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George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. “Therefore,” Shaw concluded, “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Zak Brown has never been reasonable.

In 1984, a thirteen-year-old from the San Fernando Valley appeared on Wheel of Fortune during Teen Week and won a pair of Cartier watches. He walked out of the studio, drove to a pawn shop in Van Nuys, sold them for $3,050, and used the money to buy a go-kart. “It wasn’t part of any sort of master plan,” he has said. “It’s just how it all unfolded. I’m probably safe to say, the only person in racing that has a résumé that starts with Wheel of Fortune.”

Forty years later, Brown runs McLaren Racing. The team is the reigning back-to-back Formula 1 Constructors’ Champion and is valued at approximately $5 billion, a six-fold increase from the $718 million Brown inherited in 2020. Only Ferrari and Mercedes price higher on the grid.

Three things got him there, none of which a reasonable person would attempt in sequence. He raced professionally for a decade without family money or a racing pedigree. He built the world’s largest motorsport marketing agency from a single airline client. Then, with no ownership stake, no technical background, and no guarantee of success, he walked into the worst team in McLaren’s history and turned it into a championship operation.

San Fernando Valley

Zakary Challen Brown was born on November 7, 1971. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the suburban sprawl inland of Los Angeles. His first love was baseball. He wanted to be a professional ballplayer, and in the working-class Valley of the 1970s, that was as reasonable a dream as any.

School was another matter. “I was not a good student,” he has said. “I didn’t go, and then when I did go, I got in trouble, a lot of fighting.” It ended definitively when he broke his school president’s jaw in a fight. That was what finally got him thrown out. He had no diploma, no direction, and no family background in motorsport.

The racing obsession arrived in stages. His father took him to local races. In 1981, the family attended the Long Beach Formula 1 Grand Prix, and Brown fell in love with the sound and the speed. Three years later, the producers of Wheel of Fortune arrived at his school looking for contestants for Teen Week. It was one of the rare days Brown was actually in class. He made the cut, got on the show, won two rounds, and walked out with a pair of Cartier watches.

He drove to a pawn shop in Van Nuys, sold them for $3,050, and used the money to buy his first go-kart. He was thirteen years old. It was the best investment he never planned to make.

Brown began competing in karting in 1986, winning 22 races across five seasons and three IKF championships. In 1987, already a karter with ambitions beyond California, he returned to Long Beach through a friend whose family had connections in the sport. He briefly met Mario Andretti, who had just won the race from pole in his Newman/Haas Lola. Brown asked him about going professional. Whatever Andretti told him, it stuck.

By 1991, Brown had moved to Europe alone, aged nineteen, with little money, no family ties to the sport, and no plan beyond the belief that he was fast enough to make it. That belief would outlast the evidence for it by roughly a decade.

He won his first Formula Ford 1600 race at Donington Park in the rain, starting sixth in a 60-car field. He competed in Formula Opel-Lotus Benelux, British Formula Three, Indy Lights, German Formula Three, and, in 1997, the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring in the GT2 class, finishing second in class at both. He was competent at the wheel and never more than that.

At one point, while his team folded beneath him in England, he slept on an air mattress on the living room floor of Richard Dean’s sister in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Richard Dean was a fellow racing driver who would later become his business partner and co-founder of United Autosports. He paid about $62 a week in rent. A Californian boy in a cold Northern English city, refusing to go home. “I’ve never been a quitter,” he later said. In 1992, his mother gave him her annual salary, $30,000, to keep him going.

It was not enough.

Accepting the reality about his driving would take years. The compensation, across those years of threadbare rides and serial disappointments, was something more valuable. Brown was building an intimate, networked understanding of how the commercial infrastructure of motorsport actually worked and who paid for it.

Just Marketing

The idea for JMI came from a sponsor while Brown was still racing. His European career had been funded by Trans World Airlines, and when he decided to return to the United States to chase IndyCar, his TWA contact asked if he could help them develop marketing connections stateside. It occurred to Brown that other corporations had the same problem. They wanted to get into motorsport but did not know how to navigate it. “My sponsor wanted to know what I would call my company,” he recalled. “I told them it was just a marketing company, just marketing.” The name stuck.

Just Marketing International launched in Indianapolis in 1995 with one client, TWA, and one insight nobody had yet fully exploited. The most valuable position in motorsport sat between the brands that wanted exposure and the teams that needed money. Brown kept racing in parallel, competing through 1997 at Daytona and Sebring. The business grew faster than the driving career. By around 2000, he knew he would not make it as a professional driver and took a full sabbatical from racing to focus on JMI.

What he had really built across all those cockpit years was a Rolodex.

Brown did things differently. Every other agency represented racing teams and sought sponsors for them. Brown flipped the orientation. He represented the sponsors and taught them how to use motorsport intelligently.

The deals that followed were landmarks of the era. In 2005, JMI brokered the Crown Royal whisky sponsorship of NASCAR, the first spirits brand to enter the sport in more than 40 years, after a decades-long ban. In 2008, LG entered Formula 1 through JMI. In 2010, UBS signed a $250 million global partnership with Formula 1, one of the largest sponsorship deals in motorsport history, brokered by Brown. Subway, UPS, Verizon, DeWalt, and Johnnie Walker at McLaren. The portfolio read like a who’s who of global brands.

By 2012, JMI had approximately 135 employees, offices in London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, revenue of $40.8 million, and EBITDA of $7.7 million. It had appeared five times in Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. By then, Spire Capital Partners held 60 percent, WPP held 20 percent, and Brown held the remaining 20 percent.

In October 2013, Chime Communications acquired JMI for $76 million. Brown’s 20 percent stake returned approximately $15.2 million personally. He became CEO of CSM Sport & Entertainment, Chime’s sports division. He had built a business from a single airline client into the dominant global force in motorsport sponsorship and sold it.

He was 41 and had not yet started on the company he would actually become known for.

The Worst Year in McLaren History

Brown arrived at McLaren in November 2016 as Executive Director of McLaren Technology Group. By his own description, what he found when he got there was “chaos.”

McLaren was in the grip of a bitter boardroom battle. Ron Dennis, the man who had built the team into a dynasty, was being forced out by his fellow shareholders. Among them was Mansour Ojjeh, the late Franco-Saudi businessman who, as CEO of TAG Group, had co-owned McLaren since 1984 and helped finance the Porsche engines that powered the team during its first championship era.

Ojjeh called Brown personally and told him he was not getting off the phone until they had a deal. Brown had been weighing a parallel offer from Liberty Media’s incoming Formula 1 operation, a powerful role but a corporate one. McLaren offered something different. “When the five lights went out on the startline gantry, Bernie always went home,” Brown said of the choice. “When those lights go out now, I’m on the pitwall.” The racer chose.

He joined during the ownership transition, initially as Executive Director while the structure settled around Dennis’s formal departure in early 2017. Once the dust cleared, Brown became CEO of McLaren Racing in April 2018, the undisputed leader of a team he had been handed by shareholders who believed in him when it was not obvious anyone should.

McLaren had just finished ninth in the constructors’ championship with 27 points, its worst result since 1980. The Honda partnership, rekindled with enormous optimism in 2015, had produced three years of mechanical humiliation, including Fernando Alonso’s infamous “GP2 engine” radio message at Suzuka. Sponsorship had collapsed. Morale had collapsed. “Our corporate partnerships were at a record low,” Brown said. “Our morale was at a record low. Our fans were pretty upset with us.” Staff had been offered 25-pence (32-cent) Cadbury Freddo chocolate bars instead of bonuses. The team was losing more than $129 million per year. “There was a lot of blame, a lot of conspiracy theories, and a lack of trust,” he told GRR. “Other than that, the place was great.”

Brown had no technical background. He was not going to redesign the car. What he did instead was what he knew how to do. He went after the commercial side first. “If I could bring in great corporate partners, that would let us invest in our people, our infrastructure, and our team,” he said. He inverted the conventional model, where teams won races first, and sponsors followed, and ran it in reverse.

Get the sponsors. Use the money to hire the engineers. Win the races. “Zak flipped the model and said, ‘Let’s go be really visible, get sponsors and treat them really well, and we’ll use that money to reinvest in engineering and people, and we’ll win races,’” said Ricky Paugh of 1440Sports. By the end of 2019, two years after McLaren’s historic low, the team had its first podium since 2014, with Carlos Sainz finishing third in Brazil.

The Ninth Inning

The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out McLaren Automotive’s road car revenue in 2020. The crisis rippled through the racing division. Costs for the 2021 season had already been committed. Revenue had evaporated. “Closing Abu Dhabi ‘20, we were definitely on the brink,” Brown told journalists. “We were paying all our bills, but we were months away, not several months. We knew we could make it through the year, but without a cash injection, we would have been at risk of not starting the next one.”

Brown cut more than 1,000 jobs. He sold the Norman Foster-designed McLaren Technology Centre, the iconic semicircular glass headquarters in Woking that Ron Dennis had commissioned in the late 1990s, to Global Net Lease for $234 million on a 20-year leaseback. He secured an emergency loan from the National Bank of Bahrain.

He also kept the team’s deteriorating finances hidden from his own engineers so they could keep working. “I needed to protect the team from them being aware so everyone could remain in the very positive, energetic spirits they were bringing,” he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable place at all.”

The lifeline arrived on the day of the 2020 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the final race of the season. MSP Sports Capital, an American sports investment group, acquired a 15 percent stake in McLaren Racing, rising to 33 percent by the end of 2022, for $236 million. The transaction valued McLaren Racing at $718 million. “I could put my head on a pillow at night knowing they’ll back us up if they have to,” Brown said. “But it was going to be the ninth inning, to use a baseball term, before they brought in the relief pitcher.”

The $5 Billion Rebuild

The turnaround from survival to supremacy took four years. In 2021, McLaren ended a nine-year winless streak of 170 races when Daniel Ricciardo won at Monza. Brown celebrated by getting his first tattoo of the circuit outline on his arm, and he had famously hated needles his entire life.

In 2023, the team turned a $38 million operating profit on $536 million in revenue, a swing of roughly $90 million from the Honda-era losses. In 2024, McLaren won the Constructors’ Championship for the first time since 1998. The 26-year gap was the longest in the team’s history.

In 2025, they did it again. Lando Norris won the drivers’ title. Oscar Piastri finished second, a driver Brown had audaciously poached from Alpine in 2022 after Alpine publicly announced him as their 2023 driver, only for Piastri to immediately post on social media that he had not signed any such contract. McLaren started the season by winning 12 of the first 15 Grands Prix (14 total wins for the year), clinching the constructors’ title with six rounds remaining and equalling the record for the earliest championship victory in history. It was McLaren’s first back-to-back title since 1990 and 1991, a gap of 33 years.

Brown’s ambition extended beyond Formula 1. In 2020, he brought McLaren back to IndyCar, the series he had moved back to America to chase as a young driver in the mid 1990s, partnering with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports to form Arrow McLaren SP. McLaren took majority ownership in 2021 and sole ownership in January 2025. He committed $30 million to the brand-new McLaren Racing Center in Indianapolis, nearly tripling the team’s operational footprint. In 2025, Pato O’Ward finished second in the IndyCar championship, the best points finish for a McLaren-entered driver since Johnny Rutherford finished second in the 1976 season. Brown holds no equity in that operation either. He built it, runs it, and chairs it on someone else’s money.

The commercial engine Brown built has been delivered in parallel. By 2023, McLaren had 48 active sponsorship partners generating more than $148 million in annual sponsorship revenue, with OKX, the team’s primary partner, paying approximately $25 million per year. Total revenue for 2024 reached $678 million, generating a post-tax profit of $69 million, from a team that five years earlier had been weeks from missing payroll. In late 2025, Brown announced Mastercard as McLaren’s naming rights partner from 2026 at a reported $100 million per year, ending more than a decade without a title sponsor. His own 2024 compensation, confirmed in McLaren’s filed accounts, was $47.7 million. That makes him the highest-paid non-driver executive in the sport.

In September 2025, MSP Sports Capital sold its stake back to McLaren’s majority owners, Mumtalakat (Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund) and CYVN Holdings of Abu Dhabi, in a transaction that valued McLaren Racing at $5 billion. MSP’s exit represented a 10x return on its 2020 investment. Sportico described it as the biggest sports team exit ever for an institutional fund. Brown, who holds no equity in the team, had taken a $718 million asset to a $5 billion one in five years, driven solely by performance, culture, and commercial execution.

“A simplified ownership structure gives us clarity and strength moving forward,” he said when the deal was announced. Asked how long he intends to stay at McLaren, his answer was succinct. “I’d sign a contract tomorrow to be here until 2040.”

The Bottom Line

Zak Brown is 54 years old. His net worth is estimated at $50 million to $100 million. He holds no equity in McLaren Racing. He owns United Autosports, co-founded with Richard Dean, the team’s managing director, in 2009, which has won championships in the European Le Mans Series and the FIA World Endurance Championship and has twice taken outright victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the 24 Hours of Daytona. His personal collection of approximately 40 historic racing cars, every one a winner and piloted by a world champion, is housed in a warehouse in the United Kingdom.

The financial arc of his career is clear. A $3,050 game show prize became a racing career. A racing career became the world’s largest motorsport marketing agency. A $15.2 million personal exit from that agency became the platform for the most consequential hired-gun tenure in Formula 1 history. He took a team valued at $718 million in 2020 and, without owning a single share, turned it into a $5 billion asset.

Shaw’s unreasonable man does not adapt to the world. He adapts the world to himself, and in doing so, moves it forward. Zak Brown walked into a pawn shop in Van Nuys in 1984 with two watches and walked out with a go-kart. He walked into McLaren in 2016 with a marketing résumé and walked out, eventually, with two consecutive world championships and the fastest-rising team valuation in Formula 1 history.

Mumtalakat and CYVN cannot afford to lose him. A CEO who takes a team from $718 million to $5 billion in five years without a share of the upside is every owner’s favorite kind of asset and every owner’s next headache, because the math eventually stops working in favor of the side writing the checks. Brown will extract equity in the next transaction McLaren runs, whether that is a secondary sale, an IPO route, as Mercedes charted one through Frankfurt in 2011, which Williams followed, or a restructuring tied to the 2026 regulation reset. If he does not, he will buy his way back into motorsport ownership somewhere else, and the paddock should not be surprised when he does. The unreasonable man does not stay on a salary forever.

The watches were worth more than anyone thought.

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Ocean’s Prequel in Monaco

Margot Robbie confirmed at CinemaCon on Monday that the Ocean’s 11 prequel takes place at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. She and Bradley Cooper play Danny Ocean’s parents, pulling a heist against the backdrop of the most glamorous race weekend in the sport’s history. Cooper is also directing. Warner Bros. has the release set for June 25, 2027.

Monaco in 1962 was pre-commercial F1: racing drivers and film stars shared the same hotel bars and the same headlines, and nobody had a title sponsor on their sleeve. The Brad Pitt F1 film already proved the audience exists by building itself around Silverstone, and now Warner Bros. is anchoring one of its most bankable franchises around Monaco, both films making the same bet that motorsport works as a cinematic destination.

The commercial ripple matters. A blockbuster heist movie set in Monaco is years of global brand marketing for the race, delivered free, and the Automobile Club de Monaco gets a campaign that no media budget could replicate. F1’s sponsorship market is approaching $3 billion, and another round of premium cultural reinforcement at this scale only pushes the ceiling higher.

F1 should have a playbook for moments like this by now. A major studio is about to spend hundreds of millions telling the world that Monaco is the most beautiful, high-stakes setting on earth, and the sport’s job is to convert that energy into partnerships and audience growth. History suggests it will mostly just enjoy the attention and move on.

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OpenAI Partners with Chip Ganassi Racing

OpenAI expanded its partnership with Chip Ganassi Racing to a two-race primary sponsorship on the No. 10 Honda, driven by four-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou, for Long Beach in April and Washington, D.C., in August.

Its researchers and engineers work at race events alongside the team, running data analysis, communication tools, and real-time decision support through OpenAI’s models. Ganassi posted nine wins, 17 podiums, and a championship in 2025, and those results now carry the footnote that OpenAI’s tools were part of the operation.

Rob Wills, the director behind Netflix’s Drive to Survive, has been hired to produce a documentary about how Ganassi uses AI for competitive advantage.

The partnership has three layers: car branding at two marquee races, a live technical integration with a defending champion’s team, and a documentary from the filmmaker who proved motorsport content can reach mainstream audiences. Hiring Wills is the tell. The branding and data work justify the spend to the finance team, and the film reaches a broader audience, including people who don’t follow IndyCar, have never heard of Chip Ganassi, and will absolutely watch a well-produced documentary about speed and technology.

Eight AI deals landed on the F1 grid in six months last year. Tech companies with marketing budgets in this range have historically put them there. OpenAI's choice of IndyCar, Long Beach, and D.C. suggests the series is becoming a credible alternative. If the Wills documentary reaches the kind of audience Drive to Survive built for F1, other tech companies will follow suit.

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Barilla Made a Pasta for Race Day

Angie Cotter, Barilla’s U.S. pasta category marketing director, launched Racing Wheels this week: a special-edition pasta cut shaped like an F1 wheel, ridged and circular, built for al dente texture and sauce pickup. Available on Walmart.com now, with broader retail through spring. Race weekend activation at the Miami Grand Prix includes two Lasagna Bars on-site and dishes in the Paddock Club.

Barilla holds the title of Formula 1’s official pasta partner, and Cotter’s team decided to build a product with it. Racing Wheels is a new SKU that exists because of the F1 relationship: it costs $1.17, it sits in a grocery aisle, and it puts the partnership in someone’s kitchen. That kind of move is rare in motorsport sponsorship, where the default is signage, hospitality access, and a logo on the broadcast.

The campaign wrapping it is called “Domenica Italiana,” built on the Italian tradition of Sunday meals shared while watching the race. It works because it describes what people already do on race Sundays.

Every food and beverage brand on the F1 grid should study what Cotter’s team built and ask the same question: what artifact of the partnership lives outside the circuit and inside someone’s daily life? Barilla’s answer is on Walmart.com right now and will be in Miami in three weeks.

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After becoming the first man to summit Everest, Edmund Hillary was asked what it felt like to conquer the mountain. “It is not the mountain we conquer,” he said, “but ourselves.”

Pierre Gasly knows something about that.

On the morning of August 12, 2019, Gasly received a call from Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s longtime motorsport advisor. For two decades, Marko had controlled the careers of every driver in the Red Bull program, deciding who rose and who didn’t. He called at 8:42 a.m. Gasly was on holiday in Spain. After twelve races alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull Racing, the team Gasly had spent his entire career trying to reach, he was being sent back down, demoted to Toro Rosso, the junior team he had come from. The decision had already been made. There was nothing to discuss.

Two weeks later, at Spa, during the Formula 2 support race, Anthoine Hubert was killed at Raidillon. Hubert and Gasly had shared a bedroom as teenagers, trained together for years, and been karting rivals since the age of seven. The last time Gasly saw him was at a party in Budapest, the weekend before the Marko call. On his way out, he waved from across a terrace: Have a good summer, I’ll see you in Spa. Eighteen hours after Hubert’s death, Gasly had to climb into his car and race the Belgian Grand Prix.

He was 23 years old, publicly humiliated, privately devastated, and he had a race to drive.

Normandy

Pierre Jean-Jacques Gasly was born on February 7, 1996, in Rouen, Normandy. The city has its own motorsport heritage, having hosted the French Grand Prix in the 1950s and 1960s. He is the youngest of five, with four half-brothers from his parents’ previous marriages.

His grandfather competed in karting. His grandmother was a karting champion. His father, Jean-Jacques, raced karting, endurance racing, and rallying until he fell off a mountain after his co-driver misread the pace notes, and well, that was the end of that.

Pierre first sat in a kart at a local track in Anneville-Ambourville at the age of six. By ten, he was competing. By thirteen, he had left Rouen for Le Mans to pursue a racing career seriously.

Anthoine Hubert, the friend he grew up alongside, the one who pushed him to do one more push-up, the one he waved goodbye to on a terrace in Budapest, was a product of the same world. They had been roommates at a private school in Le Mans, grinding through the same junior program, racing each other every weekend, eating breakfast across the same table. “I know I would never have achieved what I did without growing up with him,” Gasly said years later, “because we were pushing each other so much whether it was on or off the track. It made me a better athlete, made me a better driver.”

He has organized a run at Spa every year since Hubert died. Every year, he lays flowers at the Raidillon barrier in honor of Anthoine.

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The Mountain

Back at Toro Rosso, rebranded AlphaTauri for 2020, Gasly found something he had lost at Red Bull: the sense that the car responded to him, that the team was built around him rather than around his more celebrated teammate.

Then came Monza.

September 6, 2020. Gasly started tenth in an AlphaTauri that had no business winning a Formula 1 race. He pitted one lap before the safety car came out. The pit lane closed. Lewis Hamilton dived in anyway and collected a ten-second stop-go penalty. Charles Leclerc crashed at the Parabolica. Race red-flagged. When it restarted, Pierre Gasly was leading.

Carlos Sainz closed to within DRS range on the final lap. He never got close enough. Gasly crossed the line 0.415 seconds clear, the first French Formula 1 winner since Olivier Panis in 1996, thirteen months after being stripped of his Red Bull seat, in a car that had no right to be at the front. He stood on the podium and wept. Monza’s grandstands were empty, closed by COVID.

“I’ve been through so much in the space of 18 months,” he said in parc fermé. “I have no words.”

Something shifted after Monza, in his thinking more than his driving.

Formula 1 gives you access, credibility, network, and global visibility. All of it has a shelf life. Most drivers monetize that platform through endorsement deals and brand partnerships. Gasly has done that too. But he has also done something rarer: deployed real capital into actual assets, with co-investors who manage billions, on a long-horizon thesis. While still an active F1 driver, under contract with Alpine through 2028 and earning approximately $10 million a year, he is interested in ownership.

Football: FC Versailles

In March 2024, Gasly invested in FC Versailles, a club in France’s third division, as an equal third partner alongside Alexandre Mulliez, grandson of the founder of the Auchan retail empire, and Mulliez’s business partner Fabien Lazare, who had acquired the club the previous June for approximately $1.62 million. Gasly asked that his exact figure not be disclosed, but Mulliez confirmed to RMC Sport it was substantial: “It is not 3 or 4 percent. He owns the club at the same level as me and Fabien.”

He had watched Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buy Wrexham AFC in 2020 and turn a fifth-tier Welsh club into a global media property. He saw the same model in Versailles. “We have medium and long-term ambitions for five, 10, and 15 years,” he told L’Equipe. A docuseries is already in development.

The thesis is direct: buy undervalued, attach a story, execute patiently over a decade, let the compounding do the work. Versailles is a fifteen-year-old arc dressed in a third-division kit.

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Padel: Hexagon Cup

In parallel, Gasly invested in the Hexagon Cup, the team-based padel competition that, in just two editions, has become the most commercially ambitious event in a sport rewriting the global sports participation map. Padel has grown from approximately 10 million players worldwide in 2017 to more than 35 million across 150 countries as of 2025. The International Padel Federation recorded a 42 percent increase in registered members in 2025 alone.

Gasly’s co-investors as team owners include Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray, Robert Lewandowski, and Eva Longoria. In December 2025, the Hexagon Cup announced a strategic alliance with 54, the global sports agency behind LIV Golf, and the International Padel Federation, launching the Hexagon World Series: the first FIP-governed global team circuit. The investment is a bet on a sport that has not yet crossed the threshold from regional phenomenon to global mainstream.

MotoGP: Tech3 KTM

On January 30, 2026, Gasly announced an investment in the Tech3 KTM MotoGP team, as part of the Guenther Steiner-led consortium that had acquired the French-based outfit in September 2025. The total deal was worth approximately $22.6 million, with IKON Capital leading the investor group alongside David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures and Main Street Advisors, whose founder, Paul Wachter, manages $8.7 billion in assets tied to sport and entertainment. Gasly invested through his co-founded TRAIL SLAM investment fund.

