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

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

The Investor Relations Officer

Williams Grand Prix Engineering was always a family story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outrunning the Car

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

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

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

Triage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 21, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Claire, Capital & Consequence

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

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

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

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

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

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The Athlete’s Second Career Starts on LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RAF Westhampnett

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

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

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

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

The Stalling Tactic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molecomb

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

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

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

What Manufacturers Pay For

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Its Own Level

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

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

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

Verzuolo

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

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

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

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

The Franchise

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

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

The Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crashgate

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

Then came Singapore.

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

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

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

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

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

The Rebuild

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

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

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

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

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

The Return

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

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

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

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

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

The Stake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ladder

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

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

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

What M&S Gets

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

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

Eight Years in the Making

None of this arrived overnight.

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

The Cyber Year

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

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

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

The Crowd

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

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

Three Predictions

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

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

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

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

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How Silverstone Saved Itself

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

You see, Silverstone was losing money, and fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No single move saves it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Sulayem removes the ceiling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fox found IndyCar a bigger audience

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

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

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

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

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

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What I’ve Been Following

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

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

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

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

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"When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is."

Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," 1894

Edmund Patrick Jordan was born on March 30, 1948, in Dublin. His father kept the books at the ESB and turned out for Shamrock Rovers. His mother had the particular Irish iron will that either makes or breaks a boy.

Eddie had a flair for trade before he had anything worth trading. As a schoolboy, he dealt in marbles and textbooks. He thought about the priesthood. Then dentistry. He settled for a six-week accounting course and a teller’s job at the Bank of Ireland.

Most versions of this story end at the bank counter, with a safe career, a pension, and a quiet life. Jordan had other plans.

Jersey

A 1970 bank strike in Dublin cut off his income. Jordan went to Jersey for the summer, kept books by day, and pulled pints by night. One afternoon, he wandered into a kart meeting, watched for a while, and decided he wanted a go.

That afternoon rearranged him. An appetite for risk and a love of competition, long dormant, met his instinct to turn any situation into a transaction.

He went home, bought a kart, and won the 1971 Irish Kart Championship in his first season of racing. He was twenty-two. He moved up to Formula Ford and proved straight away that his talent for dealing would outlast his talent behind the wheel. He talked a Dublin carpet shop into sponsoring him, and the shop paid him in carpet remnants rather than cash, so on Saturdays he set up a stall on Dublin’s Dandelion Green and sold the offcuts himself. He loved the whole business of it, “the banter, the bartering, the blarney.”

Without quite meaning to, he was already proving the thesis that would sit under every decision he made for the next fifty years: there is a deal inside any situation if you are creative enough to see it.

In 1975, racing in British Formula 3, he crashed hard at Mallory Park and came away with two broken legs and nerve damage. The shock made his hair fall out in the hospital, and his charming, forceful mother told him to start wearing a wig.

He recovered, switched to Formula Atlantic, and won the Irish Formula Atlantic Championship in 1978. The next year, he was back in British F3 alongside Stefan Johansson, the two of them running as “Team Ireland.” By the end of 1979, the money had nearly run out, and Jordan had a clear read on his own ceiling as a driver. He founded Eddie Jordan Racing with no factory, no capital, and no obvious route to anywhere. What he did have was an eye for talent the market had not priced yet, and the nerve to act on it before anyone else.

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The Team Builder

Jordan’s team won the 1987 British Formula 3 title with a young Johnny Herbert. He moved up to Formula 3000 and won the championship in 1989 with Jean Alesi.

Jordan found drivers before the market understood what they were worth, developed them on his own money, then sold access to them to bigger teams, sponsors, and manufacturers. He steered Alesi into Formula 1 and turned the relationship into a line to Camel’s sponsorship money. Every rung was a platform for the next deal. The junior team raced cars, and the business beneath it operated as a talent brokerage.

Over the winter of 1989 into 1990, Jordan put every penny he had into building a Formula 1 team. He hired three men to design the car: Gary Anderson, who had wrenched at Brabham and McLaren and drawn Reynard’s title-winning F3000 car; Andrew Green, a young mechanical engineer; and Mark Smith, who handled the transmission. The three of them worked out of a small unit at Silverstone and produced one of the most over-achieving first-year cars the sport has seen.

He landed a $7 million deal with 7UP and arranged Cosworth engines through Ford. He painted the car green for Ireland and put the Irish Tourist Board on the sidepod. The deal carried a standing obligation: every Thursday of a Grand Prix weekend, Jordan would turn up at an Irish embassy function and talk up the value of Ireland.

The car started life as the Jordan 911 until Porsche’s lawyers threatened to sue. Jordan flew to Stuttgart, sat down with them in person, and explained that a rebrand at that stage would wipe him out. He left with a brand-new Porsche 911 Carrera on an eighteen-month loan, handed over as compensation for renaming the car the Jordan 191. The rebrand cost him nothing.

Strip Jordan’s career down, and the method is always the same:

1. Walk into the room where the problem is.

2. Find the deal living inside that room.

3. Walk out with something nobody expected you to take.

His Friends, the Bailiffs

1991 was the best and most frightening year of Jordan’s working life. The money was so tight he was on first-name terms with every bailiff in Northampton. They would ring ahead to tell him they were coming and add, helpfully, “Just make sure you don’t answer the door.” The budget had been set at $7.5 million. The team was spending closer to $11 million.

On track, the joke was on everyone who had written them off. Race after race, the Jordan 191 was quick. It finished fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, ahead of Tyrrell, Lotus, and Brabham, three teams with history and money the new boys did not have. The owner of this fifth-place team had been selling carpet offcuts at a market stall less than a decade earlier.

Then came Spa.

In August, at Spa-Francorchamps, the season handed Jordan the moment he would spend the rest of his life proud of and unable to forgive. His driver, Bertrand Gachot, had sprayed CS gas at a London taxi driver during a row, drawn an assault conviction, and gone to prison for eighteen months, all just before the Belgian Grand Prix. Jordan had a car and nobody to drive it, and almost no money to pay whoever did. Stefan Johansson was the first call. Johansson wanted to be paid.

So Jordan kept looking. Word reached him from the Mercedes sports car program about a twenty-two-year-old German named Michael Schumacher. The economics ran backward in Jordan’s favor. Mercedes paid him $150,000 to give Schumacher the drive. He asked whether the kid had ever raced at Spa. Schumacher’s manager, Willi Weber, told him, “I think about 100 times.” It was a flat lie. The deal was done anyway.

Schumacher turned up at Spa, lifted a folding bicycle out of the boot of his company car, and pedaled round one of the most dangerous circuits in the world to learn it. Picture the future seven-time champion freewheeling up through Eau Rouge on a shopping bike, two days before his debut.

He qualified seventh and put four places between himself and his experienced teammate Andrea de Cesaris. “The test drive before Spa was a wonder of the world,” Jordan said later. “I had only experienced such a presence of a young guy, such talent, such incredible speed, such confidence, once before, with Ayrton Senna.”

The debut itself was brief. Schumacher’s clutch failed on the first lap and he was out, a Jordan error, money saved in the wrong place. The impression survived the result. Before the next race in Italy, Benetton poached him. Jordan went for an injunction and lost, because no final contract had been signed, and had to watch the sport’s next world champion walk off into Flavio Briatore’s pocket.

He never quite forgave the sequence. He did, in time, extract his price. When Ralf Schumacher later drove for Jordan and wanted out, Michael had to pay to release his younger brother. Jordan told him straight: “Have a look at the contract, you’re very good at looking at contracts. There’s a buyout clause; it’s two million quid. Pay me the two million, and you can take him wherever you like.” Michael paid roughly $3.3 million.

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Benson & Hedges Years

The 1990s were the team’s peak, commercially and on the track. From 1996, Benson & Hedges came in as primary sponsor and gave a hand-to-mouth operation its first taste of real money. Jordan spent it on talent, the way he always had.

The Benson & Hedges liveries are among the most recognizable in the sport. The yellow-and-black snake, drawn up to dodge tobacco advertising rules, and the gold variations that followed, did more for the team’s profile than a plain cigarette logo ever could. Jordan had turned a ban into an advertisement. He had been running the same move since the day he took carpet instead of cash. The currency got bigger in the top flight. The method never changed.

Everything the team had been building toward arrived on one soaking afternoon. The 1998 Belgian Grand Prix was chaos, and only a handful of cars made it to the finish. Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion, had been dropped by Williams, served a grim year at Arrows, and came to Jordan as a last throw of the dice. He won. His teammate Ralf Schumacher came home second. Nobody had planned for it, least of all the organizers, who had no Irish anthem ready for the podium and instead played “God Save the Queen.”

1999 was the year it nearly all came together. Heinz-Harald Frentzen had replaced Ralf, who left for Williams once Michael had bought out his contract. Frentzen won in France and Italy and arrived at the Nürburgring on 50 points, ten behind Mika Häkkinen and Eddie Irvine, who were tied at the top on 60. He took pole. He led. When Häkkinen pitted early for tires, and Irvine’s crew bungled a stop, both title contenders dropped out of the points. Hold that order, and Frentzen wins the race, draws level on points, and turns the championship into a three-way fight with two rounds to go.

It didn’t hold. Coming out of the pits after his first stop on lap 33, Frentzen left the anti-stall engaged; the car died at the first corner and would not restart. The team called it an electrical failure. Back in the garage afterward, the car fired up perfectly. The “electrical failure” line was there to spare a driver the humiliation of a self-inflicted error at the worst possible moment of his season, at home, with a world championship in view. Jordan never blamed him in public. “Psychologically, it was a huge chasm to climb out of,” he said. “That race was his.”

The team finished third in the Constructors’ and third in the Drivers’ that year. Nothing it did afterward ever reached that line again.

Collapse and Exit

The slide from 1999 to 2005 is the reason the team eventually sold for a meager $60 million. It is also why $60 million, taken at the right moment and put to good use, became the basis for everything Jordan did next.

In June 2003 he sued Vodafone for roughly $244 million, claiming the company had verbally agreed a three-year sponsorship before handing it to Ferrari. He tried to pull the case at the last minute, as the judge was about to rule, offering to cover Vodafone’s costs. Too late. The judge delivered the verdict anyway and called the allegations “without foundation and false.” The legal bill was steep. The reputational bill was steeper. Benson & Hedges and DHL both walked that same year, and a team that had finished third in 1999 was suddenly fighting to survive on a fraction of its old budget.

