in F1 history, potentially the biggest contract in motorsport, and place him among the five highest-paid athletes in the world before endorsements.

Red Bull’s new deal with Verstappen also gives Laurent Mekies the first piece of his plan for the team’s next winning cycle.

Mekies has identified three priorities: keep Verstappen, retain and attract top talent, and build the infrastructure needed to produce a competitive car. Verstappen’s decision settles the first question. It can also help Red Bull with the second.

Red Bull has lost several senior figures, including Adrian Newey, Rob Marshall, Jonathan Wheatley, Helmut Marko, and Christian Horner. Those departures, combined with years of speculation about Verstappen’s future, made the team look unstable to potential recruits.

Mekies can now point to Verstappen’s commitment when trying to keep engineers or convince new ones to join. The fastest driver in the world has chosen to stay. That gives the project credibility.

The deal has already affected one personnel decision. Verstappen wanted Tom Hart, his performance engineer, to replace Gianpiero Lambiase. Hart was set to join Williams but has stayed at Red Bull and will work with Verstappen next season.

That still leaves Mekies with plenty to fix. Verstappen’s signature buys Red Bull time. The car has to improve, Red Bull Ford Powertrains has to deliver, the new wind tunnel has to come online, and the team has to rebuild around a new generation of leaders.

Verstappen’s contract also removes most of the surprise from the driver market for the next few seasons.

He is committed through 2030. Charles Leclerc is expected to remain at Ferrari through 2031 or 2032, while Lewis Hamilton is signed through 2027 and wants to continue if his 2026 form holds. Mercedes should keep Kimi Antonelli and George Russell. McLaren has Oscar Piastri through 2028 and Lando Norris through 2027, with another long-term deal likely for Norris.

That leaves few obvious routes into F1’s top teams.

Verstappen’s departure would have started a chain reaction. A move to Mercedes or Ferrari would have opened seats, shifted contracts, and forced the rest of the grid into motion. Instead, drivers such as Oliver Bearman, Pierre Gasly, and Carlos Sainz are left waiting.

Williams has already extended Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz, giving both sides more time to see whether James Vowles’ project can recover. Aston Martin faces a similar situation. Fernando Alonso is expected to stay unless Honda’s upgrade fails badly, while Lance Stroll has a seat at his father’s team.

Audi offers the next credible route to a front-running seat, but joining now requires patience. Driver movement gives broadcasters fresh storylines and helps F1 build national stars, as we wrote in Italy Is Back.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

A Different Kind of Ask

This one is a bit different.

Years ago, I worked with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and helped get New Haven’s Finest off the ground.

Today, I’m honored to be a 2026 Connecticut’s Finest honoree myself.

A lot has changed in CF since I first became involved. Treatments like Trikafta have given many people with CF a completely different future than they might have imagined a decade ago.

But there are still people who don’t respond to existing treatments. There is still a tremendous amount of work to do.

So I’m setting a goal of raising (at least) $2,500 for the Foundation.

If you’re in a position to donate, I’d genuinely appreciate your support. If not, sharing this with someone who might be interested is incredibly helpful too.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me over the years. This one means a lot.

Donate Here

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The short version of the case, for anyone who has only read the Lakers coverage, is as follows. Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life are annuity companies. People hand them money, often retirement savings, in exchange for a promise of payments years or decades from now, and the companies invest that money in the meantime. State regulators allow this on two conditions: report accurately what the money is invested in, and keep a cushion of extra capital in case the investments go bad. Both companies are part of Group 1001, the insurance group controlled by Mark Walter.

In February, a federal grand jury in Manhattan sent both companies subpoenas, a prosecutor’s formal demand for documents and usually the first public sign of a criminal investigation. In June, Delaware Life corrected its books. Roughly $17 billion of loans it had been reporting as made to outside borrowers were reclassified as loans to companies connected to its own owner, and the share of policyholders’ money tied up in the owner’s other businesses went from about 3 percent to 39 percent.

Delaware Life is the primary sponsor of Marcus Ericsson’s No. 28 Andretti Global Honda at all 18 IndyCar races this year. Delaware Life is also one of the two annuity companies inside Group 1001 that received a federal grand jury subpoena in February. Every insurer files a sworn financial statement on which named officers attest that the numbers are true, and the first officer named on Delaware Life’s June restatement, according to at Mispriced Assets, who read the filing, is Group 1001’s chief executive, Dan Towriss. Towriss is also the chief executive of TWG Motorsports, which owns Andretti Global outright, owns the Cadillac Formula 1 team in partnership with General Motors, and holds stakes in Wayne Taylor Racing, Spire Motorsports and Walkinshaw TWG Racing. The federal investigation into Mark Walter’s insurers reaches the race teams through that one person, and the exposure can be worked out team by team.

Lending to your owner’s other companies is legal. The rules require disclosure so a regulator can see how much of the promise to retirees depends on the performance of Walter’s other bets, and for years the filings said the exposure was small. Fitch said the corrected number was the highest of any North American life insurer it rates and put Delaware Life on watch for a downgrade; AM Best and S&P moved to negative outlook. Those grades matter because the agents and brokers who sell annuities use them to decide whose products to sell, so a downgrade slows the new money coming in. FBI agents had already taken Walter’s phone and laptop off his plane in Chicago last September.

Then the deleveraging started, which is the finance term for selling assets and raising cash to pay down debt quickly. TWG has been offering lenders double-digit interest on short-term loans, with Walter’s 20 percent of Guggenheim Partners pledged as security, and the insurers told the market to expect roughly $8 billion of the owner-connected loans to come off the books, which TWG will have to find. The Lakers went to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at $12.5 billion in a matter of days, and on Monday, The Guardian and AFP reported that Walter and Todd Boehly are considering selling their Chelsea shares to Clearlake at a £5 billion valuation.

The coverage follows the trophies, which is fair, since Walter owns them. Nemeth’s point on August 14 was that Walter has never held an insurance license or signed an annual statement; the licensed operator who swears the filings at Delaware Life and Clear Spring is Towriss, and Towriss is the man running the racing. BoS profiled him in March and mapped TWG Global in February, back when the interesting question was how an actuary from Muncie got a team onto the F1 grid. Nobody has charged anyone with anything, and TWG’s line, given to Bloomberg in July, is that “Mark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith” and that they are cooperating.

The question I keep getting from readers is: What does this do to the race teams?

The Money

The No. 28 is one of several places the group sponsors itself. Will Power’s No. 26 carries “TWG.” TWG AI, the group’s in-house artificial intelligence unit, is the primary partner of Andretti’s Formula E entry and the Official AI Partner of the Cadillac F1 car. Gainbridge, the Group 1001 annuity brand, has been the presenting sponsor of the Indianapolis 500 since 2019 and extended in November, and Group 1001 itself took a primary on Daniel Suárez’s Spire Chevrolet.

The pattern predates TWG, and it works like this. Gainbridge went on Zach Veach’s Andretti car full time in 2018 as a sponsor. Towriss became a co-owner of Andretti Global in 2022, with an investment that RACER reported matched or exceeded the roughly $250 million the team had raised that year. Walter’s TWG bought the team outright in November 2024 after Michael Andretti stepped back. Group 1001 brands started sponsoring Spire in 2023, and Towriss bought into that team in 2024, taking T.J. Puchyr’s shares while Jeff Dickerson kept the majority. (Puchyr has since bought Rick Ware Racing to build a team of his own)

Sponsoring first and buying later is a common way to build a portfolio, and it also means that a real slice of the sponsorship revenue from these teams is money the group pays itself. In-house money is the most fragile kind, because it lasts exactly as long as the parent decides to keep spending it, and the parent here is an insurer whose cushion has thinned. AM Best said the reclassification produced a “material decrease” in Group 1001’s risk-adjusted capital, which is the agency’s measure of that cushion against the riskiness of the investments. Every dollar an insurer spends on a race car is a dollar not sitting in the cushion, and the cushion is what regulators, rating agencies, and now prosecutors are staring at.

There is a second-order point, and I will label it as inference: a payment from a regulated insurer to a race team its own affiliate owns is a related-party transaction, a deal between companies with the same owner, and that is the exact category of transaction everyone is now reading line by line. Nobody has suggested the sponsorships are improper.

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Cadillac F1

About $1 billion was spent before they even showed up to the first race. That’s on top of the $450 million anti-dilution fee, which was Formula 1’s price of admission. Mark Reuss, GM’s president, said last August, “We have invested heavily, between TWG and General Motors.” GM’s own engine arrives in 2029; until then, the team buys Ferrari power. On track, zero points through Hungary, nine retirements between Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas.

Just last week, Towriss replaced team principal Graeme Lowdon with Marcin Budkowski, telling reporters the next day, “It was my decision, it wasn’t a mutual decision,” and describing it as the start of the team’s next phase. No reporting connects that change to the investigation, and nothing here suggests it does. It belongs in this piece for two reasons: it shows who is making the calls at Cadillac, and a team with no points and a new boss is a weaker negotiating partner for GM if the ownership is ever restructured. GM leadership approved the appointment.

Cadillac F1’s website lists ten official partners, one of which is TWG AI, and no title sponsor. Tyler Epp, who ran the Miami Grand Prix, is now selling that inventory against a news cycle that includes the words “grand jury.” The Super Bowl launch remains the best thing about the season.

For the purpose of this piece, however, ownership mechanics matter more than the lap times. Formula 1 rejected Andretti in January 2024 and admitted the same project ten months later when GM put its name and a future engine on it. F1’s tie is to GM. Under the commercial agreement every team signs with F1 (the Concorde Agreement), a team cannot change controlling owners without F1’s consent, so if TWG ever needs to sell down, the buyer F1 would likely wave through in an afternoon is GM.

Sportico did not assign a valuation to Cadillac in its November list of team valuations. The most comparable team on the grid is the other American team, Haas, valued at $1.68 billion.

Andretti Global

Andretti is the sentimental core and the awkward one. The Fishers building was announced in 2022 as Andretti Global’s $200 million campus; after Michael Andretti stepped back in September 2024, the campus became the F1 team’s, and the IndyCar, Indy NXT, and Formula E operations moved into 245,783 leased square feet on Georgetown Road. On track, the year is good. Kyle Kirkwood is second in the standings behind Alex Palou. Will Power took a podium at Portland, and Ron Ruzewski came over from Penske to run the shop. Sam’s Club, on Kirkwood’s No. 27, is an outside sponsor. The Delaware Life and TWG names on the other two cars come from inside the group.

One name from the buildings belongs on the watch list. Bradford Allen, the Chicago commercial real estate firm that is the master developer of the Fishers headquarters and arranged the Georgetown Road lease, is one of four companies the Wall Street Journal reported on August 16 that prosecutors are focused on as go-betweens, firms that sat between Walter’s insurers and other companies he controls when loans were made. That is an adjacency. No filing links either building to the loans, the financing of the Fishers project has never been reported, and Bradford Allen has not been accused of anything. But it is on the list of things a reporter would ask about.

The asset question is new. IndyCar’s charter system arrived in 2025 and gave established teams something like a franchise: three per team, which includes a guaranteed starting spot and a share of the series’ money that can be bought and sold with the series’ approval.

In February, Doug Boles told Honda and Chevrolet that they would receive transferable charters of their own starting in 2028. IndyCar is turning entries into paper that can be valued and sold when an owner needs to raise cash. Roger Penske and Mark Miles, who would have to approve any transfer, carry their own exposure to this group, since Gainbridge’s name is on the 500 through the multiyear extension Miles signed in November. Neither Penske nor Miles wants a distressed Andretti sale, and neither wants a presenting sponsor in the news for the wrong reasons in May.

Spire Motorsports

Spire is the cleanest position in the group and the smallest, a minority share in a team Dickerson owns most of and runs.