He became the first active Formula 1 driver to invest in a MotoGP team.

The timing traces back to July 3, 2025, when Liberty Media completed its acquisition of Dorna Sports for approximately $3.1 billion, an 84 percent stake in a deal valued at approximately $4.75 billion. Liberty is the same company that acquired Formula 1 in 2017 and grew revenue from $2.04 billion to $3.65 billion in seven years, launched Drive to Survive, opened street races in Miami and Las Vegas, and grew the 18-34 fanbase by an estimated 40 percent. The playbook for MotoGP is identical, and MotoGP’s enterprise value at acquisition was less than a quarter of Formula 1’s current valuation. Gasly saw the gap from the inside. He moved before it closed.

The returns case is already compelling. The personal case starts with a borrowed helmet.

When he was a child, about to race in his first competitive karting event, his helmet was rejected by the organizers. They needed a replacement, fast. The one they found was a replica of Shinya Nakano, the Japanese MotoGP rider who raced for Tech3 in the 250cc class in 2000, lost the world title in a dramatic final-race shootout, and stepped up to the premier class with the same team in 2001.

More than twenty years later, Pierre Gasly is a co-owner of the team whose helmet he wore as a ten-year-old boy.

Edmund Hillary said it was not the mountain that was conquered, but the self. Gasly’s mountain was 2019; the demotion, the grief, the Grand Prix raced in a fog of loss. He came through it with a framework in place.

The bigger picture always exists, and platforms are only worth something if you deploy them while you still have them.

The Nakano helmet connects the child on a kart track to the co-owner writing checks. When Gasly exits Alpine in 2028, the portfolio will be four years in. If Liberty Media executes on MotoGP the way it did on Formula 1, that Tech3 stake should be worth multiples of what it paid. FC Versailles keeps compounding. The Hexagon Cup either breaks through in American and Asian markets, or it stays a European premium event. None of these bets is certain. All of them were made early, with the right partners, from a platform that won’t exist forever.

He’s using it while he has it. That’s the play.

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“So we beat on, boats against the current.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It was a beautiful morning in Daytona Beach, Florida, on July 10, 2007. Lesa France Kennedy, granddaughter of NASCAR’s founder, daughter of the man who put the sport on national television, and the President of the company that owned twelve of its most important racetracks, had a trip planned with her husband.

Dr. Bruce Kennedy, a 54-year-old plastic surgeon, took off from Daytona Beach International Airport at approximately 8:30 a.m. in a twin-engine Cessna 310 registered to a France family affiliate. He had a co-pilot with him: Michael Klemm, a senior captain with NASCAR Aviation. They were bound for Orlando. Lesa and Bruce were going on their own trip later that same day.

At approximately 8:40 a.m., smoke began to fill the cockpit. Dr. Kennedy declared an emergency and turned the plane toward Orlando Sanford International Airport. Unfortunately, he did not make it. The Cessna came down in a suburban neighborhood a few miles short of the runway. It struck two houses and instantly engulfed both in fire. Bruce Kennedy and Michael Klemm both died. One adult and two children inside one of the homes also died.

Thirty-six days earlier, her father, Bill France Jr., the man who had taken the sport Lesa France Kennedy’s grandfather founded and turned it into a national television juggernaut, had died of lung cancer at his Daytona Beach home. He was 74. He had been diagnosed in 1999 and had spent eight years slowly deteriorating; a motorized scooter had eventually replaced his formerly confident stride. France Kennedy watched her father, the man who had negotiated a $2.4 billion television contract, slowly run out of breath. His death was announced during the live Fox broadcast of a race at Dover. In a show of respect, the flag was at half-staff.

“2007 was the toughest year of our lives,” she said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning in 2015.

With the loss of Dr. Kennedy, she was left to raise her son Ben as a single mom.

She was 46 years old, a widow with a young son, running the family dynasty's track empire as its President, at the exact moment the sport those tracks were built to host was beginning the most serious decline in its history. Two years later, she was promoted to CEO.

What France Kennedy did next deserves a closer look.

The Infield

Lesa Dawn France was born on May 24, 1961, in Daytona Beach. Her grandfather, Bill France Sr. (known as “Big Bill”), had founded NASCAR in 1948 at a meeting in the Ebony Room, a rooftop lounge at the Streamline Hotel. The drivers had been getting cheated by promoters. Big Bill organized everyone, wrote the rules, and created a sanctioning body. Then he built Daytona International Speedway. His son Bill Jr. was there for every day of construction: twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for thirteen months, driving compactors and bulldozers through the swamp.

France Kennedy grew up in the infield of that track. When she was eleven, she worked at the ticket office. She made $11 for her first day. One dollar per year of her life. “My dad made us walk the walk,” she said years later. He was famous for offering almost no sympathy when his children came to him with problems. The response was reliably the same: “figure it out.”

Her grandmother, Anne “Annie B.” France, NASCAR’s first Secretary and Treasurer, kept two sets of books. The real one, and a smaller one, she would show her husband when he came looking for the numbers. “She’d tell me, ‘Now don’t tell him that we’ve been piling up a little bit of cash over here, because he’ll go out and spend it as soon as we get it.’” The instinct to protect capital while others spent it freely would resurface, decades later, in a granddaughter who chose to deploy capital precisely when everyone else was pulling it back.

France Kennedy graduated from Duke in 1983 with degrees in Economics and Psychology. She came home anyway. The track was in her blood, and she probably knew it before Duke did.

The Climb

She joined International Speedway Corporation in 1983, served as Secretary, then Treasurer, spending a decade learning how money moved through a publicly traded racetrack company. In 1996, she became Executive Vice President. In 2002, she led the construction of Kansas Speedway and Chicagoland Speedway, expanding NASCAR from a Southern sport into a national one. The pattern was already forming: identify the market the sport hasn’t reached, build the infrastructure to reach it, and trust that the fans will follow the facility.

In April 2003, she became President of ISC. In April 2009, the CEO. Forbes named her the Most Powerful Woman in Sports four months later. The timing was brutal. Between 2005 and 2010, annual NASCAR race attendance fell 22 percent. Television viewership dropped by a third. Sponsorship dollars were drying up. Teams were merging, shrinking, or disappearing.

The conventional response is to conserve. Cut costs. Wait.

France Kennedy did the opposite.

$600 Million Against the Current

She understood something the declining numbers obscured: NASCAR’s problem was not the product. It was the experience. The racing was still extraordinary. What had deteriorated was the experience of being there in person. Tracks built for a different era, with poor sightlines and nothing to do before or after the race, made for an expensive day trip to uncomfortable seats. When a fan could watch twelve camera angles from a living room, the value proposition of attending in person had eroded.

In June 2013, ISC’s board endorsed a five-year capital plan not to exceed $600 million. The centerpiece, approximately $400 million, was DAYTONA Rising: a complete reinvention of the frontstretch at NASCAR’s most iconic racetrack. Not a refurbishment. A stadium, the first of its kind for motorsport. 101,500 new seats. Forty escalators. Integrated Wi-Fi. Named sponsorship opportunities for the world’s largest brands.

To fund part of it, she sold ISC’s Staten Island property (purchased in 2004 for $100 million as the site of a proposed New York speedway that locals had killed at a public hearing so hostile police ended it early) for $80 million, a loss on paper that generated $117.7 million in total cash flow after a tax benefit. The New York dream became the Daytona stadium. Sometimes the best capital allocation decision is knowing when to walk away.

DAYTONA Rising opened in January 2016 to a sold-out Speedweeks and was named Sports Facility of the Year. Phoenix Raceway followed: a $178 million overhaul completed in 2018. Then ONE DAYTONA, a $120–$150 million mixed-use district across the street from the speedway, was designed to make Daytona a year-round destination rather than a facility that sat dormant for 350 days a year.

The Numbers

ISC had annual revenues of approximately $700 to $750 million during her tenure. On May 22, 2019, NASCAR acquired ISC for approximately $2 billion. The France family converted their 35% stake into NASCAR ownership rather than cash.

The antitrust litigation of 2025, in which 23XI Racing (co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin) and Front Row Motorsports sued NASCAR over its charter system, produced a rare window into the ownership structure: the Jim France Family Trust owns 54.7% of NASCAR. The Lesa France Kennedy Family Trust owns 45.3%.

NASCAR generated $285 million in EBITDA in the most recently disclosed fiscal year. Its 2025–2031 media rights deal, with Fox, NBC, Amazon, and Warner Bros. Discovery, is valued at $7.7 billion. The sport her grandfather organized at a bar in 1947 is worth several billion dollars. France Kennedy’s Family Trust holds nearly half of it.

What Endures

The quality that appears consistently in the France family, across four generations, is conviction. Bill Sr. had it when he wrote the rulebook in 1947. Bill Jr. had it when he signed the CBS deal in 1979 that put the Daytona 500 on national television for the first time. Lesa had it in 2013 when she committed $400 million to a racetrack renovation while the sport was hemorrhaging fans.

Today, Ben Kennedy, Lesa and Bruce’s son, serves as Executive Vice President of Venue and Racing Innovation at NASCAR. Fourth generation. He grew up driving the sewage truck through the driver-owner lot at Daytona, just as his mother grew up selling tickets for $11 a day.

The family has run NASCAR for three generations without selling, without surrendering control, and without abandoning the sport when it got hard. For the first time in its history, credible reports indicate that outside investors, Liberty Media, and private equity may be invited in.

If they come, the asset they would be buying was shaped, in no small part, by a woman who looked at a sport everyone else was leaving and decided to swim against the current.

This newsletter is made possible through the support of our subscribers and our partners. When you support our partners, you’re supporting independent media like Business of Speed. We recently had Omologato founder, Shami Kalra, on the podcast. Use partner code BOS10 on your Omologato purchase to let them know we sent you.

Imagine: it’s late-afternoon sun cutting through the Ardennes. A 2.4-liter turbocharged V8 hits full power out of Eau Rouge, and the sound reaches the grandstands a full beat before the car does. That guttural, chest-rattling scream that makes 120,000 people go quiet for half a second, then very loud. The fuel burning through those eight cylinders is 100% carbon-neutral, synthesized from non-food biomass and municipal waste.

This scenario is a real engineering proposal gaining traction inside F1’s manufacturer working group right now. While the paddock digests the controversial 2026 regulations and the April calendar break stretches on, the conversation that matters has already moved past this season’s power units. Multiple manufacturers are pushing a 2.4-liter turbo V8 running fully sustainable fuel as the next regulation framework. Stefano Domenicali is on the record supporting it. The engineering case is strong. The politics are messy. And the timeline keeps shifting.

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Where Things Stand with 2026

The current regulations are locked. A 1.6-liter V6 turbo hybrid, MGU-H deleted, roughly 50/50 power split between internal combustion and electric output, running 100% advanced sustainable fuels from race one. Aramco developed those fuels from non-food biomass and renewable feedstocks as part of F1’s net-zero 2030 commitment. The fuel chemistry works. Drop-in compatibility is genuine, per Formula1.com’s technical documentation. No engine redesign required.

The hybrid architecture is where the trouble lives. Pre-season testing surfaced behaviors that made drivers uncomfortable: super-clipping, which electronically curtails power to protect battery state; energy recovery sequencing through fast corners that disrupts the car’s feel; and a layer of software management that pushes decisions away from the cockpit. Max Verstappen publicly said what several others had said in engineering debriefs. The 2026 package addresses sustainability while creating a racing product that concerns the people who actually have to drive the cars.

What’s on the Table

Reporting from AMuS and The Race through April 2026 has put enough detail on the record to take this seriously.

The configuration gaining the most support: a 2.4-liter turbocharged V8 running 100% sustainable fuel, with a simplified hybrid component contributing between 10 and 30 percent of total power output, roughly 220 to 240 kilowatts. That’s a deliberate reduction from the 2026 architecture, where electric power handles nearly half the output. The design goals are specific: cheaper to develop, lighter to package, louder at full rev, and more reliable across a race distance. A naturally aspirated version remains in discussion, but the turbo V8 has the stronger coalition behind it.

The timeline has already moved twice. Early conversations targeted 2029, limiting the 2026 framework to just three seasons. That window closed when the engine summit was postponed. Consensus is now forming around 2031, though 2030 stays alive if this year’s racing product underdelivers badly enough to accelerate the political calendar.

Domenicali told The Race in August 2025: “Sustainable fuel, [and] a V8, I think, is great. And hybridization is, I do believe, the next step of the future.” Fan polling backs him up. An 86% approval rate for a V8 or V10 paired with sustainable fuel is about as close to a mandate as this sport’s audience ever delivers. That kind of consensus gives the commercial side powerful ammunition in negotiations with reluctant manufacturers.

What This Changes

Sound is the headline, and it matters more than the engineering community wants to admit. The 2.4-liter V8 turbo at high revs produces a visceral frequency the current V6 hybrids simply cannot generate. Fans have been saying this for a decade. Attendance and broadcast engagement both correlate with on-track spectacle, and acoustics are a bigger component of spectacle than any technical white paper will acknowledge.

The business case runs deeper. A simplified powertrain lowers development costs, lowers the barrier to entry for new engine suppliers, creates more competition on the grid, and generates more commercial value across the entire F1 commercial ecosystem. The MGU-H deletion in 2026 was already a step in this direction. A KERS-style hybrid in a V8 framework goes further. More manufacturers, more diversity, more sponsorship inventory, more deals.

Driver agency recovers, too. When battery management software handles less of the power delivery equation, throttle application, and braking precision carry more weight. That produces a more watchable race and a more marketable champion.

The risks are real. Audi structured its entire F1 entry around the 2026 hybrid architecture, matching Volkswagen’s electrification narrative. Rewriting the power unit regulations within five years forces Audi to either defend billions in sunk costs or publicly pivot its corporate story. Honda faces a version of the same problem. And F1 itself carries scars from rushed regulatory packages. The 2026 rules were themselves a response to the complexity and cost problems of the hybrid era. Repeating that cycle would be a governance failure, and the sport’s credibility with manufacturers would take years to rebuild.

What Happens Next

No final decision exists. The signal to watch is whether Honda and Audi soften their opposition before the end of this year. If both hold firm through 2026, the 2030 window effectively closes, and 2031 becomes the default.

The 2026 racing season is the other variable. If the on-track product confirms what pre-season testing hinted at, political will for an earlier reset builds fast. If the cars produce great racing despite the software-heavy architecture, urgency fades.

Here’s where I land: the V8 happens. The timeline falls to 2031, with an outside chance of moving to 2030 if this season disappoints. The bigger question is whether Audi’s participation survives the transition. We’re watching the early stages of the next engine war form in real time. We can only hope this quiet phase of F1 engines ends soon.

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IMSA’s Record-Breaking Sebring Weekend

The 74th Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring drew over 115,000 fans across four days, March 18 through 21, shattering the event’s all-time attendance record. This follows a record-breaking Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, and the trajectory is accelerating in a way that deserves attention from anyone tracking where motorsport audiences are actually showing up.

On the bumpy concrete of Sebring International Raceway, Roger Penske’s Porsche Penske Motorsport squad locked out the top two positions in the GTP class. Porsche’s 20th overall Sebring victory, executed over twelve hours with the kind of clean strategy that reminded everyone why Penske bought into prototype racing this aggressively.

IMSA shares a weekend with IndyCar at Long Beach coming up next. If that event continues this attendance curve, the growth story around U.S. sports car racing moves from promising to undeniable. Great racing, sustainable fuel programs, and fan-first event production. Full grandstands. F1’s future engine planners would be wise to study why.

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In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that “in human affairs of danger and delicacy, successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry.”

Lawrence Stroll has spent his entire career buying things at the moment of maximum distress and minimum consensus: an unknown fashion designer for $200,000, a bankrupt Formula 1 team, a car company that had gone bust seven times. And then doing the one thing many investors can’t do.

He waits.

Will Aston Martin, the most famous British car brand in the world, and the most expensive investment of Stroll’s career, turn out to be his worst bet yet?

Montréal

Lawrence Stroll did not choose the fashion business. He was born into it.

His father, Leo Strulovitch, was a clothing importer who built a business in Montréal on the back of two licences: Pierre Cardin and Ralph Lauren, both of which he brought to Canada at a time when those names carried enormous global aspirational weight.

Lawrence spent much of his childhood learning the business at his father’s side. In the showroom, in the stockroom, listening to the conversations his father had with buyers, distributors, and brand representatives. From a very young age, he was intuitively absorbing an important lesson: a brand is not a product. A brand is perception. And perception, managed correctly, is worth an enormous amount of money.

In 1976, still in his teens, Lawrence was given the license to Pierre Cardin’s children’s wear line. He wasn’t enrolled in university, so this was more a responsibility than a gift. He was not given a salary, a desk, or a title. He was given a business to run while most of his peers were sitting in a classroom. He ran it for the better part of a decade, steadily and methodically growing the brand’s Canadian distribution and learning the mechanics of how a luxury brand actually moves through a market: how it gets into the right stores at the right price.

Then came the moment that changed everything, and it arrived sideways, as some of the best moments in business and life often do.

Stroll found himself in a bidding war against Ralph Lauren (the man himself) for a car. Lauren won the car, but Stroll walked away with something much more valuable: the European license for Polo Ralph Lauren, under the company Poloco S.A. He had lost the auction and won the relationship. It was the first demonstration of a quality he has honed throughout his career: the ability to identify what is actually worth having in any given situation and walk away with it.

Through Poloco, Stroll took Ralph Lauren to Europe in partnership with Silas Chou, a Hong Kong-based textile manufacturer whose father had worked with Leo Strulovitch. The partnership between Stroll and Chou was productive almost immediately. Ralph Lauren grew quickly in Europe under their management. By 1989, they had built enough capital and enough credibility to make their first truly independent bet.

They called the vehicle Sportswear Holdings Ltd. The first thing they put into it was a 70% stake in a virtually unknown American fashion designer named Tommy Hilfiger, reportedly for little more than $200,000.

The $200,000 Bet

In 1989, the Tommy Hilfiger brand was in trouble. Its original backer, Mohan Murjani, an Indian-born fashion entrepreneur who had launched the brand in 1985 and had created Gloria Vanderbilt jeans before it, had run into severe financial difficulty, with debts exceeding $150 million. The brand had a designer with genuine talent and enormous ambition, and no one to take it mainstream.

During a trip to Hong Kong, Stroll and Chou met Hilfiger and agreed to form an alliance on the spot, creating Tommy Hilfiger Inc. and giving the designer the financial backing he needed. Rather than take a license (the more conventional move for a distribution partner), Stroll and Chou insisted that the company owns the name outright.

They took 70% between them, split equally. Hilfiger retained 22.5%. Joel Horowitz, a former Murjani executive who had worked with the Hilfiger brand since its inception, joined as President and CEO of Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, holding the remaining 7.5%. Stroll himself took the role of CEO of Tommy Hilfiger (HK) Ltd., overseeing the Asian operations.

The total investment was approximately $206,000. At the time of acquisition in March 1989, the company was generating $25 million in annual sales across five or six different business lines, while losing $5 million a year. The first decision Stroll and Chou made was to eliminate every business line except menswear. In year one, menswear alone generated $25 million, and the company broke even. Every year after that, they roughly doubled.

What followed was one of the great brand-building stories in American fashion history. Sales grew from $25 million to $50 million, then $100 million, then $500 million, then $1 billion, then $2 billion. The brand caught fire in the mid-nineties when hip-hop culture adopted it. Snoop Dogg wore Hilfiger on Saturday Night Live in 1994, and the brand’s trajectory changed overnight. In the fall of 1992, the company made an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange at $15 a share, and the stock soared to $25 within two months. Three secondary offerings followed in successive years.

By 1996, Stroll, Chou, and Horowitz had netted a combined $325 million on their original $206,000 investment. That is a return of 157,767%. Fashion is a tough, high-risk business for returns on investment, often compared to the restaurant industry in terms of failure rates. That return is extraordinary, particularly because the brand was losing $5 million per year just seven years earlier.

In June 2002, Stroll stepped down as co-chairman and director of Tommy Hilfiger Corporation and sold his equity stake, ending a 13-year run. “It’s been a wonderful 13-and-a-half years since acquiring Tommy,” he told WWD. “I feel I’ve done all I can do.” Apax Partners took the brand private in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Not every bet landed this cleanly. Between Hilfiger and their next major move, Stroll and Chou invested in British luxury goods brands Asprey and Garrard in 2000, a bet outside their core domain. It is the one confirmed capital loss in an otherwise unblemished record. The disappointment didn’t slow them down. If anything, it sharpened them.

The next bet was Michael Kors.

In 2003, Sportswear Holdings acquired an 85% stake in Michael Kors Holdings for approximately $100 million. Kors was a critically respected designer with a devoted following and essentially no global infrastructure. The playbook was identical to Hilfiger: find the underappreciated talent, buy control, build the infrastructure, take it public. When Kors went public in December 2011, the company was valued at $3.8 billion. Stroll and Chou continued reducing their stake as the share price quadrupled in the years that followed.

In September 2014, they sold their final 5.7% stake worth approximately $893 million in a secondary public offering.

After two fashion companies were taken from obscurity to global recognition, Stroll’s personal net worth had reached approximately $2.3 billion. He was 55 years old. And he was about to do something that could be seen as completely irrational: buy a Formula 1 team.

The Racetrack and The Son

By the early 2000s, Lawrence Stroll was a billionaire with a collection of vintage Ferraris that occupied an entire climate-controlled facility. He also had a son, Lance, who had started karting and shown genuine promise.

Depending on who you ask, this part of the story is either that of a devoted father doing everything in his power to give his son every possible advantage or a billionaire manufacturing a Formula 1 career for a driver who would not otherwise have one.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. That is a story for another time. The facts are not in dispute.

When he was eleven years old, Lance was recruited to the Ferrari Driver Academy. He won the Italian Formula 4 Championship in 2014. He won the Toyota Racing Series in 2015. In 2016, he won the FIA Formula 3 European Championship with Prema, dominating the field by 187 points, winning 14 races.

He was accused throughout the season of manufacturing his title via team orders. The paddock was not quiet about it. Lawrence Stroll had hired former Ferrari chief track engineer Luca Baldisserri to run Lance’s campaign; he had invested in and part-owned the Prema team and had given his son every advantage available.

The next stop was Williams F1. According to Auto Motor und Sport, Lawrence Stroll spent approximately $80 million preparing Lance for his Formula 1 debut, covering an extensive global testing program at multiple circuits, five Mercedes engineers, a state-of-the-art simulator built specifically for Lance at Williams’ Grove headquarters, and two specially prepared Mercedes engines. “The last rookie with that many kilometres of testing for his debut was Jacques Villeneuve,” admitted Williams’ Pat Symonds.

The paddock’s reaction was quite predictable. The criticism was loud and sustained. Lance himself did not help matters when he told Auto Bild: “Motorsport is a sport where money is important, of course, so I’m very happy that my father helps me.”

What his critics consistently understate is that, regardless of his advantages, Lance Stroll has earned results that cannot be bought. He scored a podium finish at the 2017 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, becoming the second-youngest driver to score a podium in Formula 1 history. He took a pole position at the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix in wet conditions so treacherous that qualifying was suspended twice, a session in which Mercedes (who had claimed every pole position that season) finished sixth and ninth, and Lewis Hamilton was nearly eliminated in Q1. No amount of money could manufacture that.

Is the nepotism argument valid? Yes. Is it also, in the context of Lawrence Stroll’s career, somewhat beside the point? Yes. He has spent his entire life identifying undervalued assets and doing whatever was necessary to maximize their potential. Lance Stroll is his son. Whether that makes it nepotism or conviction is for each person to decide.

What Lawrence Stroll did next is a much more interesting story.

In 2018, he bought a Formula 1 team. The world assumed it was for Lance. The numbers tell a much juicier story.