In early 2005, Jordan was sold to the Midland Group for about $60 million. He was selling the labor of love he had built from a kart bought with his savings, funded with carpet remnants on a Saturday stall, and kept breathing by bailiffs who were good enough to phone ahead.

That team kept changing hands. It became Force India, then Racing Point, and today it is Aston Martin. Lawrence Stroll bought it out of administration in 2018 for $120 million, and it is now valued at around $3.2 billion. The line runs unbroken from a $3.2 billion Formula 1 team back to the Jordan 191 and the Irishman who painted his cars green for a tourist-board cheque.

Second Act

Jordan sold the team in 2005 and treated the proceeds as ammunition for what came next.

Property came first. He put money into commercial real estate, residential developments across Ireland and the UK, land with a PGA golf course, and a stretch of the Bulgarian coast. He kept the Monaco apartment and added properties in London and Cape Town. The portfolio would eventually be valued at north of $100 million. Each property got the same test he had used since Jersey: find an asset the market has mispriced, and move before everyone else works it out.

He ran the same logic in financial services. He backed Clareville Capital, the hedge fund set up by photographer and investor David Yarrow. He took a seat on Citi Private Bank’s advisory board. He bought into Kinmont Advisory, a corporate advisory firm. What Jordan brought to each table was a contact book assembled over fifteen years at the top of motorsport, stocked with the names of some of the richest people and companies on earth. He had understood early that access is its own asset class. The $60 million was seed money. The network was the business.

In 2001, while he was still running the F1 team, Jordan joined a group of Irish businessmen, among them his friend Dermot Desmond, Ireland’s most powerful private investor, in putting about $24.5 million into Celtic Football Club. Jordan’s own stake was around $1.4 million. The Celtic cheque was as much about cementing a relationship as chasing a return, and Desmond and Jordan would co-invest together many times after it. Jordan grasped the sports-equity model, buying into cultural assets that carry brand value out of all proportion to their balance sheets, a good decade or two before it became fashionable.

The Gaming Play

While the public filed Jordan away as a retired team boss turned TV pundit, he was also building a serious position in European gaming.

He read the structural shift early: online regulation loosening across Europe, betting moving from the high street to the phone, back-end suppliers consolidating, live casino platforms growing fast. He positioned himself for every part of it.

His long-term holding in Entain, the London-listed operator behind Ladbrokes, Coral, and Bwin, gave him exposure to the world's largest regulated betting and gaming business. His stake in Evolution, the Swedish live-casino technology firm that supplies nearly every major online operator, handed him a piece of one of the fastest-rising stocks in European gaming history; Evolution’s shares climbed more than 2,000% between 2017 and 2021. His position in Scientific Games, the American lottery and gaming-technology group, completed a set that covered the whole structure of modern gambling: the operator, the technology supplier, and the infrastructure underneath.

In 2021, he founded JKO Capital with Keith O’Loughlin, a former Scientific Games executive who knew the global gaming-technology market from the inside. The point of JKO was to move from passive stakes into active acquisitions. Jordan wanted to stop deferring to other people’s decisions and start making the calls himself. He was seventy-three, and as hungry for a deal as he had ever been.

The Portfolio

The rest of the book was eclectic. He held stakes in Zwift, the indoor cycling and running platform; Docplanner, a medical technology company operating in 13 countries; Tosca, a reusable packaging specialist; Valeo Foods, the Irish food group; Jarvis Hotels; and Ceiba, a healthcare technology business.

In 2012, he went past passive ownership and co-acquired Debrett’s in a management buyout alongside the private-equity executive Darryl Eales. Founded in 1769, Debrett’s is the definitive British authority on the peerage and etiquette, the book that tells you how to address a duke, who outranks whom at a state dinner, and what every titled family is actually worth. A former bank teller from Dublin who sold carpet offcuts at a Saturday market ended up owning the rulebook of the British aristocracy. Let that sit for a second.

He built consumer brands of his own, too, with V10 vodka and an energy drink called EJ-10. He was a director of and investor in Spring Studios and George & Dragon, a PR and marketing agency. The man was everywhere, in on everything.

The range looks scattered until you find the through-line. It runs straight back to the day he talked a Dublin carpet shop into sponsoring a racing driver with no results to show for it. The sector never mattered much to Jordan. What mattered was getting in early, the strength of the relationship, and timing the exit. He dealt across markets because that is what dealers do, taking whatever offered the best terms.

The Final Move

In his last year, Jordan went after distressed sports assets with the same appetite he had carried from the start. Jordan Associates described the strategy plainly: minority strategic investments in sports entities carrying deep cultural and historical value. The model was the one City Football Group had proven, a web of connected clubs sharing infrastructure, data, commercial deals, and talent across leagues and borders, applied to rugby.

His last move in Formula 1 turned out to be the most consequential. In 2024, Jordan managed his friend Adrian Newey’s exit from Red Bull. Newey is the most decorated designer in the sport’s history, and Jordan brokered his switch to Aston Martin on a reported $30 million a year. When Christian Horner realized Jordan was behind it, he called him a “silent assassin.” Nobody had seen him coming. Very Eddie Jordan.

In February 2025, Jordan’s consortium completed a takeover of London Irish, the rugby club that had been thrown out of the Premiership, carrying debts of around $38.4 million. At the same time, the group was in talks to buy the French Pro D2 side AS Béziers Hérault, stretching the network model into another country.

The London Irish deal closed ten days before Eddie Jordan died, on March 20, 2025, after a short and brutal fight with cancer. He was dealing to the end. His final podcast appearance, with David Coulthard, went out the day he passed.

The Bottom Line

The estate Jordan left behind is estimated at around $600 million. Run the tape back to the start, and the arithmetic barely makes sense. A bank teller’s summer wages become a kart. Carpet offcuts sold on Saturdays fund a racing career. A first-year Formula 1 team stays alive on the goodwill of bailiffs who phoned ahead. A $60 million exit in 2005 seeded a portfolio spanning hedge funds, gaming technology, property on three continents, and sports equity.

He never won a Formula 1 championship. He never ran the fastest car on the grid. He spent all fourteen of his seasons as a team owner somewhere near the edge of ruin, and then turned $60 million into something close to $600 million across the twenty years that followed.

Here is the part most people get wrong about Eddie Jordan: the dealing was the point, start to finish. The racing, the property, the gaming stocks, the rugby clubs, all of it was the table he happened to be playing at on a given day.

So here is the call. Jordan’s loudest monument will not be the $600 million. It will be the team. The line runs unbroken from a Formula 1 team now worth billions, chasing its first championship with the best designer of his generation drawing its cars, all the way back to a green machine built in a Silverstone shed by three engineers and a man who paid his early bills off a trestle table on a Dublin green. If Adrian Newey makes Aston Martin a winner, the first title to trace cleanly back to the Jordan 191 will land years after its founder is gone, bought with the last deal he ever brokered. I think it happens. Jordan spent a lifetime being right about people before the market caught up, and Newey may be the last and best example of it.

Oscar Wilde understood something about money that some people still resist: that taking it seriously is not a character flaw. Eddie Jordan never needed the lesson. He made the deal his art form, and he worked at it until the week he died.

RIP Eddie. You legend.

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Nick Meacham, who runs SportsPro Media, opened SportsPro London 2026 on 22 May with an essay titled “Eight things the sports industry keeps telling itself”. Reality number five reads: “Creators and athletes are the future of sport’s content.” On the StreamTime Sports podcast, Meacham and Chris Stone chewed on it, and Meacham did the honest thing by attaching the nuance most of the industry skips. It is already happening. Official channels do not pull the engagement that athletes and creators do. And here is the line that should keep every rights executive up at night, because he is naming the business model itself, the mechanics of who owns the audience: when the engagement lives on someone else’s channel, the rights-holder “is simply renting the relationship.”

DAZN48 is a network of 48 football creators, one per qualified nation, deployed as “fan correspondents” for the 2026 World Cup. Applications opened on 24 April, and DAZN pushed the deadline to 15 May after the volume came in higher than expected.

I described exactly this in July 2022. Writing for #paid’s BANKNOTES, I argued that “the top soccer creators to watch ahead of the World Cup” were already building the modern fan experience, spending every day entertaining and educating their audiences for free. That same summer I said sport should hand creators the raw feeds and let them assemble their own broadcasts. I had been circling the same shift since October 2015, when I wrote that Facebook Mentions Live spelled trouble for Periscope because the direct creator-to-audience pipe was coming for the broadcast model. DAZN48 is the institutional version of the thing I sketched out in 2015.

There’s really no debate whether creators can win and move the needle. But who collects?

In Brazil, CazéTV, the free YouTube channel built by streamer Casimiro Miguel and now home to around 31 million subscribers, holds the only rights in the country to all 104 World Cup matches in 2026, against Globo’s 55. Cristiano Ronaldo bought a stake in its parent company, LiveMode, in May 2026. A streamer who started in his bedroom now out-carries the national broadcaster, and the most-followed athlete alive is an investor. That is the present tense.

In the US, Pat McAfee turned a desk and a microphone into a five-year, $85 million ESPN arrangement announced in May 2023, with the show license itself reportedly running about $17 million a year because McAfee covers his own production. As of this month, he is negotiating an extension reported to be worth more than $60 million annually, which would make him ESPN’s highest-paid voice. In golf, Bryson DeChambeau built a YouTube channel with roughly 2.7 million subscribers that at times surpassed the PGA Tour’s official account, which had around 1.48 million, and he has said LIV’s lighter schedule gave him the room to do it. FIFA, for its part, named YouTube and TikTok “Preferred Platforms” for 2026 and agreed in March to let broadcasters stream the first ten minutes of every match live on YouTube, with TikTok running an official content hub. The governing body is openly routing attention through channels it does not own.