The team holds three Cup Series charters, NASCAR’s version of a franchise. Charters can be bought and sold, and the prices became public in last year’s antitrust lawsuit, so the comparables run from the $40 million Spire itself paid Live Fast in 2023, to the roughly $45 million Legacy Motor Club was reported to have paid Rick Ware, to the $100 million some team executives were floating in December. On those numbers, the three charters alone are worth $150 million to $300 million before you count the drivers, the trucks, or the shop. The sponsor list is solid, with Spectrum, Chili’s, Freeway Insurance, and Zeigler paying their way, and Group 1001’s brands are down to a single primary on the No. 7 in 2026 from Gainbridge and Delaware Life primaries in 2024.

Wayne Taylor Racing and Walkinshaw TWG

Wayne Taylor Racing is Cadillac’s factory team in IMSA’s top prototype class. Taylor split from Andretti after 2024, told Sportscar365 in January 2025, “I’m now partnered with TWG, with Dan Towriss and them,” and said Reuss, Jim Campbell, and Rory Harvey wanted the Wayne Taylor name on the program. The team won at Road America on August 2, ending a long drought. The dollars are small next to F1, the exposure is GM’s again, and the resolution is obvious. Taylor and GM can carry the program with or without TWG’s check, and GM will want distance from any headline that says otherwise.

Walkinshaw TWG Racing is the team Toyota chose to develop and race its official car in its first Supercars season, the GR Supra, with Chaz Mostert and Ryan Wood driving. Zak Brown and United Autosports sold their share in 2025. Walkinshaw and TWG bought it, and Scott O’Donnell’s ODFI joined in March, so it is a three-way table with Towriss as one of three directors, and TWG’s percentage remains undisclosed. Toyota’s Australian arm did not sign up for a debut season shadowed by a Manhattan grand jury, and Toyota is the most reputation-sensitive manufacturer in the sport. Expect the ownership lines to be redrawn without press releases if this drags.

The Logic

Now put the five in the order a banker would untangle for an over-borrowed client. TWG’s need is measured in billions and is near-term: short-term loans coming due within a year, an $8 billion promise to regulators and rating agencies to shrink owner-connected lending, an NBA owners’ vote on the Lakers sale still to come, and a Chelsea stake in play.

Race teams consume cash. Cadillac was spending a reported $30 million a month before it turned a wheel, and F1’s cost cap is $215 million this year, excluding items such as driver salaries and marketing. Race teams are also slow to sell, because every one of them needs someone’s permission to change hands, F1’s or NASCAR’s or IndyCar’s, and in two cases a manufacturer’s.

Assets that need permission draw fewer bidders, and bidders who know the seller is under pressure bid low. So the sequence writes itself. Easy to sell and famous first (the Lakers, done). Minority stakes second (Chelsea, in talks). Loans against what he still owns third (the Guggenheim stake). Operating businesses last. Motorsport is where TWG’s brand story lives, which puts it at the back of the queue, but the queue is moving quickly.

My POV

GM ends up owning more of the Cadillac F1 team than it does today within 18 months, either by buying TWG down or through step-in rights, which we assume GM’s lawyers wrote into the 2024 agreement. F1 would approve it in a week because F1 wanted GM in the first place.

The Spire stake is the racing position most likely to be sold if TWG needs to show a regulator some cash, and the first call goes to Dickerson, who already owns the rest of it. Andretti stays in the group, but the house sponsors come off. WTR and Walkinshaw are rounding errors financially, so GM and Toyota each get closer to the paperwork than they are today.

Investigations end without charges all the time, and this one might as well. If it does not, and the charging documents touch the filings, every series with a TWG entry goes under immediate scrutiny.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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The big headline many chose to comment on last week after Liberty Media’s Q2 earnings report was that Formula 1 reported a 61% drop in operating income for the second quarter of 2026. Formula 1’s second-quarter revenue fell 38% to $764 million. Adjusted OIBDA fell 61% to $139 million. Operating income fell 75% to $73 million.

So did Formula 1’s business actually fall off a cliff, or was this just some accounting voodoo?

To start, quarterly reports are usually so skewed because they paint an incomplete picture. But the online reaction felt like a eulogy, so there I was last week, at my in-laws’ house, pouring rain outside, listening to a 56-minute earnings call while trying to keep my 4-year-old and 2-year-old occupied with the 2004 French GP.

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The eulogists had plenty of material to work with. ‘Revenue fell 38 percent.’ ‘Adjusted OIBDA fell 61 percent.’ ‘Operating income fell 75 percent.’

As headlines, those look pretty worrisome. Here are the actual numbers; decide for yourself.

For the quarter ending June 30:

• Formula 1 revenue: $764 million, down from $1.226 billion a year earlier

• Adjusted OIBDA: $139 million, down from $361 million

• Operating income: $73 million, down from $293 million

• Team payments to the grid: $316 million, down from $513 million

• Races held: five, against nine in the same quarter of 2025

What wasn’t in most of the headlines (but was in the articles people have to read) is that Formula 1 recognizes revenue by race—in fractions of the full season—timed to when races actually happen rather than spread evenly across the calendar. Five races occurred in Q2, compared with nine in 2025. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia never raced in April, casualties of the war in the Middle East. Japan moved to Q1. Imola dropped off the schedule completely. Fewer races run, less season to recognize, less revenue booked.

I don’t think Formula 1’s business took any real damage this quarter. Its books did. And that’s why I don’t give quarterly reports much space in my mind.

Let’s take a step back, and we’ll see that things aren’t looking too bad at all.

Liberty’s own calendar puts three races in the first quarter, five in the second, seven in the third, and eight crammed into the final nine weeks of the year, from early October through the first weekend of December.

In full-year 2025, all 24 races produced $3.873 billion in F1 revenue and $946 million in Adjusted OIBDA at a 24 percent margin. Nothing about the underlying contracts changed between June and August. Media rights fees escalate on schedule. Sponsors pay out the term they signed. Teams collect a fixed share of full-season profit once the books close.

What’s genuinely uncertain is the calendar itself. Liberty told the SEC that Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s races didn’t happen in April “as a result of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East,” and that “additional calendar changes may be necessary” if it continues. Bahrain has already been rerouted to Malaysia for October. Qatar and Abu Dhabi are still on the books for late November and early December. It’s looking increasingly likely those two hold, if only because Formula 1 has now shown twice that it would rather relocate a race than cancel one. If they don’t, Stefano Domenicali has said the season finishes in Europe instead, probably at Imola.

The market didn’t need convincing either. Liberty’s stock opened the morning of the earnings call at $96.05 and closed up 3.08 percent at $99.01. It has since continued to climb.

The questions on the call read the same way. Six analysts got time with management. None asked about the drop:

• Evercore’s Kutgun Maral asked about media rights trajectory and Las Vegas profitability

• Goldman Sachs asked management to strip out the calendar noise and describe underlying performance

Context helps too. Liberty paid $4.4 billion for Formula One Group in 2017. It paid a disclosed enterprise value of €4.2 billion, worth roughly $4.5 billion at the time, for MotoGP’s commercial rights in 2024, a series with a fraction of F1’s audience. The buyer who knows this asset class best keeps paying more for it.

And the demand seems to be in line with that story. Paddock Club, F1’s hospitality product, sold out for 2026 with team allocations for 2027 already locked in. Total hours watched on Apple’s broadcast are up 13 percent season to date. The Las Vegas Grand Prix just got a ten-year extension through 2037. Sponsorship revenue grew 32 percent in 2025, to $840 million, the fastest-growing line in the business.

The online reaction will always skew toward disaster, because that’s how clicks and headlines work. While a lot of it is just the headlines doing what they do, a lot of it is also the internet doing what it does best: complaining.

The critics aren’t wrong about everything. A global calendar comes with global risk attached, and Liberty just watched that risk cost it a Grand Prix and force it to use new language in a federal filing over a war it doesn’t control.

While the risks are real, the health of the sport has never been better.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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Accessibility and marketing. They are the same thing until someone has to give something up.

Netflix, TikTok, and a Brad Pitt film that grossed $629 million. The fanbase hit 830 million, with 42% women and 43% under 35. Social followers passed 125 million, up 19%. Over eleven races, the sport drew 3.7 million people, up from 3.4 million at the same rounds last year; every weekend sold out; six attendance records broken. None of it required charging anybody less. That is marketing, done about as well as it can be done.

But it gets confused with accessibility. You see, “accessibility” is the word the fans want to hear. No one wants to think they’re just being marketed to.

The figure in circulation is $554, the average three-day ticket across the 2026 calendar, calculated by GP Destinations as the mean of general admission, cheapest grandstand, and main grandstand at each race. Last year, the same method returned $488. General admission alone increased from $232 to $275, an 18.5% increase.

On 27 February 2025, Derek Chang told analysts the 2024 Las Vegas race "missed internal expectations on revenue and OIBDA" and that "we are making further revisions to the ticket product and pricing strategy." Twelve days later, Emily Prazer cut Thursday entry from $150 to $50 and the three-day pass from $600 to $400, dedicating the race to "making the Las Vegas Grand Prix more accessible to a wider audience." She was more useful with The Race the same day: "we've kind of flipped the model somewhat, where we've been lowering the prices closer to the race."

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Where does accessibility come in?

Matthew Barry at asked me this week where I draw the line between F1 becoming more accessible and F1 just becoming more marketable, and whether those are the same thing to me. Two sides of one coin, until someone has to give something up.

The World Health Organization got there first, when it stopped calling disability an attribute of a person and started calling it a mismatch between what someone needs and what an organization offers. Accept that framing and exclusion are design decisions made on purpose.

I read six trade guides on accessible marketing while writing this. They share one thread: build it in, do not bolt it on. Accessibility in marketing means it is designed so nobody gets shut out. Price never enters the definition.

The commercial case is the part nobody runs the numbers on. One in five UK consumers has a disability, carrying £274 billion in annual spending power. Working-age Americans with disabilities held $21 billion in discretionary income. Braille Works finds that 92% of consumers prefer a business that is accessible, and 70% of disabilities are not visible, which means you are already selling to these people and mostly not noticing. Bert Floyd, who runs assistive technology at TD Bank, puts the cost of ignoring it better than any agency deck: “If you don’t design for accessibility, it’s like saying to every fifth person who walks in your door, ‘I don’t really want your business.’”

So there are two plays available here. Premium runs on scarcity, and not everyone is the product. Accessible runs on reach; you find the barrier, you remove it, and it stays removed because somebody designed it that way.

Formula 1 is caught at a crossroads thanks to amazing growth.

Right now, they seem to be running the premium play and running it well. Paddock Club is allocated to the teams through 2028; Monaco added a third floor; House 44 goes from nine locations to thirteen. Scarcity is why LVMH writes the cheque, and nobody should apologize for a strategy that works.

The real accessibility work is being done by other people.

The Red Bull Ring offers audio description for blind visitors and live text of the track announcer in its app. Melbourne is putting closed captions on every super-screen from 2027. Monza runs a free wheelchair-accessible grandstand. Every one of those is a promoter decision, all of them different, with no series-wide standard behind any of them. And the best accessibility product in motorsport this year came from Formula E, which built AI-generated audio race reports in 15 languages with Google Cloud and the Royal National Institute of Blind People, tested with blind fans before being put into use.

That is what the word means when someone means it. A discipline, with practitioners, standards, and a charity in the room.

Yes, F1 and motorsport can be more accessible. Yes, they can also become more marketable. But there’s a point where trade-offs will have to be made, and the consumer decides where their money goes.

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Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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“I come from a part of the country here in western Pennsylvania,” he told us. “People here are not known for blowing their own horn. They do their work and let their work do the talking for them. That’s pretty much how I’ve approached things for such a long period of time.”

But Chip is a smart man. He sees the shift coming.

On July 30, he launched CGR Media, an in-house editorial division inside the race team, and hired Jenna Fryer to run it as Director of Media. Fryer spent roughly thirty years at the Associated Press and took a buyout in May, after the AP changed how it covers auto racing.

A PR person told him something years ago that he has never let go of. “If you don’t tell your story, somebody else will.”

Everybody with a phone is a reporter now, which raised the volume and nothing else. “What we look to do is improve the quality of what’s out there about us,” he said. “I’m not interested in a puddle that looks very big and is not very deep.”