The Force India Moment

On July 27, 2018, the High Court in London appointed an administrator for Force India Formula One Team Limited. The team had debts exceeding $134 million. The action had been triggered by Sergio Pérez, the team’s own driver, who was owed more than $4 million in unpaid sponsorship arrangements. Mercedes, the team’s engine supplier, was owed approximately $17 million. Leading sponsor BWT was also a creditor. The team had not paid its employees for months. Over 400 creditors were waiting. The team that had finished fourth in the Constructors’ Championship twice in the previous four years had approximately $320,000 left in the bank.

Lawrence Stroll had been keeping an eye on this debacle.

The consortium he assembled moved quickly. It included his longtime business partner, Silas Chou; Canadian entrepreneur André Desmarais; fashion executive John D. Idol; telecommunications investor John McCaw Jr.; and financial expert Michael de Picciotto. These were not motorsport people. They were capital allocators. Stroll had recruited them the same way he had recruited Chou for Tommy Hilfiger: people who trusted his judgment on distressed assets, who had seen what he could do, and who were willing to move fast. The vehicle they used to make the acquisition was Racing Point UK Ltd.

On August 16, 2018, Racing Point UK Ltd. acquired Force India’s assets for approximately $120 million, explicitly excluding any debts or liabilities associated with former owner Vijay Mallya. The consortium then did something that almost never happens in administration proceedings: Stroll personally committed additional capital to ensure all creditors were paid in full, immediately, rather than waiting for the standard post-administration process that typically takes one to two years.

Team principal Otmar Szafnauer, retained from the Force India era, described the instruction from his new owner: “Lawrence wanted to do what’s right by the suppliers that have supported us. He’s definitely a motivator, and he’s a clear and direct talker, so you get good direction. He’s got high expectations, which is fine by me.”

The $120 million price tag was not a bargain. Force India had debts exceeding $134 million. It had an owner whose personal legal and financial troubles in India had precipitated the entire crisis. But it did have two race-winning cars, a world-class engineering operation in Silverstone, a Mercedes power unit supply agreement, and a group of roughly 400 people who had been building competitive Formula 1 machinery on a fraction of the budget of their rivals for a decade.

“What impressed me, and the reason for the purchase,” Stroll told GP Racing magazine, “was that it was a team that operated on a budget of approximately $120 million and only 400 employees, but two years in a row it was fourth in the championship. They did more with fewer employees than other teams. It was an incredible opportunity to build on an already strong foundation.”

Given the team had finished fourth in the Constructors’ Championship in 2016 and 2017 with a budget approximately one-fifth the size of Mercedes’, it was arguably the most efficient racing operation in the sport. Stroll had bought it at the moment of maximum distress. Same playbook he’d been using since 1989.

The team re-entered the championship as Racing Point Force India at the 2018 Belgian Grand Prix, the first race after the summer break. They finished fifth and sixth that weekend, scored 52 points in their remaining races, and finished seventh in the Constructors’ Championship. The following year, with the team renamed Racing Point F1 Team and Lance driving alongside Sergio Pérez, they finished seventh again.

In 2020, Lance Stroll took pole position at the Turkish Grand Prix. Sergio Pérez won the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain. The team finished fourth in the Constructors’ Championship, matching the best result Force India had ever achieved, and did so wearing the livery of a car company that Lawrence Stroll had spent the previous twelve months acquiring in the most deeply consequential bet of his career.

The Seventh Bankruptcy

There is a phrase that Andy Palmer, Aston Martin’s CEO, used repeatedly in the years before Lawrence Stroll arrived. “In the first century, we went bankrupt seven times. The second century is about making sure that is not the case.”

Seven times. The first in 1924. The most recent in 1974. A company that the entire world recognizes, that James Bond drives, that carries more than a century of heritage. A company that has sold approximately 70,000 total cars across its entire history, a number Nissan eclipses in a single week. Aston Martin has 13 million Instagram followers and has never sold more than 7,300 cars in a single year.

This is the kind of asset Lawrence Stroll has been looking for his entire life.

On January 31, 2020, Stroll led the Yew Tree Investments consortium (which included his long-time partner Silas Chou, JCB chairman Anthony Bamford, and former Power Corporation of Canada chief André Desmarais) to invest $233 million into Aston Martin Lagonda in exchange for a 16.7% stake in the company. He beat out Chinese automaker Geely, owner of Lotus and Volvo, to close the deal. He was appointed executive chairman immediately upon completion.

What he had acquired was a company in genuine distress. Aston Martin had floated on the London Stock Exchange in October 2018 at approximately $25 per share, a listing that went poorly from the first day, with shares immediately trading below the IPO price. By the time Stroll arrived, they had lost nearly 80% of their float value. The company had reported annual losses in 2018 and 2019 and was on course to report them again in 2020. Its debt was mounting. Its previous owners, Kuwaiti investment groups, were not in a position to provide further capital. The $642 million total package Stroll assembled, including a $408 million rights issue alongside his consortium’s $234 million, gave the company the liquidity it needed to survive.

The Racing Point F1 team, which Stroll already owned, was rebranded as the Aston Martin F1 Team in 2021, marking the British manufacturer’s return to Formula 1 after a 61-year absence. The F1 program was a brand-building investment, a decision to spend money on the most visible motorsport stage in the world at the exact moment Formula 1’s American audience was beginning to explode.

He did not stop at 16.7%. By March 2025, Stroll confirmed that since 2020, the Yew Tree Consortium had invested approximately $756 million into Aston Martin. His stake has grown incrementally with each injection of capital: from 16.7% to 27.7%, and most recently to 33% following a $68 million investment confirmed in March 2025, with the consortium targeting 35% when possible.

He recruited Fernando Alonso from Alpine in 2023, a two-time world champion who brought immediate credibility, championship-level development feedback, and a global fanbase. He announced in September 2024 that Adrian Newey, the most celebrated aerodynamicist in Formula 1 history with 13 Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships, would join Aston Martin as managing technical partner, on a reported package worth approximately $30 million per year. He secured a Honda power unit partnership beginning in 2026, replacing the Mercedes supply agreement. (We can debate that decision another time.) He also committed to a new $275 million facility at Silverstone, the most advanced F1 factory in Britain.

The numbers at the car company itself tell a more complicated story. In 2024, Aston Martin reported pre-tax losses of approximately $323 million, up 48.7% from the prior year. Net debt increased 43% to approximately $1.46 billion. Deliveries totaled 6,030 units, down approximately 9% from 2023. The share price, which peaked in 2021, trades today at a fraction of that.

Stroll’s response to every piece of negative news has been identical: he puts more money in with the deliberate conviction of a man who has the capital and the patience to wait out his bet.

“Since 2020, my partners in the Yew Tree Consortium and I have invested approximately $756 million in the company,” he said in his most recent statement. “This proposed investment further underscores my conviction in this extraordinary brand.”

It is the same sentiment he expressed for Tommy Hilfiger in 1989. And about Michael Kors in 2003. And about Force India in 2018.

The question that matters for Lawrence Stroll as an investor is whether Aston Martin is the same kind of asset as those. Or whether it is something structurally different: a brand so compromised, so chronically undercapitalized across its entire history, that no amount of money, talent, or conviction can fix it permanently.

The Numbers

What he has spent: The Force India consortium acquisition in August 2018: approximately $120 million. The Aston Martin car company investment through Yew Tree Investments in January 2020 was approximately $233 million. Additional capital injections into both the car company and the F1 team through 2025: approximately $756 million at blended rates across those years. The new Silverstone factory alone: approximately $275 million. Adrian Newey’s reported annual package: approximately $30 million.

The total capital deployed is exorbitant. But by the standards of what Stroll has built, it is also somewhat rational.

What he owns: The Aston Martin F1 team, acquired for $120 million in 2018 out of administration, was valued at $3.2 billion in a July 2025 stake sale confirmed by Bloomberg. That is a transaction-verified increase of approximately 2,550% on the original acquisition price, in seven years. Sponsorship revenue at the team has increased by more than 1,000% since Stroll bought it in 2018.

The valuation trajectory of the F1 team alone tells the story:

• November 2023: $1.3 billion (Arctos Partners stake sale)

• March 2024: $2.4 billion (HPS Investment Partners and Accel Partners)

• July 2025: $3.2 billion (latest confirmed stake sale, Bloomberg)

In less than two years, the team’s transaction-verified valuation more than doubled. This was not driven by on-track performance; 2024 and 2025 were difficult years to say the least. It was driven by the structural growth of Formula 1 itself, by the infrastructure Stroll has built around the team, and by the credibility that Newey’s arrival and the Honda partnership have injected into the long-term thesis. (Whether the Honda engine’s early struggles will affect further valuations is not for us to hypothesize here.)

His stake in the Aston Martin car company sits at approximately 33% of Yew Tree’s holding, which controls the majority of Aston Martin Lagonda. The car company itself remains deeply loss-making (pre-tax losses of approximately $323 million in 2024, net debt of approximately $1.46 billion), but Stroll’s position is structural and long-term. He is, as ever, patient.

Forbes’ most recent confirmed figure places his net worth at approximately $3.9 billion as of 2024, up from $2.4 billion in 2016, the year before he entered Formula 1. The $1.5 billion increase in eight years is almost entirely attributable to the appreciation of his motorsport and automotive holdings.

He has also been inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame (2019) and received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022.

The Question

Lawrence Stroll’s record is practically unblemished: Pierre Cardin children’s wear at seventeen. Ralph Lauren across Europe. Tommy Hilfiger for $200,000, returned at $325 million combined by 1996. Michael Kors for $100 million, returned at $2.3 billion by 2014. Force India for $120 million, now valued at $3.2 billion.

Aston Martin is different because of the nature of the asset itself.

Tommy Hilfiger was a brand problem. It had a gifted designer, an unloved product, and no infrastructure. Stroll and Chou provided the infrastructure. Michael Kors was the same. Force India was a liquidity problem masquerading as a structural one, a team that was genuinely world-class but simply had an owner who had run out of money. Stroll provided the liquidity. In each case, the underlying asset was sound. The problem was solvable. The fix was capital and management.

Aston Martin, the car company, is something more complicated. It has gone bankrupt seven times because the underlying business model, hand-building ultra-luxury cars in small volumes at extremely high cost, is structurally difficult to sustain at a profit, regardless of how much capital you inject. The brand is undoubtedly extraordinary. The product is spectacular. But the economics are brutal.

The F1 team’s 2024 and 2025 on-track results have been poor, leaving Aston Martin ranked near the bottom of the Constructors’ standings. The question we should ask is whether the asset he is building it around, a car company with a profitability problem that no previous owner has solved, is the same kind of asset as Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors. Or whether it is something structurally different: a brand so chronically compromised by its own finances that patience and capital alone cannot fix it.

The Bet Is Still On

Steinbeck was right in that often, a successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. Lawrence Stroll has never hurried. Not in fashion, not in Formula 1, not in the boardroom of a company that has gone bankrupt seven times and is betting its second century on a man from Montréal who learned about brand value at his father’s side.

He is 65 years old. He is a billionaire whose daily life will be unaffected if the Aston Martin investment doesn’t pan out. He likely needs it to work because walking away from a bet is something Lawrence Stroll has never done.

The cars are in the garage at Silverstone. Newey is at his drawing board. Honda is trying furiously to perfect the lackluster engine. And at any given paddock, there’s a Canadian man who paid $200,000 for Tommy Hilfiger and walked away with $2.3 billion from Michael Kors, doing the one thing he has always done better than anyone else in the room.

He is waiting.

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The Feature

Melbourne produced 120 overtakes in the 2026 season opener. The same circuit generated 45 the year before. Shanghai delivered similar numbers. Two races in, and the FIA’s new regulations are producing exactly what Liberty Media ordered: more action, more highlight clips, more reasons for a casual fan scrolling Apple TV to stop and watch.

Max Verstappen thinks you’re an idiot for enjoying it.

“Anybody who enjoys this doesn’t understand motor racing,” the four-time world champion said after Round 1. Charles Leclerc called the overtaking “artificial.” Lando Norris pointed to dangerous speed differentials between cars running different power modes on the same straight. George Russell, who won in Australia, has been the loudest defender of the new formula, but Russell winning tends to correlate with Russell approving of the rules, so take that endorsement with appropriate seasoning.

How the Boost Button Works

The 2026 power unit regulations tripled the electrical output of the MGU-K from 120kW to 350kW, creating a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical power. That’s the single biggest shift in F1’s hybrid era. Drivers now manage when to charge and when to deploy through a manual boost button that unlocks the full 350kW from the MGU-K, giving them a burst of speed that tapers off above 290 kph.

The catch: using it drains the battery and leaves the car vulnerable on the next straight. Leclerc described the pattern after Shanghai. You boost, you pass, you become a sitting duck. The other driver boosts past you on the following straight. Then you do it again. The racing looks frantic on camera. In the cockpit, drivers say it feels like managing a video game power-up cycle rather than actually racing.

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“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” — William Faulkner, The Paris Review, 1956

Roger Penske, founder and chairman of Penske Corporation, has built the most successful motorsport operation in American racing history, a truck leasing empire, and one of the largest automotive retail groups on Earth, by holding everything he touches to a standard that most people find exhausting just to observe.

The word everyone uses about him isn’t “genius.” It’s not “visionary.” It’s “standards.” “Penske Perfect” is a term widely known across the motorsport community. It means the cars are prepared to a degree that borders on compulsive, the pit stops are rehearsed to the second, and the culture tolerates nothing less than winning. And it’s paid off. As of publication, Penske has more than 660 wins, over 700 pole positions, and 47 championships across IndyCar, NASCAR, and IMSA.

Roger Penske is the kind of man who pressure-washes the pit lane. The man who once, on the morning of a race, personally walked the garage floor, checking that every tool was in its exact designated position. The man whose teams’ transporters are cleaner than most operating rooms. That compulsion (to make everything around him operate at maximum efficiency, maximum presentation, maximum performance) is not a personality quirk. It is the entire system. It has been the entire system for sixty years. And it has made him a billionaire many times over.

Shaker Heights

Roger Penske was born on February 20, 1937, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's most affluent suburbs. His father, Jay, spent thirty years at a metal distributorship, eventually becoming its vice president and general manager. His mother, Martha, ran the household.

“My parents were a great team,” Penske has said. “They taught me to be truthful and to help others. We didn’t have a lot, but my parents always shared with others.”

The pact in the Penske household was simple. “Usually my parents would pay half for my extras, and I would work to pay the other half,” Penske has recounted. “That pact between us taught me patience. There was no instant gratification. I believe the way I was raised served me well throughout my life.”

His father’s motto, passed down and eventually plastered across the culture of every company Penske would ever build, was three words: effort equals results. It sounds simple. Which is exactly why it works.

When he was eleven years old, his father sent him to summer camp at Culver Military Academy in Indiana. “Overall, that experience at Culver was terrific. You worked with people from different parts of the world at Culver. I would say it was a great foundation for me to have discipline, to understand you had to work to get to the front.” He was sent there, not as punishment, but because his father saw something in him and wanted to sharpen it.

As a teenager, he bought old cars, repaired them, and sold them for profit. Perhaps this was the beginning of a system.

When Penske was fourteen, his father took him to Indianapolis. “I knew immediately that the race track was a place where I wanted to be. I told my father that day I wanted to be a racecar driver.”

It was 1951. Sixty-eight years later, he would own the track.

Driver of the Year, F1 and Retirement…all by 28.

Penske graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1955 and enrolled at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where he studied business administration, pledged Phi Gamma Delta, and continued racing on the side. He spent three summers working in an Alcoa aluminum plant during college, and joined the company as a sales engineer when he graduated in 1959.

He was a genuinely accomplished racing driver. Sports Illustrated named him its SCCA Driver of the Year in 1961. The following year, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times named him North American Driver of the Year. He competed at Le Mans, Sebring, and Daytona. He made two Formula One Grand Prix starts, in 1961 and 1962, both at the United States Grand Prix in Watkins Glen. He won a NASCAR race at Riverside in 1963, as well as the Pacific Grand Prix, a sports car race at Laguna Seca, in 1964.

But even at the height of his driving career, Penske was already thinking like an owner rather than a driver. “I don’t want to be known as a race driver,” he told a reporter a full year before he retired from driving. In hindsight, it was a statement of intent.

He understood his ceiling. He was talented enough to compete at the highest levels of American motorsport. But he wasn’t talented enough to be the best in the world. And being anything other than the best in the world was not something he was prepared to accept. So he made a different calculation: if he could not be the fastest driver in the car, he would build the organization that put the fastest drivers in the fastest cars.

In 1963, at age 26, he left Alcoa to become general manager of a Chevrolet franchise in Philadelphia. By 1965, he had borrowed $50,000 from his father and bought it outright. He retired from driving that same year. He was 28.

The Dealership and The Standard

How he managed that Chevrolet dealership became a template for the future.

Penske did not simply run the dealership. He transformed it. He applied the same logic to a car showroom that he would later apply to a race garage: every surface clean, every process documented, every employee clear on exactly what was expected of them and exactly how performance would be measured. The dealership became, almost immediately, one of the top-performing Chevrolet franchises in the country.

This was not accidental. Penske has spoken about the realization, arriving early in his business life, that most organizations underperform not because of bad people but because of undefined standards. When you define the standard precisely and hold everyone in the building accountable to it, including yourself (especially yourself), the results follow. It is not a complicated philosophy. Very few people have the discipline to execute it day after day for six decades.

His nickname “The Captain” did not come from motorsport as many might assume. It came from his employees. It is a title of respect, but it also speaks to Penske’s precision. Captains run tight ships, captains set the heading, and captains do not tolerate drift. It is the most accurate single word anyone has ever applied to Roger Penske.

The dealership became the cornerstone. Through it, Penske met the people, understood the systems, and developed the appetite that would take him far beyond a single franchise in Philadelphia. He renamed it Roger Penske Chevrolet, secured a National Car Rental franchise for the Philadelphia market, and when National eventually bought him out, he took those proceeds and pointed them at his next move.

The Captain and The Engineer

In 1966, Penske returned to racing, this time from the other side of the pit wall. Team Penske made its debut at the 24 Hours of Daytona with an obsolete Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport. The result was inauspicious. But it didn’t matter, because that same year, Penske hired a driver named Mark Donohue.

Donohue was a Brown University engineering graduate: precise, methodical, quiet with his hands and loud with his data. He could drive a race car to its absolute limit and then come back to the garage and explain, in technical detail, exactly what the car needed to go faster. He was the perfect driver for Roger Penske.

Together, they dominated. Trans-Am racing in Camaros and Javelins. Can-Am in the fearsome Porsche 917-10 and 917-30 turbocharged cars. Machines so powerful that they effectively killed Can-Am as a competitive series. Wherever they went, they won. And wherever they won, they did it in Penske’s immaculate Sunoco blue livery, with cars that looked as good as they were fast, because in Penske’s world, those two things were never separate.

In 1972, they arrived at Indianapolis. They won.

It was Penske’s first Indianapolis 500 victory as an owner. As of March 2026, he has won twenty. No one in the history of the race has won more.

In 1974, having largely run out of things to conquer in American racing, Penske created Penske Cars Ltd. in Poole, England, and set his sights on Formula One. Then, in August 1975, tragedy arrived without warning. At the Austrian Grand Prix at the Österreichring, Donohue’s car suffered a tire failure during a warm-up lap and crashed. He walked away from the accident but complained of a worsening headache and collapsed. He died the following day, August 19, 1975, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was only 38 years old.

Penske announced Donohue’s death himself. He stayed in Formula One for one more season, with John Watson as his driver. Watson won the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix, at the same circuit, one year after Donohue’s fatal crash, in a Penske-Ford PC4. It is the last F1 win to date for an American-licensed constructor.

Penske has spoken rarely and carefully about losing Donohue. Donohue wasn’t simply his driver. He was his collaborator, his friend, and in many ways the walking proof that Penske’s entire philosophy worked: that standards, preparation, and precision could beat raw talent alone.

The Truck That Built The Empire

In 1969, the same year he was winning races with Donohue, Penske made a move that most people outside his inner circle did not fully understand at the time. The proceeds from the National Car Rental buyout (figures undisclosed) became the seed capital to purchase a small truck rental and leasing business serving eastern Pennsylvania, with just three locations. Once acquired, he folded it into the newly incorporated Penske Corporation.

Truck leasing is not glamorous. But it is the type of business that generates cash flow, year after year, with the kind of reliability that racing never can. Penske understood this. Racing was where he publicly applied his standards. Truck leasing was where those standards printed money quietly.

Penske Truck Leasing grew steadily, then grew dramatically. By 1981, Penske Corporation was reporting revenues of $254 million. By 1988, it had crossed $2 billion. The same logic that governed the dealership and the race team governed the truck business: define the standard, hire people who can meet it, hold them to it, and let the results compound.

In May 1999, Penske took control of United Automotive Group, a struggling automotive retail group founded in 1990. He eventually renamed it Penske Automotive Group. He applied his signature standard, and the company began to grow. In 2024, Penske Automotive Group, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, posted annual revenues of $30.46 billion, making it one of the largest automotive retail operations in the world.

Today, Penske Corporation spans truck leasing, logistics, automotive retail, motorsport, and speedway ownership. It employs more than 70,000 people across 3,200 locations worldwide. Forbes’ 2026 World’s Billionaires List places his net worth at approximately $6.4 billion.

The $50,000 borrowed from his father in 1965 was far from just a loan. It became the compounding machine that has been running without interruption for 60 years.

The Numbers

Here is what that standard has actually produced.

Penske Automotive Group, the publicly listed automotive retail business, posted $30.46 billion in revenue in 2024, with net income of $919 million and EBITDA of $1.49 billion. That is a single division of a larger private empire. In 2024 alone, PAG completed acquisitions representing approximately $2.1 billion in estimated annualized revenue, meaning even at this scale, the compounding machine is still running.

Penske Truck Leasing, operated through a partnership between Penske Corporation, Penske Automotive Group, and Mitsui & Co. of Tokyo, runs a fleet of more than 450,000 vehicles from nearly 1,480 locations globally and generated $198 million in equity earnings for PAG alone in 2024. Penske Corporation as a whole manages revenues that industry estimates place above $40 billion annually when all entities are consolidated.

Team Penske, the racing operation, has recorded over 660 victories, over 700 pole positions, and close to 50 championships across IndyCar, NASCAR, and IMSA. Twenty Indianapolis 500 victories. Three Daytona 500 victories. Four overall wins at the Rolex 24 in Daytona. Three overall wins at the Sebring 12 Hours. It is the most successful motorsport team in American racing history, and it has never been a vanity project or a labour of love that tolerates losses. It is a business run to the same standard as everything else.

Penske has been inducted into seven motorsport and automotive halls of fame (a detail that, honestly, deserves its own article):

• Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (1995)

• International Motorsports Hall of Fame (1998)

• Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame (2002)

• Automotive Hall of Fame (2015)

• SCCA Hall of Fame (2016)

• NASCAR Hall of Fame (2019)

• Trans-Am Series Hall of Fame (2025)

The Speedway

On November 4, 2019, Roger Penske became the fourth owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in its 110-year history. He purchased it, along with the IndyCar Series and IMS Productions, from the Hulman family, who had held it since 1945. The official price was never publicly disclosed. People familiar with the transaction told the Associated Press that discussions involved offers of between $250 million and $300 million for the package, with a promise of additional capital improvements to the Speedway. The deal, from first conversation to closing, took roughly six weeks.

Since taking over, Penske has committed more than $30 million in capital improvements to the Speedway: new video screens, additions at Turns 3 and 4, and a series of infrastructure upgrades that have modernized one of sport’s most iconic venues.

The investment is already paying back. In July 2025, Fox Corporation purchased one-third of Penske Entertainment, the holding entity that contains both IndyCar and IMS, in a transaction valued by the Wall Street Journal at approximately $130 million.

The implied math is straightforward: one-third at $130 million puts the full Penske Entertainment entity at approximately $390 million. He bought the package for somewhere between $250 million and $300 million, poured more than $30 million into improvements, and has already recouped a substantial portion of his investment while retaining two-thirds of the asset. The Captain bought the track. Then he ran it like a business.