This is the part the industry keeps fumbling. The winners build creator-first, then add the institution. Cadillac understood it when it hired a creator-focused CMO before it had a car on the grid, an organization designed around the channel that actually holds the audience. Liberty Media made the same read when it bet on culture instead of ratings. Aston Martin made it when it put creators where celebrities used to stand at a car launch. The teams treating content as a revenue engine are building the muscle broadcasters wish they had, which is the whole reason I keep arguing that the broadcast is the least interesting part of the product.

There is a cost nobody at the conferences wants to name. The athlete economy narrows the pie. Cristiano Ronaldo passed a billion cross-platform followers in September 2024, and his “UR · Cristiano” YouTube channel hit a million subscribers in roughly 90 minutes after launch, which is enormous personal leverage and also a gravity well that pulls value toward one man, his agent, and his family office while less reaches the league, the academy, and the development pipeline that produced him in the first place. Even MrBeast, the most-subscribed creator on the planet, admitted in 2025 that his per-video views had slipped from a peak of roughly 200 million toward the mid-50 million, a reminder that individual attention is leverage right up until it leaks. The money pools around a handful of people, and the rest of the system gets the runoff.

The one body that handled this well did the counterintuitive thing. The NBA treated highlights as free marketing, while the NFL was fining teams up to $100,000 for posting in-game clips under its 2016 policy. The NBA’s audience grew, and in July 2024, it signed an 11-year deal worth roughly $76 billion across Disney, NBC, and Amazon, replacing a nine-year package worth about $24 billion, which is roughly three times the prior annual value. They gave the clips away and got paid more for the rights, and that is what converting attention into revenue actually looks like in practice.

Here is my call, and I am happy to be wrong about the timing.

The next media-rights cycle goes to whoever turns the conversation into revenue. Expect broadcasters to flood their schedules with cheap, opinion-led, creator-style programming on the McAfee model, because the math is too clean to ignore, and it is the only format that competes with what is already winning. And the first rights-holder that hands creators real economics, equity, and shared upside, the kind of deal that goes past rev-share crumbs and an affiliate link, resets the market the way the NBA’s open-highlights bet did.

I think that happens inside the next rights cycle. DAZN hired 48 people to build relationships. Whoever figures out how to let creators own one collects the decade.

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Twenty-one kilometers of steel Armco. Twenty thousand square meters of wire fencing. Tonnes of grandstand material, all bolted onto streets that residents drove to work in January and will drive to work again in July. Today is Saturday. Hundreds of yachts are settled into Port Hercules. The Ritz-Carlton has docked its 623-foot vessel, the Evrima, in the harbor with its 149 cabins, a private chef rotation, a full spa operation, and suites running from $10,000 to over $100,000 for the weekend.

On Sunday, the cars go. On Sunday evening at 6:00 PM, the barriers start coming down. By Monday morning, most of the roads will be open.

Monaco will have run its race, earned its fee, and returned to being what it actually is: a 2.1-square-kilometer principality with a €10.3 billion GDP, zero income tax, zero wealth tax, zero capital gains, zero property levy, and twelve Formula 1 drivers who chose to live here for reasons that have nothing to do with the Mediterranean light.

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A Cigarette Man Needed a Permit

The story starts in 1925, with paperwork.

Antony Noghès ran the tobacco monopoly for the Grimaldi family, which gave him standing in Monaco without giving him ambitions beyond it. By 1925, he wanted to transform the Automobile Club de Monaco from a regional motoring curiosity into a recognized national body under the AIACR. This is the organization that would become the FIA. The requirement for national club status was to host an international racing event wholly within your territory.

Monaco is 2.1 square kilometers.

Noghès spent three years routing a circuit through the only streets that existed, working with Monaco’s most celebrated driver, Louis Chiron, to thread it past the harbor, up past the casino, down to the sea, through a tunnel under the Fairmont Hotel site, and back around. The Société des Bains de Mer, Monaco’s casino company with the Grimaldi family as majority stakeholders, underwrote the first race. Sixteen invited drivers appeared on April 14, 1929, racing for 100,000 French francs (~$4,000 USD at the time).

William Grover-Williams won in a Bugatti T35B, beating Rudolf Caracciola by a margin that the records have measured and history has since ignored. He would go on to win the French Grand Prix twice. He would later be recruited by the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, code-named Sebastian, running a resistance network outside Paris alongside two fellow racing drivers. The Nazis captured him in August 1943 and executed him at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in March 1945. He was forty-two years old and posthumously recommended for the Order of the British Empire.

The Greek Who Tried to Own It

By 1953, Aristotle Onassis had decided he wanted Monaco.

He had done this before, wanting something large and acquiring it through methods that were not quite transparent. Through Panamanian shell companies, Onassis accumulated shares in the Société des Bains de Mer until he held 52% of the company that controlled Monaco’s casino, its hotels, and its cultural infrastructure. Prince Rainier III had initially welcomed the investment. Monaco needed capital. Onassis had capital.

Their relationship deteriorated as Onassis’s vision for the principality collided with Rainier’s. Onassis wanted Monaco to remain an exclusive enclave for a small clientele of the supremely wealthy, the kind of place where 200-foot yachts anchored and nothing was built for anyone who couldn’t afford them. Rainier wanted broader tourism, more construction, and a modern state rather than a private club for the rich. Onassis, in essence, saw Monaco as an asset to be managed for returns. Rainier saw it as a country to be governed.

In June 1966, Rainier approved the creation of 600,000 new SBM shares to be permanently held by the state. Onassis’s stake collapsed from 52% to under a third overnight. He challenged the dilution in Monaco’s Supreme Court and lost in March 1967. He sold his holdings to the state for $9.5 million and left.

The Grimaldis had ruled Monaco since 1297 by disguising themselves as monks and talking their way past gate guards. Diluting a Greek shipping magnate through share creation was, historically speaking, a relatively conventional defense. They currently hold 59.47% of SBM. The company reports annual revenues of €768 million with a record €110M profit. Interesting note: the Grimaldis are the oldest ruling house in Europe.

The Wedding That Changed the Value of Everything

Through the 1940s and early 1950s, Monaco’s glamour was a regional thing. The European casino destination, with its beautiful coastline, is the sort of place wealthy French and Italians went when they wanted to gamble in clement weather. The Grimaldis were royalty in a principality most people couldn’t locate precisely on a map. Prince Rainier III understood that Monaco needed something it could not manufacture domestically.

Then he met Grace Kelly in Monaco in May 1955, while Kelly was at Cannes.

On April 18 and 19, 1956, Kelly, an American film star and Academy Award winner, twenty-six years old, married Rainier in two ceremonies broadcast live to over 30 million television viewers across nine countries via Eurovision. It was the first royal wedding ever televised. She wore 100 yards of silk net, 125-year-old rose-point lace, and thousands of tiny pearls, assembled by MGM’s costume designer Helen Rose, in a gown the studio donated because the publicity value of Grace Kelly becoming a princess was beyond what any conventional marketing budget could achieve. Kelly retired from acting permanently to do it.

Monaco’s tourism numbers climbed in the years that followed. The Grand Prix, which had run as part of the F1 World Championship since 1950, now existed inside a completely different cultural frame. Photographers who came to Monaco for the race weekend came for the race; they stayed, increasingly, for everything else. The paddock and the harbor and the terraces and the helicopters and the people who arrived on them acquired meaning that the circuit itself couldn’t generate alone.

The race became the Monaco race. That distinction, which sounds superficial, is worth approximately €10 billion in annual GDP today.

De Gaulle’s Blockade and the Tax Trap

The tax code that draws Formula 1 drivers to this square mile came out of a confrontation, not a gift.

Monaco’s zero-income-tax regime for residents predates Formula 1 as a concept. What it created, through the mid-20th century, was a steady migration of wealthy French citizens moving a short distance over the border to escape the French Republic’s tax apparatus. By the early 1960s, de Gaulle’s government was watching French capital drain toward the Riviera and had run out of patience.

In 1962, France imposed a customs blockade on Monaco. Border controls were in place on every road in and out of the principality. Monaco, which France surrounds entirely and defends by treaty, had approximately zero leverage.

The principality capitulated. On May 18, 1963, the Franco-Monegasque tax convention was signed under conditions that were, diplomatically, as close to compulsion as sovereign negotiations get.

The provision that still runs today: French nationals residing in Monaco are taxed on their worldwide income exactly as if they had never left France. Unless they established Monaco residence before October 13, 1962, and have remained continuously since. That grandfather clause is now sixty-three years old. The people it protected are mostly dead. What remains is a hard boundary that splits the paddock cleanly.

Pierre Gasly was born in Rouen. Esteban Ocon was born in Normandy. Both hold French passports. Both pay French taxes regardless of their address. The treaty de Gaulle forced on Monaco in 1963 is the reason you will not find their names on the resident list, and why the tax arithmetic that drives eleven other drivers to the same square mile simply does not apply to them.

The Colony

12 of the twenty-two drivers on the 2026 grid are Monaco residents. Charles Leclerc was born here in 1997.

Max Verstappen’s reported salary from Red Bull sits in the range of €60-70 million annually before sponsorship. For a driver at that earnings level, the UK income tax liability in a single year would approach £25 million. Over a ten-year career peak, choosing Monaco over London is a decision I venture could be worth somewhere in the range of £200 million in accumulated net wealth. The €500,000 minimum bank deposit required to establish Monaco residency, which remains in your account, accruing interest, represents less than 1% of that figure.

The 183-day minimum stay requirement is the only genuine constraint, and the Formula 1 calendar mostly satisfies it for you. F1 drivers travel more than 75,000 miles per year across 24 race weekends. Between travel days, testing, sponsor commitments, and factory visits, being physically present in Monaco for the remaining calendar nights requires no particular sacrifice.

Nice Côte d’Azur Airport is under 15 road miles away. Seven minutes by helicopter from Fontvieille. For people who commute between Bahrain, Melbourne, Silverstone, Singapore, and Las Vegas in a single season, seven minutes to one of the best-connected airports in southern Europe is just another day in the life.

Then Monaco requires written government permission for all professional photography in public spaces. In a principality where one-third of the residents are millionaires, that law has cultural weight that money cannot replicate elsewhere. Verstappen is not a celebrity in Monaco. He is a neighbor. The principality’s structural disinterest in fame is the most expensive private amenity on offer, and it costs nothing on top of the bank deposit.

