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Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest told reporters that Formula One should be a museum. He was in London launching Fortescue Zero Racing, a Formula E team that has not started a race.
Reuters, of course, ran with the line. And naturally, Twitter did its thing. 1996 world champion Damon Hill answered it.
The museum comments he made actually never happened on stage, but came during a media scrum afterward at the Shoreditch Electric Light Station.
“I think Formula One has a place. It should have a very large building with Formula One at the front of it, made out of limestone, with lights on it, and it should be a museum because the younger generation are going to go to the highest performance, greatest technically advanced and kindest to the environment racing there is, and that’s going to be Formula E. Formula One are fantastic but their time is ticking past them.”
He talked about “that old dinosaur, noisy, smoky, smelly,” then added, “Oh, sounds like the fossil fuel sector. No, it’s Formula 1.” He said he wants to see Formula One go head-to-head with Formula E: “How many decades did they have to get this right and how many months did we have to get it right, and let’s see how we go.”
Who is Twiggy Forrest?
His name is John Andrew Henry Forrest, known as Twiggy since school. He is 64, lives in Perth, and is the founder and executive chairman of Fortescue, the Australian iron ore company. He grew up on Minderoo Station in the Pilbara, the family property his great-grandfather established in 1878. He studied economics and politics at the University of Western Australia, then worked as a stockbroker.
In 1993, he became founding CEO of Anaconda Nickel. He was ousted in 2001, when the company almost collapsed. In April 2003, he took control of Allied Mining and Processing, which held iron ore rights in the Pilbara, and renamed it Fortescue Metals Group. The first commercial shipment left Port Hedland on May 15, 2008, bound for China’s Baosteel.
Forbes lists his net worth at $15.8 billion, 182nd in the world. In 2025, TIME named him one of its 100 most influential people.
In July 2025, Fortescue canceled two green hydrogen projects: a plant in Arizona, reported at US$550 million, and the Gladstone PEM50 project in Queensland, which had been slated to produce up to 8,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year. Growth and Energy CEO Gus Pichot blamed a “shift in policy priorities away from green energy” in the United States for Arizona, and described Gladstone as part of a “strategic shift away from electrolyzers.”
He also said green hydrogen is still “key to our future.” At the Formula E launch, Twiggy told the room, “The energy we had back then was hydrogen,” while recounting how the company built a hydrogen truck in 93 days.
The Williams Advanced Engineering purchase
On January 24, 2022, Fortescue announced it was buying Williams Advanced Engineering for £164 million from private equity firm EMK Capital and Williams Grand Prix Engineering. The deal completed on March 1, 2022. WAE was set up in 2010 by the Williams Formula One team as its commercial technology arm. Its battery work started with the energy recovery system Williams developed for its Formula One cars. It later supplied the batteries for Formula E’s first generation of cars, and won the contract to supply the Gen3 battery as well.
BBC called WAE “the battery and technology arm of the Williams Formula One racing team.” Fortescue said it wanted the technology for freight trains, heavy equipment and haul trucks.
WAE was renamed WAE Technologies in January 2023, then rebranded as Fortescue Zero in June 2024. Fortescue Zero was already Formula E’s official Pit Boost supplier and a technical partner to Jaguar. In September 2026, it bought the Penske Formula E operation, a team on the grid since 2014 that later raced as DS Penske. Fortescue Zero Racing is a Jaguar Gen4 customer team based in Kidlington, England, and Fortescue describes it as the first Australian-owned entry in the series. Jim Wright, a former Williams F1 staffer, was appointed team principal on September 23, 2026.
Claire Williams, Sir Frank’s daughter, is a Fortescue ambassador and hosted the launch. On stage, Twiggy called Sir Frank Williams “my mentor.” The livery includes nods to Twiggy Forrest and Sir Frank, plus topography of Fortescue’s first planned green mine in the Pilbara. Pichot said, “What we learn on track will help us to develop smarter batteries, faster charging and more efficient electric technologies for the real world.”
Do I think Twiggy believes what he’s saying? Yes.
Do I think he said it with full awareness that it would be picked up by social media and create some awareness around his new Formula E team? Also yes.
Formula E posted a pre-tax loss of ~$86 million (€78.3 million) in 2023/24. Disney+ becomes the global streaming home in 144 territories in 2026/27. And while Formula E reported a Season 11 cumulative television audience of 561 million, Nielsen Sports puts Formula One’s audience at over 750 million.
I think Twiggy’s going to have to start making comments weekly for the numbers to catch up.
Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR, and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator, featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.