The full-circle quality of the IMS purchase is almost too neat to be real. The fourteen-year-old boy who sat in those stands in 1951 and told his father he wanted to be a race-car driver. The young man who competed at Le Mans, Sebring, and Daytona, but never raced in Indianapolis. The team owner who won the Indy 500 twenty times. And finally, in his eighty-third year, the man who bought the place itself.

“I hope my dad is looking down at me and this group and saying, ‘Son, you did a good job,’” Penske said after the purchase was announced.

What Standards Build

In 2017, days after his driver, Josef Newgarden, won the IndyCar championship at Sonoma Raceway, Penske underwent a kidney transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The kidney came from his son, Greg. He kept the procedure entirely private and was back at the racetrack roughly 10 days after surgery. He did not announce it until 2019, when it came up incidentally during a press session. When asked about the recovery, his answer was characteristically Penske: he described being encouraged to stand up and walk to the window the same day. He was in his son’s room the next morning.

Kidney transplant. Ten days. Back on track.

The man does not know another gear.

Roger Penske’s success in business comes down to one thing: he applies the same standard to everything, and he never stops applying it. No exceptions. No fatigue. None of the quiet compromises that accumulate in most organizations over time and, without anyone quite noticing, become the ceiling.

Penske has never accepted a ceiling. He assessed his own talent honestly at 28 and pivoted before most would have. He took a single dealership and made it a model. He built a racing operation that has been winning for six decades. He compounded a $50,000 loan into a $6 billion fortune. And at 83, ten days after a kidney transplant, he was back at the race track.

At 89, he is still The Captain.

Jay Penske’s motto was three words. His son has spent sixty years making them true.

Effort equals results.

Check the pit lane. Check the garage floor. Check the transporter. Check the record books.

It’s all there.

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F1 had just announced revenue rising 14% to $3.87 billion in 2025. Shanghai was selling out tickets and hospitality as China’s expanding middle class and Gen Z caught the F1 bug.

Yet, as Thomas wrote, brand sponsorship from China has “slowed to a trickle,” with Lenovo standing “almost alone” as a major Chinese global F1 partner and no team on the grid currently carrying a major Chinese name. Thomas was at the first Chinese Grand Prix in 2004 and was part of the commercial gold rush that followed. His framing of “full grandstands, growing fanbase, empty sponsor pipeline” stuck with me, and I wanted to understand the structural reasons behind it.

Then the race happened, and everything he described played out in real time. 230,000 people attended the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. They packed Metro Line 11 in Ferrari red caps and McLaren papaya tees, carrying handmade banners, some with Labubu dolls dressed as their favorite drivers dangling from their backpacks. Lewis Hamilton, who has raced in Shanghai for two decades, said he had never seen crowds that large.

Tickets across every price tier, from ¥330 ($45) practice day passes to ¥42,800 ($5,860) premium packages, sold out, and gate revenue hit ¥190 million ($26 million), up 35% from last year. After the weekend, Thomas posted again, writing that sales records were smashed across sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, merchandise, and concessions, with “literally not a free seat in the house.”

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Where the Money Went Instead

China generates close to $20 trillion in annual GDP, and around 130 Chinese firms sit in the Fortune Global 500. Nielsen reports Chinese F1 fandom grew 39% year over year. Over half of fans in the country discovered the sport in the past four years, and the audience skews young with a 50/50 gender split, a demographic profile that should have every sponsorship broker in the paddock on a plane to Shanghai.

F1 generated $3.65 billion in total revenue in 2024, and its global partner roster has nearly tripled since 2020, from 12 to 31. LVMH signed a 10-year global deal. American Express, LEGO, Sony, and Santander all entered.

More than 110 U.S. brands now sponsor F1, more than double the figure from 2017, and forty-five percent of McLaren’s 57 sponsors are American. The world’s second-largest economy contributes one name to that roster, and the reason has far more to do with how F1 sells than with whether Chinese companies are buying.

Put the 2004 and 2026 numbers side by side, and the reversal becomes clear: two decades ago, the arrival of F1 in Shanghai triggered a wave of Chinese commercial interest that Thomas described as a gold rush with “some pretty hefty deals” getting signed across the paddock. The fanbase today dwarfs what existed then, the sport’s global revenue has multiplied several times over, and Chinese corporate presence in F1 has moved in the opposite direction.

Chinese Brands Are Choosing Different Global Sports

The idea that Chinese companies haven’t figured out international sports sponsorship is easy to believe if you only look at the F1 grid.

Look wider, and the picture changes fast.

Five Chinese companies, Ant Group, Hisense, AliExpress, Vivo, and BYD, served as official global sponsors of UEFA Euro 2024, accounting for a third of the tournament’s entire sponsor pool. Alibaba holds a top-tier Olympic partnership running through 2028. Hisense has been embedded in FIFA and UEFA cycles for the better part of a decade and reported a 274% year-over-year sales surge during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. BYD replaced Volkswagen as UEFA’s official vehicle supplier and, in February 2026, Stella Li traveled to Manchester to personally finalize a multi-year deal making BYD the official automotive partner of Manchester City, following an earlier partnership with Inter Milan.

These are substantial commitments. The money exists. The appetite for global platforms exists. What Chinese companies have repeatedly and deliberately chosen are properties with massive single-event reach, concentrated activation windows, and straightforward ROI measurement. A month-long football tournament with 5 billion cumulative viewers and a fixed host market is a different proposition than a 24-race global calendar that requires year-round activation across 180+ broadcast territories. Thomas, who has watched this dynamic play out from Shanghai for more than two decades, identified the core tension on LinkedIn: F1’s commercial model remains “too Western-centric” while Chinese brands continue to prioritize domestic digital platforms, short-form media, and performance-driven spend.

Matthew Marsh, an F1 sponsorship broker covering Asia, told Autosport that Chinese company leadership approaches sponsorship like a commodity purchase, evaluating it the way they’d evaluate a shipment of steel, with a focus on measurable returns. The Apple model of building margin through brand association and long-term equity hasn’t taken hold in most Chinese boardrooms, and that framing clashes with how F1 partnerships actually function, which is largely through compounding brand presence over multiple seasons, hospitality relationships, and the soft power of being seen inside a global entertainment property week after week.

Jason Du, GM of global brand marketing at Join-Cheer Digital Group, which works directly with Chinese EV brands on overseas campaigns, told The Current that increased global marketing spend from Chinese companies is inevitable, given how saturated the domestic automotive market has become. The question was never whether the money would move outward. The question is which platforms capture it first, and F1 has been losing that race to football for years.

The Activation Gap in Shanghai

Look at the race week activation schedule in Shanghai during the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. F1 teams sent their drivers all over the city to front brand events. Max Verstappen appeared at an ExxonMobil event alongside actor Daniel Wu. Charles Leclerc visited a PUMA store. Fernando Alonso showed up at the BOSS flagship in Jing’an. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli hosted an IWC Schaffhausen event at Taikoo Hui. Jiemian News, one of China’s most prominent business outlets, covered the full circuit of appearances, and every brand the drivers were activating for was Western.

The commercial infrastructure of F1 in China is designed to serve sponsors who already exist, all of whom are based outside the country. Nobody from the teams is building relationships with Chinese corporate leadership on Chinese terms, using Chinese commercial logic, through Chinese digital platforms.

F1 poured enormous energy into its American expansion, and Liberty Media invested years of strategic effort into understanding how American brands think, what American audiences consume, and how to build a commercial bridge between the two. That pipeline brought in more than 110 U.S. sponsors. No one has attempted anything comparable in China, and the difference shows in every race week activation schedule Shanghai produces.

F1’s Growth Engine Doesn’t Reach This Market

Drive to Survive is the single most effective fan-acquisition tool F1 has ever deployed, and Netflix penetration in China is zero. The show simply doesn’t exist in the market. The F1 movie starring Brad Pitt pulled ¥328 million ($44.9 million) at the Chinese box office, a solid number that still accounts for only a fraction of its global $633 million haul. Tencent signed a multi-year broadcast renewal through 2027 to carry every race, and CCTV has expanded coverage, but the storytelling pipeline that converted casual viewers into obsessive fans across the U.S. and Europe hasn’t been replicated on Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, or any other Chinese platform.

Without a Chinese-language content ecosystem that builds emotional connection to drivers, teams, and paddock culture, fandom stays broad and shallow.

There is also no emotional anchor on the grid. Zhou Guanyu, the first full-time Chinese driver in F1, raced for Alfa Romeo and Sauber between 2022 and 2024, and when Frederic Vasseur signed him, he publicly dismissed the idea that the move was commercially motivated. He also later admitted to Autosport that tapping into the Chinese market had been “difficult” even with Zhou in the car. SenseTime and Yili both came on board during Zhou’s tenure, and both are gone now that he’s been reduced to a reserve role at the Cadillac F1 Team.

The Ground Is Moving Faster Than the Paddock

The most interesting commercial signal from the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix came entirely from outside the paddock. Taobao Instant Commerce, Alibaba’s on-demand delivery platform, became an official race partner through a sequence that F1’s commercial team should study. Last August, the company redesigned its delivery rider uniforms in orange and black, and Chinese internet users immediately spotted the resemblance to McLaren’s livery. The comparison went viral, the company leaned into the moment, and a partnership with the Chinese Grand Prix followed.

That deal was born of organic cultural momentum on Chinese social media, and it reveals how commercial energy actually moves in this market. Chinese consumers are ready to connect brands with the sport when the connection operates on their terms, through shareable identity, cultural resonance, and a logic that ties back to something measurable rather than abstract brand equity.

China Daily reported on a broader consumer shift that accelerated during COVID, away from conspicuous luxury consumption and toward health, lifestyle, and premium experiences. Their reporter described fans on Metro Line 11 wearing full team kits, carrying homemade signs, treating the race weekend as a destination event in a way that looks more like what F1 has cultivated in Austin and Miami than the corporate-hospitality model of a decade ago. F1 as a live experience fits that shift, and the commercial opportunity attached to it remains almost entirely untapped.

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BYD Is Coming

Stella Li attended the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last December and was in the Shanghai paddock last week. In 2025, she became the first woman and first representative of a Chinese brand to be named World Car Person of the Year. She is the person most directly responsible for BYD’s international expansion, and she is spending time in F1 paddocks.

BYD is already the largest electric vehicle seller in Europe by unit volume, operates in more than 110 countries, and has built a production facility in Hungary. Its sports sponsorship portfolio now spans UEFA Euro 2024, Manchester City, and Inter Milan. Huu-Hoi Tran, managing director and global VP at Capgemini Invent China, told The Current that Chinese EV brands like BYD have the superior product but need to integrate themselves into consumer consciousness in new regions, and Prof. Holger Görg of the Kiel Centre for Globalization told the South China Morning Post that sports sponsorship helps Chinese brands appear “less threatening” in European markets where they face persistent perception barriers around quality and market competition.

So far, BYD has deployed that strategy through football. Motorsport.com reported this month that the company is now actively assessing F1 entry options, from team acquisition to a 12th entry application to a title sponsorship modeled on what Alfa Romeo did with Sauber for six seasons. The Geely Group, which controls Lotus, Volvo, and Polestar, attempted to acquire a team two years ago and was priced out by the surge in F1 valuations, though a title sponsorship remains on their table.

What makes BYD’s entry feel inevitable rather than speculative is the convergence of several forces. The 2026 regulations shift F1 toward a 50/50 split between electric and combustion power, making the sport far more relevant to an EV manufacturer’s narrative.

The Chinese consumer base is already engaged. BYD has entered the growth phase where purely domestic brand investment hits diminishing returns. And behind BYD sit 10 to 20 more Chinese EV brands preparing to compete internationally, all of which will eventually need to differentiate against each other on something other than price and will run out of UEFA and FIFA inventory before they get there.

Revolut’s deal with Audi showed what a modern F1 partnership looks like when the partner embeds itself into the team’s operational infrastructure rather than buying logo space, and Toyota’s embedded approach with Haas offers another template built on lower risk, high learning, and room to scale. BYD is sophisticated enough to study both models and build something that aligns with Chinese commercial priorities rather than imitating a Western playbook designed for companies with a different relationship to brand equity.

The Call

F1 is running a global commercial operation that has cracked the U.S., consolidated Europe, and aggressively expanded into the Middle East, but it has not built the muscle to compete in China. The partnership model assumes sponsors already think in terms of long-term brand equity, that they want global category exclusivity across 180+ broadcast territories, and that they’re comfortable spending $30 to $70 million per year for a position on a car they can activate at 24 race weekends across five continents.

That model works for LVMH, HP, and Oracle, but it does not work for Chinese companies that operate primarily in domestic markets, prioritize measurable return on investment, and view marketing as performance-driven spend. Thomas laid out what the alternative looks like on LinkedIn: China-first commercial strategies, modular sponsorship models, localized digital and social solutions, and deeper integration with Chinese tech and commerce platforms. That list should be pinned to the wall of every team’s commercial office. Teams need on-the-ground leads in Shanghai and Shenzhen year-round, not executives who fly in for race week and leave, and F1 itself needs content creation pipelines in Mandarin that do what Drive to Survive did in English.

BYD will enter F1. When it does, it will open the door for a wave of Chinese EV brands behind it, just as Liberty Media’s American expansion turned a trickle of U.S. sponsors into a flood. The question is whether F1 will be ready to receive them with something more than the same pitch deck it uses in London and New York, or whether 230,000 fans will keep filling the grandstands while the commercial model stays a decade behind the audience it already has.

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This is the kind of analysis we publish every week at Business of Speed, with a point of view on where the money is actually moving in motorsport. If you're not subscribed yet, you should be. We have a limited number of sponsorship slots available for the newsletter and podcast. Reach out at ciao@bizofspeed.com, and if you're a brand or rights holder looking at motorsport and want help making the investment work harder, that's the other side of what we do.

The plan is to bring you more around what’s happening in IndyCar this season, so stick around.

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IndyCar just raced between a football stadium and a baseball stadium in Arlington, Texas. Sold-out grandstands. Up to $100 million in projected economic impact. Drivers who’ve raced all over the world say it felt like a completely different series.

The Java House Grand Prix of Arlington, held March 15, ran a 2.73-mile, 14-turn street circuit threading between AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field. Longest street course in IndyCar history. Kyle Kirkwood took the win.

The real story, however, is what the track was built on. Parking lots. Service roads. The kind of infrastructure that exists for one reason: moving 100,000 people in and out of a building on a Sunday afternoon. Penske looked at that and saw a racetrack.

Let’s talk about the money. Penske Entertainment, the Dallas Cowboys, the Texas Rangers, and the City of Arlington split the $50 million build cost four ways. For context, building a permanent racing circuit from scratch runs anywhere from $250 million to over $1 billion. Arlington’s math looks very different.

Mark Miles, Penske Entertainment CEO, put it plainly: the existing pavement, roads, and parking lots “require relatively little expenditures to get into racing fitness.”

The infrastructure was already there. It just needed a different purpose for one weekend.

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Why a Stadium District Changes Everything

Street racing has always carried logistical baggage. You shut down a city center. Reroute traffic. Negotiate with local businesses losing foot traffic. Relocate utility access. It’s expensive, politically messy, and the goodwill runs out fast.

Nashville learned this the hard way. The Music City Grand Prix ran downtown across the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge starting in 2021. Then construction began on the new Titans stadium, displacing the circuit. The race hasn’t returned.

Arlington sidesteps all of it. The entertainment district exists specifically to absorb massive crowds. Wide roads. Modern pavement. Hotels, restaurants, and convention infrastructure are already operating at scale. Sixteen million visitors come through that district annually. Doug Boles, IndyCar’s president, put it simply: “You are in and amongst the community, but you have the benefit of these massive parking lots.”

Scott Dixon, six-time champion, said after the race: “I didn’t think I was turning up to an IndyCar event. I thought it was maybe an F1 event.” Then he added something that should probably hang on a wall somewhere at Penske Entertainment headquarters: “I think this is the new standard. This is what IndyCar needs to stick to.”

Santino Ferrucci called it IndyCar’s “first Formula 1-style street course.”

The closest comparison in American motorsport is the Miami Grand Prix, which races around Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Dolphins. Stephen Ross built that model from scratch, turning a stadium parking lot into a temporary circuit surrounded by a multi-day festival. The result: $449 million in economic impact and a race weekend that sells out months in advance. Arlington took that same stadium-as-backdrop concept, applied it to an entertainment district that already had two venues instead of one, and executed it for a fraction of the cost. Where Miami spent years and hundreds of millions building its footprint, IndyCar walked into an infrastructure package that was already assembled.

Motorsport’s push into American culture has largely been driven by spending into new markets. IndyCar is finding a different entry point. Same instinct, leaner execution.

Fox’s Role

In July 2025, Fox Corporation acquired a one-third interest in Penske Entertainment for roughly $125 to $135 million. Bundled with a multi-year extension of IndyCar’s media rights.

Think about what that means for venue selection. A broadcast partner wants compelling television. Fine. An ownership partner wants compelling television in top-10 media markets, with iconic visual backdrops that enhance the value of their investment. Different conversation entirely.

And this goes beyond corporate strategy. Fox CEO Eric Shanks is an Indiana native who used to go to the Speedway as a teenager and tell people Rick Mears was his uncle to try to impress girls. As Will Buxton put it on the Business of Speed podcast: “What better platform could you have than the boss of the network being this huge fan who just wants to do it right and wants to tell the story and promote it and make it as big as he thinks it should be and should always have been.”

Fox ran IndyCar commercials during the Super Bowl. Think about what those slots cost. Eight figures, easy, for airtime they could have sold to advertisers. That tells you something about conviction.

DFW is the fourth-largest metro in America. AT&T Stadium is one of the most recognizable buildings in professional sports. Fox didn’t need much convincing.

The early returns are worth noting. The 2025 Indianapolis 500, Fox’s first as broadcaster, averaged 7.01 million viewers. A 41% increase. A 17-year high. The full 2025 season averaged 1.36 million viewers per race, up 27% over 2024. Buxton offered a stat that doesn’t get enough attention: in 2025, IndyCar and Formula 1 both averaged 1.3 million viewers in the United States. The same number.

Fox is also reviving the SPEED brand as a cross-series motorsport media platform, pulling NASCAR, F1, and IndyCar content under one roof. Own a piece of the series. Broadcast the races. Build the media ecosystem around them. Stadium-district races in major markets feed every layer of that stack.

The Audience Was Already There

The series has a well-documented structural problem. Eighty-seven percent of its television audience disappears after the Indianapolis 500. 87%. The series has struggled for years to build sustained fandom in individual markets.

Marshall Pruett, who’s covered IndyCar longer than most people have watched it, framed the challenge on Business of Speed: “IndyCar’s greatest problem is not the quality of the drivers, racing, none of that. The product’s phenomenal. Not enough human beings know that it exists.”

Tony Kanaan said nearly the same thing from the team operations side: “Fox bought into the series. I think we need to get known. The series is great, the cars are great. It will not matter if people don’t know who we are.”

NFL stadiums offer a shortcut to that awareness problem. And a pretty elegant one.

The Cowboys’ marketing machine, their sponsor network, their fans. These are assets IndyCar could never build on its own in a market like Dallas-Fort Worth. Jerry Jones showed up in hospitality. Pudge Rodriguez and DeMarcus Ware gave the start command. That kind of crossover doesn’t happen organically. It gets engineered through partnership.

Pruett sees this as the real unlock for IndyCar’s growth: getting big partners with big marketing machines to tell the story for you. “What’s more important,” he asked, “IndyCar adding a lot more money to its bottom line or figuring out ways to use big companies with big marketing machines to say, hey, you probably know F1, you probably know NASCAR. Let us tell you about this American tradition.” The Cowboys and Rangers are exactly that kind of megaphone.

Arlington’s entertainment district draws from a metro of 8 million people. Roughly 40% of race weekend visitors came from outside Texas. IndyCar didn’t build that audience. The Cowboys and Rangers had already built it. IndyCar just showed up with cars.

Conor Daly put his finger on what Arlington delivered that most IndyCar weekends still lack: “We just got to figure out a way to get more of the, ‘Hey, whoa, what’s happening there? We got to go there.’ That factor. Right now, it’s really cool to go to an F1 race. We just need to have a little bit more of that as well.”

Arlington had it. The question is whether it can travel.

And for brands looking at the series, the sponsorship entry point starts around $500K. The venue economics are built on splitting costs with partners who already own the real estate. When you’re trying to attract commercial partners and grow the grid, that accessibility matters.

Denver, D.C., and What Comes Next

Arlington looks like a proof of concept. Not the endgame.

Promoters in Denver have proposed a 1.8-mile street circuit around Empower Field at Mile High, home of the Broncos. They’re targeting 2027 and seeking a four-year commitment from the city. Same model: NFL entertainment district, existing infrastructure, major media market.

Washington, D.C., follows a different version of the same logic. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix, scheduled for August 23, 2026, will run a 1.66-mile circuit near the National Mall. Pennsylvania Avenue. The Washington Monument. The Capitol. Free to the public, with over a million spectators expected. No NFL stadium, but the principle is the same: race in front of something iconic. Make the broadcast impossible to ignore.

IndyCar also just restructured its relationship with Honda and Chevrolet, offering transferable equity-like charter stakes through 2030. The manufacturer deal, the Fox ownership stake, and the stadium venue strategy. All load-bearing walls in the same structure that Penske is building.

The Template

Roger Penske bought IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2020. Since then, the strategic direction has been consistent: raise the floor on every dimension of the product. Broadcast quality. Venue quality. Partnership quality.

For years, the results lagged behind the ambition. Pruett was blunt about it: “Looking for moves, looking for big things to happen. They’re not happening. 2024, hey, okay. We’re now many years into owning IndyCar. Big things? Nothing happened in there as well.” But 2025 changed the trajectory. The Fox deal landed. Arlington got announced. D.C. materialized. New cars and a new engine formula began to take shape. The momentum everyone hoped for in 2020 finally arrived, just five years late.

“We don’t have this kind of commitment any place that we go as we do here,” Penske said in Arlington. “The investment by the partners along with IndyCar is amazing.”

Stadium entertainment districts give him something he can replicate. A venue template. Existing infrastructure, shared costs, built-in audiences, broadcast-ready backdrops. Every NFL city in America has one. Not everyone will get to race in IndyCar. But the ones in the right media markets, with the right ownership groups willing to invest, just got a glimpse of what’s possible.

Buxton, who left F1 broadcasting to join Fox’s IndyCar coverage, sees this as an inflection point: “I see so many parallels between what Fox wanted to do with IndyCar and what Liberty did with Formula One.” He pointed out that when he was broadcasting F1 in the States on Speed Channel and NBC in the early 2010s, the series averaged around 400,000 viewers. Liberty took over in 2017, and it still took 3 to 4 years before F1 broke the million mark. IndyCar is already averaging 1.36 million in year one with Fox.

Zak Brown was at the race. His review: “Fantastic event. Drivers loved it, sponsors loved it, and it was packed.”

Pato O’Ward called it the best street course and event in IndyCar. Period.

Penske found his template. Now the question is: how many times can he stamp it?

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In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger at the broken places.” The story of Torger Christian Wolff, known universally as Toto, does not begin with privilege, with a famous father, or with a clear-cut path to the top. It begins in Vienna, Austria, in 1972, with a family coming apart at the seams, and a little boy learning about financial insecurity and profound loss.

Many people who grew up in situations of scarcity say that those memories never leave them. So if we want to understand why Toto Wolff is the way he is (meticulous, relentless, incapable of accepting mediocrity), we have to start there, in that city, under those circumstances.

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The French School

Vienna wears its wealth openly with grand boulevards, the opera house, and the fancy boutiques. Growing up there, broke but surrounded by it, is an education in and of itself.