The Mystique

The circuit is, by any rational modern assessment, unsuitable for Formula 1 cars.

The Circuit de Monaco runs 3.337 kilometers through streets that have not seen a meaningful change in layout since the 1986 harbor chicane was added. The cars have changed. And while the 2026 chassis regulations are far better than their predecessors, these cars are still too big for streets like Monaco.

Drivers enter the section under the Fairmont Hotel at approximately 280 kilometers per hour. They go from full Mediterranean sunlight to complete darkness in a fraction of a second. They are still adjusting when they come out the other side, back into daylight, at the track’s fastest point, with the chicane brake zone arriving less than a second later. Every driver who has described it in detail has said the same thing: there is nothing else like it in world motorsport. The sensory whiplash at those speeds, on a public road tunnel, is genuinely unlike anything the sport produces anywhere else.

And then there is the racing, which is almost entirely absent. In 2024, the top ten in qualifying finished the race in exactly that order. In 2025, the FIA mandated two pit stops per driver. Lando Norris won. The mandatory two-stop rule was subsequently withdrawn. What will 2026 bring? We’re about to find out.

None of it matters, though. 250,000+ people attend over the weekend, a record set in 2024. Hundreds of yachts fill the harbor. Every hotel room within five kilometers exceeds the cost-per-night figures most people encounter once in a lifetime, if at all.

The impossibility of real racing here is the point. The mystique requires the constriction. A Monaco where drivers could actually follow each other through the tunnel and attack into the chicane would be a different event entirely. The tension between modern machinery and ancient streets is what the broadcast sells. We’ve covered how street circuits generally interact with F1’s commercial strategy, and Monaco is the original. It’s the one every subsequent attempt is auditioning against.

What the Machine Produces

Monaco pays Formula One Management $20 million annually to host this race. Before the contract extension signed late last year, which runs through 2035 and reportedly doubled the fee to approximately $40 million, it was the lowest sanctioning fee on the entire calendar. And even at $40 million, it would still be the lowest fee.

Liberty Media accepted the discount for the same reason every smart negotiator accepts a below-market price: they were buying something the money couldn’t fully capture.

The direct economics of race weekend are staggering regardless. Monaco’s statistics office has estimated the Grand Prix contributes over €100 million to the local economy over four race days. Hotels run at 96.7% occupancy. A sea view room at the Fairmont runs €25,000 for the weekend. A terrace suite at the Hôtel Hermitage exceeds €48,000. As we’ve written before, the real hospitality margins in Formula 1 operate well above the Paddock Club tier, and Monaco is where that hierarchy becomes most visible.

A prime trackside mooring for a 50-to-59 meter superyacht costs €110,135 for the week in 2026, up 47% from €74,737 in 2019. A master suite cabin aboard one of the hundred or so yachts costs between €24,000 and €42,000 per person for the weekend, with private chef and maid service included. The Ritz-Carlton’s Evrima, at 623 feet and 149 cabins, represents the hotel industry’s recognition that Port Hercules during race week is a category that justifies sailing an entire floating hotel to Monaco once per year. Somebody running an Owner’s Suite at $100,000 is not watching the race. They are watching who else is in the harbor. The race is the reason the harbor looks the way it does.

Liberty Media will keep Monaco on the calendar as long as the Automobile Club de Monaco signs contracts, and the ACM will sign contracts until Formula 1 gives them a reason not to.

The race’s commercial identity has no substitute. When Drive to Survive transformed F1 from a European niche into a global cultural event between 2019 and 2023, Monaco was the episode that required the least explanation to new audiences. Every new fan who encountered the sport through Netflix encountered Monaco first in terms of cultural legibility, even if Silverstone, COTA, or Suzuka gave them better racing.

Liberty understands it’s running a luxury lifestyle brand, and Monaco is the original proof of concept for its authenticity. Vegas is aspirational. Miami is new. Monaco is the thing both of those venues are trying to be adjacent to.

You cannot manufacture ninety-seven years of continuous history by offering a better fee structure.

Seventy-eight times on Sunday. The most laps on the calendar, around the shortest, slowest, narrowest track in the sport. Add it all up, and the race covers about 260 kilometers, short of the 305 every other Grand Prix has to clear. The sport bends its own rulebook to keep this one.

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And I already know exactly what you’re going to say, because everyone says it.

You’re right. Let me say it louder than you will. I have sat through Monaco Grands Prix where the single most dramatic event was a slow pit stop, turned to whoever was in the room, and called it a masterpiece. I was lying. Overtaking here ranges from heroic to impossible. In all of 2025, under a brand-new rule forcing everyone to pit twice, the entire race saw only one legal overtake. One. Zero inside the top ten. Mercedes ran the numbers: to have even a coin-flip’s chance of passing the car ahead, you needed to be four and a half seconds a lap quicker.

That car doesn’t exist.

Max Verstappen took one look at the 2024 edition and got on the radio to say it was so boring he should have brought his pillow. Even Will Buxton, who loves the place, says the quiet part out loud: “The racing itself has never been great in Monaco.” Not lately. Not ever.

So here’s my confession, and then my line in the sand.

I make my living looking forward. By temperament and by paycheck, I am the last guy on earth who should be defending a traffic jam invented in 1929 off the coast of a tax haven.

But if you come for Monaco, I will fight you in the street.

Let me give you the why, because “tradition” is a lazy answer, and you deserve better than that.

Over the last few decades, Formula 1 has gotten safer, and thank God for it. It also got softer. The sport sanded down its corners and paved over its mistakes until a screw-up costs you a few tenths and a frown from your engineer. Run wide at most modern tracks, and you’ll find a parking lot of smooth asphalt waiting to catch you, dust you off, and hand you back. The walls moved away. Danger became a number on a screen.

Monaco never got the memo. Monaco kept the wall.

That’s the whole argument, and it lives on Saturday.

Because the secret about the crown jewel is that the jewel is qualifying. Sunday is a coronation. The pole lap is the achievement. One driver, one car, one lap, no margin, no help, the barrier a hand’s width from the wheel at every apex and a guillotine at every exit. Get it wrong, and you don’t lose a few tenths, you lose the car, the weekend, the skin off your knuckles. Fernando Alonso calls it “the best Saturday of the year,” all adrenaline and fun behind the wheel, then admits the race itself “can be a little bit boring.” Daniel Ricciardo said it better than the rest of us could: “It’s so awesomely scary and beautiful and insane and intense.”

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And nobody ever drove that edge like Ayrton Senna in 1988.

He was already on pole. Job done, feet up. Instead, he kept going, and the lap kept getting faster, until he was a second and a half clear of Alain Prost in the identical car. His own words, because no one has ever described the inside of greatness better than this:

Not the tunnel under the hotel. The whole circuit had become a tunnel. He scared himself so badly that he backed off and came in. A man drove clean past the edge of his own mind, and the only sane thing left to do was stop.

Then Monaco did what Monaco does. On Sunday, he led that race by almost a minute. Untouchable. On lap sixty-seven, mind drifting out front, he kissed the barrier at Portier and threw the whole thing away. He didn’t drive back to the pits. He walked to his apartment and didn’t come out for hours. The same wall that crowned him on Saturday swallowed him on Sunday.

You cannot fake that. You cannot bolt it onto a sprint race, a DRS zone, or a fan vote. It exists for one reason. The walls are real.

In 2024, a kid named Charles Leclerc, who grew up on those exact streets and spent his childhood looking down at that circuit, won his home Grand Prix and broke down on the radio, the first Monégasque to win it since Louis Chiron in 1931. You don’t get that in a parking lot in the desert. You can’t build it or buy it. It happened because a hundred years of the same impossible streets were still standing there, waiting for him.

This is why I’ve started calling Monaco the cathedral that the sport refuses to renovate. Everything else in Formula 1 sprints into the future. Aero by the millimeter, strategy by the algorithm, a calendar stuffing itself with shiny new street circuits built to look like Monaco the way a casino buffet is built to look like Italy. The machine runs flat out, forward, always. And then, once a year, it stops, takes off its hat, and drives the same lap it has since a Bugatti piloted by a man racing under a fake name won the first one. Graham Hill won it five times, and they called him Mr Monaco. Senna won it six. The track has barely moved. The royal family still watches from the same box.

Because I optimize everything. So do you. We sand the friction off our days, automate the dull parts, A/B test the wonder until it converts. The one move that keeps a person from vanishing into all that smoothness is to plant a flag on something gloriously, stubbornly inefficient and refuse to fix it. A manual gearbox in a world that shifts for you. A long lunch with no agenda. A race that flatly declines to be a good show, kept exactly because keeping it is the meaning.

So to whoever’s drafting the next proposal to take Monaco off the calendar or widen the hairpin, please, put the pen down. That corner is the slowest in the sport already, twenty-eight miles an hour at the apex, and it has never once needed your help. They ran the experiment last year. The two-stop rule was the fix, and it led teams to order one car to back up the field so the other could escape into clean air. Gone by 2026, struck from the book inside twelve months. You’re trying to fix the one race that was never broken. The procession is exactly what it’s supposed to be. The boredom is the price of admission to the only test left in the sport where a mistake still costs a human being something real.

Keep your new circuits. I’ll watch those too. I want both, the way I always want both.

Just leave the walls where they are. Leave Monaco alone.

Formula 1 is always going to chase “tomorrow”, but Monaco is the one Sunday a year it remembers it was always about a person, a machine, and a hand’s width of empty air.

Don’t you dare get rid of it.

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I don’t know why I think about that ad so often, especially in today’s world, where we have AI models doing a lot of that for us.

Maybe because SAP has been a longtime client of mine, or maybe because they were on to something early.

I’ll move on to the point. Anthropic gave itself a job title at Williams: Official Thinking Partner.

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Every tech sponsor in Formula 1 sells compute, cloud, or connectivity. Anthropic‘s Claude is selling the cognitive work itself, which happens to be the one thing nobody has figured out how to put on a billboard.

That’s why “Pattern of Thought” exists.

The value of an AI knowledge tool is invisible. You can’t photograph an engineer reading hundreds of pages of technical regulations faster than he could last season. So, ad agency Mother strapped consumer headsets on Alex Albon, Carlos Sainz, and James Vowles, captured their reactions under pressure in the sim and at the desk, and turned that into a visual that lands on helmets and race suits in Monaco.