Sponsorship Hangs in the Balance

Sponsorship has been priced against earned media for forty years. A logo on a sidepod gets valued in broadcast seconds and impressions, run through a media-value multiplier calculated by an agency that nobody in the room fully trusts, and the whole exercise rests on the assumption that a working press corps exists to generate the earned half. That assumption is expiring.

A team-owned newsroom changes what a partner is buying. First-party audience data replaces an estimate. Placement is guaranteed rather than hoped for. The format belongs to the team. The crew has access no outside outlet will ever be granted. Ganassi’s announcement puts it plainly. The division exists to “create meaningful value for our partners through premium, owned content.”

Access is the moat, and it is underexploited. Only the team has the Sunday morning debrief, the transporter at four in the morning, the engineer explaining why the car was three tenths off. That is the highest-value footage in motorsport, and it is sitting unshot in most of the garages on the grid. Formula 1 already ran the experiment. Drive to Survive proved what narrative does to a demand curve, and the teams handed most of the upside to Netflix.

The Tradeoff

Owned coverage is not independent coverage. CGR Media may never publish the piece about the bad year, the driver dispute, or the partner who walked.

Asked to his face about Fryer being a polarizing figure, Ganassi did not flinch. He pointed out that writing for the AP means writing about everybody, and that the new job is narrower. “Hopefully this is gonna be a little different where she’s not really opining about other teams,” he said. “It’s just about us.”

Every Team is a Media Company

I’ve been beating this drum for over a decade: every company should be a media company.

I do believe that within the next few years, every American team with a real fanbase employs at least one full-time journalist, and the teams that skip it could find nobody covering them at all.

Watch the second-order effect. As teams absorb the writers, the independent outlets that supply pricing credibility get thinner, and the number a sponsor uses to justify the spend starts arriving from the organization selling the spend.

Ganassi will tell you he is not thinking about any of it. “We’re about the show, not the sideshow,” he said, and he has been saying a version of that for thirty-six years.

The media company conversation is one segment of an hour conversation we had with the legend. He walks through the Scott Dixon conversation and says the search for a replacement is down to the short strokes. He explains why he hires on values and teaches the rest, what Mario Andretti told him in 1994 that changed how he ran the team, why he had zero involvement in bringing the Freedom 250 to Washington, what Alex Palou told him about the IR-28 after driving it, and who he considers the most naturally gifted driver he has ever been around. Enjoy!

Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.

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Precision timing is crucial in motorsports, where milliseconds can determine the winner. MYLAPS advanced timing solutions ensure the most accurate results.

The Race co-founder Darren Cox got Flavio Briatore at Enstone for what was scheduled as thirty minutes and ran closer to an hour. Cox spent years inside Renault, several rungs below the man across the table, and wrote up his own read of the conversation on August 1. His version is about culture and conviction, and he’s right on both.

I listened to the full podcast to hear what a 76-year-old executive says when nobody in the room has a reason to interrupt him.

Here are some of the things that stood out to me.

He Talked About How He Gets Paid

“Last year, I promised Renault that next year we are in the first six. If we make it, maybe we are in the first five. But surely, the first six from P10 to P6 is already there. It is what I promised. My bonus is in the first six. Anyway, at least I take the bonus.”

Alpine sits sixth with 61 points, five behind Racing Bulls and forty clear of Haas. The bonus is live, and it is close.

I can’t think of another team boss on this grid who has discussed his compensation on camera. The deal he described pays on where the team finishes, a position he can protect for the rest of the season and still lose on one bad Sunday afternoon.

He Would Sell the Team

Cox asked whether valuations have topped out. “If the team was mine, I’d have sold already!”

Then, asked whether he wished he still owned a piece of one of the three teams he’s held stakes in: “No question, too high.”

The bull case he handed to other people. “The prediction of the people is that the price of the team is still not high, but normal. And the prediction of the people is that in three, four years, the team is worth much more.” The bear case he kept for himself.

He Priced Otro’s Stake

Otro Capital holds 24 percent of Alpine, bought in 2023 for a reported $218 million. Mercedes walked away from acquiring that stake in May over the distance between Otro’s reported ask of around $720 million and what Mercedes thought the whole team was worth.

Cox asked who would make a good incoming investor. Briatore called it Renault’s issue rather than his, then volunteered a number nobody had requested.

“I never see somebody buy, spend 600 million to buy a minority, to be signed as partner, if you don’t agree with the majority.”

Earlier in the same stretch of interview, he had valued Alpine at 3.2, then 3.5 within one answer, never naming a currency. Twenty-four percent of 3.2 billion is 768 million. The figure he chose to say out loud sits below his own arithmetic and below the ask already reported in the paddock. He framed it as a price no buyer would pay, and he said it while Renault is negotiating.

Whether that’s a man rounding or a man talking a price down, I don’t know. My read is the second.

He Changed the Culture…and People Love It

Cox set up his culture question with something he picked up in the lobby on his way in. “I spoke to your receptionist here, as I was coming into the facility. She’s been here many, many years.” Briatore, cutting in: “Longer than me.” Cox again: “She, without me asking, said, it’s great to have Flavio back because he brings a different culture.”

Briatore’s own answer defined the culture by subtraction. “There’s no fucking tourist thing around the world, you know?” The Benetton people who came before him “had no idea about winning. The idea was to be in Formula One, to go around the world, have fun at the barbecue. And I don’t like barbecue, and I don’t like going around the world. I want to win.”

He Doesn’t Watch the Racing

“But if I don’t have the team, I don’t know if I watch Formula One, honestly.”

Asked whether he watched during the years he was out of the sport: “No, sometimes, but never.”

The same distance runs through his restaurants. “For me, the pizza was the excuse to go to Crazy Pizza. The pizza was the DJ, the rumor, the spinning pizza, and the experience. I don’t care about the pizza, if it’s good or bad.”

He put the principle in one line: “For me, our car is our product.” The executive who sold Gucci on Formula 1 has no personal relationship with Formula 1, which is probably why he could look at a race weekend and see inventory.

His Numbers Run High

“And the average of the support of Formula 1 has dropped dramatically; now you talk about 28, 30. And what is incredible is that 60% are women and 40% are men.”

The 2025 Global Fan Survey, 100,000-plus responses across 186 countries, puts the average fan at 32 and women at 42 percent of the audience, up from 37 percent in 2018. He also said Miami draws 500,000; the race reports around 275,000 across its weekend.

Then he gave Silverstone as 560,000 when the circuit published 564,000. The only figure he rounded down was the one that happened to be true.

Cox didn’t correct any of it, and I doubt many interviewers would have. Sixty-forty is the slide a title sponsor’s marketing team wants in the deck, and it will now circulate as a quote from the man who signed Gucci onto a Formula 1 car.

The Driver is Not His Priority

Three separate times, Briatore said the driver is not his priority. “In this moment, the driver is really not our priority.” “Today, my priority is to build a racing team.” “Really, the driver is not my priority.”

Cox then produced this: “In the past, you’ve been great at talent spotting, so I was going to ask you if there’s anyone on the junior ladder that excites you that could be the next Schumacher or Alonso. Unless you have someone’s name, I won’t ask you that question.”

He asked it and withdrew it in the same breath.

Briatore’s reputation in this sport was built on two driver signings: Michael Schumacher, poached from Jordan two weeks after his debut in 1991, and Fernando Alonso, spotted as a teenager in 1999, parked at Minardi, promoted to test driver, and handed the Renault race seat in 2003 on the way to two titles at the same factory Cox was sitting in when he asked the question and pulled it.

The reason he gave for not needing a third is buried in the same answer. “Don’t forget, this team, we arrived in this team with 1,200-1,300 people. Now we drop to 900 people.” That’s roughly 300 people out of a factory he insists can beat McLaren and Ferrari, and the conversation moved straight past it.

6.5/10

Asked whether he has the right people on the engineering side: “from zero to ten, we are about six and a half.”

He then located the problem more precisely than team bosses usually do. “At the back, we are okay with the Mercedes engine, with the gearbox, we are okay.” And: “Now our people are working from the top of the nose to the driver because this is the problem we have.”

Everything Enstone builds itself is the part he’s calling weak. He followed it by aiming at one office without naming the occupant. “Maybe we have very good engineering here, but it’s still on the bench. I think so. Our technical director needs to be really, really looking.”

Somewhere in that building, a technical director heard that sentence at the same time the rest of us did.

The Gucci Deal Closed because François-Henri Pinault had a Nice Weekend in Monaco

The origin story he gave has no strategy in it at all.

He pitched Luca de Meo, who had left Renault for Kering. “In the beginning he told me it was a very bad idea, okay, I never give up, I push him, push him, push him.” De Meo eventually came back with a condition. They would have to convince François-Henri Pinault, who “never followed Formula One, had no idea what was going on.”

So they brought Pinault to Monaco. “He was incredibly enthusiastic, you know, to see all this, plus Monaco, it’s an event, it’s a big event.”

A reported $50 to $60 million a season, escalating past $150 million, for a house working through eleven straight quarters of declining sales at last count, traces back to persistence and one good hosting day on the best weekend of the calendar. Every commercial director priced out of this market should ask which of those two things closed it.

Reheated Soup

Cox built his culture section around returners: Steve Nielsen, back at Enstone for a second spell, and Harry Richards, son of the David Richards who replaced Briatore in 1997.

Briatore, in the same section, on the people who left for Cadillac and Aston Martin and now want to come back: “For the moment, no. I don’t want anybody, the people left, to say a word. I don’t care.” Then, by way of explanation: “We don’t like the minestrone riscaldato.”

He offered reheated soup as a hiring policy in the middle of a conversation built around people who came back.

What I Think Happens

Otro’s 24 percent does not trade this year at anything close to the 768 million Briatore’s own valuation implies. The man running the asset spent an hour telling the market that the price is high, that the majority holder is relaxed about timing, and that a minority stake without Renault’s blessing has no buyer at the ask.

On the parent side, Renault carried a market capitalization of €7.68 billion in mid-June, which pushes Alpine toward the top of its 40-to-50-percent range. That arithmetic keeps getting more extreme.

The other call is sixth place. Racing Bulls are five points up the road. Briatore said his bonus is sixth, said he expects someone else in his chair within two or three years, and said he’d sell if the team were his. Put those three statements together, and he has already described his exit.

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In The Fast and the Furious, Edwin (played by Ja Rule) says to Brian (played by Paul Walker), “Everyone knows it’s not how you stand by your car, it’s how you race your car; you better learn that.”

Apparently, Stefano Domenicali has other thoughts.

The Formula 1 president and chief executive spent part of his Saturday at the Hungaroring talking to George Lucas about how new fans watch the sport. On a media call at the start of the summer break, he reported back what he had taken from it.

“I think that the truth is exactly the other way around, because no one is interested in how you drive your car,” he told reporters, in quotes carried by Autosport. “The people are interested if you’re overtaking or not. That’s the vast majority of the people.” Lucas, he said, “was giving me an incredible view on how the new fans are watching Formula 1. They are fascinated by the fact that there is a lot of action.”

The question that prompted it was about battery state-of-charge graphics, which ran on the world feed at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix and then thinned out through Silverstone and Spa as driver criticism of the 2026 rules got louder. Domenicali allowed that “for a niche of our fans, this data is relevant. And of course, it is available.” On the BBC, he took on the energy-management complaints directly, saying fans “don’t understand our technology, division of ‘clipping’, or whatever it is, because it’s too technical for the wider base that we have.”

That answer is what the sport sounds like when the people running it treat it as a business first and a sport second, which is the only way Liberty Media has ever asked Domenicali to think about it.

Sounds like an insult to many on the outside.

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“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” Joan Didion wrote that in Vogue in August 1961, in an essay she’d later retitle “On Self-Respect,” about self-respect that had nothing to do with motorsport, debt, or inheritance. It’s still the cleanest way to describe what Claire Williams did between 2011 and 2020.