Wolff was born to a Polish mother and a Romanian father. His mother was a physician. His father was an entrepreneur who was diagnosed with brain cancer when Toto was a young child. His parents separated. His father deteriorated slowly, across a decade, until he died when Toto was just fifteen. That’s ten years of what Wolff has described as the “gradual dissolution of security”, the kind a kid depends on so that they can focus on just being a kid.

In his own words: “He was terminally ill for ten years, so basically all throughout my childhood. And (our) financial hardship was related to this.”

Despite the circumstances, his mother did something remarkable. She kept him enrolled at the Lycée Français de Vienne, one of Vienna’s most prestigious private schools. That single decision gave Wolff his multilingual foundation and placed him inside a social network he could observe but not quite inhabit. He has recounted the story of him and his sister being pulled out of class in front of all their peers and sent home because their school fees hadn’t been paid. He was only fourteen years old. The memory of the humiliation he felt that day has never faded.

“I went to school in an affluent environment without being a part of it,” he told The Times. He would later reflect that the result was a specific type of hunger: not envy, exactly, but a refusal to accept the distance between what he could see in front of him and what he didn’t have.

He describes his school performance as “getting by with the smallest possible margin”. He passed his Matura (the Austrian school-graduating examination) at eighteen, which, given what was happening at home, he has called genuinely surprising.

He received two invaluable gifts from this school. The French he learned would prove useful for the rest of his life. And at seventeen, a friend invited him to watch a race at the Nürburgring in Germany. Something switched on inside him that day, and it never switched back off.

The Self-Aware Racer

What happened next is important to his story because of what it teaches us about Wolff’s brand of self-awareness.

He started racing and was quite serious about it. He competed in Austrian and German Formula Ford from 1992 to 1994. He won his category at the legendary Nürburgring 24 Hours in 1994. He loved every minute of it, but by the mid-nineties, he began to run out of money to fund his racing and, more importantly, to assess his ability. He was good. He was not elite.

This is actually a harder conclusion to reach than it may seem. People who get as far as Formula Ford are not hobbyists. They are competitive, committed, and have invested enormous time and self-belief in the idea that they belong in racing. Admitting, at 25, that your path runs through the paddock but not through the cockpit requires an immense amount of intellectual honesty.

Wolff pulled back from full-time racing. He enrolled at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, then dropped out. He hated the curriculum and wanted urgently to be dealing with real-world capital. He picked up an internship at an investment bank in Poland. “I went into an internship in a bank in Warsaw (my mother’s Polish), and I remember it was so bad.”

He stayed there long enough to absorb what he needed.

He then took a sales management role at Koloman Handler, an Austrian metal parts manufacturer founded in 1900 that became the largest producer of ring binder mechanisms in Europe, processing more than 5,000 tons of wire and steel annually. Not glamorous. But something important happened inside that company.

As Wolff has put it: “In 1996, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Koloman had taught me how to calculate margins as a percentage of the selling price, and within a year, I started analyzing how much the owner was going to make. I saw that I could earn more as a shareholder in the first year than as an employee.”

That was the moment. Not a dramatic epiphany, just a young man doing the math and deciding he was on the wrong side of the numbers. He began traveling to the United States, where the internet was beginning to take visible shape: Netscape, America Online, and mobile portals offering free SMS access. He came back to Vienna with one clear thesis: Everything he’d seen would exist in Austria too, and someone was going to profit from being early. He wanted to be that someone.

He scraped together enough money to fund consultancy stakes in early-stage technology companies. And then, in 1998, he made his first real move. He co-founded Marchfifteen.

The Internet, Cold Calls, and the First Real Money

The late 1990s were the kind of moment in European tech that will not be repeated. It was an era of genuine naivety where companies with no revenue could be acquired for extraordinary sums if someone believed hard enough in the underlying trend.

Wolff started cold-calling tech founders. He had almost no cash to offer. So the pitch was something else entirely: I will find you investors, help you structure the business, and get you listed. In exchange, all I want is equity.

Those early cold calls produced two landmark exits, both in the same year. The first was UCP, an Austrian text message software provider that Marchfifteen had backed in the early days of mobile communications. In 2006, UCP was acquired by Amdocs, a global technology company specializing in software for communications and media companies, for $275 million. The second exit that same year was Sysis, a mobile communications software company that Marchfifteen had taken public on the stock exchange in 2000, and which was subsequently sold to VeriSign. Between the two transactions, Wolff is reported to have netted approximately $30 million. For a man who had started with almost nothing, that number changed everything.

By 2004, he had founded a second firm, Marchsixteen, and expanded the strategy to medium-sized industrial companies and listed equities. The portfolio was methodical, patient, and built around the same logic he would bring to every subsequent decision: find the thing that is structurally undervalued, get in early, and have the discipline to wait.

The Bridge

By 2006, Wolff had begun looking for a place where his investment framework and his old racing passion could intersect. He found it in HWA AG, a German company that was basically the engineering backbone of Mercedes-Benz’s motorsport ambitions. HWA developed Mercedes’ Formula 3 engines and ran the brand’s DTM program.

HWA AG looked, on the surface, like a conventional German engineering company. Its entire purpose and value, though, was tied to motorsport. Wolff bought a 49% stake.

The following year, he listed HWA on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. It was the same playbook: identify an underappreciated asset, take a substantial position, and create a liquidity event that realized the value others hadn’t seen. He divested his HWA stake in 2015. It had served its purpose.

The most important thing HWA gave him was visibility inside the Mercedes-Benz motorsport ecosystem. He had crossed from outside observer to insider, embedded in the architecture of how a major manufacturer approached racing. That proximity became the foundation for everything that followed.

In 2002, alongside F1 world champion Mika Häkkinen, Wolff co-founded a racing driver management company. Among the young drivers they backed were Finnish driver Valtteri Bottas, who would eventually race for him at the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, and Canadian Bruno Spengler, who would become DTM champion in 2012.

“In a way, I tried to give back to young drivers what I was missing: financing and advice.”

The young man who had been priced out of racing was now the man writing the checks for others trying to get in. Between that venture, HWA, and the Marchfifteen/Marchsixteen portfolio, a pattern was becoming clear: he was constructing a network aimed at one specific destination. Emphasis on the one.

Enter Williams

In 2009, the late Sir Frank Williams reached out to Toto directly because the Williams F1 team he founded in 1977, which had experienced so much glory in its heyday, had fallen on hard times. Wolff bought a 16.3% stake in Williams F1 and joined the board of directors as the only outside owner. By 2012, he was the team’s executive director. That same year, on a warm afternoon in Barcelona, Pastor Maldonado took the checkered flag for Williams’ first race win in nearly eight years.

It is also their last win as of the publication date.

Wolff arranged Williams’ IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2011, listing 27.39% of the company’s shares. The float valued the team at approximately $361.3 million. He was building the team's institutional infrastructure even as he managed it daily.

From across the paddock, the Mercedes factory team, which had returned to F1 in 2010 and was struggling to compete with the customer teams they were supplying, took notice.

What happened next remains one of the more quietly significant career moves in the sport’s modern history.

Mercedes asked Wolff to conduct an assessment of their F1 operation. They asked him to identify, from the outside, what was going wrong. He did. And then they asked him to come fix it. Wolff hesitated. He had a stake in Williams, so helping their engine supplier become a genuine competitor felt awkward, to say the least. Mercedes removed the hesitation, the only way that works with a man like him: they offered him equity.

The $58.5 Million Bet

In January 2013, Toto Wolff left Williams and joined Mercedes as executive director, team principal, and CEO. He acquired 30% of Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd (the holding entity for the F1 team), reportedly for around $58.5 million. Niki Lauda held another 10%. Daimler held 60%.

The 2014 season began, and Mercedes dominated in a way that nobody could have predicted. The new turbo-hybrid regulations suited the power unit Mercedes had been developing, and something about the Wolff-led team culture had fundamentally shifted the organization’s internal cohesion. Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg crossed the line first, again and again and again.

What followed became the most dominant era in Formula 1 history.

Eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships, from 2014 to 2021. Seven consecutive Drivers’ Championships. Records that had stood for decades, toppled, one by one. More than half of all races run during that period were won by a single team. They didn’t just overtake the previous benchmark (Ferrari’s six consecutive Constructors’ from 1999 to 2004 and five consecutive doubles with Michael Schumacher at the helm), they lapped it.

During this run, the ownership structure evolved. When INEOS, the British chemical conglomerate controlled by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, bought into the team in 2020, Wolff’s stake increased to an equal one-third alongside Mercedes-Benz and INEOS, each holding 33%.

The team, acquired by its parent company for roughly $140 million in 2010, was valued at $6 billion by 2025.

Let’s do the math on what that means for the man who bought his stake at $58.5 million. His third of the team is now worth approximately $2 billion. He has since sold 15% of his holding company (the vehicle through which he owns his Mercedes shares) to CrowdStrike founder George Kurtz for $300 million. That transaction, announced at the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix, valued the team at a record $6 billion, surpassing McLaren's $4.7 billion stake sale just weeks earlier. Wolff remains as CEO and team principal, with roughly 28% of the team still in his possession.

The Paddock and the Professor

His success at Mercedes has produced something unusual: a team boss who has become an object of academic study. In 2022, Harvard Business School published a case study titled Toto Wolff and the Mercedes Formula One Team, authored by Professor Anita Elberse, who had spent time inside the operation studying how it maintained its culture under sustained competitive pressure. Wolff now co-teaches the case to MBA students as an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.

The Harvard connection reflects something real about what Wolff built at Brackley. The Mercedes operation during the dominant era was an organizational machine that generated alignment between engineers, strategists, drivers, and management, with a consistency that most corporations, let alone racing teams, cannot sustain across a single season, much less eight consecutive ones.

Wolff has spoken about what this costs personally. He has been candid about mental health, about the toll of high-performance environments, about the way the childhood fear of instability can masquerade as professional motivation until you are honest enough with yourself to separate the two. He has said that what happened in his early life left permanent scars. “I still wake up having dreamt I am alone,” he told The Daily Mail in 2021. “It’s a dream I have had since I was a child.”

Trophies don’t resolve trauma.

Behind the Dynasty

Here’s the financial architecture of the house that Toto built:

The Mercedes Valuation. At a $6 billion team valuation, set by the Kurtz transaction in November 2025, Mercedes recorded the highest transaction-verified valuation in Formula 1 history. For context, INEOS paid approximately $266 million for its equal third in 2020. Five years later, the same-sized stake would cost more than $2 billion. The revenue tells the same story: Mercedes posted approximately $813 million in revenue in 2024, the highest of any team on the grid, with a pre-tax operating profit of approximately $205 million and a net profit after tax of approximately $154 million, the first Formula 1 team in history to record a nine-figure net profit. The team declared a total dividend of approximately $160 million for 2024, with each of its three equal shareholders receiving approximately $53 million.

Wolff’s personal compensation. In 2024, Wolff’s total earnings from his Mercedes position exceeded $64 million. His base salary as team principal was approximately $7.7 million (confirmed in the Companies House filing), down from approximately $10.2 million the prior year. The far larger number came from dividends: Mercedes distributed approximately $171 million to its three equal owners across two tranches in 2024, meaning Wolff’s dividend income alone was approximately $57 million. His salary, in other words, is almost a footnote. The real money flows from ownership, which has been the logic of his entire career.

The Kurtz sale. In November 2025, Wolff sold 15% of his holding company, representing 5% of the team outright, to CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz for approximately $300 million. The logic was straightforward: Kurtz is a tech entrepreneur and an accomplished endurance racer in his own right. He has class victories at Le Mans, Spa, Sebring, and Road Atlanta. He’s a two-time Asian Le Mans LMP2 champion. And in January 2026, he finally claimed the one race that had eluded him: the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

Given how much of modern F1 is tied to data infrastructure and the American market, Wolff was explicit that Kurtz was chosen for what he brings, not merely what he paid.

Net worth. As of March 2026, Forbes’ real-time billionaires tracker ranks him 1,548th with a net worth of $2.7 billion. The largest single component is his Mercedes stake: before the Kurtz transaction, his 33% holding at the $6 billion valuation was worth approximately $1.98 billion; after selling 15% of his holding company to Kurtz, his remaining 28.33% stake is worth approximately $1.7 billion.

His portfolio extends beyond Mercedes. He holds a 0.95% stake in Aston Martin Lagonda, the British sports car manufacturer, acquired in April 2020 and subsequently diluted from an initial 4.95% position following a rights issue. He also has his ongoing Marchfifteen and Marchsixteen holdings, among other strategic positions. His annual compensation from Mercedes alone (salary plus performance bonuses) is confirmed at between $20 million and $26 million.

One More Rival. One More Room.

By March 2026, when the new Formula 1 season opened in Melbourne, we got a first look at where the Mercedes camp's attention might be pointed next.

The target: a 24% stake in Alpine F1, currently held by Otro Capital, an American private equity firm whose celebrity investors include golfer Rory McIlroy, actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney (through their Maximum Effort Investments vehicle, the same partnership behind Wrexham AFC), NFL stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, and Real Madrid star Trent Alexander-Arnold…among many others.

Otro paid approximately $233 million for the stake in 2023, and Alpine’s value has more than doubled since then, reaching approximately $3 billion. The 24% slice is now worth in the region of $750 million. More than three times what Otro originally paid.

Alpine’s polarizing executive advisor, Flavio Briatore, acknowledged that any minority shareholder would effectively be a “passenger” in Alpine’s decision-making. “Normally one company with 75% decides, and the 25% is a passenger, and this is the reality.”

So what could the strategy be behind acquiring a minority stake? The first conclusion is purely financial: given the upward trend in Formula 1 team valuations, a minority stake in Alpine is simply a strong investment. The second is strategic: Mercedes already supplies Alpine’s power units and gearboxes through at least 2030, and having equity in a customer team secures that relationship. The third is operational: with two teams running closely related mechanical packages, Mercedes gains access to a significantly larger volume of comparative development data. In theory, a closer relationship with Alpine could also create a pathway to evaluate young Mercedes drivers under real-racing conditions, something it currently lacks a direct mechanism for.

The complication, and the part of the story that has sent the paddock into a frenzy, is who else wants the same slice.

Christian Horner.

A man who publicly said at a Dublin event in January that he has “unfinished business” in Formula 1 and that he will only return as a partner, not a hired hand. Briatore confirmed there are “three or four potential buyers” for the Otro stake, with Horner among the interested parties.

Briatore was explicit on Friday at the Chinese Grand Prix: “I know there is a negotiation from Mercedes, not with Toto, with Mercedes, and we see.” Alpine has declined to comment on specific bidders. A Mercedes spokesperson said only: “Mercedes is a key strategic partner of Alpine, and we are being kept apprised of the latest developments.”

If Mercedes’ bid succeeds, Horner’s route back into F1 via Alpine is likely closed. Their on-track rivalry (the 2021 championship fight, the radio wars, the Abu Dhabi denouement) was the defining sporting conflict of the hybrid era.

Their relationship has apparently softened. Horner revealed on the recent season of Drive to Survive that Wolff sent him a text after his Red Bull sacking. But warm texts and competing for the same equity stake are completely different ball games.

The pattern is unmistakable. Williams in 2009. Mercedes in 2013. And now, thirteen years into the most dominant run in the sport’s history, Wolff and the institution he built are looking at the chessboard and figuring out which square to occupy next. The boy from Vienna has never been content to simply hold station. He is always planning his next move.

What Trauma Builds

There is a theory of performance, one you hear in elite sport and high-stakes finance and from highly successful individuals across every walk of life, that motivation doesn’t always come from ambition, but rather from a refusal to return to a state of powerlessness previously experienced.

Wolff has been direct about the connection between his childhood and his drive. “I think overcoming drama, trauma, and humiliation creates more motivation to prove that you’re worthy,” he told The High Performance Podcast. “I see that with many successful people. There was some kind of event, or situations that scarred them and caused pain.” The school fees. The tram ride home with his sister, trying to explain why they had been sent away. “It was quite a humiliating experience,” he said. “I wanted to make a better life for myself and did what I could to succeed.”

What he has been less public about, until recently, is that he has struggled significantly with his mental health throughout his adult life, and that he has sought help. He has been seeing a psychiatrist since 2004 and estimates he has accumulated more than 500 hours of therapy. “I have suffered mentally, and I still do,” he told the Sunday Times. “Getting help is a way of overcoming my problems, and it has helped me to access untapped potential.”

For a man who built an empire on control and precision, it’s a disarmingly candid admission. And it reframes the closing chapters of his story considerably: the championships, the billions, the Harvard fellowship. None of it resolved what lies beneath. It just gave him better tools to deal with it.

From Vienna to Harvard, by way of Brackley. For the boy sitting in that classroom in 1987, it would have seemed an unimaginable life.

But it turned out to be his.

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Promoter fees, the payments circuits and governments make to Liberty Media for the right to host a Grand Prix, generated $824 million in 2025. That was 27% of F1’s primary revenue. The money arrives on contract, years in advance, with built-in escalators. It is the financial equivalent of a fixed-income instrument inside a growth business. Stable. Predictable. Boring in the best way.

Until a missile hits the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the Manama district, the neighborhood where F1 teams stay during race week, wounding two US Department of Defense employees.

F1 is expected to formally cancel the Bahrain Grand Prix (April 12) and the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix (April 19) this weekend. The races will not be rescheduled. They will not be replaced. The calendar shrinks from 24 to 22 races. And according to a Guggenheim Partners analyst note published Friday, the cancellations will cost Formula 1 approximately $190 to $200 million in revenue and $80 million in EBITDA.

That is not an existential number. F1 generated $3.87 billion in total revenue last year with $632 million in operating income. The sport can absorb the loss. But the loss reveals something about F1’s financial architecture that the growth narrative tends to obscure: the single most lucrative region on the calendar is also the most geopolitically fragile.

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The Promoter Fee Machine

When Liberty Media acquired Formula 1 from CVC Capital Partners in 2017, promoter fees amounted to $503 million, roughly 34% of primary revenue. Eight years later, that line item has grown to $824 million. The growth has come from two forces: new races in premium markets (Miami, Las Vegas, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) and annual escalation clauses embedded in most hosting contracts. Standard escalators run at approximately 5% per year, meaning a circuit that signed a $30 million deal in 2020 is paying close to $38 million today without any renegotiation.

The revenue breakdown matters here. F1’s 2025 financials showed four primary streams: media rights at 31%, race promotion at 27%, sponsorship at 22%, and everything else (hospitality, licensing, F1 TV) at 20%. No single stream dominates, and that diversification is a genuine strength. But within the promoter fee category, the concentration is extreme.

Five races in the Middle East and Caucasus sit on the 2026 calendar: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Guggenheim estimates that Bahrain and Saudi Arabia alone account for roughly $115 million in combined hosting fees. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are believed to pay approximately $55 million each. Bahrain pays an estimated $45 million. Abu Dhabi sits at around $42 million. Azerbaijan may actually top them all at roughly $57 million. Add it up, and this region represents well over $250 million in annual promoter fees. That is roughly a third of the entire category, coming from a part of the world where bombs are dropping all around.

For comparison, Silverstone pays approximately $26 million. Monza is in the $20-$30 million range. European circuits operate against their own balance sheets. Gulf states operate against their treasuries. That distinction is what made Liberty’s calendar expansion so profitable. It is also what makes this moment so uncomfortable.

What’s Happening?

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The numbers

Fintech Branding Studio’s analysis of the 2026 grid identified 34 financial companies as sponsors. In 2025, that figure sat around 20. A 70% jump in a single season.

The breakdown by subsector:

• Crypto accounts for 26% of financial sponsors (9 companies)

• Institutional finance holds 24% (8 companies)

• Trading and investing platforms are also at 20% (7 companies)

• Payments makes up 15% (5 companies)

• Digital banking, automotive finance, and e-commerce finance round out the remaining 15%

Traditional finance now represents 74% of the financial sponsor pool. Two years ago, crypto dominated the conversation around financial services in F1. That has flipped.

Who is where?

The 2026 ecosystem has some new contenders in the ring, including Revolut, BingX, Nubank, eToro, BlockDAG, IC, XMTrading, Barclays, BNY, Nuveen, Nexo, Aleph, Public, AvaTrade, and Carlyle.

McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team

• Mastercard

• FxPro

• Airwallex

• OKX

Scuderia Ferrari HP F1 Team

• UniCredit

• ZCG

• BingX

Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula 1 Team

• VISA

• Carlyle

• ROKT

• Avatrade

• Gate.io

Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team

• Nasdaq

• Nubank

• UBS

Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team

• Coinbase

• Public

• Pepperstone

• CoinPayments

BWT Alpine F1 Team

• eToro

• ApeCoin

• BlockDAG

• Mobilize Financial Services

TGR Haas F1 Team

• IC

Visa Cash App Racing Bulls F1 Team

• Visa

• Cash App

• XMTrading

Atlassian Williams F1 Team

• Nuveen

• Barclays

• BNY

• Kraken

Audi Revolut F1 Team

• Libertex

• Nexo

• Revolut

• Aleph

Only Cadillac, as of this writing, is missing a major finance or crypto partner.

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Why F1, Why Now?

Three dynamics explain the surge.

The audience. Formula 1 reaches over 800 million viewers annually, with the fastest growth in the 18-to-34 demographic. For financial services companies fighting to acquire younger customers, the cost-per-qualified-impression math works.

Regulatory arbitrage. Financial services advertising restrictions vary by country. F1’s global broadcast model lets a brand appear in 25+ markets through a single sponsorship. For crypto companies facing patchwork regulation, this solves a distribution problem that no other marketing channel can.

Competitive pressure. When Visa sponsors a team, every payment network recalculates its marketing allocation. When Revolut secures a title sponsorship, every neobank takes notice. The category has reached a tipping point where absence from F1 feels like a strategic gap.

But what does the mix say?

Crypto companies still represent a quarter of financial sponsors, but they are now outnumbered by banks, payment networks, and asset managers. That maturation is the story. Crypto brands were early because they had large marketing budgets and fewer traditional channels. That first-mover advantage brought the rest of the industry in behind them.

The grid now looks more like a cross-section of the global financial system than a crypto conference. The diversity of the financial sponsor base is the strongest signal that this category has moved from speculative to structural.

How F1 stacks up against the NFL, and the Premier League

Thirty-four financial sponsors across 10 teams is a striking concentration. But financial services companies are flooding into every major sport right now. How they appear on each platform tells you what each platform actually delivers.

The NFL

Financial services is the league’s second-largest sponsorship category, generating roughly $250 million in team-level revenue for the 2024 season.

Total NFL club sponsorship hit $2.49 billion that year, up 6%, with financial services growing at 10%.

Visa has a seven-year deal with the Buffalo Bills. Intuit renewed as the league’s official financial and accounting software sponsor through 2026.

Bank of America is embedded with the Dallas Cowboys.

Truist is the official retail bank of the Miami Dolphins.

The Chargers and Rams play in SoFi Stadium.

The average NFL team now carries 113 sponsorship deals.

The profile skews legacy. Banks. Insurance companies. Accounting software. The fintech insurgents that define the F1 grid are largely absent. The NFL’s audience is massive and overwhelmingly domestic. A neobank chasing global customer acquisition gets scale in one market. F1 gives them 25.

Crypto sponsors have been cautious about the NFL since the FTX collapse, and the league has been cautious right back.

The Premier League

The most interesting sponsorship story in global sport right now is happening in English football. Starting in the 2026-27 season, betting companies will be banned from front-of-shirt positions. Eleven clubs currently carry betting sponsors on their chests. That is 11 shirt fronts about to hit the open market simultaneously.

Financial services already have a presence. Liverpool’s Standard Chartered deal runs through 2027 at approximately £40 million per year. Axi sponsors Manchester City with access to the broader City Football Group ecosystem. Trade Nation holds a sleeve deal with Aston Villa. Crypto platforms have invested over £400 million in Premier League partnerships between 2021 and 2026, with seven clubs maintaining digital asset deals.