They sold the romance of thinking.

Williams Racing Team Principal, James Vowles came up through Mercedes’ strategy. He thinks in data, and a team clawing its way up the order has everything to gain from operational speed without the dynasty-sized ego. A hungry operation makes a better case study than a dominant one.

Every serious team now races with a tech giant in the garage. Oracle has been inside Red Bull since 2021, and this February it extended the title deal and pushed an AI strategy agent trackside; Hannah Schmitz’s strategists already run roughly 25% more race simulations thanks to the cloud behind them. McLaren went the other way with Google, training Gemini models to predict race outcomes. Ferrari runs its strategy engine on AWS, which also ingests 1.1 million data points from each car every second, generated by 300-odd sensors. The aero math is just as stark. A CFD simulation that used to take 40 days now clears in under 12 hours.

So the compute war is both settled and permanent. What’s left to win is judgment.

Since 2021, F1 has operated a cost cap set at $215 million for 2026. You can’t buy your way to the front anymore. Wind tunnel time is rationed, CFD is metered, and salaries are capped, so every team is solving one problem: more performance per regulated dollar.

A tool that lets an engineer digest a new rule, debug a model, or pressure-test a strategy in an afternoon instead of a week isn’t a gadget. It’s cost-cap arbitrage. You’re buying thinking speed in a formula that has capped almost everything except how well your people think.

That’s the real reason Williams was the right lab. Mid-grid was the point. James Vowles came up through Mercedes strategy, he thinks in data, and a team clawing up the order has everything to gain from operational speed and no dynasty-sized ego to protect.

If Anthropic can show that a full racing team moves faster by thinking with Claude, it has written a sales deck for every mid-sized enterprise watching the broadcast. And the Formula 1 calendar is the live demo.

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The Pinterest search “Formula 1 aesthetic outfit” has increased by 483% over the past year. That’s the single most important data point in the business of motorsport right now.

Pinterest just published its Summer 2026 Trend Report, the first edition in its 16-year history dedicated entirely to sport. The team sifted through searches from roughly 600 million monthly users and found something that should rearrange how every F1 team, broadcaster, and sponsor thinks about their audience. The F1 fan has changed shape.

A few more numbers, before we go further:

• “World Cup shirt”: +840%

• “Baddie tracksuit outfit”: +276%

• Dad trainers: +906%

• And the one I had to re-read twice: searches for the American figure skater Alysa Liu, up +39,228%.

That last one is not a typo. Fan culture in 2026 has officially crossed into fashion. Sydney Stanback, Pinterest’s Global Trends Lead, put it cleanly: “Fandom is becoming a global lifestyle signal.” Translation: people are getting dressed in the sport they love.

For the last twenty years, the metric that mattered in the business of motorsport was viewership. How many millions tuned in for Monaco? What the Drive to Survive curve looked like. How long did the race retain its audience after the safety car? You could draw a single line on a chart and tell your sponsors how much attention you were giving them.

Pinterest just made that chart insufficient.

The report calls its headline trend Power Players, and the data is its own argument. “Eileen Gu” searches up 5,503%. “Georgina Rodriguez aesthetic” up 225%. “Caitlin Clark selfie” up 142%. “Angel Reese basketball” is up 96%. Female athletes are being mood-boarded the way Hollywood actresses used to be, with the additional perk that their wardrobes come pre-loaded with merch, sponsors, and trophy cases.

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Pinterest names other trends, too. There’s Sports-Luxe Street Style. Off-Duty Varsity. Pep-Rally Glam, a makeup look with smoky eyes that smudge “like match-day intensity.” Hybrid Trainers. Fan Finishing Touches (tinsel hair: +622%, bandana scarves: +424%, halo hair color: +598%). Each trend tells the same story from a different angle. Sport is bleeding into the dressing table, the closet, the brunch table, the photo dump.

Here’s Stanback again, with the line every Business of Speed reader should ponder:

“It wasn’t contained to one category. It was showing up in fashion, beauty, food, and lifestyle all at once.”

That sentence describes a new species of fan.

Here is a Sunday in the life of an F1 fan, according to Pinterest. Watch the race. Search “Alexandra Saint Mleux Leclerc’s outfit.” Order denim jorts (up 330% in searches). Build a pre-race playlist. Lay out a Pantry Picnic (a Pinterest-named trend built around tinned fish and stone fruit; sardine searches up 1,815%). Take a photo. Post it. Become part of the broadcast.

Sponsorships sell to lifestyles now.

That is why Gucci just signed a roughly $50 million-a-year deal to put its name on an Alpine car. The team will race in 2027 as Gucci Racing Alpine, the first luxury fashion house ever to title-sponsor an F1 team.

Francesca Bellettini, Gucci’s president and CEO, called Formula 1 “a unique convergence of performance, culture, and global reach.” Read between the syllables. She means the only remaining audience on earth where the same screen pulls in Drive to Survive bingers, Pinterest mood-boarders, and traditional Italian tifosi at the same time, in the same hour, all of them with money to spend on a $2,400 belt.

Gucci just paid for an audience that Pinterest already mapped.

Here is the part the motorsport business has to internalize, and quickly.

For thirty years, fashion treated sport as a costume. Stella McCartney designs a one-off F1 race suit for charity. Louis Vuitton makes the trophy trunk for the World Cup. Everyone smiles politely and moves on. Branded courtesy.

That era is over.

Pinterest just turned that shift into a number. Search behavior is the most honest data we have, because people type what they actually want, anonymously, with no one to impress. What 600 million of them are typing is that watching sport, wearing sport, eating sport, and doing their eyeliner like sport have fused into one continuous activity. Sport is the operating aesthetic of regular life now. F1, with its native blend of glamour, geopolitics, and Swiss watch-grade engineering, happens to be the cleanest expression of all of those impulses at once.

The audience has evolved. Teams measuring viewership minutes are reading last year’s report. Pinterest published this year’s.

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Fellow Substacker, dove in deep on this report. Check it out below 👇🏻

Practice Session

Pinterest put F1 in its latest Trend Report. Here's what that means for brand marketers

When you think of Pinterest, wedding mood boards, dinner party decor, and holiday photo looks come to mind. So when the Summer 2026 Trend Report comes out and names Formula 1 looks as a documented aesthetic that 600 million monthly active users are actively saving and searching, that’s worth paying attention to…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Manvi Mittal

The deal lands at a complicated moment for the house. Gucci has now posted eleven consecutive quarters of organic sales declines. Q1 2026 revenue fell 14 percent on a reported basis, with Western Europe soft, China structurally weak, and the Middle East disrupted. Kering CEO Luca de Meo has installed Demna as creative director, reset the product architecture across the portfolio, and publicly described the work ahead as a multi-year reconstruction.

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The F1 spend is part of that reconstruction. Gucci is buying 24 runways disguised as race weekends per year of paddock presence, broadcast distribution into 180+ territories, and direct exposure to one of the wealthiest, most aspirational audiences in global sport. As we covered in Conquering American Culture, the paddock has become the highest-yield luxury distribution surface money can buy at this tier. LVMH bought into the championship across multiple brands in 2024 for a reported $150M per year. Gucci just bought a single team for a third of that and got naming rights on top of that.

Against the cost of equivalent reach through paid media, runway activations, or brand ambassador rosters, the math is defensible. As an instrument for restoring cultural relevance to a brand mid-turnaround, F1 is one of the more efficient surfaces available at this price. That is the only frame under which a fashion CEO commits $150M+ to a team that has not finished higher than fourth in the constructors’ championship in over a decade.

The Briatore Factor

The deal was brokered by Flavio Briatore, Alpine’s executive advisor, and his counterpart was a man he had known for years. De Meo ran Renault Group when it owned Alpine, championed the team’s F1 entry, and only moved to Kering last year. Two operators who already knew the file, sitting on opposite sides of a deal that benefits both companies for different reasons.

Briatore has run this play before. He took over Benetton F1 in 1989 and won back-to-back drivers’ championships with Michael Schumacher in 1994 and 1995. The Italian clothing brand on the side of the car spent fifteen years in Formula 1 and walked away with two titles, a generation of brand equity, and an outsized cultural footprint for a casual-wear company. Briatore has now built two of his most visible commercial chapters around the same template: an Italian clothing brand married to the Enstone factory. Gucci is buying the kind of championship-era brand association Benetton actually earned. Briatore is betting he can deliver it again.

Alpine Needs Stability

Alpine has spent the last two years on the open market in everything but name. Otro Capital, the American PE firm with Patrick Mahomes, Ryan Reynolds, Travis Kelce, Rob McElhenney, and Rory McIlroy among its LPs, paid roughly $233M for 24 percent of the team in 2023. As we laid out in the Toto Wolff dispatch, that stake is now valued at around $750M against a team enterprise value of approximately $3 billion. Multiple buyers have circled, including Wolff himself.

A signed luxury title sponsor at this price changes the conversation. Forward revenue is now visible through 2029. The brand association moves from water treatment to one of the most recognizable houses in luxury fashion. If the team converts the Mercedes power unit into a podium-capable car over the next two seasons, the valuation argument writes itself.

What It Means for the Grid

For the rest of the paddock, the implication is more immediate. Title sponsorship is open to more than just tech and oil. McLaren signed Mastercard for the 2026 season. Williams renewed and expanded with Atlassian. Cadillac is still in the market for a title sponsor. The comp set for every 2027, 2028, and 2029 deal in negotiation now includes Gucci Racing Alpine.

Two things follow. First, mid-tier teams negotiating their next title deal have a defensible upward floor. As we documented in the Fan Prix piece last summer, premium F1 title partnerships were priced between $30M and $70M per year.

Second, sponsorship at the very top of the grid (Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren) becomes harder to discount. The luxury cohort has now demonstrated willingness to pay for a fifth-place team. The premium attached to a championship-contending team is, by definition, higher.

Two things I think are worth pointing out.

One: Gucci is not buying Alpine’s racing program. Gucci is buying access to the F1 audience for a brand mid-restructuring, on terms set by a CEO who knows the property because he used to run it. The F1 paddock has become the most reliable cultural distribution platform in luxury, and Kering needed one for the back half of de Meo’s reconstruction plan.