Williams Racing needed capital she didn’t have, so in August 2020 Claire Williams put her name on the document that ended 43 years of family ownership, in public, as the face of the decision, so the cars, the factory and the workforce could keep racing on someone else’s money.

The Investor Relations Officer

Williams Grand Prix Engineering was always a family story.

Frank Williams founded it with Patrick Head in 1977, and Head ran engineering, first as technical director, later alongside Adrian Newey as chief designer, through the run of championship cars that carried Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve to titles.

The pair funded the team with prize money, sponsorship prepayments, and loans from friends. By the time Claire joined the team’s press office in 2002, Williams had already won seven drivers’ championships and nine constructors’ titles, a run it hasn’t matched since.

She wasn’t building something from nothing. She inherited the job of running something people already loved, a piece of motorsport history three generations of fans had grown up on. She took the job just as the sport turned hard against any team without a manufacturer or a billionaire behind it.

The first real capital-markets decision with her name on it came on March 2, 2011, when Williams Grand Prix Holdings listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange’s Entry Standard segment. It was the first Formula 1 team in history to go public. The offering floated up to 27.39% of the company’s shares in an indicative range of €24 to €29 each, roughly $33 to $40 at the time. Claire Williams was the company’s named Investor Relations officer on the filing, the actual contact listed on the regulatory announcement.

Frank Williams kept majority control. Patrick Head, who’d held stock since the late 1970s, sold most of his in the float, dropping from 27% to about 6%. Toto Wolff, who’d bought roughly 15% of the team in 2009 and taken a board seat, held onto his shares. He wouldn’t move to Mercedes for another two years. The bet underneath all of it was that public capital markets, not just sponsorship and prize money, could fund a Formula 1 team’s survival. No other team on the grid has tried it, before or since.

For a few years, the bet looked sound. Williams signed a technology partnership with Jaguar Land Rover to co-engineer the C-X75, a hybrid hypercar planned for a run of 250 units, and brought on Petroleos de Venezuela as a sponsor. Williams Advanced Engineering, the commercial spin-off applying F1 technology to automotive, aerospace, marine and healthcare clients, grew into a real second business, eventually employing more than 300 people across over 40 projects. The C-X75 never reached a single customer. It was canceled before production began.

In March 2012, Frank Williams stepped down from the board, though he kept the Team Principal title, stayed on full-time, and remained the majority shareholder. His daughter took his old board seat that April, as director of communications and marketing. On March 27, 2013, she was appointed deputy team principal, the de facto head of one of the grid’s most storied teams and one of only two women ever to run a Formula 1 team.

Outrunning the Car

The commercial side outran the car for a while. Claire negotiated a multi-year sponsorship with Unilever’s Rexona brand and, in 2014, brought in Martini as title sponsor through the end of 2018, a deal industry sources put at $15 million a year. Neither Williams nor Martini’s parent, Bacardi, ever confirmed the number. The team backed it up on track. A new Mercedes engine deal in 2014 pushed Williams to third in the constructors’ championship that year, and again in 2015, its best finish since 2003.

Then the car and the numbers collapsed together. Williams finished last in the constructors’ standings in both 2018 and 2019, scoring one point across the entire 2019 season. The company’s own annual report called it back-to-back last-place finishes, the worst run in the team’s history.

The racing side of the business felt it just as hard. Formula One segment revenue, the team’s own racing operation, not the group total that folds in Advanced Engineering, fell from $174.5 million (£130.7 million) in 2018 to $121.9 million (£95.4 million) in 2019. Segment EBITDA went from $21.4 million in the black to $12.9 million in the red. Group EBITDA, the number that actually reached the board, swung from a $17.2 million profit to a $16.6 million loss. Williams Grand Prix Holdings still closed the year with a $24.5 million net profit on paper, only because selling 75% of Advanced Engineering a week before New Year’s booked a one-time $45.8 million gain that covered the trading loss underneath it. A team that had gone public in 2011 to raise growth capital couldn’t fund its own competitiveness, and needed an asset sale just to keep the balance sheet presentable.

Triage

On December 24, 2019, CEO Mike O’Driscoll sold 75% of Advanced Engineering, the group’s most viable commercial asset, to EMK Capital, keeping a 25% stake for Williams. The price was never officially disclosed. One deal-tracking database later put it at roughly £47.7 million. The point wasn’t the number. It was freeing up cash for a racing team that couldn’t fund itself anymore.

The scale of what that sale gave up became clear two years later. In January 2022, EMK Capital and Williams Grand Prix Engineering together sold the rest of Advanced Engineering, including the 25% Williams had kept, to the Australian mining company Fortescue for $223 million (£164 million). By then Dorilton Capital had owned Williams Grand Prix Engineering, and everything still sitting inside it, for a year and a half. The family that built the business was already gone. None of the 2022 windfall touched them.

Then came ROKiT. Jonathan Kendrick and John Paul DeJoria, the American billionaire behind Paul Mitchell hair care and Patrón Tequila, founded it in 2018 out of Pacific Palisades, California, selling budget smartphones, Bavarian beer, tequila and telemedicine bundles under one roof, a genuinely strange business to be putting its name on a Formula 1 car.

The fit showed. ROKiT signed on as Williams’ title sponsor in January 2019 at roughly £13.5 million a year, about $17.2 million, then extended the deal that July to run through 2023. When COVID threatened to gut the 2020 calendar, ROKiT offered to pay a reduced fee. Williams, already carrying roughly $11.5 million (£9 million) in trade debtors and deferred income tied to ROKiT’s 2020 sponsorship and mid-negotiation with prospective buyers, couldn’t absorb another shortfall. Williams terminated the contract in May 2020. It cost the team its only title sponsor. Williams would race without one for the next five years, until Atlassian signed on for 2026.

Williams took ROKiT to the London Court of International Arbitration and won: a final award of £26.2 million plus a flat $1 million, worth about $35.7 million when the tribunal ruled in October 2021. A US federal court confirmed the same award in December 2022, by which point the pound had cratered against the dollar after the UK’s gilt crisis that September, and the same £26.2 million converted to just $33.25 million. The debt hadn’t shrunk. The currency had.

ROKiT countersued for $149 million in April 2023, in Florida federal court, alleging Williams had fraudulently oversold the 2019 car’s competitiveness, including the hiring of technical director Paddy Lowe, to get the sponsorship signed in the first place. The suit named Claire Williams personally, alongside former CEO Mike O’Driscoll and CFO Doug Lafferty. Williams called it spurious and pointed to the arbitration win.

By then the team was running on borrowed time in a literal sense. Michael Latifi, the Canadian food magnate whose son Nicholas drove for the team, extended $45 million in loans through his Ontario company, Latrus Racing, secured against collateral appraised at roughly $62 million: the team’s headquarters, its race entry, and a fleet of more than a hundred historic F1 cars dating back to 1978. In default, Latifi would have owned everything Frank Williams had built, historic cars and all.

With COVID gutting 2020’s commercial rights income on top of everything else, Williams announced a formal strategic review in May 2020, the low-key corporate term for what everyone in the paddock knew meant: we are for sale.

August 21, 2020

Dorilton Capital acquired Williams Grand Prix Engineering for $179.5 million (€152 million). Dorilton is a New York-based private investment firm co-founded in 2009 by Matthew Savage, a 22-year Rothschild veteran who advised on M&A and restructuring in London and New York, and Darren Fultz, who spent years in Rothschild’s corporate finance practice before founding the firm with him.

Dorilton operates as a family office, deploying the founders’ own capital instead of managing outside money. No investment committee, no pressure to flip the asset on somebody else’s timeline. At a smaller scale, it looked like the patient ownership Williams itself once represented, not the quick-flip private equity that had circled the F1 paddock for years.

After debts were settled, Williams Grand Prix Holdings had about $132 million (€112 million) left to return to shareholders. Frank Williams held a 52% stake at the time of the sale. The roughly $47 million gap between what Dorilton paid and what shareholders actually received is the cost of the debt the family had piled up keeping the team alive through 2018 and 2019.

A company valuable enough to list on a public exchange in 2011 sold nine years later for a fraction of what it would soon be worth again.

Under Dorilton, with hundreds of millions of dollars invested, Williams’ value has moved into a different universe. Sportico put it at $2.14 billion in November 2025, then at $2.08 billion in a follow-up piece months later. Forbes had it at $2.5 billion on $245 million in revenue around the same time. The exact number depends on who’s counting, but every count lands multiples above what Dorilton paid, in the same stretch of valuations that has McLaren trading places with Ferrari for most valuable team on the grid. The team enters the 2026 season, its 49th, rebranded as the Atlassian Williams F1 Team, having sold naming rights to the Australian software company in what Williams called the biggest commercial partnership in its history, part of the same wave of tech and fintech sponsors remaking F1’s paddock. Call it $2 billion or $2.5 billion: it’s roughly eleven to fourteen times the $179.5 million Dorilton paid five years earlier. Claire Williams has since said the house her father built could fetch $2 to $3 billion in today’s market. She wasn’t wrong.

Claire, Capital & Consequence

Neither of the following numbers comes from a financial filing, a probate record, or anything sworn. They’re the only public estimates that exist, from celebrity-wealth trackers with no disclosed sourcing, so treat them as directional, not exact. Claire Williams’s personal net worth is put at somewhere between $15 million and $20 million, built mostly from salary and consulting income rather than any windfall from the sale. Frank Williams’s estate was estimated at around $200 million when he died in November 2021, the accumulation of four decades as majority owner. She never got an equity payday. He had one for most of his life. That gap, even allowing for how soft both numbers are, says something true about who absorbed the cost of keeping Williams alive and who got to walk away from it decades earlier with the money already banked.

Eleven weeks after stepping down, on November 24, 2020, she incorporated Claire Williams Consulting. She now advises brands entering Formula 1, speaks on the corporate circuit, and serves as global brand ambassador for Fortescue Zero, the renamed remnant of Williams Advanced Engineering, the division the company sold to survive 2019. She’s also back on screen, returning as an analyst for Drive to Survive’s seventh season.

She holds an OBE, awarded in 2016 for services to Formula One, and serves as Vice President of the Spinal Injuries Association, the charity that supported her father after the 1986 road accident that left him paralyzed for the last 35 years of his life.

In a March 25, 2026 interview with City AM, she didn’t rule out a run for Parliament someday, calling politics something she’s “always been interested in” and might “pursue as a career.” Asked about ever owning a piece of Formula 1 again, she didn’t hedge as much: “If I could wave a magic wand and have Williams back and run it as our family team again, then that would probably be my biggest dream. I would love to do that. I don’t have the money, and I don’t know if anyone is going to bet their dollars on me.”

The team her father built is worth somewhere between $2 billion and $2.5 billion today. Claire Williams put her name on the statement that ended her family’s ownership of it for $179.5 million, a fraction of that, because the alternative was watching it die under the family’s own name. Didion wrote that self-respect springs from the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life. Claire Williams accepted responsibility for one of the costliest, most public decisions in the sport’s business history. By that measure, she came out of it with more than most people who made far more money off Formula 1 ever will.

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We run our sponsorships like an F1 team, so there’s no shortage of ways to get involved. (btw, we’re still looking for the right Title Partner!) These are integrated partnerships, not just banner ads. If that’s interesting to you or someone in your network, please reach out to partnerships@bizofspeed.com

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The Athlete’s Second Career Starts on LinkedIn

Fernando Mendoza spent the winter before the 2026 NFL Draft building his professional future on LinkedIn, right down to the “Open to Work” banner.

In April, the Las Vegas Raiders made the Indiana quarterback the first overall pick, and the banner stopped reading as a bit. LinkedIn had already named him a Top Voice. He is twenty-one; he staged his own arrival on the platform your compliance team uses to post about webinars, and the market answered with the richest job in the sport. That is the shape of the modern athlete. The career gets built in public, and more of it gets built here.