The structural difference from F1 is the inventory. A club has one shirt front, one sleeve, and a handful of high-visibility positions. An F1 team can layer multiple financial sponsors across a car, race suits, garage branding, and digital assets without conflict. McLaren can carry both Mastercard and Airwallex. A Premier League club cannot stack two competing financial brands on the same shirt.

F1 can absorb more financial sponsors per team. The Premier League’s fintech wave will be constrained by the number of available slots. Demand is there. Space is not.

Each platform offers something different to a financial services brand:

• F1 delivers global reach, regulatory flexibility, and the ability to stack multiple financial sponsors per team. Broadest subsector mix of any sport.

• The NFL delivers a domestic scale that nothing else can match. Attracts established financial institutions. Fintech disruptors have mostly stayed away.

• The Premier League is about to open up a historic number of shirt slots as betting sponsors exit. Limited inventory will mean premium pricing and fierce competition.

F1 sits at the intersection of global audience, young demographics, regulatory flexibility, and ample inventory. No other sport combines all four.

The question going forward

At 34 financial sponsors and counting, the grid is approaching category saturation. The next phase will sort the brands that extract measurable commercial value from those that discover a logo at 200 mph, which does not automatically translate into customer acquisition.

The same ROI logic is reshaping media rights deals across motorsport applies here.

Teams that can prove returns for their financial partners will command premium rates. The rest will watch those sponsors rotate out after two or three seasons. The boom is real. Whether it lasts depends on results that have nothing to do with what happens on track.

Explore the full analysis from Fintech Branding Studio here, including additional stats and visuals on every financial sponsor across the grid.

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

The Omologato Story

At the 2022 24 Hours of Le Mans, Shami Kalra heard someone calling his name from across the grid.

He turned to find Richard Mille walking toward him. Mille, whose watches retail in the six- and seven-figure range. Whose brand sponsors McLaren and Ferrari. Whose name gets dropped in rap songs as shorthand for extreme wealth.

Kalra’s most expensive watch sells for just over $1,000.

“I went, no way, you don’t know who I am,” Kalra recalled. His wife was standing next to him. “He said, ‘Shami, everyone knows who you are.’”

They spoke for fifteen minutes about racing. Mille told him to keep going, that his passion was obvious, that he saw it everywhere. For Kalra, the encounter validated something he’d been building for nearly a decade: a watch brand called Omologato that occupies a part of the market most luxury houses refuse to acknowledge exists.

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A shared language

The bond between watchmaking and racing dates back to before Formula 1.

In 1916, Heuer introduced the Mikrograph, the first stopwatch accurate to 1/100th of a second. It became the official timer of the Olympic Games throughout the 1920s, but its real home was the racetrack, where fractions of a second determined winners.

By the 1960s, the relationship had become cultural. Jack Heuer, the company’s chairman and a devoted racing fan, developed the Carrera (named after the Carrera Panamericana, a notoriously deadly Mexican road race) and the Monaco (which Steve McQueen wore in the 1971 film Le Mans). In 1969, Heuer released the Caliber 11, the first automatic chronograph movement. These weren’t accessories. They were instruments developed alongside the sport.

Rolex followed a parallel path. The Cosmograph Daytona, named after Daytona International Speedway and introduced in 1963, became one of the most collected watches in history. Paul Newman’s personal Daytona sold at auction for $17.8 million in 2017.

The connection runs deeper than sponsorship contracts. Watchmaking and racing are both built on precision engineering, marginal gains, and the obsessive measurement of time. They speak the same language.

The Six-Figure Grid

That language now comes at a premium.

TAG Heuer returned as Formula 1’s official timekeeper in 2025 as part of an LVMH deal reportedly worth $150 million annually. Richard Mille sponsors both Ferrari and McLaren. IWC partners with Mercedes. Breitling joined Aston Martin for 2026. Tudor, Rolex’s sibling brand, backs Racing Bulls.

Nearly every team on the grid carries a watch partner, and the cheapest TAG Heuer F1 model starts around $1,700. Richard Mille’s prices begin in the six figures. The watch-racing relationship has scaled with F1’s commercial growth, but the fans who fill grandstands and wake up at odd hours to watch qualifying have been largely priced out of the category.

Shami Kalra knows this because he lived it.

£9.61

In 1999 (or 2000, he can’t remember), Kalra saved $500 over three months to take his son to the British Grand Prix. When they arrived at Silverstone, reality set in. Twenty dollars for a hamburger. VIP ropes separating fans from tented areas displaying $7,000 watches. A sport built by mechanics and dreamers had become a velvet-rope operation.

Kalra had been making watches since 1993, spending 25 years in corporate design building timepieces for automotive brands and racing teams as a supplier. The work was steady and anonymous. By 2015, he was burned out and disillusioned, with £9.61 in his bank account.

One Friday night, after an argument with his wife, he sat in his study and opened Photoshop. He started laying motorsport liveries on watch faces. Papaya orange. British Racing Green. Grid patterns pulled from the iconography he’d loved since his father took him to Donington Park at age 15 to watch V8 GT racing.

He thought: I’d buy that.

He registered a domain, built a site on Shopify’s 30-day free trial, and called his Japanese supplier, a relationship stretching back two decades. On Tuesday, the site went live. By Thursday, he’d sold $1,000 worth of watches. Within 30 days, he hit $50,000.

He named the brand Omologato, from the Italian “omologato,” meaning homologated. Ready to race.

What’s in the dial

Omologato’s product line now spans more than 30 designs, priced from £99 to roughly $1,000. The entry-level Tifosi collection starts at $120 and is built specifically for younger fans to participate.

What separates the brand from the wave of “racing-inspired” watches flooding the market is the specificity of its storytelling. The 722 marks the 7th hour and 22nd minute on its dial: the exact moment Sir Stirling Moss started the 1955 Mille Miglia. The Laguna Seca features a dial offset by 45 degrees, a nod to the track’s famous Corkscrew corner. The Can-Am collection uses papaya-orange markers that reference the McLaren liveries that dominated Group 7 racing.

Then there’s the carbon.

When four-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou won the 109th Indianapolis 500 with Chip Ganassi Racing, Omologato released a limited chronograph with dial inserts made from the actual carbon fiber of Palou’s championship-winning car. Five hundred pieces. $1,012.88 each. A similar piece was made for NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, incorporating carbon from the car he drove at the 2025 Coca-Cola 600.

“Lots of watch brands put out their own watch and say, ‘This is a racing watch,’” Kalra said on the Business of Speed podcast. “Why is it a racing watch? Because you put stripes on there? That doesn’t mean it’s a racing watch. It just means it’s a watch with a couple of stripes. The authenticity is what matters.”

The business of sincerity

Omologato posted an 83% gross profit margin in 2023. Revenue jumped 46% in Q1 2024. The brand ranks among the top five most profitable British watch companies and sells in over 200 stores worldwide, with the United States as its largest market.

The company is 100% independently owned. No investors, no parent company, no board to appease. Kalra has been approached twice by potential acquirers and turned them both down.

A significant portion of Omologato’s profits is reinvested in racing. The company sponsors young karters, funds up-and-coming drivers, and pays for its partnerships through a combination of rights fees, value-in-kind, and B2B deal facilitation. Kalra acts as a connector in the paddock, brokering arrangements between partners that extend beyond logo placement. In late 2024, the company had approximately 30 B2B deals in progress.

This reinvestment is so aggressive that UK tax authorities launched an eight-week investigation in 2023, suspicious of the numbers. They found nothing wrong. Instead, they wrote Kalra a letter expressing surprise at the level of profit being given away.

“I have now framed that letter in my office,” Kalra said, “because it certifies that I am a nut case.”

From British Leyland to the Indy 500 podium

Kalra’s parents emigrated from India to England in 1965. His father’s first job was washing cars at a British Leyland dealership.

In 2025, their son became the first person of Indian descent to stand on the podium during an Indy 500 winner’s ceremony. Omologato sponsors Chip Ganassi Racing, and when Palou crossed the finish line, Kalra was there. He told Ganassi he felt like a fraud standing up there.

Ganassi’s response: “Your logo’s on the car. You’re an effing winner.”

The partnership list now includes IndyCar teams, NASCAR drivers, Formula E, the British Superbike Championship, Trans Am, SVRA, and circuits like Monza, Imola, and Watkins Glen. The brand has served as the official timing partner for F4 U.S. and FR Americas, designing custom timepieces for championship winners in both series.

Precision at every price

Jack Heuer didn’t build the Carrera so it could sit behind glass at a concession tent. The watch was designed to be worn at speed, read at a glance, and trusted under pressure. It was for the paddock, not the gift shop.

Kalra operates from the same instinct, just at a different price point. His watches carry race-used carbon fiber, dial engravings pulled from actual track layouts, and movement references that only make sense if you know the history. The fans buying them are the same people who sit in general admission and argue about tire strategies on the 364 days a year between the big races.

At Le Mans, Richard Mille saw that. The man whose watches cost more than most cars recognized something in Kalra’s work that transcends price.

The watches are affordable, but the stories they tell are priceless.

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Vincenzo Landino proudly owns two Omologato timepieces. The Omologato Jim Bamber #1 Alonso Webber watch is a limited-edition (25 units) motorsport watch celebrating Mark Webber's 2013 Singapore Grand Prix ride on Fernando Alonso's car, and the Omologato Panamericana Oslo Edition is a limited-run motorsport chronograph set to arrive in April 2026, with only 50 units made.

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Dan Towriss built an insurance and financial-services platform that manages over $76 billion in assets by thinking in terms of probability. He’s now applying that same logic to Formula 1.

Some people are averse to risk. Dan Towriss sees risk as a variable, something to be quantified and priced. He was trained in that discipline. And he used it to build one of the most significant financial services companies in America.

Then he went after motorsport.

The Cadillac Formula 1 Team is the first new constructor to join the F1 grid since Haas in 2016. The man running it is an actuary from Muncie, Indiana, who attended Indiana University on a baseball scholarship before an elbow injury redirected his path to Ball State University, where he graduated cum laude in 1994 and found his calling in probability tables.

From Baseball to Ball State

Towriss grew up in Muncie, Indiana. He was a talented baseball player, good enough to earn a scholarship to Indiana University over Notre Dame. But a throwing-elbow injury during his freshman year ended that path. He returned home to Ball State and discovered actuarial science, the discipline of building mathematical models around uncertainty. He graduated in 1994 as a credentialed Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, and that framework has never left him.

His early career moved through several major insurance enterprises: Lincoln National Life in Fort Wayne, then Lincoln Re, ING Reinsurance, and AEGON, where he served as Chief Risk Officer. In 2009, he joined Guggenheim Partners, where he helped construct the firm’s insurance investment platform alongside Mark Walter, Guggenheim’s CEO.

When the chance arose to operate that platform independently, Towriss took it. In 2013, he founded what would become Group 1001, named for the “next” policyholder beyond the thousand the industry traditionally prioritized. To quote Shakespeare’s Juliet: “What’s in a name?” That name was a statement of philosophy before it was ever a brand.

Towriss built Group 1001 on the actuarial insight that insurance is fundamentally a data problem, and that most legacy carriers were solving it badly. Delaware Life, Gainbridge, Clear Spring Health, and Clear Spring Life: each brand under the Group 1001 umbrella was engineered around a specific underserved segment. Gainbridge was by far the most visible. A direct-to-consumer digital annuity platform, it removed traditional broker friction and let people engage with retirement products in a more transparent way.

Between the company’s 2017 rebranding and 2025, assets under management grew from approximately $37 billion to over $76 billion. Delaware Life has been named a Ward’s 50 Top Performer for six consecutive years. In January 2026, Delaware Life launched the industry’s first fixed indexed annuity with Bitcoin exposure via a BlackRock index, making it the first insurance carrier to offer an index that includes cryptocurrency.

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The Phone Call

In 2017, a young IndyCar driver named Zach Veach was trying to fund a ride at the Indianapolis 500 with A.J. Foyt Racing. Running out of options, he asked his pastor, Aaron Brockett, for leads. Brockett had one: Dan Towriss.

Veach made the call. Towriss opened with, “Hey, kid, I don’t sponsor race cars and race car drivers, but go ahead and tell me your story.” By the following Monday, Towriss called back: “Hey, kid, you’re going to the show.”

Within months, Group 1001 had entered IndyCar. By 2019, Gainbridge became the presenting sponsor of the Indianapolis 500, the largest single-day spectator sporting event in the world, held in Towriss’ home state. Shortly after, Towriss acquired an ownership stake in Andretti Autosport, where Veach had competed.

The acquisition price was never publicly disclosed. What is confirmed is that Towriss is the controlling owner of Andretti Global and CEO of TWG Motorsports.

This is how Towriss operates. A cold call becomes a sponsorship. A sponsorship becomes equity. Equity becomes control. Each step, he assesses the risk, understands the upside, and moves before the market catches up.

By 2021, Gainbridge had secured naming rights for Gainbridge Fieldhouse, home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and the WNBA’s Indiana Fever. In February 2022, Gainbridge signed a multi-year founding partnership ahead of the inaugural Miami Grand Prix. By 2023, Towriss had formally joined the Andretti Global ownership group, and the Cadillac Formula 1 bid was announced in partnership with General Motors.

There’s Always A Way In

The F1 bid needs context. Here’s the short version for those who missed it.

Formula One Management (FOM), the commercial rights holder owned by Liberty Media, initially rejected the Andretti-Cadillac bid, even though the team had already received formal FIA approval. Existing constructors were openly resistant to splitting prize money with an eleventh team. Toto Wolff and Christian Horner were vocal in their opposition.

In late 2024, TWG Global, the holding company co-chaired by billionaire Mark Walter (who also controls the Los Angeles Dodgers and holds ownership stakes in the Los Angeles Lakers, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, and Chelsea FC), took full operational control of Andretti Global. Michael Andretti stepped into an advisory role. The political dynamics shifted. It seemed the issue had been the “Andretti” name. “TWG” and “Cadillac” raised no objections.

Formula One approved the entry.

Towriss was named CEO of TWG Motorsports in early 2025. The team scaled quickly. It appointed Graeme Lowdon (former CEO of the Virgin and Marussia F1 teams) as team principal, assembled senior technical leadership with deep Formula 1 experience, and secured Ferrari power units on an interim basis while General Motors develops its own power unit program near Charlotte, North Carolina. The goal is to run a GM-built works engine by 2029.

Here’s a look at the math involved in playing in this sandbox:

The anti-dilution fee: $450 million. Cadillac is required to pay a $450 million anti-dilution fee to the existing ten teams, split equally at $45 million per team. Prior Concorde frameworks referenced a $200 million entry fee, but updated agreements raised it to $450 million. Teams had reportedly lobbied to push it as high as $600 million.

The $1 billion before a single lap. Motorsport broadcaster Will Buxton estimated on his Up to Speed podcast that Cadillac had already spent $1 billion before turning a wheel. That figure includes the anti-dilution fee, infrastructure across facilities in Silverstone, Indianapolis, Charlotte, and Warren, Michigan, plus staffing and development costs.

The annual cost cap: $215 million. For 2026, the F1 cost cap rises to $215 million. That’s the regulated ceiling for team spending per year, though high costs fall outside it: driver salaries, executive pay, marketing, travel.

The prize money upside. Forecasts suggest a $63 million prize fund allocation for Cadillac in 2026 before earning a single point. At that rate, it would take roughly 7.1 years to recoup the $450 million anti-dilution fee alone, unless they climb the constructors’ championship. For context, last-placed Sauber earned approximately $60 million in 2024 prize money.

Gainbridge and the Long Game in Women’s Sports

Long before Caitlin Clark became a cultural phenomenon, Gainbridge was already investing in women’s sport. The brand had signed International Tennis Hall of Fame inductee Billie Jean King and World Golf Hall of Fame inductee Annika Sörenstam. It also became the title sponsor of the Billie Jean King Cup, the largest annual international women’s team competition in sport, with over 130 nations competing.

In March 2024, while Clark was still finishing her collegiate career at Iowa, Gainbridge signed her as a brand ambassador. Gainbridge did not disclose the financial terms of the multi-year deal, though Clark’s total NIL partnership portfolio was estimated at around $3.1 million at the end of her collegiate career, aggregating all her deals. The announcement coincided with the launch of ParityFlex, an annuity product designed by women around women’s financial planning needs.

In 2025, Gainbridge became the first entitlement partner of a professional soccer league in the United States, signing on as title partner of the Gainbridge Super League, USL’s Division One women’s competition. The multi-year deal is reported to be a seven-figure agreement giving Gainbridge league-wide brand exposure across digital, broadcast, and in-stadium platforms.

Gainbridge’s broader commitment to women’s sports also includes $222,000 in grant funding through its 2025 Gainbridge Assists program (formerly Parity Week), awarded to 32 organizations and athletes across 21 states in partnership with Parity and the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Towriss likes placing capital where the market has low expectations: women’s sports, electric racing before credibility (via Andretti Formula E), and an American team in Formula 1 before there was a clear path to acceptance.

The Actuary From Muncie

The 2017 Zach Veach sponsorship may have looked impulsive. It turned out to be the first move in a seven-year sequence, from logo placement at the Indy 500 to ownership of a Formula 1 constructor.

What makes Towriss worth watching is the tension he carries: the conservatism of an actuary alongside the ambition of elite motorsport. Insurance taught him patience. Racing gave him a place to deploy it.

The probability of going from Muncie, Indiana, to the Formula 1 grid was always low. But the actuary had already done the math.

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Part 3: The Culture

In 2016, the average Formula 1 fan was 36 years old, male, European, and wealthy. Women made up roughly 8% of the fanbase. The sport’s commercial rights holder, CVC Capital Partners, had extracted an estimated $4.5 billion in profits while investing almost nothing back into growth. The man running the show, Bernie Ecclestone, had openly dismissed the idea of courting younger fans. His reasoning was simple: they couldn’t afford a Rolex.

By 2025, the average fan age had dropped to 32. Women represented 42% of the global audience. Three in four new fans were female. The fastest-growing demographic was women aged 16 to 24. The total fan base had swelled to 827 million, surpassing the NBA as the largest international sports property on earth.

Something fundamental changed. Understanding what, why, and who drove it is the story of modern Formula 1.

The Old Regime

Bernie Ecclestone ran Formula 1 for nearly four decades. He was brilliant at extracting value from the sport and terrible at growing it.

His approach to digital media was not indifference. It was hostility. He once told Campaign Asia-Pacific: “I’d rather get to the 70-year-old guy who’s got plenty of cash.” On younger fans and sponsors, he was explicit: “Young kids will see the Rolex brand, but are they going to go and buy one? They can’t afford it. Or our other sponsor, UBS. These kids don’t care about banking. They haven’t got enough money to put in the bloody banks anyway.”

This was a deliberate commercial strategy. F1’s sponsor model was built around ultra-premium brands whose target consumers were older, affluent men. Ecclestone saw no reason to court anyone else.

The content strategy matched the philosophy. Formula One Management aggressively issued DMCA takedowns for any race footage posted online, including decade-old archival clips. Filming inside the paddock was banned for anyone other than official broadcasters. Lewis Hamilton received stacks of cease-and-desist letters for posting onboard clips from his car to Instagram. Teams had almost no latitude to create or share visual content from race weekends. Every image and every second of video was treated as a monetizable asset to be hoarded.

His views on women in the sport were worse. In 2005, he said women “should be dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances.” He told CNN he didn’t believe women would “physically be able to drive an F1 car quickly” and that they “wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

On the American market, he was dismissive. A proposed New Jersey Grand Prix never materialized. The US Grand Prix at Indianapolis collapsed after the infamous 2005 tire debacle. He once said, “So many stupid things come out of America, and everyone’s happy.” Under his reign, the US rarely had more than one Grand Prix, and even that relationship was contentious.

The broadcasting strategy accelerated the decline. Ecclestone shifted from free-to-air television, which had built F1’s global audience to a peak of roughly 600 million cumulative viewers in 2008, toward exclusive pay-TV deals. The result: F1 lost one-third of its worldwide TV audience between 2008 and 2016. Approximately 200 million viewers disappeared.

F1 had no marketing department. No content team. No sponsorship sales operation in any modern sense. No streaming service. No official YouTube channel of substance. The internet was treated as a threat to be contained. Greg Maffei, Liberty Media’s president, later characterized Ecclestone’s approach as the “old rich white guy” economic model.

It worked for Ecclestone and his investors. CVC made roughly $7.6 billion in total returns on F1. Ecclestone himself walked away with an estimated $4.7 billion when Liberty acquired the sport. But the audience was shrinking, the demographics were calcifying, and the commercial infrastructure hadn’t evolved since the 1990s.

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The Takeover

In January 2017, Liberty Media completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of Formula 1 and installed a three-person management team: Chase Carey as CEO, Ross Brawn as Managing Director of Motorsports, and Sean Bratches as Managing Director of Commercial Operations.

Bratches, a former ESPN executive, was the key figure in the commercial transformation. His mandate was to turn F1 from a motorsport company into a global media and entertainment brand. The starting point was stark: there was no commercial department to inherit. He built it from scratch.

The first move was symbolic and immediate. In February 2017, teams received a formal letter confirming relaxed social media rules. They were now encouraged to post clips from racing events. The paddock filming ban was lifted. Drivers, who had been legally threatened for sharing their own experiences, were suddenly positioned as the sport’s primary content creators.

F1 launched its official YouTube channel in earnest, posting race highlights within hours of each Grand Prix, along with tech explainers, driver Q&As, and full classic race replays. The channel grew from under a million subscribers to over 13.5 million. In select markets, full races were streamed free on YouTube. F1 TV, a direct-to-consumer streaming platform, launched in 2018 and grew to over 3.2 million subscribers by 2023.

Then came TikTok. F1 leaned into short-form content hard: team radio moments, pit lane drama, pre-race rituals, driver personality clips. The account grew to over 5 million followers. Throughout the 2023 season alone, F1’s TikTok content accumulated 111 million views, averaging 3.3 million per post.

The total social media footprint tells the story most efficiently. In 2017, F1 had roughly 18 million followers across platforms. By 2025, that number was 114.5 million. A 512% increase in eight years. F1 became the fastest-growing major sports league on social media for five consecutive years.

Stefano Domenicali replaced Carey as CEO in January 2021 and further extended the vision. His stated goal: make F1 a lifestyle brand. “I want people to talk about different kinds of business,” he said. “I want F1 to be seen as a lifestyle. When you talk about us, you talk about the place to be.”

Drive to Survive

In March 2019, Netflix released Formula 1: Drive to Survive, a docuseries produced by Box to Box Films with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the paddock. The same paddock that had been sending Hamilton cease-and-desist letters two years earlier.

The show did something decades of racing couldn’t: it made millions of people who had never watched a Grand Prix care about the sport. The formula was character-driven storytelling over race statistics. Rookies chasing dreams, team principals fighting for their jobs, veterans contemplating retirement, rivalries playing out in real time. The production values were cinematic. The editing was aggressive. The drama was real, even when purists argued it was selectively amplified.

The timing was accidental and perfect. Season 2 landed during COVID-19 lockdowns, when captive audiences were searching for anything to binge. TikTok was emerging at the same time, and Gen Z creators started sharing clips, memes, and explainers that brought F1 to users who had never engaged with motorsport. When live racing resumed, F1 was among the first sports back, and newly hooked viewers could transition directly from episodes to races.

The numbers are unambiguous. In the US, 53% of adult fans cited Drive to Survive as a reason they became regular viewers. Among fans under 45, 74% credited the show as playing a role. More than 360,000 viewers who had not watched F1 in 2021 started watching races in 2022 after first watching DTS. ESPN’s average race viewership jumped from 547,000 in 2018 to 1.32 million by 2025.

The new fans the show attracted looked nothing like the old fanbase. Nielsen data showed DTS-driven fans were younger (46% under 34, compared to 16% of pre-existing viewers), more diverse (23% Hispanic vs. 12% among non-DTS fans), and more affluent. They were also disproportionately female. In the UK, 46% of Drive to Survive viewers were women. By 2022, Domenicali reported that 40% of F1’s US audience was female.