Two: Briatore has now built two of his most visible commercial chapters around the same template, an Italian clothing brand married to the Enstone race team. Benetton in the 1990s walked into Formula 1 as a casual-wear company and walked out with championships. Gucci in the 2020s is buying the same kind of brand association before the team has earned it. Briatore is betting he can deliver again. Given his record at this factory, the better question is whether anyone should bet against him.

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A man has just driven five hundred miles in a circle at speeds that crest 230 miles an hour, strapped into a carbon-fiber missile that costs more than your house, in front of three hundred thousand people who have been drinking since dawn. He is soaked. His ears are ringing. His heart is doing something his cardiologist would not approve of.

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And before the trophy, before the check, before he kisses the bricks, somebody hands him a glass bottle of cold milk.

Cold, white, served in a glass like it’s 1955.

He tips it back like a six-year-old who just finished mowing an imaginary lawn, lets it run white down his chin, and then dumps the rest over his own head. Whole, probably.

I need you to sit with how strange this is.

In 1936, a driver named Louis Meyer won his third 500 and asked for a glass of buttermilk, because his mother swore there was nothing better on a hot day. Mothers are like that. A photographer caught him gulping it down. A dairy executive saw the picture, smelled an opportunity the way dairy executives apparently do, and offered to put a bottle in the winner’s hands every year after.

That’s the whole origin of the most sacred ritual in American motorsport. A guy was thirsty, and his mom had opinions.

It got serious, the way these things do. Today, before the race, every driver fills out a card declaring a preference: whole, two percent, or fat-free. The American Dairy Association of Indiana keeps it on file like a sommelier’s note. Somewhere in Indianapolis sits a refrigerated cooler holding thirty-three little glass bottles, one for every car on the grid, each labeled, each a small act of faith that its driver might be the one to drink it. Thirty-two of them go home untouched. It’s the only prize at the Speedway you can’t earn ahead of time.

You want to know how much it matters? Ask Emerson Fittipaldi.

In 1993, Fittipaldi won, climbed out, and, being the proud owner of a Brazilian orange grove, reached for orange juice instead. He took a long, deliberate, businesslike sip of OJ on national television, in the cathedral of milk. He had broken no rule. The orange juice was arguably the smarter drink. And none of it saved him, because he had treated the milk as a beverage, and the milk stopped being a beverage in 1936.

They booed him. Hard.

Here is a sport that worships the future. Everything about the Indianapolis 500 is built to chase it: aerodynamics shaved by the millimeter, telemetry by the terabyte, the relentless forward lean of a machine engineered to beat the version of itself that ran last year. And at the climax of the whole spectacle, at the highest moment of triumph, the fastest people on earth reach for the most wholesome, least cool, most grandmotherly thing imaginable.

That’s the secret about rituals. They were never supposed to make sense. A ritual is a thing we agree to keep doing until it starts to mean something, and then keep doing because it does.

Every family has one. The dish nobody actually likes, but no holiday survives without. The toast in a language that half the table can’t speak. Milk is what Indianapolis built instead. It looks ridiculous to the tourist and means the world to the people inside the fence. You drink it because the champions before you drank it, and because someday a kid who isn’t born yet will drink it and think of you.

So when the fastest man alive lifts that bottle, he’s swallowing ninety years of it. Louis Meyer is in there. So is his mother. So is every winner who tipped the same cold glass to the same blinding Indiana sky.

The fastest men in the world spend their whole lives chasing the future.

And the moment they finally catch it, they taste history.

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There was no crowd that day, no trophy, nothing on the line. Just a man and a wheel and a screen full of corners he had run ten thousand times for real. He was forty-one years old and three winless seasons into the back half of a career that had already outrun everyone else’s. And there he was, on an ordinary weekday, chasing a lap time that counted for nothing.

That is the whole story, if you want it in a sentence. Kyle Busch was found unresponsive in that simulator. He died the next day in a Charlotte hospital. The most accomplished racer in the history of his sport spent his last conscious moments doing the one thing that ever made him fully himself.

Racing.

In NASCAR, there is a word the drivers reserve for one another, and they do not give it out for championships. They give it out for something harder to measure. The word is “racer.” It means the one you would want in your car with five laps left and a fender hanging off. It means the driver who would rather win ugly than finish clean. By the end, nobody in the garage argued about who that word belonged to.

He came up out of Las Vegas, a skinny kid who won 65 Legends races before most boys his age had a learner’s permit. put him in a truck at sixteen. By twenty, he had won a Cup race at Fontana and become the youngest man ever to do it. The sport spent the next two decades trying to build a number big enough to hold him and never quite managed it.

The numbers, for the record: 234 wins across NASCAR’s three national series, more than any human being who has ever turned a wheel in the sport. Sixty-three in Cup. A record 102 in Xfinity. A record 69 in Trucks. Two Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019. He won that 2015 title after breaking his leg and his foot in a wreck at Daytona, missing the first eleven races of the year, and coming back to beat everyone anyway. He twice won races in all three national series on the same weekend (Bristol 2010 & 2017), which is a little like throwing a no-hitter, then driving the team bus home and cooking dinner for everyone.

For most of those years, they booed him. He drove a green M&M’s car at Joe Gibbs Racing and answered to a nickname, Rowdy, that he earned and then leaned all the way into. When he won, he climbed out and took a deep, theatrical bow toward grandstands full of people screaming for anyone else. At Chicagoland in 2018, he ran Kyle Larson into the wall to win after Larson clipped him; as they rolled past each other, Larson stuck a thumb out the window in salute, and Busch answered the boos with a crybaby gesture. He played the villain. He never once pretended otherwise, and that honesty is the reason the crowds who jeered him for twenty years are the ones flooding his wife’s charity with donations tonight.

Because Kyle Busch built a life with both hands, too. He and Samantha started the Bundle of Joy Fund after their own long road to having a child, and they quietly paid for other families’ fertility treatments with it for years. His older brother Kurt won a championship of his own; they remain the only brothers to both win Cup titles. And his boy Brexton races now, on dirt and in Legends cars and karts, the way his father once did in the Las Vegas heat. The last thing Kyle Busch posted to the world was about Brexton going racing.

He became a father who watched his son fall for the only thing he himself had ever loved that completely. Not everyone gets that.

His final seasons were lean. The wins that came in floods at Joe Gibbs Racing slowed to a trickle after he moved to Richard Childress Racing and the No. 8 in 2023, and then stopped. His last checkered flag came only days before the end, in a truck race at Dover, long after the Cup victories had dried up. He did not need it to mean anything for a title. He won it because there was a race, and he was in it, and that was always reason enough.

So picture him one more time in that quiet room in Concord. The winningest racer the sport has ever produced, along with a wheel on a Wednesday, running laps that counted for nothing, because the running was the point and always had been.

Take a bow, Rowdy. The whole grandstand is cheering now.

Please consider donating to @bundleofjoyfund in honor of Rowdy.

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She’ll start the Indianapolis 500 at noon. Race 500 miles around the two-and-a-half-mile oval. Board a private jet to Charlotte. Take the green flag at the Coca-Cola 600 that evening. One thousand, one hundred miles. Two races. One day.

That’s The Double.

History of The Double

John Andretti ran the first one in 1994, finishing 10th at Indianapolis and 36th at Charlotte. Tony Stewart is the most famous name in the history of the attempt. In 2001, he completed all 1,100 miles, finishing sixth at Indy and third in the 600, a feat that remains the benchmark for anyone who’s tried since. Kyle Larson took two shots at it, in 2024 and 2025, and came away empty both times.

Five drivers have attempted the feat, starting with John Andretti on May 29, 1994. In 2001, Tony Stewart became the first and only driver to date to complete all 1,100 miles of both races in the same day. Robby Gordon has tried five times, Stewart and Kyle Larson twice, and Kurt Busch once. No driver has won either race while attempting the feat. Stewart’s 2001 effort stands as the best combined result: sixth at Indianapolis and third at Charlotte. Larson attempted it in 2024-2025.

Katherine Legge will become the first woman to attempt the effort.

Who is Katherine Legge?

She’s 45, from England, and has been racing go-karts with her father since she was 9. Her résumé spans nearly every category in American motorsport. Forty-seven career IndyCar starts. Nineteen NASCAR national series starts. Four victories as an Acura factory driver in sports cars. Stints in Formula E, touring cars, and Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

The Indy 500 is where she’s made her mark on the oval circuit. In 2023, she set the fastest single-lap qualification speed by any woman in the event’s history: 231.627 mph. Her four-lap average of 231.070 mph went with it. Records that still stand.

For this year’s race, she qualified 27th, driving the No. 11 for HMD Motorsports in partnership with AJ Foyt Racing.

The 600 side comes through Live Fast Motorsports. Legge is 39th of 39 entrants, driving the No. 78. No charter. No guaranteed field spot. A small entry list cleared that problem for her.

The Brand Behind the Entries

e.l.f. Cosmetics is sponsoring both entries.

That deserves more than a sentence. This is year four of the partnership between Legge and e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF). In 2024, e.l.f. became the first beauty brand in American motorsport history to serve as the primary sponsor of an Indianapolis 500 entry. Now they’re funding both halves of the most operationally demanding single-day feat the sport has. The No. 11 at Indianapolis and the No. 78 at Charlotte both carry e.l.f. colors.

The campaign is called “eyes.lips.fuel.” Patrick O’Keefe, e.l.f.’s Chief Integrated Marketing Officer, described it plainly: “eyes.lips.fuel. is a commitment to every eye, lip, and face watching who needs to see that they belong.”

Legge’s own framing of the partnership tells you something about how four years feels from the inside: “e.l.f. has been more than a sponsor. They’ve been my voice, my platform, and my fuel.”

e.l.f. has built a deliberate portfolio in women’s sports over the past three years, and Legge is the anchor of it.

Their current roster: the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the Billie Jean King Cup, the National Women’s Soccer League, and the iHeart Women’s Sports Audio Network. Paralympic swimmer Anastasia Pagonis is an Individual Athlete Partner. And Legge across IndyCar and NASCAR.