Two things are true at once, and together they explain the migration. The professional athlete has become an operator who starts the second career before the first one ends, holding equity, making investments, and running a personal business while still on the roster. And LinkedIn is where that operator meets the buyer. The platform says the number of pro athletes on it is up 31% since 2021, and the company has spent two years feeding the run, standing up an editorial desk, handing out Top Voice badges, and pushing athletes toward the top of its fastest-growing categories. Laura Lorenzetti, who runs LinkedIn’s global editorial, gives everyone who asks the same reason: an athlete’s first career is their sport, and it will not be their last.

I have spent a decade watching brands decide where motorsport money goes, and I wrote the first version of this argument long before the athletes arrived. In 2015, I argued that live video would come for the broadcast model because the direct pipe from a person to their audience was going to matter more than the institution standing in the middle. In 2022, writing for #paid, I said the modern World Cup fan experience was already being built by creators entertaining and educating for free, an argument I extended this year when DAZN hired 48 creators to cover the World Cup.

A sponsorship is a business-to-business sale dressed in a replica kit. The executive who approves an F1 title deal worth thirty to seventy million dollars a season, or the fifty to sixty million a year Gucci is reportedly paying to put its name on Alpine, is a chief marketing officer or an investor who spends the workday in that feed, already thinking in the vocabulary of return and audience. An athlete posting there makes the commercial case in the room, unpaid, to precisely the right crowd.

The behavior is everywhere once you look for it. Tracy McGrady posts about his minority stake in the Buffalo Bills and his job as chief innovation officer at a basketball-tech startup. Jalen Brunson, this year’s NBA Finals MVP, posts about his equity in the Just Salad chain. DeAndre Hopkins writes up the checks he has put into Beyond Meat and Olipop. Spencer Jones, a 24-year-old on the Denver Nuggets, posts twice a week to more than 23,000, keeps a private database of the founders and investors he meets on the road, and closed his first startup investment because one of them read his posts. Between games he has toured Shield AI and Boston Dynamics. None of these men waited for retirement to become businesspeople, and every one of them is doing the becoming in public.

Racing runs the same play. Lewis Hamilton broke his move from Mercedes to Ferrari on LinkedIn, updating his headline to “entrepreneur, investor and F1 driver,” posting a photo of himself as a boy in a red helmet, and pointing the announcement at the audience he now wants funding Lewis Hamilton Ventures.

Lando Norris lists a McLaren seat up top and the company he built beneath it, Quadrant, the lifestyle and gaming brand he grew and sold a majority stake in during 2025. Daniel Ricciardo publishes native LinkedIn articles about resetting his goals and building things, with enough conviction that Ford chief executive Jim Farley shows up in his comments. And the most instructive account on the grid belongs to a driver most fans could not pick out of a lineup. Amber Balcaen races NASCAR’s feeder ranks without a blue-chip backer; her headline reads “NASCAR / ARCA Racing Driver | Speaker,” and when she could not raise the money to fund a Daytona season opener, she said so on LinkedIn, in plain figures, and got answered by marketers and founders who move money into race cars for a living. She is building in public, like any founder these days, and it’s working. A driver with a fraction of Hamilton’s reach can still land in front of the person with the budget, which is the whole point.

Stone Garrett was an outfielder who got released by the Marlins organization. A former Marlins video coordinator sent him a LinkedIn note wishing him luck, Garrett wrote back to ask whether any club needed an outfielder, and that thread became a tryout, a Diamondbacks contract, and four seasons in the major leagues. His own account of it is that without LinkedIn, none of it happens. A message on the boring professional network put a man back in the big leagues. Every athlete building a presence there is playing for some version of that outcome, whether the prize is a roster spot, an investor, or a sponsor.

The executives are in it too, and they treat the account as reputation infrastructure. Zak Brown runs his McLaren Racing story on LinkedIn as a working leadership diary: the under-funded early years, the operating lessons, the climb to a title team, and the book about how it happened. James Vowles has turned the Williams rebuild into a running narrative that recruits engineers, reassures partners, and frames a team principal as a business mind who happens to work in a garage. What they are building is a channel that talks straight to talent, partners, and capital, from driver to principal, and the ones using it well are compounding an attention advantage most of the paddock is still leaving on the table.

Here’s my thought, and I am glad to be wrong about the details. The athletes who win the next decade on this platform are the ones documenting real work, the funding gaps, the founder meetings, and the blunt replies that change a career, because that is what compounds into trust, and trust is what converts. The accounts that outsource the whole thing to an agency and post milestone graphics will keep wondering why the platform did nothing for them, and the gap between the two groups widens every quarter. LinkedIn spent years as the place professionals parked a resume. It turned into the place the modern athlete builds the next business while the whole industry watches. The ones treating it as a stage for the real work are going to own the room.

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I was supposed to be in West Sussex right now, watching a 1,000-horsepower electric prototype climb a narrow driveway at close to 150mph, chasing a record that didn’t exist four years ago.

Of course, life always has other plans. But the question I received more than I can count when I was talking to non-motorsport folks about the event was always the same.

Goodwood Festival of Speed is a four-day motorsport festival held every July on the grounds of Goodwood House, built around a 1.16-mile hillclimb rather than a conventional circuit, and it now draws more than 200,000 people across the weekend.

The estate behind it is 11,000 acres in the South Downs, seat of the Dukes of Richmond since 1697, when the 1st Duke, an illegitimate son of Charles II by his French mistress Louise de Kéroualle, bought the Jacobean house he’d been visiting since he was seventeen. The Festival is the best-known thing to come off that estate today, but it’s just one of more than twenty-five businesses now running on it, alongside horse racing, two golf courses, an aerodrome and one of Europe’s largest organic farms. Nearly all of it traces back to a planning application that got turned down in the early 1990s.

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RAF Westhampnett

Start with the circuit. The Festival of Speed only exists because of what happened to it.

Goodwood Motor Circuit sits on the perimeter track of RAF Westhampnett, a Battle of Britain fighter station from which Douglas Bader flew his last sortie before he was shot down and captured. When the war ended, the 9th Duke of Richmond, an amateur racer known to everyone as Freddie March, turned the old airfield into a race track. March had won the Brooklands Double 12 in 1930 and designed car and aircraft bodies for a living. The circuit opened on September 18, 1948, with March himself driving a Bristol 400 around it. Eighty-five drivers and more than 15,000 spectators turned up. Britain hadn’t seen a motor race organized at that scale since Brooklands shut for the war nine years earlier.

Goodwood ran competitive racing for eighteen years. Cars got faster every season, and by the mid-1960s Freddie March had grown uneasy about exactly how fast. The last competitive meeting ran on July 2, 1966, and the circuit closed to racing that August. It remained in use as a test track and, eventually, as a venue for track days, but wheel-to-wheel racing didn’t return for 32 years.

In 1936, Freddie March had already run a private hillclimb up the Goodwood House driveway, for the Lancia Car Club, and won it himself in a Lancia Augusta March Special. His grandson doesn’t appear to have remembered that when he went looking for a way back into motorsport almost sixty years later.

The Stalling Tactic

Charles Gordon-Lennox, then Earl of March, began managing Goodwood in 1994, though he’d been living at the house and working on his plan for at least a year before the formal handover from his father. What he actually wanted was to reopen the circuit. The planning permission never came.

So he tried something smaller, and on paper much odder: invite people to bring historic racing cars and drive them up his own driveway, timed, in front of his house.

Andrew Frankel, then a young reporter at Autocar, drove down to interview him about it in the spring of 1993 and came away thinking the whole plan was faintly ridiculous. The road was narrow. It had no motorsport history that anyone could point to. Hillclimbing was a niche sport within a niche sport, and half the stately homes in England already ran some version of a car show on their lawns. March himself guessed 2,000 to 3,000 people might show up.

On Sunday, June 20, 1993, roughly 25,000 did, about ten times what he’d expected, though even that number is an estimate. As March told Frankel years later, “hardly any of them paid to get in.” The whole event ran a single day. There were 101 car entries and 32 motorcycles. The only sculpture on the lawn was an Aston Martin DB7 propped on a plinth, nothing like the towering Gerry Judah steel structures that now define the Festival’s look every summer. Sally Mason-Styrron drove a Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta up the hill first. Ron Dennis and Ken Tyrrell, then running McLaren and Tyrrell, ate off paper plates from the self-service canteen, sitting on the steps of Goodwood House.

It wasn’t all charming. In practice that same weekend, vintage motorcyclist Chas Guy was killed when his Vincent developed a steering wobble and threw him into a tree. Motorcycles haven’t been timed at the event since.

March later called the whole thing a stalling tactic: a way to reintroduce motorsport gently while he kept pushing to reopen the circuit properly. The stalling tactic outgrew the plan behind it. By 1998, Goodwood had given up on returning contemporary racing to the circuit and instead reopened it that September for the Goodwood Revival, a three-day meeting restricted to cars and bikes that could plausibly have raced there between 1948 and 1966, the only major event in the world staged entirely in period dress. A second circuit meeting, the Members’ Meeting, followed in 2014, covering cars from after 1966 that the Revival’s rules leave out. Silverstone, England’s other great post-war motor racing venue, spent the following three decades fighting just to keep a single Grand Prix weekend solvent. Goodwood spent them turning one rejected planning application into three separate events: a hillclimb that never needed the circuit at all, and two more meetings once the circuit itself finally reopened.

Molecomb

The hill itself climbs 1.16 miles past Goodwood House, and its defining feature is Molecomb, a tight right-hander that arrives without warning after a blind brow. Andrew Frankel, who has covered the event since that first year, put it better than most: Molecomb’s hay bales, he wrote, “have surely collected a far greater number of motor sporting heroes” than Montreal’s Wall of Champions ever has.

The hillclimb record has moved fast over the last decade. Nick Heidfeld set the timed shootout mark in 1999 at 41.6 seconds in a modified McLaren MP4/13, a car whose team is now worth more than Ferrari by some measures. Romain Dumas broke 40 seconds for the first time in 2018, running 39.90 unofficially in Volkswagen’s electric ID.R prototype. Then, in 2022, Max Chilton, a former F1 and IndyCar driver, took McMurtry Automotive’s Spéirling, a sub-1,000kg fan car that generates more than 4,400 pounds of downforce even standing still, up the hill in 39.08 seconds before over 150,000 spectators. It beat both marks at once. It was the first fan car to compete in sanctioned motorsport since 1978, and it has never lost.

None of this is risk-free theater. In 2000, driver John Dawson-Damer lost control of his Lotus 63 and crashed into the finish-line gantry, killing himself and marshal Andrew Carpenter, and severely injuring a second marshal, Steve Tarrant, who lost a leg in the accident. A loose tire struck spectators in 2023, though no one was seriously injured. After an unticketed crowd of 158,000 showed up in 2003, Goodwood switched to advance-ticket-only admission and has capped daily attendance at 150,000 ever since, one of the few motorsport events anywhere that deliberately limits its own crowd instead of chasing a bigger one.

What Manufacturers Pay For

The Geneva International Motor Show once pulled 600,000 visitors and 120 exhibitors into 120,000 square meters of exhibition space over an eleven-day run. It canceled its 2020 edition when COVID hit, never recovered afterward, and was effectively wound down as a Swiss event, unable to compete with the shows in Paris and Munich. Frankfurt’s IAA relocated to Munich after its 2019 edition, following years of shrinking exhibitor lists. Goodwood has no exhibition hall at all. It has a lawn, a hill and four days in July, and this year that’s enough to host the world debut of BYD’s Denza Z electric supercar, the production debut of the manual-transmission Hennessey Venom F5-M, a bespoke Rolls-Royce Phantom Regatta, Alpine’s electric A110 FUTURE concept, and Ford firing up its new Le Mans hypercar in public for the first time. Manufacturers keep choosing a hillclimb over a convention center because Goodwood sells noise, smell and direct access to the people who actually buy their cars, rather than a static stand wedged between a coffee kiosk and a rival’s booth.