The show’s complicated legacy is worth acknowledging. Longtime fans criticized it for fostering rivalries and compressing timelines to heighten drama. Several drivers, most notably Max Verstappen, refused to participate in certain seasons because they felt misrepresented. The show prioritized accessibility over technical depth, a trade-off that helped expand its audience but alienated some of its core audience.

Every major sport tried to replicate the formula. NASCAR’s Race for the Championship aired on USA Network in a late-night slot and drew roughly 233,000 viewers. Formula E, IndyCar, and MotoGP all announced their own behind-the-scenes series. None achieved the same cultural penetration. The conditions that made Drive to Survive work (unprecedented access, pandemic timing, TikTok virality, Box to Box’s production quality, and the epic 2021 Hamilton-Verstappen championship battle) were a constellation unlikely to repeat.

By 2023, the discovery pipeline had shifted. Social media overtook DTS as the primary channel through which new fans found the sport (22% vs. 14%). The show opened the door. The content ecosystem built behind it kept people walking through.

The Movie

The Brad Pitt F1 film, released in 2025 and starring Damson Idris alongside Pitt, grossed over $630 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing sports film ever made.

Its cultural significance went beyond the box office. In a media landscape saturated with irony and deconstruction, the film offered something unfashionable: sincerity. An earnest, aspirational story about merit, collaboration, and what it takes to compete at the highest level. That tone resonated with an audience already primed by Drive to Survive to see F1 as something emotionally legible.

The film’s presence at the 2025 Met Gala crystallized the crossover. Damson Idris wore a white racing suit encrusted with 2,000 Swarovski crystals over a red Tommy Hilfiger tuxedo. Lewis Hamilton arrived in an ivory Grace Wales Bonner ensemble that referenced his ancestral history. These weren’t athletes borrowing fashion credibility. They were cultural figures operating comfortably at the intersection of sport, luxury, and identity.

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Who Shows Up Now

The demographic shift is the most consequential change in F1’s modern history, and the data is worth sitting with.

In 2017, women made up roughly 8% of Formula 1’s fanbase. By the end of 2024, Nielsen’s study across 37 markets and 46,000 respondents found that 41% of F1’s 750 million global fans were women. That’s over 300 million female fans worldwide. The 2025 Global Fan Survey, based on over 100,000 responses from 186 countries, found that three in four new fans are female and nearly half of all Gen Z respondents are women.

The age profile shifted in parallel. The average fan age dropped from 36 in 2017 to 32 by 2021. Among new US fans who have followed the sport for five years or less, 47% are aged 18 to 24. More than half of all new fans identify as Gen Z. Seventy percent of Gen Z respondents engage with F1 content daily.

Comscore data from 2024 shows the shift playing out online in real time: unique female visitors to Formula1.com increased by 73%, with women aged 25 to 34 up 670%. On McLaren’s YouTube channel, the female audience share jumped from 28.5% to 50.4%.

These aren’t peripheral trends.

The Essence article “The Future of F1 Looks Like Us” captures the human dimension behind the data. Nina Meyers, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, launched Full Throttle, a platform designed to open doors in motorsports for Black women, Americans, and women of color. Her work addresses not just fandom but pathways: driver development, STEM roles through HBCUs, and corporate partnerships aimed at systemic inclusion. “For decades, Formula 1 in the U.S. was coded as exclusive, expensive, and inaccessible,” Essence noted. “This year shattered that myth.”

Lewis Hamilton’s significance extends well beyond his seven championships. He remains the first and only Black driver in F1 history. His cultural influence operates on a different frequency than his on-track record: the fashion, the advocacy, the visibility. When Beyoncé attended the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix, wearing Louis Vuitton and driving a Ferrari, took a hot lap with Hamilton, and posted about it, that wasn’t a celebrity cameo. It was confirmation that F1 had entered a cultural orbit where the audience arriving through fashion, music, and identity is as large as the one arriving through motorsport.

As Girls United framed it, “The real story isn’t about celebrities dipping into the paddock. It’s about the fans who finally see themselves reflected in a sport where they were never expected to show up.”

Fashion and the Paddock

The paddock used to be a restricted industrial space. Now it functions as a stage.

The shift has commercial roots. LVMH’s 10-year global partnership, reportedly worth $150 million per season, brought Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy, and TAG Heuer into the F1 ecosystem. The “F1 75 Years in Motion” exhibit at Selfridges in London positioned racing as a luxury cultural artifact. Charlotte Tilbury became the first female-founded beauty brand to sponsor F1 Academy. Elemis became the first skincare partner of an F1 team.

“Motorcore,” a term coined in 2022, describes how motorsport aesthetics infiltrated mainstream fashion. People across the US started tracking down vintage Ferrari jackets. Chanel incorporated motorsport references into runway shows. Drivers became fashion magazine fixtures: Hamilton’s elaborate pre-race outfits, Daniel Ricciardo at the Met Gala, and Charles Leclerc’s modeling work for various fashion houses.

F1 offers what Colin Magazine described as “danger without consequence, luxury without access, drama without scripts, and speed without limits.” That combination maps perfectly onto what modern audiences, particularly younger audiences consuming content through social platforms, find aspirational.

The commercial value follows the attention. A 35% surge in Earned Media Value for fashion brands associated with F1 was recorded in 2023 alone. Instagram delivered $314.7 million in total media value for F1. TikTok averaged $45,200 per post. The audience that fashion and luxury brands want (young, affluent, digitally native, globally distributed) is the audience F1 is now delivering.

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The American Expansion

The US was F1’s single largest growth opportunity, and Liberty Media treated it accordingly.

Under Ecclestone, the country had at most one Grand Prix. Under Liberty, it has three: Austin (COTA), Miami (added in 2022, contract through 2041), and Las Vegas (launched in 2023). Liberty invested approximately $500 million directly into the Vegas event, including $240 million for land and $80 million for infrastructure. The LEGO Miami Grand Prix generated over 24 billion views, with all 20 drivers operating drivable LEGO cars during the parade lap.

The broadcasting trajectory captures the shift in a single line. ESPN’s original F1 rights deal under Ecclestone cost roughly $5 million per year. By 2023, the renewal was $75 to $90 million.

Apple’s 2026 deal came in at approximately $150 million per year. A 30x increase from the pre-2023 baseline.

US viewership doubled between 2018 and 2025. The American fanbase reached 52 million. 58% of US fans are now under 45. Domenicali noted: “Forty percent of our U.S. audience is female. The average age is 34. Very young. We need to connect with them.”

Cadillac’s entry adds an American constructor to the grid for the first time in decades. The team hired a creator-focused CMO, signaling that their strategy is as much about cultural positioning as it is about racing. Whether F1 can sustain this level of American attention or whether it’s riding a wave that will eventually plateau is the open question. Three US races, an American team, and an Apple broadcast deal represent a significant bet that the answer is the former.

The Races That Carry Weight

Not every Grand Prix means the same thing.

Monaco, Spa, Monza, Silverstone, Suzuka. These circuits carry a weight that newer additions to the calendar haven’t earned and may never earn. They represent 75 years of accumulated history, the mythology that made the sport worth caring about before Netflix and TikTok made it accessible.

The 75th anniversary celebration in Milan offered a window into what heritage looks like in practice: a dinner at Garage 21 with trophies and memorabilia, Jackie Stewart’s 1960s championship car, Michelin-starred food from Massimo Bottura, and Moet & Chandon (the brand behind the champagne shower tradition since the sport’s early decades). It was a gathering of the sport’s institutional memory, the kind of event that connects the present grid to something larger.

Monza fills the grandstands with tifosi who have supported Ferrari through every era. The atmosphere at Silverstone reflects a country that considers Formula 1 part of its national sporting identity. Suzuka’s figure-eight layout and its devoted Japanese fanbase give it a character no simulator or architect could replicate. Spa’s Eau Rouge corner is the kind of challenge that defines whether a driver belongs at the top level.

Newer races serve different purposes. Vegas is a commercial proof of concept. Miami is an entertainment spectacle. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nation-branding exercises backed by sovereign capital. Madrid joins the 2026 calendar while Imola drops off. The tension between heritage and expansion is constant, and the calendar is where it’s most visible. F1 needs both: the historic circuits provide emotional legitimacy, and the new venues provide revenue growth and market access. Managing that balance, year after year, is one of the sport’s quiet ongoing challenges.

The Question Underneath

A Cambridge academic paper titled “Desiring Machines: Formula One as Cultural Performance” argued that F1 succeeds not by following the logic of sport but as a cultural performance for the transnational capitalist class: fast cars, jetsetting lifestyles, luxury goods, a fantasy of consumer life supplied by the international corporate elite.

That framework still holds. But the audience consuming the fantasy has changed entirely.

F1 is bigger, more diverse, more accessible, and more culturally embedded than at any point in its 75-year history. 827 million fans. 42% women. The fastest-growing demo is 18 to 34. Social media followers grew 512% in eight years. Attendance records fall annually. The F1 movie outgrossed every sports film ever made. Lewis Hamilton has more Instagram followers than Serena Williams.

The sport that Ecclestone built for old men with Rolexes is now being claimed by young women on TikTok, by Black fans building platforms like Full Throttle, by Americans who discovered the paddock through a Netflix show during a pandemic.

Growth at this scale changes what a thing is. The question F1 faces now is whether the culture that made it compelling in the first place, the engineering obsession, the driver mystique, the sheer physical danger of racing at 360 km/h, survives the commercial and demographic expansion that has made the sport more popular than ever. Whether heritage and access can coexist. Whether exclusivity and scale are actually compatible.

The sport’s oldest fans worry that F1 is becoming a lifestyle brand that happens to race cars. Its newest fans couldn’t care less about that distinction. They showed up, they stayed, and they’re spending. The paddock belongs to both audiences now, and the tension between them might be the most interesting story Formula 1 is telling.

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Part 2: The Business

In 2017, Liberty Media acquired Formula 1 for $4.4 billion. By 2024, the enterprise value had climbed to $22 billion. In 2025, F1 posted $3.87 billion in revenue, up 14% year over year, with operating income rising 28% to $632 million. More than double what the sport generated annually when Liberty took over.

These numbers explain the grid. They explain why certain drivers have seats and others don’t, why Cadillac paid $450 million just to be allowed in the door, and why Apple committed $140 million a year to stream races in the US. Every decision in Formula 1, from who drives the car to who builds it to where the races happen, runs through money.

The Dealmakers

Formula 1’s commercial transformation has a short list of architects.

Stefano Domenicali, the CEO since January 2021, just extended his contract through 2029. Under his leadership, annual revenue has nearly doubled (from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $3.87 billion in 2025), the race calendar has grown to 24 events, and the fanbase has expanded into demographics the sport had never seriously pursued. His stated ambition is to make F1 a cultural event, something that lives beyond the racetrack and enters the broader conversation. The Apple deal, the LVMH partnership, and the push into new markets are all extensions of that thinking.

Behind him sits Liberty Media and its chairman, John C. Malone. Their playbook was straightforward: F1’s fundamentals were strong, but its commercial infrastructure was outdated, and its audience was underleveraged. They invested in digital, leaned into content (Netflix’s Drive to Survive drove US viewership up 67% after its debut), and treated the sport like a media property with a racing problem to solve, rather than the other way around.

At the team level, the business operators matter just as much. Toto Wolff built Mercedes into a three-way ownership split between Mercedes-Benz, INEOS, and himself, each holding a third. Lawrence Stroll sank $235 million into Aston Martin’s infrastructure. Zak Brown turned McLaren from a team posting $75 million losses into one valued at $4.73 billion. These are executives running billion-dollar operations that happen to compete on Sundays.

Revenue: Where It Comes From

F1’s $3.87 billion breaks down across four streams:

Media rights: 31%. The broadcast money. Apple, Sky Sports, and dozens of regional partners.

Race promotion fees: 27%. Governments and promoters pay between $20 million and $60 million annually for the right to host a Grand Prix. Those fees escalate year over year through contractual clauses, which is part of why the calendar keeps expanding and why cities compete for a slot.

Sponsorship: 22%. F1’s global partner roster has nearly tripled since 2020, from 12 to 31. LVMH signed a 10-year global partnership integrating Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer, and Moet. LEGO, American Express, Sony, and Santander have all entered.

Everything else: 20%. Hospitality, licensing, F1 TV, merchandise.

No single stream dominates. That balance matters. It means F1 can absorb a downturn in one area without the model breaking.

Revenue: Where It Goes

Liberty Media distributes approximately 45% of annual revenue back to the teams through the Concorde Agreement, the binding commercial contract that governs the sport’s financial structure. In 2025, the prize pool sat around $1.25 billion.

How it gets divided is where the politics live.

Championship position determines the largest share. The Constructors’ Champion receives roughly 14% of the pot. The team finishing tenth gets around 6%. But finishing position alone doesn’t determine the payout.

Ferrari receives a guaranteed 5% of the entire prize fund regardless of where they finish. Written into the Concorde Agreement as recognition of their unbroken presence since 1950. This is why Ferrari topped the 2025 prize money table at $277.7 million despite McLaren winning both championships.

Then there are legacy performance bonuses. Mercedes, because of their dominance during the hybrid era (2014 through 2021), earned roughly $112 million in historical success payments on top of their standard share.

The system rewards sustained excellence, not a single strong year. With Cadillac joining in 2026, the pool now splits eleven ways instead of ten. Their $450 million anti-dilution fee was paid to each existing team as a $45 million lump sum to offset dilution.

The Cost Cap

Before 2021, spending was essentially uncapped. Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull routinely poured over $200 million per season into car development alone, creating a financial moat that made it nearly impossible for smaller teams to compete on merit.

The budget cap changed the math. Initially set at $135 million, it forced top teams to make choices they’d never faced before. Where do you allocate? What do you sacrifice? Which development path gets funded and which gets shelved?

For 2026, the cap sits at $215 million, a 30% increase to account for new regulations and the engineering demands of active aerodynamics and redesigned power units. The principle still holds. You can’t outspend your way to a championship. You have to outthink.

The downstream effects have been real. McLaren reversed a $75 million loss into a $16.7 million profit in 2023. Smaller operations like Haas have become more competitive. The performance gap between the front and back of the grid has narrowed in ways that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago.

Technology as Competitive Advantage

The cost cap created a secondary economy inside F1: technology partnerships that function as performance multipliers without counting against the spending limit.

Oracle’s partnership with Red Bull goes well beyond the logo on the car. Their cloud infrastructure allows Red Bull to run up to four billion race-day simulations, modeling tire wear, weather scenarios, and competitor tactics in real time. Ansys simulation technology, used by the team since 2008, began with aerodynamics and now covers cooling, materials management, and driver safety. Oracle’s own data show that the partnership improved race simulations by 25% and reduced technical faults by 50%.

McLaren’s approach runs through Google. Engineers from the partnership work in the pit lane during race weekends to optimize data.

Dell developed a CFD wind tunnel for McLaren, freeing up budget for other R&D areas under the cap. DP World handles global freight logistics. Dropbox manages content transfer between the factory and the circuit. The head of human performance films pit stops on Android tablets and shares annotated footage with the crew between sessions.

Ferrari chose Amazon Web Services for their CFD simulations, enabling faster and more efficient aerodynamic development cycles.

These arrangements have shifted what a “sponsor” actually means in modern F1. The smartest teams distinguish between companies that buy visibility and companies that contribute operational capability. The latter generates competitive leverage that shows up in lap times.

Team Valuations

In 2019, the average F1 team was valued at roughly $500 million. By late 2025, that number had climbed to $3.6 billion. Every team on the grid is now valued at above $1.5 billion. Four years ago, only four had cleared that threshold.

The top five:

Ferrari: $6.4 billion. The most valuable team for the third consecutive year.

Mercedes: $5.88 billion.

McLaren: $4.73 billion. Valuation up 203% in two years, the largest jump on the grid. Bahrain’s Mumtalakat and Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings completed a takeover at a record $5 billion figure.

Red Bull: $4.32 billion.

Aston Martin: $3 billion.

These valuations are backed by real revenue and a cost structure that the budget cap has made more predictable. The investor profile of F1 has shifted accordingly. Private equity firms like Arctos Partners and HPS Partners have entered the space. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund took a minority stake in Sauber (now Audi). What was once a playground for wealthy enthusiasts is now attracting institutional capital.

Sponsorship

F1 teams collectively generated $2.04 billion in sponsorship revenue in 2024. The average deal sits at $6.01 million annually, nearly eight times the average NFL sponsorship agreement.

The tiers are steep. A sidepod logo on a top team costs $5 to $7 million per year. A title partnership with McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, or Red Bull runs $30 to $70 million annually. Oracle’s deal with Red Bull is reportedly worth $300 million over five years. McLaren announced Mastercard as their naming partner for 2026, reportedly worth $100 million per year.

Those figures only cover the fee. Activation costs, hospitality, and global travel can easily double the investment. A mid-tier brand pursuing a meaningful F1 presence could be looking at $40 to $140 million all in.

This pricing structure means roughly 95% of potential sponsors are priced out. The concentration keeps the commercial ecosystem exclusive but also narrows the pool of potential partners. F1 sponsorship, at the top tier, is a market for tech companies, luxury houses, and sovereign-adjacent capital.

Circuit Economics

Hosting a Grand Prix is expensive and counterintuitive. The race fee alone runs $20 to $60 million, but total operational costs, including infrastructure, insurance, and staffing, push the real figure to $70 to $150 million per event.

General admission barely moves the needle financially. The revenue engine is hospitality. Paddock Club access runs $6,000 to $16,000 per person. Private suites go higher. Monaco yacht experiences reach six figures. Hospitality margins outpace general ticket revenue by a factor of ten, and F1 captures most of the premium.

The Las Vegas model represents where things are heading. Rather than sharing revenue with a local promoter, F1 operates the Vegas event directly and keeps 100% of the proceeds. The 2024 race generated $934 million in economic impact and $45 million in tax revenue.

But the economic impact extends beyond the race itself. Singapore’s Grand Prix drives tourism spending across the broader Asia-Pacific region, with a quarter of American and Canadian attendees adding trips to Japan and nearly a third of Australians continuing on to Indonesia. Melbourne’s 2026 Australian Grand Prix sold out its Friday, Saturday, and Sunday sessions in record time, with 450,000 expected across the weekend and significant spillover into local hospitality and regional tourism.

Most traditional circuits survive through a combination of luxury real estate development, year-round corporate partnerships, and government subsidies. The racing itself is rarely where the profit sits.

Broadcasting

The media rights story is a growth story.

In 2018, ESPN picked up US broadcast rights for F1 at essentially zero cost. Average viewership: 554,000. By 2025, that number had climbed to 1.32 million, with marquee races clearing 2 million. The US fanbase reached 52 million, up 11% year over year.

Apple saw what was building and committed roughly $140 million per year over five years for exclusive US rights. The path from a free ESPN deal to a $700 million Apple commitment says everything about how F1’s commercial trajectory has changed.

Globally, F1 reached 827 million fans in 2025, a 12% increase that pushed it past the NBA as the largest international sports league by fanbase. The 18-to-34 demographic is the fastest-growing segment. Women now make up 42% of the audience, up from 37% in 2018. The F1 movie grossed $630 million, becoming the highest-grossing sports film ever made.

On social media, F1 has led all sports properties for five consecutive years with 2.3 billion total engagements. TikTok growth is at 91%. YouTube at 53%.

These numbers directly inform the value of broadcast deals, sponsorship pricing, and the overall leverage F1 holds in commercial negotiations. When Apple pays $140 million a year, they’re buying access to a young, global, affluent, digitally native audience.

Driver Salaries

Driver pay sits outside the cost cap. Salaries are funded by the team but don’t count against the $215 million development budget, creating a separate market with its own logic.

Max Verstappen leads the grid at a reported $65 million annual base from Red Bull, with performance bonuses pushing his 2025 total to an estimated $76 million. Lewis Hamilton earns approximately $60 million base from Ferrari, with a 2025 total of $70.5 million. Lando Norris, the reigning champion, takes home $20 million from McLaren.

The gap between Verstappen and Norris is notable given that Norris beat him for the title. Driver salary negotiations reflect market timing and leverage at the point of signing. Verstappen’s contract was set when he was dominant. Norris’s was signed before his championship run. That disparity won’t last.

At the back of the grid, rookies earn between $1 and $3 million. Some bring sponsorship funding that subsidizes their seat. The financial spread between the highest- and lowest-paid drivers on the grid is more than 60x.

Sustainability

F1 has committed to reaching Net Zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the business case is increasingly intertwined with the environmental one.

By the end of 2024, the sport had achieved a 26% reduction in carbon emissions against its 2018 baseline. Without any changes to operations, emissions would have actually increased by 10% over that same period, given the calendar’s expansion from 21 to 24 races and attendance growth from 4 million to 6.75 million.

The most visible change for 2026 is the switch to 100% advanced sustainable fuels, made from carbon capture, municipal waste, and non-food biomass. These fuels are designed as “drop-in” replacements, meaning they could work in standard road cars without modification. F1 is essentially using its platform and R&D capacity to develop sustainable fuel technology at a scale and pace that the broader automotive industry can eventually adopt.

Aviation and logistics represent the largest portion of the sport’s footprint. DHL and Qatar Airways, both global partners, have co-invested in sustainable aviation fuel, reducing related emissions by roughly 8,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2024 alone, an approximate 19% reduction for the air freight charter program. Remote broadcast operations have cut travel emissions by 25% compared to 2018.

The sustainability push also functions as a commercial magnet. Partners increasingly evaluate F1 through an ESG lens, and the sport’s ability to demonstrate measurable progress (not just targets) makes it a more attractive platform for brands that need to justify their sponsorship spend to boards and shareholders.

The Flywheel

Revenue growth attracts investors. Investment drives up team valuations. Higher valuations attract more sophisticated sponsors. Sponsorship revenue, combined with prize money, funds development within the cost cap. Better engineering produces better cars. Better cars produce results. Results generate viewership. Viewership makes broadcast rights more valuable.

Liberty Media’s bet was that this cycle existed but was underperforming. Nine years later, revenue has more than doubled, the fanbase has reached demographics the sport never previously engaged, and the average team is worth seven times what it was when they bought in.

The racing is the product. The business is the infrastructure that keeps it running, funds the engineering, pays the drivers, and determines which teams are positioned to compete. One without the other gives you an incomplete picture.

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Next in this series: Part 3: The Culture explores the human side of Formula 1, from the rivalries that define eras to the sport’s complicated relationship with its own growing fame.

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Part 1: The Sport

Formula 1 is the world’s premier open-wheel racing series. Twenty-two drivers, eleven teams, twenty-four races spread across five continents. City streets in Monaco and Singapore. Purpose-built circuits in Silverstone and Suzuka. A global championship that runs from March through December.

Behind each car sits an operation of thousands: aerodynamicists, strategists, data scientists, mechanics, and engineers, all working to shave hundredths of a second off a lap time. The sport rewards precision at every level, from the factory floor to the pit lane to the final corner of the final lap.

Two championships run simultaneously. The Drivers’ Championship crowns the best individual. The Constructors’ Championship determines which team built, strategized, and executed at the highest level across the entire season. The Constructors’ title carries significant prize money, which directly funds next year’s car development. Win both, and you’ve dominated. Lose both, and you’re redesigning the car from the ground up.

The Grid

The 2026 season arrived with the most significant shakeup in years.

Lando Norris enters as the reigning World Champion after edging Max Verstappen by two points in 2025. Two. An entire season decided by a margin that thin.

McLaren took the Constructors’ title alongside him and return with Norris and Oscar Piastri. Ferrari paired Lewis Hamilton (seven-time champion) with Charles Leclerc. Red Bull kept Verstappen and promoted Isack Hadjar from their junior team. Mercedes is running George Russell alongside Kimi Antonelli.

Then there are the new arrivals.

Cadillac became the first new team to enter F1 since Haas in 2016.

