Subscribe now

“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.

Share

The Latest on Business of Speed

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

"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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Floyd “Chip” Ganassi Jr. grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s and 1970s, when that philosophy ran through the city like a river. The Steelers won four Super Bowls in the 1970s. The Pirates won the World Series in 1971 and again in 1979. “I was so lucky to grow up here during the age of the Steelers and the Pirates,” he has said. “It was about hard work, perseverance, grit on the field, excellence, and ability. To me, that’s what it’s all about.”

It is no coincidence that his best-known catchphrase, deployed after every victory, is three words: “I like winners.”

He has had no shortage of material to work with.

He had just turned five in 1963, when his father, Floyd Ganassi Sr., a World War II veteran who had parlayed a small asphalt-paving operation into a concrete and commercial real estate business called FRG Group, brought home an 8-millimeter film of the Indianapolis 500. Parnelli Jones won that year. Ganassi has said he watched that film more than 700 times, frame by frame. The Indy 500, on eight-millimeter film, on a loop, in a house in Pittsburgh, watched by a five-year-old who would one day win that race six times.

Steel City

Ganassi was born on May 24, 1958, in Monessen, Pennsylvania, a small mill town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and grew up in Fox Chapel, a suburb to the northeast of the city along the Allegheny River. He attended Fox Chapel Area High School, where he discovered motocross and skiing before his focus shifted. He attended the Bob Bondurant Driving School in 1977, won his first auto race in a Formula Ford at eighteen, and began competing in open-wheel racing while simultaneously working in the family business and pursuing a degree in finance at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh’s Spiritan institution perched on the Bluff above the Monongahela River.

“My apprenticeship as a race car driver went fast,” he has recalled. “I turned 23, graduated from college, and qualified for the Indy 500 all in a 10-day period.”

At that first Indianapolis 500 in 1982, he was the fastest rookie qualifier on the grid, averaging 197 mph. He was voted Most Improved Driver in the CART series (now IndyCar) in 1983. He put Patrick Racing’s Wildcat on the podium twice that season. The following year, he finished second at the Budweiser Grand Prix of Cleveland.

Then came July 22, 1984, and the Michigan 500.

Michigan

The race was on lap 148 when Ganassi’s car cut a tire exiting one of the banked turns at Michigan International Speedway. The car darted left into Al Unser Jr. Both cars slid toward the infield. Unser’s car lost its top but stayed upright. Ganassi’s car flew, twisted, slammed into the inside Armco barrier, tumbled multiple times, and broke apart. Legendary CART team doctor Stephen Olvey reached the wreck to find Ganassi unconscious and unresponsive, and was preparing to administer CPR when Ganassi resumed breathing. He was airlifted to the University of Michigan Hospital with a broken sternum, a broken hand, stitches in his knee, and serious head injuries. He was briefly comatose.

“I was very, very, very lucky,” he has said.

He never returned to full-time racing. After a handful of CART and sports car appearances in 1986, including a Le Mans entry in 1987 where his car’s gearbox failed, his driving career was over. He was twenty-six years old.

Most people in that position grieve the loss of the thing they loved. Ganassi redirected it. He had a finance degree from Duquesne, a working knowledge of what a top racing team required, and a competitive instinct with nowhere else to go. In 1988, he bought a minority stake in Pat Patrick’s IndyCar operation, one of the oldest and most respected entries in the sport. He stayed in the background, learning the business from the inside. The following year, he stood in Victory Lane at Indianapolis when the Patrick/Ganassi car, driven by Emerson Fittipaldi, won the 1989 Indy 500. He was a co-owner watching the race he had watched on film 700 times as a child, now win in real life.

Patrick had agreed to sell Ganassi the team, but then had second thoughts. He went ahead with the deal regardless, handed Ganassi the assets, and restarted his own team elsewhere. Chip Ganassi Racing was born: one car, one driver in former Formula 1 racer Eddie Cheever, and one sponsor. The sponsor was a midwestern department store chain that had recently begun a national expansion. It was called Target.