The clearest evidence of what that access is worth sits a few hundred yards from the hill itself. BMW’s relationship with Goodwood, built over years of Festival of Speed participation, eventually led the company to put its Rolls-Royce production line on the estate: a 22,500-square-meter, Nicholas Grimshaw-designed factory that cost £60 million (about $78 million) to build, employs 800 people, and is landscaped with 400,000 trees so it can’t be seen from the road. Few relationships that start at a car show end with a permanent factory built a few hundred yards from where the cars were parked.

Gene Haas has driven his own team’s VF-23 up the hill himself, one of a growing list of F1 owners and principals who treat Goodwood as a place to show up in person rather than send a car and a hospitality tent. Red Bull, McLaren, Sauber, Williams and Haas are regulars. The Goodwood Revival, the historic-only meeting held every September, brought together a collection of cars and bikes worth roughly £1 billion in 2025 alone, a figure that says as much about what Goodwood does to classic car values as it does about what collectors already owned before they arrived.

The money underneath all of it is real, if only partly visible. The Duke of Richmond has described Goodwood's finances as those of "a little conglomerate," a group of small, connected businesses that only work together because they share one address and, in his words, because "we're passionate about all of them."

By his own account, estate turnover climbed from around $10.4 million (£8 million) when he took over to more than $78 million (£60 million) within about two decades of active diversification. The Goodwood Estate Company reported $119 million (£91.5 million) in revenue for 2016 and $177 million (£135.9 million) for 2023, though pre-tax profit that year fell to $4.4 million (£3.4 million) from $11.2 million (£8.6 million) as inflation pushed up costs and the group deliberately spent an extra $2.6 million (£2 million) on building repairs. Hospitality packages for the Festival itself start at $765, or roughly £589.

None of these filings break the Festival of Speed out as its own line item. Goodwood Road Racing Company Limited, the entity that actually runs it, bundles motor racing, horse racing, motorcycle events and aviation into one set of accounts, the same kind of disclosure gap that makes it hard to say what any single race weekend is worth on its own anywhere on the calendar.

On Its Own Level

Adam Waterworth became Goodwood’s group chief executive in October 2024, promoted after 14 years in the business, taking over from Chris Woodgate, who had run it for 7 years. The Duke of Richmond, who became the 11th Duke when his father died in September 2017 at 87, remained chairman. Management now runs two layers deep at a business that turns 33 this summer, which matters more to its odds of survival than any single hillclimb record.

No rival festival is coming for Goodwood. Nobody else owns 11,000 acres, a house Charles II’s son bought in 1697, and three decades of goodwill with every car manufacturer on the planet. What Goodwood has to manage instead is its own arithmetic: 150,000 people a day, sold out months in advance, hospitality packages that start around $765 and climb fast from there. Demand for one driveway in West Sussex will keep outrunning what that driveway can physically hold, and sooner or later that forces a choice between raising prices further, expanding the footprint, or telling some share of next July’s applicants they’re not getting in. Thirty-three years of history suggests which way the Duke leans: toward keeping the thing scarce, because scarcity is what built everything else on the estate. My bet is he holds that line rather than widen the gates.

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In Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that impetuosity and audacity often succeed where deliberation fails. That was five centuries before a mediocre student from a small Italian town in the Piedmontese foothills spent his career proving him right, ruined himself in the process, and then proved him right all over again. It seems Flavio Briatore has never lost a single night’s sleep over the line between audacity and recklessness. By his own account, there just isn’t one.

Verzuolo

Briatore was born on April 12, 1950, in Verzuolo, a small town near Cuneo in the foothills of the Cottian Alps, below Monviso. His parents were both elementary school teachers, but he was held back twice at the public technical institute in Cuneo. He completed his diploma in land surveying as a private student at Fassino di Busca, with the minimum passing grades. Nothing about his childhood suggested fame and fortune. He was just a restless kid in a small town who wanted out.

He worked as a ski instructor and ran a few restaurants, including one back in the Cuneo area, which he named Tribùla after his own nickname: a regional word for a restless character who will do almost anything to get what he wants. Foreshadowing at its finest. It failed and closed under a mountain of debt. Next, he sold insurance door-to-door before working his way into Milan’s finance and society circles. Somewhere in the years that followed, he was introduced to Luciano Benetton, a clothing manufacturer from the Veneto region of Italy.

The first serious trouble found him around the same time. Briatore had worked in Cuneo as an assistant to a financier named Attilio Dutto, who owned a paint company called Paramatti Vernici. The business had a dubious past of its own: it had once belonged to a convicted financier named Michele Sindona. Dutto was killed in a car bomb attack in 1979, a crime that was never solved. Briatore resurfaced in Milan afterward, where he schmoozed his way into the orbit of Achille Caproni, heir to the family that had founded the Caproni aircraft company, and was put in charge of one of Caproni’s holding companies, Compagnia Generale Industriale. CGI went on to acquire the same Paramatti Vernici where Briatore had once worked, and the combined group collapsed into bankruptcy, a business disaster that never itself produced a criminal charge. The charge came from somewhere else: a ring of card sharps running rigged games in Milan and Bergamo to fleece wealthy marks, a group that also included a fake marquis, a real count, a lawyer, and television presenter Emilio Fede. In 1984, a Bergamo court convicted Briatore of that ring and sentenced him to 18 months, a sentence that was later reduced on appeal. Two years later, a Milan court convicted him again of the same scheme, sentencing him to three years, which was reduced to 14 months on appeal.

He never served a day of either sentence. To avoid prison, Briatore fled to Saint Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and lived there to evade Italian justice. Both convictions were eventually extinguished by amnesty, and he returned to Italy a free man. The only price he ever paid for those crimes? Roughly six years of self-imposed exile on a stunning Caribbean island.

The Franchise

While he was a fugitive, Briatore never stopped working for Benetton. Benetton had already put him in charge of building out the American franchise network back in 1979, years before his fraud convictions, as the Italian clothing company expanded aggressively into the United States. He simply kept doing the same job from exile. It’s one of the more remarkable facts of his career that his greatest wealth-building act before Formula 1 happened while he was a fugitive from justice, hiding on Saint Thomas.

Exile or not, he was very good at his job. By the end of the decade, Benetton had roughly 800 stores across the United States, up from a handful when he’d started. Briatore took a cut of every franchising agreement he signed. The model was so aggressive that franchisees eventually complained that Benetton had oversaturated markets with its own stores, and the U.S. store count was later cut. But by the time that correction came, Briatore had already made himself genuinely wealthy. He built his first fortune franchising t-shirts and jackets in American malls, without ever racing a car, designing an engine, or working a single day in a racing paddock, all while legally unable to set foot in his own country.

The Team

Luciano Benetton took him to his first Formula 1 race, the 1988 Australian Grand Prix. In 1985, Benetton’s family had bought the underperforming Toleman team and renamed it Benetton Formula. The team had never won a single race in five full seasons on the grid. Bernie Ecclestone later recounted that Luciano Benetton asked him personally to look after the inexperienced young man he was sending over from New York. Briatore had zero technical background in motorsport and, by his own admission, no real interest in it. He was made commercial director of the team in 1989. When he fired the existing management shortly after, he was promoted to managing director and given the team.

He hired celebrated technical director John Barnard to oversee the technical side, but existing chief designer Rory Byrne and engineer Pat Symonds were unhappy working under Barnard and, along with 11 other engineers, quit to join Adrian Reynard’s Formula One project. (This ambitious effort ultimately failed to make it to the grid.) In one of the more underrated pieces of people management in F1 history, Briatore managed to stay on good terms with both Byrne and Symonds during their absence and persuaded them to return at the end of the 1991 season after Barnard left the team.

Then came the move that defined his first act in the sport. In August 1991, a young German driver named Michael Schumacher made his Formula 1 debut for Jordan at the Belgian Grand Prix, after Jordan driver Bertrand Gachot was jailed for an unrelated assault charge. Schumacher qualified seventh on a track he had never driven before. By the very next race, Briatore had him in a Benetton. Jordan sought a court injunction, arguing the letter of intent still bound Schumacher, and lost, because no final contract existed. Briatore got his driver. Jordan needled him about the deal for years afterward, and McLaren’s Ron Dennis reportedly told him: “Welcome to the piranha club.” It was the single most consequential signing of Briatore’s career, and he made it within two weeks.

Schumacher won his first championship for Benetton in 1994, a season clouded by controversy on multiple fronts. The FIA investigated Benetton’s engine software after Imola and found hidden “launch control” code, but couldn’t prove it had been used in a race, so no penalty was issued. Separately, after a refueling fire on Jos Verstappen’s car at the German Grand Prix, investigators found Benetton had removed a safety filter from the car’s fuel rig to speed up pit stops. Once again, no penalty was issued: the FIA ruled that the filter had been pulled in good faith and that most of the grid had done the same. The team was issued a $100,000 fine for missing the FIA’s deadline to hand over engine source code, and a $500,000 fine for Benetton plus a two-race ban for Schumacher, for defying a black-flag penalty at Silverstone. Benetton appealed, so Schumacher kept racing while it played out. The ban was upheld a month later, and he served it, sitting out Monza and Estoril.

In 1995, Schumacher repeated as champion and Benetton took the constructors’ title. Briatore had turned a team that had never won a race before his arrival into a back-to-back World Championship operation within five years.

In 1997, with the team sliding after Schumacher left for Ferrari, taking Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne with him, Briatore was pushed out, replaced by David Richards, the former World Rally champion who ran Prodrive. In 2000, Renault bought the Benetton team for a reported $120 million and brought Briatore back as managing director. He was gone for less than three years.

Crashgate

At Renault, Briatore’s signature move was identifying talent early. He met a teenage Spanish driver named Fernando Alonso in 1999 and became his manager. He placed Alonso at Minardi for 2001, promoted him to Renault test driver in 2002, and gave him the race seat in 2003. Alonso won the World Drivers’ Championship in 2005 and 2006, with Renault also taking the Constructors’ Championship in both years. It was Briatore’s second separate championship dynasty, built around his second different driver, fifteen years apart, at the same factory in Enstone, Oxfordshire, under two different team names.

Then came Singapore.

On September 28, 2008, at the first night race in Formula 1 history, Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr. crashed into the wall at Turn 17 on lap fourteen. The timing of the crash, just after teammate Fernando Alonso had made an unusually early pit stop, meant the resulting safety car period dropped the rest of the field behind Alonso, who went on to win the race. At the time, it was treated as a driver error, and Piquet himself called it a mistake. That held for nearly a year.

Piquet raced his last Grand Prix for Renault at the Hungarian GP on July 26, 2009. Renault dropped him about a week later. Piquet gave the FIA a sworn statement in Paris within days: he said Briatore and Symonds had instructed him to deliberately crash at that exact corner to manufacture a safety car and hand Alonso the win. A month later, in late August, Brazilian television publicly broke the story, and Piquet gave the FIA a fuller statement in September.

His testimony, corroborated by an unnamed Renault employee who became known as “Witness X,” led the FIA to charge Renault with conspiracy and race-fixing. On September 16, 2009, Renault announced it would not contest the charges and that Briatore and Symonds had left the team. Briatore told the Daily Mirror the following day that his departure was an act of responsibility: “I was just trying to save the team. It’s my duty. That’s the reason I’ve finished.”

It did not save him from the World Motor Sport Council, which convened in Paris five days later. Renault received a two-year ban suspended on the condition of no repeat offense. Symonds received a five-year ban from FIA-sanctioned events. Briatore received an indefinite ban with no fixed end date and a separate bar from managing any driver holding an FIA Super License. At the time, the Daily Mirror called it the harshest sanction ever imposed on an individual in motorsport history.

Briatore did not accept the ban quietly. He sued. In January 2010, France’s Tribunal de Grande Instance overturned it, ruling that the FIA had no authority to sanction team personnel who don’t hold a competition license, and that the process was tainted by the known animosity between Briatore and WMSC chairman Max Mosley. The court awarded Briatore and Symonds a combined $20,000. The court did not exonerate him of the underlying conduct. It ruled only that the FIA had not followed proper procedure in punishing him. The FIA announced plans to appeal that ruling. The matter was finally settled in April 2010. Briatore and Symonds agreed not to hold any operational role in Formula 1 until January 1, 2013, and not to work in any other FIA-sanctioned championship until the end of 2011. As part of that settlement, both men formally acknowledged their share of responsibility for the crash and apologized to the FIA. Briatore stopped short of admitting personal guilt, and continued for years afterward to describe the safety car that handed Alonso the win as simple “good fortune.”