Audi took over the former Sauber operation and is racing as a full factory team for the first time. Racing Bulls handed a seat to eighteen-year-old Arvid Lindblad, the only rookie on the grid. And Fernando Alonso, at 44, is still racing for Aston Martin.

The Cars

Every car on the grid is built from scratch. Each season. Teams design, manufacture, and refine their own cars within the FIA’s technical regulations, then continue developing them throughout the year. The car that lines up in Melbourne in March barely resembles the one that crosses the line in Abu Dhabi in December.

A cost cap limits what teams can spend on development. Efficiency in how you allocate that budget matters as much as the budget itself.

For 2026, the cars are running a genuinely new technical package. Active aerodynamics allow front and rear wing elements to adjust their angle based on where the car is on track. Through corners, wings stay shut for maximum downforce, pressing the car into the tarmac. On straights, the flaps open, drag drops, and top speeds push past 320 km/h. This replaces the old DRS system entirely.

The power units are a true 50/50 hybrid: turbocharged internal combustion paired with an electric motor. Half the power comes from electricity. Every car is also running on advanced sustainable fuels for the first time, made from carbon capture and non-food biomass.

The cars themselves are smaller and lighter. Wheelbase reduced by 200mm. Width cut by 100mm. Thirty kilograms were shaved off the minimum weight. More agile. More raceable. That’s the theory, anyway.

How a Race Weekend Works

An F1 weekend is a three-day operation.

Friday brings two free practice sessions, each 60 minutes. Teams experiment with car setup, test tire compounds, and run race simulations. Drivers learn the track.

Saturday starts with a final practice session, then moves into Qualifying. Three rounds. Elimination format.

Q1: all 22 cars on track. The slowest six are cut.

Q2: sixteen remain, another six eliminated.

Q3: the fastest ten fight for pole position.

Sunday is the Grand Prix. Roughly 305 kilometers, or two hours, whichever comes first.

Some weekends run an alternative Sprint format: a condensed qualifying session followed by a 100 km Sprint Race with no mandatory pit stops. Points to the top eight. Short. Aggressive. Very little room for a conservative approach.

Race Day

Five red lights come on, one by one. Then all five go out simultaneously. Twenty-two cars launch toward the first corner at over 300 km/h. More positions change in those opening seconds than in most of the race that follows.

The physical demands on a driver are severe. Forces exceeding 4G under braking and through corners. Around 2G under acceleration. Cockpit temperatures past 50°C. Heart rate between 150 and 170 BPM for nearly 2 hours. Drivers regularly lose 3 kg of body weight in sweat over a single race.

Passing another car at 360 km/h requires three things: opportunity, technology, and nerve.

Slipstreaming means tucking in closely behind the car ahead, using their wake to cut air resistance, then pulling out to make a move.

Overtake Mode lets drivers deploy stored electric energy as a burst of power. Attack into a braking zone. Defend when someone’s coming for you. Being within one second of the car ahead unlocks this advantage under the new regulations.

The technology creates the opening. The driver decides when to take it.

Pit Stops and Tires

Pit strategy is where races are quietly won and lost.

A pit stop involves roughly 20 mechanics executing a rehearsed sequence: all four tires changed in approximately two seconds. Three crew members per wheel. A front jack, a rear jack, and everyone moving in sync. A strong stop gains track position. A mistake (a wheel gun that doesn’t engage, a tire that isn’t seated) can undo an entire afternoon.

Compounds

Teams must use at least two different tire compounds during a dry race:

Softs (red): the fastest compound. Maximum grip, rapid degradation.

Mediums (yellow): balanced performance and durability.

Hards (white): slower, but they last.

When to switch and how many times to stop are decisions that separate good teams from great ones. A one-stop conserves time in the pits but demands careful tire management over a longer stint. A two-stop is faster on raw pace but burns roughly 20 extra seconds in the pit lane. The math shifts lap by lap depending on wear, conditions, and what your rivals are doing.

When it rains, the equation resets entirely. Intermediates handle both damp and drying surfaces. Full Wets displace standing water. Visibility drops to almost nothing, and driver instinct matters more than car performance. Some of the most memorable results in the sport’s history have come from wet races where the usual order collapsed.

The Pit Wall

Twenty-two drivers get the attention, but this is a team sport staffed by hundreds.

The Pit Wall is the command center. Strategists and data engineers sit alongside the Team Principal, monitoring live telemetry from every sensor on the car: tire temperatures, fuel loads, engine modes, gaps to competitors.

The call to pit (”box, box, box” over team radio) is made under real-time pressure. One lap too early and you’re on cold tires while your rival is pushing. One lap too late, and your rubber is gone.

At the team factory, sometimes on the other side of the world, engineers run real-time simulations and feed strategy updates back to the circuit. What you see on screen is a fraction of the operation running behind it.

Points

Points go to the top ten finishers:

• P1 - 25 points

• P2 - 18 points

• P3 - 15 points

• P4 - 12 points

• P5 - 10 points

• P6 - 8 points

• P7 - 6 points

• P8 - 4 points

• P9 - 2 points

• P10 - 1 point

Over 24 races, every point matters. Norris won the 2025 title by two. A single overtake at any point during the season, a different strategy call on any given Sunday, a mechanical failure that didn’t happen or one that did. Any of it could have changed the outcome.

The championship accumulates. Race by race, decision by decision, across eight months and five continents.

Where to Watch

If you’re in the US, Apple TV is now the exclusive home of Formula 1. Every practice, qualifying, sprint, and Grand Prix. A subscription runs $12.99/month or $99/year and includes F1 TV Premium (4K streams, onboard cameras, multi-feed views). Select sessions and a handful of races are available free with an Apple account. There’s a 7-day free trial if you want to test the waters.

The path from ESPN to Apple is worth knowing. In 2018, ESPN picked up the US broadcast rights for essentially nothing. Viewership averaged 554,000. By 2025 that number had climbed to 1.32 million, with some races clearing 2 million. Apple paid roughly $140 million per year to lock it down for five years. Netflix is also broadcasting the 2026 Canadian Grand Prix under a separate licensing agreement.

For the rest of the world:

United Kingdom: Sky Sports F1 carries every session live through 2029. Now TV offers monthly and day passes as a lighter alternative. Channel 4 airs qualifying and race highlights for free and broadcasts the British Grand Prix in full.

Canada: TSN for English, RDS for French. F1 TV is also available with Access, Pro, and Premium tiers.

Europe: Sky holds rights across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy through 2027. Most other markets run a mix of pay-TV and local free-to-air arrangements.

Australia: Fox Sports handles domestic coverage.

Rest of World: F1 TV continues expanding its direct-to-consumer reach, with recently launched Japanese-language commentary and a fully localized interface.

Formula 1’s official broadcaster page has the full country-by-country directory.

Next in this series: Part 2: The Business explores how the money works, from cost caps and team valuations to sponsorship economics and the financial machinery that keeps the grid running.

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LOVE.

The time spent on the course is my favorite way to spend 3-4 hours outside. (aside from a racetrack or with my wife and kids)

And I’ve always been into gear. Golf gear has a certain way of hooking you in with new technology to improve your game. Or new ways to approach preparation.

Now, I may not buy the latest and greatest every year, or even a few years, but you bet your ass I’ll be at the pro shop or go out of my way to a Golf Galaxy to swing the new driver that promises huge gains, or the wedges that swear they’ll get you spinning the ball around the greens like Phil.

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All this to bring us here today… or yesterday, I suppose, when McLaren announced McLaren Golf, a dedicated golf equipment company.

Not a collaboration.

Not a limited-edition driver with a papaya colorway.

A standalone subsidiary with its own CEO, its own team, and its own Shopify storefront.

The obvious question: why would a Formula 1 team start making golf clubs?

The less obvious answer: because F1 fans and golfers are increasingly the same people.

The Audience Overlap

47.2 million Americans played golf in 2024, up 38% from pre-pandemic levels. The fastest-growing segment? The 18-34 age group, now the largest cohort of on-course players at 6.3 million.

That same demographic drove F1’s American explosion over the past five years, fueled by Netflix’s Drive to Survive and a calendar that now includes three US races.

Both sports skew affluent and brand-conscious. Both have undergone dramatic demographic shifts in the same direction: younger, more diverse, more globally connected. Women now represent 28% of on-course golfers, a record. And 25% of golfers identify as Black, Asian, or Hispanic. The old-money country club stereotype is fading fast, replaced by a consumer base that cares about design, technology, and cultural relevance.

McLaren didn’t dream this up in a vacuum. TaylorMade and Oracle Red Bull Racing have been running an F1-golf crossover collaboration since 2023. It started with limited-edition drivers. It has since expanded annually into irons, wedges, putters, and apparel. Each drop sells.

That partnership proved something important: golf consumers will pay a premium for equipment connected to motorsport. The appetite is real and growing. McLaren is taking the same thesis and pushing it further. Instead of co-branding with an existing golf manufacturer, they’re building the whole thing from scratch.

Lando Norris, McLaren’s F1 world champion, played in the Netflix Cup and the BMW PGA Pro-Am. Zak Brown, McLaren Racing’s CEO, is a known golf obsessive. The cultural bridge between the two sports already exists at the top of McLaren’s own organization.

The Market Math

The global golf equipment market is worth roughly $9.2 billion in 2025, growing at a 4.4-5.8% CAGR toward $11.5-12 billion by 2030. The broader golf economy generates $102 billion annually. Premium is where the growth is: premium golf apparel alone is expanding at a 6.77% CAGR, and 51% of US consumers prefer premium brands.

Golfers are spending more and replacing clubs more frequently. The premiumization trend favors exactly the kind of brand McLaren can build. One that is high-end, engineering-forward, design-led.

There’s also a timing advantage. The USGA and R&A finalized new golf ball distance regulations in March 2025, effective in 2028. Every manufacturer on the planet will need to reformulate. When established technological advantages get temporarily leveled, new entrants get their best window to break in.

Why McLaren?

Plenty of car brands have dipped a toe into golf. BMW sponsors tournaments. Mercedes partners with The Masters. Porsche sells branded Titleist balls and leather headcovers. None of them make actual clubs.

Bentley tried. Launched a full club line in 2016. Sold 100 sets of its Centenary Collection at $16,000 each. But secondary market discounting of 63-70% suggests they never found real traction beyond the novelty buyer. Porsche went further in the late 1990s and 2000s, producing metalwoods and forged irons before quietly exiting the business entirely.

McLaren’s argument for why they’ll fare differently comes down to two things.

First, the engineering transfer is credible. Carbon fiber composites, aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, materials science. These are real McLaren capabilities. Whether that translates to measurably better golf equipment remains to be seen. But the brand permission to charge a premium and the R&D pipeline to potentially back it up both exist.

Second, and more practically, they hired real golf people to run it. CEO Neil Howie spent 26 years at Callaway and started his career at TaylorMade. CMO Ryan Lauder came from TaylorMade. Head of Brand Nick Fergus came from Callaway. These are operators who know the golf business from the inside. Previous automotive attempts at golf were run by car people. McLaren hired golf people and gave them a car brand.

Behind all of it sits CYVN Holdings, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth entity that acquired McLaren Automotive in April 2025 and created McLaren Group Holdings with an explicit mandate to expand into new categories. Sovereign wealth money is patient money. And patience is the resource most new golf equipment brands run out of first.

So, What’s Coming on 29 April?

McLaren Golf has promised a product reveal on April 29, 2026. Until then, everything is brand equity and personnel. No clubs. No pricing. No tour endorsements.

The golf industry seems split. Golf Digest drew the Porsche comparison and signed off with “We shall see.” Today’s Golfer compared it to PXG’s launch in 2014, the last time a new brand entered at this scale and actually stuck. On GolfWRX, the enthusiast forum that functions as golf’s town square, engagement was immediate.

The questions that matter:

• Will McLaren produce a full bag or start with select categories?

• Will pricing land at Bentley-level ultra-premium or PXG-level accessible premium?

• Will any tour professionals play the equipment?

• Can McLaren’s Shopify-based DTC model compete in a market dominated by fitting studios and pro shop relationships?

The demographics line up. The market is growing. The cultural overlap between F1 and golf is deeper than ever. And McLaren has the engineering credibility, the brand equity, and the financial backing to sustain a long build.

Whether any of that puts a club in a golfer’s bag is a different question.

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There’s a certain kind of power in staying. But an even rarer kind, in leaving.

Growing up, my mother used to tell me: “no raspes fiesta”. It’s a Colombian idiom for ‘don’t be the last one to leave the party.’

Nico Rosberg’s most consequential professional decision did not involve a steering wheel. It involved knowing when to leave the party.

Five days after winning the 2016 Formula 1 World Championship, Rosberg announced his retirement. The speed of the decision sent a shock wave through the global motorsport community. It seemed like a prank. Implausible.

With time, we learned the decision was anything but reckless.

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To win the 2016 World Drivers’ Championship and defeat his former best friend-turned-fiercest adversary, Lewis Hamilton, Nico adopted an extreme, monastic lifestyle. He optimized every single variable in his life and has spoken candidly about the toll this took on him, how he emptied his “physical, emotional, and psychological tanks” in the process.

He now knew what it would take to beat Lewis…

…in equal machinery…

…by a mere 5 points…

…at the last race of the season.

He had no desire to repeat that process year after year.

While champions are expected to compound their success, Nico did the opposite. He stopped racing when the balance sheet was pristine and firmly in his favor.

A Childhood Inside the System

Rosberg was born in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1985 and raised largely in Monaco, a country whose economy (let’s be honest) is governed by engineered incentives.

His life was international from the outset, and he grew up fluent in German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Racing is in Nico’s blood. His father, Finnish racing driver Keke Rosberg, won the 1982 Formula 1 World Championship while driving for Williams. Rosberg did not grow up chasing access. He grew up in high circles; he was around race cars and race tracks from birth.

He was a very intelligent, academically inclined kid. When he finished high school, he was offered a place to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London. He declined in order to pursue his dream of racing in Formula 1. It’s well-documented that he achieved the highest score ever on Williams’ engineering aptitude test, an assessment they gave prospective drivers at the time that focused on technical understanding. This speaks to his unusually deep engineering literacy, especially for someone of his age and experience.

Rosberg entered Formula 1 in 2006 with Williams. He marked his debut at the Bahrain Grand Prix by recording the fastest lap, becoming the youngest driver (20) to do so.

In 2010, he moved to Mercedes and became teammates with one of his closest friends, Lewis Hamilton. They had spent the entirety of their teenage years karting against each other, travelling, sharing hotel rooms, playing video games, and going on Rosberg family holidays. (F1 teammates?! Childhood dream unlocked!)

That relationship slowly soured. Then it ended. In 2016, he finally beat Lewis (a three-time World Champion at the time) and achieved his dream of winning the WDC. He abruptly retired five days later…at 31.

As noted, he is of high-intelligence and has an analytical mind, so he likely surmised rather swiftly that every additional year in F1 would cost him more than it yielded.

That instinct, knowing when marginal returns turn negative, has since become the defining principle of his investment strategy.

Allocating Capital

What followed Rosberg’s retirement was not a lazy drift into brand deals or honorary hyped-up roles, but the methodical construction of a capital platform. Rosberg did more than just invest.

Rosberg Ventures, the investment firm he founded in 2016, began as a vehicle to manage personal capital. It was a natural first step for someone with his analytical temperament to take his own financial future seriously. Over the past decade, it has matured into a fully institutional venture platform. In January 2026, Rosberg announced the close of a third fund at $100 million, oversubscribed 1.4 times, with allocations deliberately capped to protect long-term performance. (In layman’s terms: He turned money away.)

Total assets under management now exceed $200 million, and at that scale, it is a capital platform with sufficient continuity and access to operate independently of its founder’s profile.

The firm’s mandate is intentionally restrained. Rosberg Ventures operates primarily as a fund-of-funds and selective co-investment platform, allocating capital to top-tier global venture managers while retaining the flexibility to invest directly alongside them in breakout companies identified from within that portfolio. The objective: optimize exposure, diversify manager risk, and compress downside.

Equally important is who the platform serves. Rosberg Ventures acts as a bridge for European family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and industrial capital seeking disciplined access to venture markets without building internal teams. Rosberg’s credibility and network serve as non-financial leverage, unlocking allocations and access that capital alone cannot secure.

ClickHouse

One of the most telling direct investments by Rosberg Ventures is ClickHouse, a real-time analytics database that sits deep within modern data infrastructure. Rosberg Ventures is named as a ClickHouse investor in multiple reports, and ClickHouse’s own financing disclosures list Rosberg among new backers.

ClickHouse wasn’t born in a venture studio, the way so many of its peers were and still are. It was created inside Yandex, built to solve a very specific engineering problem: how to run analytical queries on vast, constantly updating datasets without pre-aggregating everything into oblivion. The system was in production as early as 2012, before being open-sourced in 2016. Essentially, the product was stress-tested at an industrial scale before it ever became a company.

The commercial vehicle came later. ClickHouse, Inc. was formed in 2021 to formalize and monetize what the open-source community had already validated. By October 2025, the company extended its Series C financing, and it was in that round that Rosberg Ventures made its entrance, participating alongside a cohort of new institutional backers.

The valuation story took off. ClickHouse was reported to be valued at $6.35 billion in May 2025. By January 2026, after a $400 million Series D led by Dragoneer, with participation from Bessemer, Index, Khosla, Lightspeed, and others. It catapulted to $15 billion. More than double, in under a year.

Ivy

We see the same structural logic in Rosberg’s involvement with Ivy, a payments infrastructure company founded in Munich in 2021.

Ivy provides a single API that enables instant, account-to-account bank payments, allowing merchants and platforms to bypass traditional card networks entirely and settle funds directly between bank accounts in real time. Rather than competing for consumer loyalty in an already crowded fintech market, Ivy positions itself upstream by embedding in the regulated payment rails that underpin commerce itself.

Card networks routinely charge merchants north of 2% per transaction, with settlement delays measured in days. Ivy’s model, built on open-banking frameworks, enables near-instant settlement at materially lower cost, improving merchant cash flow and reducing dependence on intermediaries whose fees persist regardless of whether the merchant can negotiate them. Once integrated, this kind of infrastructure is operationally sticky. It is not very common for someone to rip out a payment rail because a competitor offers a slightly better API. It’s not worth the headache!

In July 2023, Ivy raised a €7 million seed round led by Creandum. Nico first backed the company, then personally invested as an angel alongside some prominent fintech founders and operators. Five weeks later, the company closed a $20 million Series A led by Valar Ventures, at a valuation in the $80–90 million range. The speed of that sequencing, seed to Series A in barely over a month, was a clear signal.

This was not a company that needed to convince investors.

Surely not someone as savvy as Nico.

Formula E

In 2018, two years after hanging up his helmet, Rosberg became a shareholder in Formula E, the all-electric single-seater racing series that had debuted in Beijing just four years earlier. At the time, Formula E was still a championship that the mainstream motorsport world regarded with considerable skepticism: too slow, too niche, too politically correct. The conventional wisdom among the F1 establishment was that it would struggle to survive.

Rosberg saw something different. He saw a sport structurally aligned with where energy, mobility, and urban infrastructure were all heading simultaneously. Formula E races in city centers by design, on temporary street circuits in the middle of major metropolitan areas, rather than in the remote, purpose-built cathedrals of speed that F1 typically has called home for decades.

It was a deliberate strategy from the beginning to make electric racing directly visible to the populations most likely to be buying electric vehicles. As Rosberg himself put it, “it goes to the people.”

There was also a personal element. On the night he announced his F1 retirement, he received an offer to drive in Formula E (which, guess what? He declined.) When he attended the 2018 Berlin E-Prix, he didn’t just watch. He put on a race suit and became the first person to drive the GEN2 car publicly, on the streets of his home country, around the iconic Tempelhof Airport circuit.

He has since remained a committed advocate for the series, as an engaged minority shareholder, and the series itself has continued its ascent. By mid-2024, Liberty Global, which had held a minority stake alongside Rosberg and a group of other investors, had acquired Warner Bros. Discovery’s shareholding, taking a controlling 65% position in Formula E Holdings, with the remaining 35% held by minority shareholders, including Rosberg.

Formula E’s CEO Jeff Dodds, at the time of that transaction, described the overall investor portfolio as worth over $3 billion and growing.

SpaceX and Lyft

Rosberg Ventures’ exposure to SpaceX and Lyft didn’t come through conventional venture rounds, but via special-purpose vehicles.

SPVs let investors take part in hard-to-access, late-stage private companies without reshaping the main fund or concentrating risk where investors didn’t expect it. In practice, they’re a way to participate when getting a seat at the table is the hardest part, and in the case of SpaceX, that table is about as exclusive as it gets.

SpaceX has raised approximately $11.9 billion across 31 funding rounds from over 240 investors. And yet, meaningful allocations have grown progressively harder to access as the valuation has gone from $33 billion in 2019 to $350 billion by late 2024, and an estimated $800 billion by the end of 2025. A lesson in what happens when you hold the infrastructure of a category and refuse to go public. The fact that Rosberg Ventures secured any position at all says something, not about luck, but about the quality of the platform’s network.

However, Lyft is a different kind of bet. And that’s probably precisely the point. It posted nearly $5.8 billion in revenue for 2024, up 31% year-on-year, and delivered its first full year of GAAP profitability, with record gross bookings of $16.1 billion and 44 million annual riders.

A company that spent so many years absorbing the ‘pandemic pain’ and the long shadow of Uber, quietly emerging on the other side with real operating leverage. The global rideshare market is projected to reach $210 billion by 2029. Lyft doesn’t need to win the war outright to capture a very meaningful slice of that pie. And to a wise investor, a nice slice is plenty.

Fuse Energy

There is a version of sustainable investing that is essentially marketing. The kids call it greenwashing. A logo on a pitch deck, a panel appearance at Davos, a portfolio page with a random green leaf icon.

Rosberg Ventures is very much not doing that version.

The firm’s investment in Fuse Energy, an early bet that has since grown into one of the most remarkable energy companies in Europe, makes the distinction clear. Fuse was founded in London in 2022 by Alan Chang and Charles Orr, two former Revolut executives who decided that the energy sector was broken in the same way fintech had been broken a decade earlier: fragmented, expensive, and oh-so-ripe for vertical integration.

Their thesis was bold. Rather than building another retail energy brand that simply resells power at a margin, Fuse set out to own the entire stack: from utility-scale renewable generation (think: solar, wind, batteries) through in-house trading that places power onto the grid at the optimal second, all the way to direct consumer and business supply. The ambition was not to be a greener version of a legacy utility. It was to make energy abundant and cheap in a world where AI data centers are becoming the new heavy industry.

Rosberg came in early, before the trajectory was clear to most. His thesis, in very Nico fashion, was precise: Fuse was reinvesting 100% of its profits into building more renewable capacity. As he wrote at the time, that kind of capital discipline, aligned with a genuine environmental mission, was exactly what he looked for.

The numbers since have been difficult to ignore. By mid-2025, Fuse had reached $90 million in annualized revenue. By Q3 2025, it was growing at 8x year-on-year. By December 2025, it had crossed $400 million ARR, turned cash flow positive, and was supplying power to more than 200,000 households across the UK, before its third birthday!

In July 2025, Balderton Capital led a round that valued the company at north of $1 billion, officially granting it unicorn status. Five months later, in December 2025, Rosberg Ventures participated in Fuse’s Series B alongside Balderton, Lowercarbon, Ribbit Capital, Lakestar, Accel, and others, a round that pushed the valuation to $5 billion.

In under three years, Fuse had gone from a founding round to a $5 billion company. Game. Set. Match.

Back to Monaco

There’s a photo that doesn’t exist, but should. Nico Rosberg, a few days after the most important victory of his life, sitting somewhere in Monte Carlo, not celebrating, but thinking.

He knows.

He’s decided.

“No raspes fiesta.”

What she understood, and what Rosberg has spent the decade since his retirement proving, is that the most powerful move available to anyone, in racing, in capital, in life, is the voluntary exit.

To leave while the room still wants you. To close the chapter before it closes you.

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