The Target Years

The partnership between Chip Ganassi Racing and Target lasted twenty-seven years. When the IndyCar partnership ended after the 2016 season, a new Target chairman had decided to shift the company’s sports marketing budget toward soccer. Mike Hull, managing director of Chip Ganassi Racing, described the twenty-seven-year run as unheard of in professional sports. Ganassi himself called it “the greatest sponsor in racing, ever.” Between 1990 and 2016, Target-sponsored Ganassi cars won 102 IndyCar races and 11 championships.

The red-and-white Target bullseye became one of the most recognizable liveries in American motorsport.

Wins came in time. The first arrived in 1994, when Michael Andretti, just returned from a disastrous Formula 1 season at McLaren, joined the team and won in his first race with Ganassi, at the season opener in Surfers Paradise, Australia. Ganassi had stretched to sign Andretti: “I knew then we had a guy that could win races. I thought, ‘If I have a guy in the car that can win races and we don’t win races, who are they going to look at?’”

Two years later, Jimmy Vasser won the CART championship. One year after that, Alex Zanardi, the Italian with elite racecraft and a wonderful smile, won it again, and then again in 1998. In 1999, a twenty-three-year-old Colombian rookie named Juan Pablo Montoya arrived at Ganassi, attacked the CART series with what Ganassi would later describe as lightning, and won the championship at his first attempt. Four consecutive CART titles, 1996 to 1999. No car owner had ever done that before.

Then Ganassi did something that redefined the politics of American open-wheel racing.

Crossing the Line

In 1996, a bitter split had divided American open-wheel racing into two competing series: the established CART, which Ganassi had dominated, and the upstart Indy Racing League, which controlled the Indianapolis 500. For four years, the teams lined up on one side or the other. In 2000, Ganassi crossed, entering Montoya and Jimmy Vasser in the Indianapolis 500 under the IRL banner as the first major CART operation to break ranks. The decision was commercially and politically seismic. It also worked: Montoya dominated the race and won at his first attempt, leading 167 of 200 laps and winning by more than seven seconds, a margin that left no debate.

By 2003, Ganassi had committed fully to IndyCar. He brought a quietly ferocious New Zealander named Scott Dixon into the fold. Dixon won the championship in his first full season, 2003. He would win it again in 2008, 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2020, for a total of six titles, the second-most in the history of the series, behind only A.J. Foyt’s seven. He has 59 career victories, also second to Foyt’s 67. He has won a race in twenty-one consecutive seasons and in twenty-three of his twenty-five years in the series. He set the all-time IndyCar starts record in 2025. “Nobody had Montoya’s swagger at that age,” Ganassi has said. “But nobody in the sport’s history has had Dixon’s staying power.”

Dario Franchitti joined in 2009, adding three more championships in three consecutive years, 2009, 2010, and 2011, and two more Indy 500 wins in 2010 and 2012. Between Dixon and Franchitti, Chip Ganassi Racing won six IndyCar championships in six years. No organization in the sport has matched that.

NASCAR: Entry, Expansion, Exit

Ganassi entered NASCAR in 2001, buying an 80 percent stake in Felix Sabates’s Team SABCO, an operation founded by a Cuban-born entrepreneur that had been competing since 1989. No purchase price was ever disclosed, but Sabates retained 20 percent and remained a partner for nearly two decades. The terms of entry mattered less than what Ganassi proceeded to build on top of them.

The partnership grew quickly. In 2009, Ganassi merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc., running briefly under the Earnhardt Ganassi Racing banner until 2014, when the name reverted to Chip Ganassi Racing. At its peak, the organization ran four cars across the Cup and Xfinity Series and employed hundreds of staff at a race shop in Concord, North Carolina. Kyle Larson became the centerpiece driver from 2014 to 2020, “a once-in-a-generation talent” in Ganassi’s own words, until a racial slur incident during a virtual race in April 2020 ended his tenure within days. Over twenty years in stock cars, the NASCAR operation produced forty-four Cup and Xfinity Series wins.

In June 2021, Ganassi received an unsolicited call from Justin Marks, a former Ganassi Xfinity Series driver who had founded Trackhouse Racing with musician Pitbull as co-owner. “I can honestly say that my NASCAR team was not for sale,” Ganassi told the AP. “Justin simply came to me with a great offer and an even better vision.”