The Rebuild

The next part of Briatore’s story probably gets the least attention, but it’s the most telling for understanding what kind of person he actually is. He spent the wilderness years building a completely separate fortune, in an entirely different industry, on a foundation he’d actually laid over a decade earlier.

In 1998, while he was still running Benetton, Briatore had co-founded a nightclub brand with DJ Max Correnti called Billionaire. They opened the original location in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. In 2001, he followed it up with a beach club called Twiga in Forte dei Marmi, in Versilia on the Tuscan coast, taking over the concession alongside a small group of partners, among them Daniela Santanchè, now an Italian government minister. After Crashgate took his F1 career away, these ventures went from side interest to full-time occupation.

The numbers for these two clubs were incredible in this category. According to a 2019 investigation by Corriere della Sera, the Twiga location generated roughly $4.5 million in annual revenue while paying annual concession rent of just under $20,000. He expanded the portfolio aggressively: Twiga locations in Monte Carlo and at Baia Beniamin in Liguria; a Billionaire haute couture menswear line, launched solo in 2005 with the Percassi Group joining as a partner two years later, generating roughly $27.7 million a year by 2014 across 30 stores in more than 20 countries (he and Percassi sold a 51 percent stake to designer Philipp Plein in 2016 for an undisclosed sum); a luxury resort in Malindi, Kenya; a Cipriani restaurant partnership in London and Monte Carlo; new Billionaire locations in Dubai, Riyadh and Mykonos through the 2010s and early 2020s; and eventually, a pizza chain called Crazy Pizza with locations in London, Monte Carlo and Porto Cervo.

He restructured the holding company as Majestas Group in 2013, in a fifty-fifty partnership with entrepreneur Francesco Costa. According to Corriere della Sera, the group closed 2022 with roughly $83 million in total revenue: $26.2 million from Billionaire, $24.8 million from Twiga, and the remaining $32 million from brand licensing, including the Cipriani and Cova Montenapoleone names. Geographically, Europe and the UK accounted for about $52 million, with the Middle East contributing roughly $31 million. Briatore and Costa publicly targeted €100 million, roughly $108 million, in revenue for 2023, though subsequent reporting has not confirmed whether the group reached that figure.

In December 2024, now nearing his 75th birthday and with his attention shifting back to Formula 1, Briatore sold the entire Twiga brand outright, along with the original Billionaire venue in Porto Cervo, to Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, son of the late Luxottica founder. The deal was finalized in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum and folded those four venues into Del Vecchio’s hospitality group. Majestas kept the Billionaire nightclub brand and Crazy Pizza.

The Return

Briatore came back to Formula 1 first as an ambassador for the sport in 2022, and then more substantially in June 2024, when Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo brought him in as Executive Advisor to Alpine, the team that had been Benetton once upon a time, then Renault, now racing under a third name at the same factory in Enstone.

When de Meo first approached him about a return, Briatore told him there was no Plan B: Alpine would have to abandon its own struggling Renault power unit and switch to buying engines from Mercedes for the new 2026 technical rules, or he was not interested. “I wanted a Mercedes-Benz engine completely,” he said. “There was only one way to come back.”

It was a purely commercial demand masquerading as a technical one, exactly the kind of move that built his reputation in the first place. He didn’t care whose name was on the factory gates if the alternative made the car faster. Renault agreed and shut down its own engine program at Viry-Châtillon. The decision did not go over well and triggered employee protests. Ultimately, Briatore got his way, and Alpine switched to Mercedes power for 2026.

In May 2025, after just six races, Alpine team principal Oliver Oakes resigned. Briatore, officially still only an advisor, became the team’s de facto boss.

It seems the power unit switch was indeed the correct call. Alpine is putting in a solid 2026 campaign and sits 5th overall in the Constructors’ Championship, best of the rest behind Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull. Briatore himself credited the Mercedes switch with meaningfully improving Alpine’s competitiveness heading into 2026, telling the Beyond the Grid podcast that the partnership had “changed our performance a lot” and given “more motivation to everybody” within the team.

The Stake

Which brings this story to where we are now, the middle of 2026.

A private equity-adjacent group called Otro Capital, whose investors include actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and golfer Rory McIlroy, bought a 24 percent stake in Alpine in 2023 for a reported $218 million. By late 2025, with Formula 1 franchise valuations climbing across the grid, Otro began exploring a sale of that stake. Mercedes, already supplying Alpine’s engines, opened talks to buy it. During the Chinese Grand Prix weekend in March 2026, Briatore acknowledged that discussions were taking place at an implied valuation of roughly $3 billion. That’s more than triple what the team was worth when Otro bought into it in 2023, when the same 24 percent stake valued Alpine at around $900 million.

The deal fell through toward the end of May. According to multiple paddock reports (rather than any official Alpine, Mercedes or FIA statement), the crux of the issue was that Otro reportedly wanted $720 million for its stake, with reports that Mercedes valued the team closer to $2.3 billion overall and decided to walk away from the gap. Briatore was characteristically blunt about who he thought was at fault, telling reporters the price had simply gotten too high and that Toto Wolff and Mercedes had been treated unfairly in the negotiation: “Toto was very fair. I believe it. I don’t think the Otro people are fair.”

Asked directly and repeatedly whether he was tempted to buy the stake himself, Briatore gave the same answer every time: No. “I’m just looking (at) what’s going on and just watching what’s going on,” he said. “If somebody buys the share, we are very happy.”

It’s a strange final note for a man who has never been a passive observer of anything in his life. He took his fugitive’s franchising commission and turned it into a fortune. He took a team nobody wanted and won two championships with it. He took a beach club’s rent roll and built a $100-million-plus hospitality group around it. He has identified value in places no one else has thought to look over the past 40 years. And now, sitting close to the center of one of the most desirable asset classes around, he’s choosing, for once, to watch.

Whether that is restraint, a shrewd strategy, or just a man who’s already built three separate fortunes and doesn’t need a fourth, is the only open question left in this story. Machiavelli never wrote a line about knowing when to wait. For Briatore, after five decades of betting on audacity, that may be the only bold move he has left.

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Fifty models walked the Silverstone pit lane this week, through the working garages, past the wheel guns and the jacks, as the British Grand Prix built toward an expected 565,000 people by Sunday night. Marks and Spencer put a catwalk on the most famous stretch of asphalt in British motorsport and used it to showcase a summer collection already on sale. Sharry Cramond, who runs marketing for M&S Fashion, Home and Beauty, called it “a really bold step for us” and said it was something no one has done before. Both claims check out. The more interesting part is how little it probably cost.

Six weeks ago, when Kering agreed to a reported $150 million to make Gucci the title sponsor of Alpine, we wrote that the house was buying 24 race weekends a year of paddock presence, twenty-four runways in effect, for a brand that had just posted its eleventh consecutive quarter of declining sales. The metaphor held for about six weeks before a 142-year-old British retailer built the literal version.

The Ladder

Fashion now has three price points for the same audience. LVMH pays a reported $150 million a year to be the championship’s luxury layer, with TAG Heuer timing the races and Louis Vuitton’s trunk carrying the trophy. Gucci will pay a reported $50 to $ 60 million per season, with escalators pushing the total value past $150 million, to put its name on a team that has not finished above fourth in the constructors’ standings in over a decade. M&S signed a multi-year circuit partnership whose terms neither side has disclosed.

I don’t know the fee. Comparable venue deals, an event partnership plus naming rights on a stage, tend to price in the low single-digit millions per year. But even doubled, it means M&S bought its way onto the same weekend LVMH pays nine figures to own.

Let’s calibrate for a moment: when we mapped the sponsorship market last summer, premium F1 title partnerships priced between $30 million and $70 million a year. The bottom of this ladder is very far from the top, and everyone on it is renting the same crowd.

What M&S Gets

The deal has two halves. The Silverstone half makes M&S an official event supporter of the British Grand Prix for its four-day run, July 2 through 5, with its name on the main stage, where up to 60,000 fans gather each night after track action ends. The partnership covers Silverstone’s full calendar, including MotoGP and CarFest.

The Williams half, signed in February, makes M&S the team’s official travel kit partner. The retailer dresses the entire operation, drivers, engineers, leadership, across 24 races in 21 countries, in tailoring from its Autograph Performance line. The same wrinkle-resistant, four-way-stretch pieces sell online and in stores, and some of them walked the pit lane inside the “Dress to Thrill” edit. Gucci bought a billboard that races. M&S turned a Formula 1 team into a never-ending catalog shoot.

Eight Years in the Making

None of this arrived overnight.

Tommy Hilfiger started dressing Mercedes in 2018 and built the Tommy x Lewis line on Hamilton’s back. BOSS moved to Aston Martin in 2022. Palm Angels wrapped a capsule around Haas’s Miami weekend, Reiss took McLaren, and then LVMH made the whole category structural in October 2024 with a ten-year championship deal. By 2025, Louis Vuitton was titling Melbourne and TAG Heuer had taken over the clocks. The 2026 entries took five months: M&S to Williams in February, Gucci to Alpine in May, a catwalk on the pit lane in July.

The Cyber Year

Why would a mid-market retailer spend on spectacle right now?

Look at what the last year did to its fashion business. Hackers got into M&S systems over Easter weekend 2025, and online clothing orders were stopped for seven weeks. The company has since quantified the damage at roughly £300 million in profit, including £131.3 million in identified incident costs. Group adjusted profit before tax fell 23.8 percent to £671.4 million in the year to March 2026, and the pain concentrated exactly where the pit lane show lives: Fashion, Home and Beauty adjusted operating profit came in at £213.4 million against £478 million the year before, a 55 percent drop, while Food grew sales 7 percent and carried the group.

Set against a £300 million hole, a runway costs nothing that matters. M&S has guided a return to profit growth this year, and the 2026 marketing calendar reads like a confidence restoration project: an Ibiza show in May to launch the “Summer of Love That” campaign, a pit lane in July, each one an argument that the fashion arm is back on offense after a year spent apologizing for empty shelves. Cramond’s line about “showing up in new, unexpected ways at the UK’s biggest moments” is the sanctioned version of the same thought.

The Crowd

Silverstone is a rational place to make that argument. The British Grand Prix drew 340,000 people in 2018 and 500,000 last year, and the circuit expects 565,000 across this weekend’s four days, which would break the all-time Formula 1 attendance record Adelaide has held since 1995. More than 175,000 tickets are sold for Sunday alone. This is the same venue that nearly handed the race back in 2017 because the hosting fee was eating it alive, a story we told this week. Nine years later, it sells branded main stages and pit lane catwalks to retailers. We love a good recovery arc.

F1’s cumulative TV reach runs past 1.8 billion, and the fan behavior data we covered in May shows race weekends driving searches for what to wear to them. A grandstand full of people planning race-day outfits is about as addressable as a market gets for a high-street summer dress. Gucci needs that crowd to feel differently about the brand. M&S just needs them to shop.

Three Predictions

First: another mass-market brand stages a show at a heritage circuit within twelve months. Monza and Austin are two obvious venues, both sell experience inventory aggressively. To some extent, Las Vegas and Singapore could work as well.

Second: circuits productize this. Venue-as-runway becomes a rate-card item, as garage hospitality did, and the entry price for fashion in F1 keeps falling because the circuit tier has every incentive to undercut the teams.

Third: the proof lands in M&S’s numbers, so watch clothing market share and the Autograph Performance line through the autumn. If sell-through doesn’t move, this was theater with excellent lighting.

Now watch to see if the space gets even more crowded.