Chief Marketing Officer Kory Marchisotto has stated publicly that the brand won’t do “logo slap” sponsorships. That means every activation needs a story attached.

The statistics e.l.f. cites about women in motorsport make the brief explicit: women receive 1% of all sports sponsorships. Women account for 4% of drivers on track. Women are twice as likely to leave racing in their first five years. The brand is not citing those numbers to create guilt. They’re citing them to identify an underserved market and position themselves inside it before the competition.

For a company trading on the NYSE, this is a commercial thesis, not an awareness campaign.

The broader pattern of brands spending record levels in motorsport is mostly about audience scale and corporate hospitality. e.l.f.’s approach is different: they’re building cultural ownership around a specific idea. A beauty brand that shows up where beauty brands don’t. An audience that wasn’t being spoken to by the category.

What This Weekend Means

The Double is a long shot regardless of who’s driving. Kyle Larson had Hendrick Motorsports infrastructure and still couldn’t complete it. Legge is running a non-charter team in the 600 after a 27th-place grid position at Indianapolis.

Finishing is the goal.

Either way, e.l.f. owns the story of the first woman to attempt The Double, and if she completes both races, that has a shelf life that extends well past the race broadcast. Four years of consistent investment become a punchline that actually pays off.

Motorsport sponsorship rarely works this way. Most brands buy reach and then wait. e.l.f. has been building toward a specific historical moment with a specific driver for four consecutive years.

Regardless of outcome, Legge is a hell of a racer, and e.l.f. is a hell of a brand taking big swings in playgrounds not traditionally dominated by women.

I’ll be rooting for them.

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Formula 1 lends its IP to Hasbro’s Monopoly

Growing up, I loved Monopoly. It taught me about business and managing money, and how to get out of jail (just kidding).

But now, two of my loves, board games and Formula 1, come together in an epic remix of one of the most iconic games of all time.

Formula 1 has partnered with Hasbro to release a special-edition Monopoly, available from July 15.

The F1-themed edition of the game will have players racing around the board with the 24 locations on the real calendar, taking the place of the regular properties.

Emily Prazer, chief commercial officer of Formula 1, said: “Monopoly is one of the most iconic and best-loved board games in the world, so we’re thrilled to bring a Formula 1 twist to such a classic. This edition captures the excitement and competitiveness of the sport in a fun, accessible way, and we’re confident fans of all ages will love going head-to-head with their friends and family when they take to the grid and compete in the Monopoly Grand Prix.”

Billy Lagor, president of toy & games at Hasbro, said: “Formula 1 is one of the most iconic sports in the world, and we’re excited to bring the adrenaline of race day - roaring engines, pitlane drama, and split-second strategy - into a game night experience.”

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Latest on the Business of Speed Podcast

Robert Jakobi grew up with Ayrton Senna at his family’s dinner table. His father ran IMG Europe and later left to manage Senna personally. When Senna died in 1994, the Jakobi family lost one of their closest friends.

Thirty-two years later, Robert is using that relationship to build something new. His company, Hyton, is four months old and has just secured a deal to bring the Ayrton Senna Forever exhibition to Fontainebleau Las Vegas this November.

Nine cars, helmets, trophies, a full immersive installation, and it’s the first time the exhibition has ever come to America.

We sat down with him at the Concours Club during Miami GP week. Go listen.

The car looks like a piece of Anduril hardware. And that’s the entire point. It’s part of the greater Anduril world.

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The driver door carries Anduril’s actual product-spec typography: “ANDURIL INDUSTRIES EST.—2017. TRANSFORMING DEFENSE THROUGH ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. USA. AUTONOMY FOR EVERY MISSION. CAUTION: FAST MOVING VEHICLE.”

Same design language Anduril runs on its drones, sensor towers, and autonomous platforms. The Anduril shield sits oversized in white outline on a black hood. Yellow accents on the #24, splitter, rocker, and rear hazard chevrons. Black, silver, and white everywhere else.

Most Cup paint schemes are billboards. Sponsor logos sized to read at 200 mph, color block to match the brand guide, repeat. The Anduril car is a different exercise. It treats the body of a NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet the same way Anduril treats its hardware: as a surface for design language, not a canvas for logos.

“The paint scheme is part of a greater world-building initiative, similar to what we have done with our systems,” said Jen Bucci, who led the design at Anduril. She used the word kineticism.

The Jeff Gordon link is in the yellow. Bucci said the team leaned on Gordon nostalgia and remixed it, and the Hendrick team flagged the yellow #24 connection early. The yellow, tying back to NASCAR’s safety vocabulary on flagging and signage, was a separate decision. Two reasons the color earns its place, neither of which drives the base.

Bucci’s other reference points, in her words: tradecraft, the covert world, and old Italian rally cars from the 60s and 70s. None of those references shows up as a direct quotation on the car.

Jeff Miller, VP of marketing at Anduril, on the bigger play: “We picked NASCAR because it has an unapologetic tie to the military, and we want to support the real heroes.”

That’s the deal. Plain and clean.

The venue does most of the storytelling for them. The Anduril 250 marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy. It runs at Naval Base Coronado on the first NASCAR street course ever built inside an active military installation. The base is home to the Naval Special Warfare Command. The audience in the grandstands and watching at home includes a meaningful percentage of the defense community Anduril sells to.

This is the part of the play that operators outside the category continue to underrate. Anduril is not a consumer brand. They do not sell to NASCAR fans. They sell to the Department of Defense, allied governments, and military procurement officers. A Cup Series broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, with Senate Armed Services Committee staffers and DoD program managers watching from couches in Northern Virginia and San Diego, is a more efficient audience for Anduril than most defense trade publications. The paint scheme is a recruiting poster, a brand statement, and a reminder to procurement that Anduril owns the airspace around the Navy’s biggest birthday, all in one piece of hardware.

Anduril is the Official Defense Partner of NASCAR. The structure is a three-layer play BoS broke down last fall: series-level partnership, ownership of the Coronado weekend as title sponsor, and a primary scheme on Hendrick’s home car. Each layer reinforces the other. Pulling anyone out would weaken the rest. Putting all three on the table at once is why the activation reads as deliberate rather than opportunistic.

For Hendrick Motorsports, the fit is cleaner than most multi-year defense deals. Byron carries an Anduril scheme twice a year through 2028. The second appearance lands at Chicagoland on July 5, which makes the Independence Day weekend the second of two patriotic windows inside a single contract.

The Bucci-led design team also gave Hendrick something they rarely receive from a sponsor paying this much: a paint scheme with editorial restraint. The Anduril Industries wordmark appears at scale on the doors. The shield appears at scale on the hood and the rear quarter. Beyond that, the rest of the surface is given to the design system. No tagline scroll, no QR code, no website URL across the rear bumper. The brand trusts the audience to know who they are solely through the typography.

Whether the audience does will be the test. The Anduril 250 runs Sunday, June 21. Coverage on Amazon Prime Video. The work that brought the car to this point has been moving for months.

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One thing first. BoS will be at the Indy 500 on May 24. We’re looking for a brand to underwrite that coverage. You fund our team being on the ground, and your name shows up across everything we publish from both weekends. Newsletter, podcast, social, and more. Reply to this email if your brand wants the slot.

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Liberty Media’s Q1 Drops Today: F1 Up 53%

Reported this morning. Formula One Group hit $711M in Q1 revenue (up 59% YoY); F1 alone climbed 53% to $617M with Adjusted OIBDA more than doubling to $172M. MotoGP, the $4.2B Liberty acquisition that closed last July, posted $94M (vs. $75M a year prior) but is still bleeding $24M in operating losses. CEO Derek Chang framed it as the start of Liberty’s “long-term strategy for MotoGP.” FWONK rallied more than 5% on the open to over $93. Worth flagging: three Q1 races vs. two last year, and the full 2026 calendar is two events shorter after Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were dropped over geopolitical tensions.

Read the full report here.

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Anduril 250 NASCAR race to be held on ‘Qualcomm Circuit’

NASCAR named Qualcomm as the Official Circuit Partner of NASCAR San Diego Weekend presented by Anduril, with the new 3.4-mile, 16-turn street course at Naval Base Coronado now officially branded the Qualcomm Circuit. Construction begins late May ahead of the June 19–21 debut. It will be the first NASCAR track ever built on an active military base. The Cup Series runs the Anduril 250 on Sunday, June 21, with the Truck Series taking Friday’s Navy Community Day and the O’Reilly Series racing Saturday.

The corporate stack is the story. Anduril, the defense AI firm building Pentagon contract revenue at speed, owns the weekend. Qualcomm, a 40-year San Diego anchor repositioning around AI chips and edge computing, takes circuit naming rights and will deploy intelligent computing and advanced connectivity across the event. Both companies are treating the venue as a live demonstration of their enterprise. NASCAR is treating both companies as long-term ballast. Chicago’s street race never quite found its commercial footing across three seasons. San Diego comes in with a captive military audience, two anchor sponsors with operational roots in the host market, and a patriotic format that lines up cleanly with the Cup demographic.

Sky Sports Drops £1B to Keep F1 in the UK Until 2034

Sky and Liberty extended their UK and Ireland broadcast deal five additional years through 2034, with Italy renewed through 2032. Reported value: £1 billion ($1.4B), a 55% jump over the previous £645M agreement. The current deal still had three years to run, making this the earliest renewal since Sky picked up F1 in 2012. The strategic read: F1 just locked in its biggest European broadcaster before Apple’s U.S. blueprint could trigger a bidding rethink in other markets. Italy is the smart play. Sky Italia’s audience is up 25% this season on the back of Kimi Antonelli, with his Chinese GP win drawing 1.2M on Sky and another 1.4M on TV8.

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FIA Confirms V8s Return by 2031

Mohammed Ben Sulayem told reporters during the Miami weekend that V8 engines will return to F1 in 2030 or 2031. The current 2026 hybrid regs, the ones Liberty and Audi just bet billions of dollars on, are being walked back inside their first month of competition. Four of six manufacturers (Mercedes, Ferrari, Honda, GM, Audi, Red Bull/Ford) need to approve a 2030 switch. If they don’t, the FIA can unilaterally force a 2031 implementation. Ben Sulayem called it a “no-brainer” with “very, very minor electrification.” Audi just spent €600M acquiring Sauber to build a hybrid works engine. GM is mid-build on its own power unit program in Charlotte. Both companies’ multi-year roadmaps were oriented around an engine formula that may now have a five-year shelf life.