No financial terms were disclosed, but the two Cup Series charters alone were then trading at more than $10 million each on the open market, meaning the charter value alone exceeded $20 million before the Concord shop, equipment, and assets were factored in. Ganassi walked away from two decades in stock cars without visible regret. “I’m 63 years old. What am I going to do? Am I going to do this for 10 more years or something?” He turned back to IndyCar, where the dynasty was about to produce its most extraordinary chapter yet.

The Grand Slam

The achievement that stands alone in the history of American motorsport came from a single calendar year.

In February 2010, Jamie McMurray won the Daytona 500 for Ganassi’s NASCAR team, the first of the season’s three major crowns. In May, Dario Franchitti won the Indianapolis 500 for the IndyCar team. In July, McMurray passed Kevin Harvick on a late restart and pulled away to win the Brickyard 400, completing what no team owner in the history of American motorsport had ever done: winning the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500, and the Brickyard 400 in the same season. “You wouldn’t dare to dream this,” Ganassi said. “You wouldn’t dare to dream this kind of year.”

He was not finished. In January 2011, his sports car team won the Rolex 24 at Daytona, making Ganassi the first owner in history to hold all four of the most important titles in North American racing simultaneously. He subsequently added the 12 Hours of Sebring and a 24 Hours of Le Mans class win, making him the only team owner in history to have won the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Six trophies, and no other owner in the history of motorsport holds all of them.

The Palou Affair

In the summer of 2022, news broke that Chip Ganassi Racing had re-signed reigning IndyCar champion, Spaniard Alex Palou, for the following season. Within hours, Palou issued a statement denying it. It emerged he had already signed a contract with McLaren Racing to drive for Arrow McLaren, McLaren’s IndyCar operation, from 2024 to 2026, with the promise of a pathway to Formula 1. Ganassi exercised a contractual option on Palou for 2023. A federal court fight followed, settled through mediation, with McLaren covering Palou’s legal costs. Palou remained at Ganassi in 2023 and was McLaren’s reserve and test driver for the F1 team.

Then, when Oscar Piastri signed with McLaren to be their F1 driver and Palou’s IndyCar dominance deepened, Palou decided he did not want to join Arrow McLaren after all. He reneged on his contract.

McLaren sued for $31 million. A six-week trial was held at the UK Commercial Court in London in the autumn of 2025. In January 2026, the judge awarded McLaren $12 million in damages, tied to sponsorship losses, most notably $5.3 million covering losses from the team’s deal with NTT Data, while dismissing McLaren’s Formula 1-related claims entirely. Chip Ganassi paid Palou’s legal fees throughout. “Alex has our full support, now and always,” Ganassi said when the verdict landed. “We know the character of our driver and the strength of our team, and nothing changes that.”

By that point, the man he fought to keep had won the IndyCar championship in 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025, four titles in five years, including the most dominant season in modern IndyCar history in 2025 when Palou won eight of seventeen races and clinched the championship with two rounds remaining. Combined with Scott Dixon’s six titles, Chip Ganassi Racing has now won thirteen IndyCar championships since 2003 and seventeen open-wheel championships overall, including the four consecutive CART titles of the 1990s. No other team in American open-wheel history has come close.

The Numbers

By design, Chip Ganassi Racing’s financial architecture is not publicly disclosed. The available data tells a clear enough story.

As of 2024, the team’s annual revenue is estimated at approximately $35 million, generated primarily from sponsorship, Honda manufacturer support, and prize money. Against that, the costs are unrelenting: running three competitive IndyCar cars at championship level requires budgets of $8 to $14 million per car per season, according to RACER. Honda engine leases alone run $1.6 million per car annually, meaning Ganassi’s three-car IndyCar operation carries an engine bill alone of nearly $5 million a year before a wheel has turned. By conservative estimates, the total operating costs are well over $33 million a year simply to field.

The margins in IndyCar are thin by the standards of any professional sport.

The sponsor roster tells its own story about how the team sustains itself. PNC Bank anchors the No. 9, Scott Dixon’s car, the most decorated active seat in the sport. DHL, the global logistics company, anchors the No. 10, Palou’s championship-winning car, in a multi-year partnership signed at the end of 2023. Both fit the template Ganassi has always used: multi-year, multi-million dollar commitments, deep enough to be structurally important to the operation. The template was set by Target, which stayed for twenty-seven years. The names change. The model has not.