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How Silverstone Saved Itself

On 11 July 2017, John Grant pulled the British Grand Prix out of its own contract. The BRDC chairman triggered a break clause that, left alone, would have made 2019 the last British Grand Prix at Silverstone. His reasoning went straight into the club’s filed accounts, signed by the directors: “unless a new contractual arrangement can be reached between Liberty Media and The BRDC, 2019 will be the last year that the British Grand Prix takes place at Silverstone.”

You see, Silverstone was losing money, and fast.

In December 2009, the club had signed a 17-year deal with Bernie Ecclestone carrying a 5% annual escalator. The fee compounded from about £11.5m (around $18m) in 2010 to £16.2m (around $21m) by 2017, on track to reach roughly £25m (around $33m) by 2026. Grant put the problem on the record: “the costs are more than the revenues. We generate a lot of revenue from this event, probably more than any other F1 race, but we still have substantial costs.”

Who owns Silverstone is what made the fee fatal. The BRDC is a private company limited by guarantee, company number 00257980, with no share capital and roughly 850 invitation-only members. There is no equity to issue and no shareholder to call for cash. When the hosting fee outran the gate, against operating costs that run far ahead of the fee for almost every promoter on the calendar, the club had no balance sheet deep enough to cover the gap.

Four years earlier, on 11 September 2013, the BRDC had granted MEPC a 999-year lease over the industrial estate and about 280 acres of development land for a single £32m (about $50m) premium. The circuit itself stayed out of it. The cash cleared the Lloyds and Northamptonshire County Council loans the club had taken on to build The Wing, the £27m (about $43m) pit and paddock complex, which opened in 2011.

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The members took the £32m and gave up the land. How much they gave up showed in 2022, when CPP Investments paid £135m (about $170m) for half of that same estate, a valuation near £270m (about $335m). The club sold the property's future to keep the racetrack's present.

On 10 July 2019, Silverstone, the BRDC and Chase Carey ended a two-year standoff with a five-year reset covering 2020 to 2024. The change that counted was structural: the 5% compounding escalator was replaced by a flat fee. The headline number was never disclosed, and reporting still splits between roughly £13.5m and £20m a year (about $17m to $26m). Liberty had bought F1 in 2017 and wanted a strong British round, one that sat next to the team cluster in Motorsport Valley and in front of the biggest crowd on the schedule. Silverstone wanted a fee it could plan around. Both got it. In February 2024, Stefano Domenicali signed the extension that carries the race to 2034, described in the filings as an eleven-year contract and reported unofficially at near £30m a year (about $40m).

Fixing the fee capped the recurring cost. It did nothing for revenue.

Stuart Pringle, who has run the circuit since 2017, named the old failure plainly: “There was a prolonged period of under-investment when we made no meaningful money out of our major events.” The fix turned one weekend into a calendar. The British Grand Prix became a four-day festival with concert stages and dynamic pricing. Weekend attendance climbed from 480,000 in 2023 to a record 500,000 in 2025, the biggest F1 weekend Britain had seen in three decades, and Silverstone says this year’s race, run the first weekend of July, is expecting a record 565,000 in attendance.

Around the race, the club stacked recurring income: Escapade Silverstone, sixty trackside residences with a gross development value near £90m (about $115m), sold out and opened in 2024; conferencing and corporate hospitality; driving experiences; a dense secondary calendar of MotoGP, ELMS, British GT and BTCC.

The museum is the one build that has not delivered. A £20m (about $26m) project part-funded by a £9.1m (about $12m) National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, it opened in 2019 on a business case projecting 436,500 visitors in year one. It has been running closer to 150,000.

Silverstone Circuits Limited, company 00882843, swung from a £1.484m loss (about $2m) in 2016 to a £626,000 profit (about $0.8m) in 2017, its first black ink after a run of losses. From there it compounds. Turnover rose from £53.5m (about $88m) at the 2014 trough to a record £104.4m (about $134m) in 2024. Pre-tax profit reached £14.1m (about $18m). Net worth moved from £10m of net liabilities (about $12m) at the end of 2016 to £37.7m of net assets (about $48m) at the end of 2024. Cash sat at £45.7m (about $58m), against £7,000 (about $9,000) at the bottom of the crisis.

COVID punched a hole in the middle of it, turnover crashing to £14.2m (about $18m) in 2020 behind closed doors, and the rebound came fast: £61.5m and a £7.3m profit (about $85m and $10m) by 2021. The whole thing runs on a float of money it does not yet own. £48.4m of deferred income (about $62m) from advance ticket sales is the largest single line on the balance sheet and the engine that funds the year. There is no meaningful drawn bank debt.

Is the Grand Prix profitable on its own, or carried by the estate?

The accounts say the race “generates more than half of the group’s annual revenue,” better than £52m (about $67m) of that £104.4m. The race carries the estate. The filings provide no separate event P&L, and the auditors identify the F1 contract and ticket sales as key risks, so the structure relies on one weekend in July. The old “the GP loses money” line traces back to Grant’s 2015 and 2016 figures of £2.8m and £4.8m (about $4.3m and $6.5m), management numbers that never appeared in the statutory accounts and described the cost base before the escalator was killed.

Turnaround or windfall? Both, in sequence. The £32m (about $50m) MEPC deal in 2013 was the tourniquet: debt cleared, land surrendered. The fee reset and the estate build are the repeatable parts; that's why the company now earns £14m a year (about $18m) instead of bleeding. Take away the land sale and the club still drowns in 2016. Take away the fee reset and the diversification and the £32m only buys a few years.

No single move saves it.

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Most of the grid never pays for itself. F1 collected about $824m in promoter fees in 2025, roughly 27% of its revenue, and the large majority of those cheques are written or topped up by governments.

The Australian Grand Prix Corporation, a Victorian state body, needed A$102.3m in public funding (about $68m) to cover the 2024 race, with revenue of A$116.9m (about $77m) against expenditure of A$219.2m (about $145m). Record crowds, nine-figure subsidy. Singapore co-funds up to 60% of a roughly S$135m (about $104m) annual cost and books it as tourism marketing. Texas reimburses COTA through a state events fund whose own report concedes the impact is “not measurable.” The Gulf rounds in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are state-owned outright.

Lord Mandelson set the British terms back in 2009: “I’m not in a position to use taxpayers’ money to bail out what would be a sort of commercial venture in a very cash-rich sport. I can't do that, especially during a recession, but [Ecclestone] has my backing in what he's trying to do.”

Silverstone is one of two races on the 2025 and 2026 calendar with no government support. The other, Zandvoort, leaves after 2026. From 2027, the BRDC is the last self-funded heritage promoter standing.

The contract runs to 2034. The land that would fund the next decade of building is already leased for 999 years, so the asset that financed the recovery cannot be sold again. The cash sits in the wrong pocket: £45.7m (about $58m) inside the operating company, while the land-holding parent club holds £136,000 (about $175,000) and answers to an unpaid volunteer board. New markets keep bidding for slots, Bangkok among them, each able to outpay a members’ club in Northamptonshire. And the commercial relationship leans on one man, Pringle, with no published succession plan.

The members’ club model survives this contract because Liberty wants the British Grand Prix and Silverstone finally learned to price it. By 2034 the fee will have moved again, the land will still be gone, and the club will face the choice it faced in 2016 when Jaguar Land Rover walked away: raise capital it cannot raise as a guarantee company, or sell the thing it exists to protect.

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Right now, we have one sponsorship spot available for the Q2/summer across the newsletter and full BoS ecosystem, and three remaining for Q3. These are integrated partnerships, not just banner ads. If that’s interesting to you or someone in your network, please reach out to partnerships@bizofspeed.com

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Ben Sulayem removes the ceiling

On Thursday in Macau, the FIA’s member clubs voted to remove the limit on how long their presidents can serve. More than 90 percent backed it. Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who took the job in 2021 and ran unopposed for his second term in December, can now stay in power past the three-term cap that Jean Todt’s reforms put in place.

Future candidates must now “demonstrate sufficient experience within an FIA member or an FIA body,” language vague enough to mean whatever the sitting president needs it to mean. Ben Sulayem raised the ceiling above his own head and thickened the walls around the office in a single afternoon.

The people who might have challenged him are already gone. Carlos Sainz Sr., the two-time world rally champion, looked at the rules and walked. So did Tim Mayer, the former FIA chief steward we covered when he tried to take on the system, and Laura Villars, who we had on the Business of Speed podcast last year during her campaign. The barrier that stopped them was bureaucratic and effective: a candidate has to field a full slate of vice presidents drawn from all six FIA regions before the ballot will accept the name. Try assembling that as an outsider in a few months.

One guardrail survives. Candidates still cannot run past the age of 70, which would cap Ben Sulayem at the 2029 election, where he would be 68. The BBC reports he wants that gone too. Watch for it.

This is the same operator whose plan to bring naturally aspirated V8s back to F1 fell apart last autumn when he could not find the votes, and who removed the UK’s senate representative when the politics turned. When Ben Sulayem loses a fight on the merits, he changes the rules of the room. That is a pattern, and patterns predict.

Robert Reid saw it coming. The deputy president for sport resigned earlier this year and said, on the way out, that “fundamental principles were being eroded” and that “raising legitimate concerns was not always welcomed.” At the time it read as one official’s frustration. After Thursday it reads as a forecast.

Here is the business question underneath the governance theater. F1 is in its richest era, and Liberty’s machine has turned the championship into a global entertainment product. All of it sits atop a regulator now built around one man with no expiration date. Sponsors, manufacturers, and promoters are writing nine-figure checks into a sport whose rulebook can be rewritten by whoever controls the assembly. Stability is good for business until it becomes the wrong kind of stability.

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Fox found IndyCar a bigger audience

IndyCar is posting the kind of television numbers it has chased for two decades. Through the first ten races of 2026, the series is averaging 1.7 million viewers on Fox, the strongest start in its modern history. The first three rounds each cleared a million, something that had not happened since the open-wheel split healed in 2008.

The standout is Arlington. The Grand Prix in the Cowboys’ backyard drew 1.336 million, up 142 percent on last year’s comparable round at Long Beach and 54 percent above the 2025 average for a Sunday that is not the Indianapolis 500. The 110th running of the 500 itself pulled 6.635 million. Across everything Fox has aired, the season average is 2.383 million, 10% ahead of last year.

The most instructive number came from Road America. Fox scheduled the race directly behind a World Cup match and handed IndyCar 1.8 million viewers, its largest non-500 audience in fifteen years. That was engineered. Fox moved its inventory around to feed a property it co-owns, having bought a third of Penske Entertainment last summer for somewhere between 125 and 135 million dollars and tied the deal to a multi-year rights extension.

Doug Boles is the other variable. He took the president’s chair fewer than three weeks before the 2025 season after years running the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he steered more than 150 million dollars in investment. He treats each round as an event in its own right. Gateway goes to Sunday night primetime on network television this year, a first for the series. Mexico is on the expansion board.

We have been skeptical here before, and the skepticism still has teeth. The series carries what we called its 364-day problem: enormous relevance for the month of May and a fight to hold attention the rest of the year. A World Cup lead-in is borrowed reach. A primetime experiment is a bet that has to be repeated to count. The honest read is that the floor has risen, the million-viewer races are real, and the open question is whether Fox’s promotional muscle is building a year-round audience or renting one race by race.

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What I’ve Been Following

Seventy days ago, a caterer in Liberty Lake, Washington, made a promise to the internet. Tim Mitchell, who runs Mangia Catering Co. and served 53,454 guests across 520 events last year, said he would cook and post a cinematic food video every single day, with no end date, until Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc agrees to sit at his table. He has not missed a day.

The campaign, called Cook for Charles, is completely organic, no agency, no paid reach. Gordon Ramsay has liked the work. HexClad has reached out.

I’ll be talking to Chef Tim this week to get more details and report back. Stay tuned, but for now, give him a follow on Instagram.

My take: somebody on Leclerc’s commercial team should book the dinner, film it, and turn a regional caterer’s obsession into a Ferrari content win. The story is too fun to leave on the table.

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