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Coca-Cola Returns to 23XI Racing

Coca-Cola signed on as the Exclusive Beverage Partner of Bubba Wallace and the No. 23 team, debuting a co-branded paint scheme with Hardee’s at Watkins Glen this Sunday (May 10). The timing is built around Coke’s 140th anniversary. The structural story is more interesting. 23XI Racing was the named plaintiff that just forced NASCAR into permanent evergreen charters last December, and a charter’s market value reportedly leapt from $45M to nearly $100M overnight on the news. Coca-Cola’s return signals to the market that the most aggressive team in the sport, the one that took the league to court, is now fully bankable to legacy Fortune 50 sponsors.

Miami Pulls 275K and Cadillac Debuts at Home

Miami International Autodrome set its third straight weekend record at 275,000 attendees, with Hard Rock Stadium adding a 50-foot-tall, 264-foot-long super-yacht hospitality structure inside Turns 5–9 and a five-deck MSC Yacht Club suite. Race-day premium suites cleared $10K. The result on track: Mercedes’ Antonelli took his third win of the season. The result off-track: Cadillac ran its first race on American soil with a Stars-and-Stripes livery, a Tommy Hilfiger-fronted team kit, and a sponsor lineup that already includes Jim Beam and Tenneco. Per their CCO, no title sponsor by design. They’re keeping the position open. With the Miami GP locked in through 2041 and Liberty’s U.S. flywheel spinning, GM appears willing to wait for the right number.

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Around the Horn

Marsh signs on as F1’s first Official Risk Partner in multi-year deal

Modelo joins RFK Racing as ‘Official Cerveza’ with Watkins Glen primary on Keselowski’s No. 6

Ryan Blaney signs long-term Team Penske extension; team also renews Menards deal

Sam’s Club becomes Official Sponsor of NTT INDYCAR Series and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway

OnlyBulls digital wallet takes title sponsorship of IndyCar’s Portland race

RFK Racing comes up empty on its charter hunt; Keselowski says fix could run $40M to $80M

Verstappen calls FIA’s revised 2026 regs “a tickle,” still threatening to walk

NASCAR Cup ratings dip at Texas despite sold-out grandstands; Elliott takes second 2026 win

Jeff Gordon tells Bloomberg the rise of F1 in the U.S. is lifting all of motorsports

NASCAR Silly Season opens with static moves and bigger questions still pending

F1 Grid Gigs presented by American Express returns, expanding to five races and launching in Miami

Apple TV reports F1 viewership “way up” against ESPN’s last season as U.S. takeover continues

Toto Wolff says 2026 regulation critics “should hide” after Miami delivered a “spectacular” race

Andy Street rejoins Kyle Busch as crew chief of the No. 8 in his second stint inside seven months

Katherine Legge confirmed for Indy 500 in HMD-Foyt entry with e.l.f. Cosmetics primary on the No. 11

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Italy hadn’t produced a repeat Grand Prix winner in over 70 years, since Alberto Ascari, and Giancarlo Fisichella’s 2006 win in Malaysia was the last time an Italian stood on the top step at all. An entire generation of Italian motorsport fans grew up rooting their national pride through Ferrari’s marque because there was nobody else to carry it.

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Sunday changed that, and when Antonelli cleared the barriers in parc fermé to find his parents, even the drivers who’d just finished behind him sought him out. Verstappen, both Cadillac drivers, and Franco Colapinto were all walking over with hugs. The paddock was telling you something.

Pair that with Jannik Sinner holding the world’s top tennis ranking at the same moment, and Italy has a cultural sports story it hasn’t had in a long time, two generational talents in two different sports running concurrently, neither of them appearing particularly burdened by what they’re carrying. And with the men’s Italian national soccer team missing a third straight World Cup, the time is now for both Sinner and Antonelli.

Antonelli said Thursday that he was aware of the historical pressure but wasn’t trying to focus on it. Watch the press conference footage, and you believe him.

The race earned him something that the first three couldn’t

McLaren brought a meaningful upgrade to Miami, enough for Norris to beat Antonelli in Saturday’s sprint and spend the second half of Sunday with a legitimate shot at the lead. Antonelli dropped two positions at the start due to a grip problem; Toto Wolff later called it a team mistake. He fought his way back through Charles Leclerc, passed Norris on Lap 28, and then spent the closing stages defending, with a gearbox issue developing around Lap 33 and rear tire temperatures spiking four laps later. Peter Bonnington, who spent years talking Lewis Hamilton through equivalent moments from the same radio seat, brought him back lap by lap, and by Lap 40, Antonelli’s voice had settled.

The first three wins came with a car that made the driver’s job manageable. Miami had the advantage compressed, meaning the question of whether Antonelli is a product of Mercedes or a genuine championship-level driver is effectively answered.

Inside the garage, Russell is navigating something uncomfortable

He finished fourth, admitting to Sky Sports F1 that he spent the final ten laps running Antonelli’s differential and brake bias settings after struggling all weekend with a setup that didn’t suit his style, and called the impact bigger than he expected. Russell is 20 points back, won in Canada last year, and has flagged Montreal as a circuit where he expects to recover ground. Antonelli, unprompted in the post-race press conference, said the same thing about his teammate.

Wolff is threading a needle that tightens with every Antonelli win, praising the younger driver publicly while immediately noting Russell’s competitive threat and framing the starts as a team-level problem rather than an individual one. Mercedes leads the constructors’ championship by 68 points, and the starts genuinely need fixing. Wolff called them unacceptable for a team with title ambitions, and he’s right about that.

The viewing data is where the commercial stakes become real

The 2026 regulations have created a problem Liberty Media did not budget for. Spain’s DAZN recorded a 49% year-over-year audience drop after the Japanese Grand Prix, France’s Canal+ fell 43%, Germany lost 21%, and Austria shed 36%. These are not rounding errors in peripheral markets. France and Spain are two of the sport’s historically central territories, and the collapse in combined viewership across those four countries represents a direct threat to the broadcast rights valuations that underpin F1’s revenue model.

To understand why that matters financially, start with the top line. F1 generated $3.87 billion in revenue in 2025, with media rights fees accounting for 31.3% of that total and live viewership up 21% compared to 2024. Sponsorship alone contributed $840.4 million, up sharply from $634.5 million in 2024. The sport’s commercial model is built on audience scale, which justifies rights fees, which in turn justify sponsor pricing, reinforcing the cycle. A sustained decline in viewership in Europe puts pressure on every layer of that stack when broadcast contracts come up for renewal.

Italy is the single exception. Sky Sports Italia drew 824,000 viewers for the Japanese Grand Prix, up 36% over the same race in 2025, with Antonelli entering that weekend as the first Italian driver with a genuine shot at the championship since Michele Alboreto in 1985. That number didn’t happen because the 2026 regulations suddenly became popular in Bologna. It happened because Italy finally has a driver, and the market responded immediately and measurably.

For Liberty Media’s commercial team, Italy’s counter-trend is both a proof of concept and a product brief. Driver-market correlation is the mechanism they’ve used to grow audiences since Drive to Survive: Verstappen built the Netherlands, Norris accelerated the UK’s younger demographic, and Colapinto lit up Latin America overnight. What I’m calling the “Antonelli effect” has reignited national attention in Italy around a new protagonist in ways no marketing campaign could replicate, even as Italy was already engaged through Ferrari. The additive effect of a national title contender at a rival team is commercially distinct from Ferrari loyalty. It creates new entry points.

Mercedes, the direct beneficiary, is already the sport’s most commercially valuable constructor. SponsorUnited’s latest data puts Mercedes-AMG Petronas at an estimated $558 million in sponsorship revenue in 2025, leading all ten teams, with the average F1 sponsorship deal worth roughly $6 million, approximately eight times the average NFL team deal. Their Advertising Value Equivalent, which measures the media exposure delivered to commercial partners, reached $5.7 billion in 2024, up 8% year over year. Three wins into a dominant 2026 campaign, with a 19-year-old Italian leading the drivers’ championship, those AVE numbers are compounding in real time.

The contract structure underneath all of this is worth understanding. Antonelli is currently earning a reported $2 million base salary in 2026, and he is contracted through 2029, which means the renegotiation conversation isn’t imminent, but the market comparison already exists.

When Charles Leclerc won back-to-back in Belgium and Italy in 2019, his base salary reportedly moved from around $12 million to $30 million within two years. Antonelli is two years younger than Leclerc was at that moment, already has more wins, and is at the sport’s most commercially active team. The salary structure is management’s problem to solve in 2027. The endorsement value is a problem for every brand that didn’t sign him in 2025. [Note: salary figures above are estimates from third-party sources; neither Mercedes nor Antonelli’s camp has confirmed specific contract terms publicly.]

Across the sport, F1 team sponsorship reached $2.54 billion in 2025, a 22.1% increase that has closed the gap to the NFL, which leads at $2.66 billion, to just $120 million. F1 surpassed the English Premier League. That trajectory runs directly through narratives like this one: a young driver from a historically passionate market, winning in his second season, carrying a national story that every broadcaster on the continent can sell. The 2026 regulatory headwinds are real, and Liberty Media is under genuine pressure to fix the on-track product in several European markets. Antonelli gives them cover they didn’t plan for and leverage they’ll use, whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not.

Eighteen races remain. Russell will be competitive in Canada, McLaren will keep pushing, and the starts need fixing before a reliability or tactical error costs Antonelli points he shouldn’t be losing. None of that changes what the Italian audience data through four rounds already confirms, or what happens to Mercedes’ $558 million commercial portfolio if this championship run extends to July.

The sport needed a story that could hold European audiences while the regulations were sorted out. One arrived on schedule, wearing number 12, and collecting the chequered flag in South Florida.

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Field Notes - Miami Grand Prix

Thanks to our clients at Hyton, we had the opportunity to experience The Concours Club both at the Miami GP track and back at the club itself, located at the Opa Locka Executive Airport. We’ll write more about it in the coming weeks, but for now, here are some of the photos from the weekend.