The broader financial context matters. Each IndyCar charter, introduced in 2025 to give teams a tradeable franchise value, is estimated to be worth approximately $1 million. NASCAR charters trade at between $25 and $45 million each and are rising. An F1 team is valued in the billions. Ganassi built his dynasty in the least financially leveraged major motorsport series in the world. Twenty-four championships. Six Indianapolis 500 wins. The only Grand Slam in American motorsport history. All of it is built on the economics of a series in which the charters, even today, are worth less than a mid-range Manhattan apartment.

Ganassi’s personal net worth is estimated at approximately $100 million, a figure that reflects the racing operation, the FRG Group’s commercial real estate and transportation holdings that his father built and that underpin the family’s broader wealth, and thirty-five years of accumulated competitive success. He lives in Fox Chapel, the same suburb where he grew up. He maintains his corporate offices in Pittsburgh. He has an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, is a member of the Motorsports Hall of Fame, and was a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates for nearly a decade, “to do something good for the city that I grew up in.”

His father’s equation, etched into his Motorsports Hall of Fame induction citation, is three words: Life times people.

700 Times

Chip Ganassi is sixty-six years old. He started with one car, one sponsor, one rented shop, and a finance degree, and has spent thirty-five years as the most decorated team owner in American motorsport history.

The eight-millimeter film his father brought home in 1963 showed a race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Ganassi has since won it six times, along with the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and a class win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He is the only person in the history of motorsport to have done all of that.

Palou is twenty-seven. Dixon will retire in the next few years, and when he does, Ganassi will need to find what he has always found: a driver nobody else has fully committed to yet, built into a champion before the field catches up. He has done it with Montoya, Dixon, Franchitti, and Palou. The process looks less like luck each time.

Expect the dynasty to run through the decade.

Share

This dispatch brought to you by Omologato UK

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

Subscribe now

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

Zak Brown has never been reasonable.

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

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

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

San Fernando Valley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not enough.

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

Just Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst Year in McLaren History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ninth Inning

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

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

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

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

The $5 Billion Rebuild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

The watches were worth more than anyone thought.

Share

This dispatch brought to you by Omologato UK

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

Subscribe now

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

Pierre Gasly knows something about that.

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

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

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

Normandy

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The Mountain

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

Then came Monza.

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

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

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

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

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

Football: FC Versailles

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Padel: Hexagon Cup

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

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

MotoGP: Tech3 KTM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

This dispatch brought to you by Omologato UK

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What France Kennedy did next deserves a closer look.

The Infield

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

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

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

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

The Climb

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

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

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

France Kennedy did the opposite.

$600 Million Against the Current

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

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

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

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

The Numbers

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

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

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

What Endures

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

He waits.

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

Montréal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The $200,000 Bet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next bet was Michael Kors.

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

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

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

The Racetrack and The Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Force India Moment

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

Lawrence Stroll had been keeping an eye on this debacle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Seventh Bankruptcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Question

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

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

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

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

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

The Bet Is Still On

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

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

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

He is waiting.

Share

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

Shaker Heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dealership and The Standard

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

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

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

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

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

The Captain and The Engineer

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

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

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

In 1972, they arrived at Indianapolis. They won.

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

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

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

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

The Truck That Built The Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers

Here is what that standard has actually produced.

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

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

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

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

• Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (1995)

• International Motorsports Hall of Fame (1998)

• Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame (2002)

• Automotive Hall of Fame (2015)

• SCCA Hall of Fame (2016)

• NASCAR Hall of Fame (2019)

• Trans-Am Series Hall of Fame (2025)

The Speedway

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Standards Build

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

Kidney transplant. Ten days. Back on track.

The man does not know another gear.

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

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

At 89, he is still The Captain.

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

Effort equals results.

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

It’s all there.

Share Business of Speed

More from Business of Speed

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

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

Subscribe now

The French School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Self-Aware Racer

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

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

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

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

He stayed there long enough to absorb what he needed.

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

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

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

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

The Internet, Cold Calls, and the First Real Money

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

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

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

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

The Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

The $58.5 Million Bet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paddock and the Professor

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

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

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

Trophies don’t resolve trauma.

Behind the Dynasty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One More Rival. One More Room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Horner.

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

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

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

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

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

What Trauma Builds

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

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

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

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

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

But it turned out to be his.

Share