AVOID BREAKAWAY LEAGUES

“Red Bull dumps Sauber and makes the radical decision that rather than sponsoring another team, they are going to directly get into the business. And Mateschitz and Red Bull buy the failing Jaguar racing team, which was at this point in time owned by Ford. Things are so bad for the team that Ford is willing to sell the whole team to Red Bull for one British pound. The purchase price that Red Bull paid was one British pound to establish Red Bull racing.”

“Everyone talks about the technology and speed, but the under discussed component is the human side. An F1 driver is operating at fighter pilot like cognitive load for 90 minutes straight. Six Gs under pressure, which means their head weighs like 80 pounds at that moment. Their heart rate is 180 beats a minute or more, and they've lost 5% of their body weight during the course of the race. They're doing this making micro decisions of thousands of times with no timeouts, no commercial breaks, and I don't think there's another sport like it.”

“There's a funny thing here where you might think, oh, Formula One, that's the big established series that legitimizes an automaker by being a part of it. It actually works the other way with Ferrari. Ferrari participating in Formula One legitimizes the series. Ferrari, if they ever decided to stop racing in Formula One, would make people go, oh, so what is the big racing series?”

“Mercedes does an estimated 200 million in operating income from Formula One now. 25% operating income. And on top of being phenomenally profitable, TotalWolf estimated in 2021 that Mercedes, that he thinks Mercedes gets a billion dollars of advertising equivalent value for being involved in the sport. So on $600 million of total spend last year, Mercedes generated a double bottom line of over a billion dollars in marketing equivalent value plus $200 million in actual profit.”

“Bernie, meanwhile, is just getting tons of money into his bank accounts. CVC and Bernie, for his portion, spend about $2 billion acquiring 100% ownership. They put $900 million of cash equity into the deal. Compared to, I believe, over $3 billion that Bernie and his trust had pulled out of the company through all the debt and equity machinations that we discussed earlier. There's a great quote from Eddie Jordan. He said that Bernie Ecclestone was someone who sold Formula One four times, has never bought it back, has never lost its control, and still owns it. And do you know the most important thing? He never effing owned it in the first place.”

“Braun is scrambling. He just went from like top of the world at Ferrari to getting to be team principal at Honda and now he's out of a job. So in one year, this team and Ross Braun went from like new Honda team principal to nearly out of the sport to owner of his own team for one pound to world champion. Mercedes buys it a year later, or 75% of it, for 200 million pounds. Today, Mercedes is worth $6 billion under Toto.”

“The whole corporate operation was run out of a building in London that was also his house. Seriously, like the bottom floor floors of the building were F1 offices. And then he had the floors above. And supposedly, he had all the rooms in the offices bugged. So he could listen to what everybody was saying at every point in time. And famously, he would kick everyone out at 6 p.m. He'd be like, all right, leave my house now. It's time for you all to go home.”

“Drive to Survive worked. It's a human drama. When we said there's three concurrent competitions, there's a driving competition, there's the World Cup of Engineering, and there's the World Cup of Office Politics. It turns out the World Cup of Office Politics is an amazing, amazing thing for effectively a reality TV show. But the human story, that is the killer unlock of Drive to Survive.”

“Cost caps to institute a cost cap on manufacturing. Basically what they're proposing is the F1 equivalent of a salary cap. It instantly makes every team at least close to break even. The average revenue per team today in 2026 is about 430 million. 15 years ago, all four of those teams were operating at a loss. And 10 years ago, most of them were operating at a loss. Forbes estimates team valuations at about $3.6 billion on average.”

“There are 830 million global F1 fans for a league that does 3.4 billion and teams that generate another 2 billion or so on top of what the league pays them. So that's about $5.5 billion gross total revenue across the whole sport for 830 million fans. The NFL generates $23 billion of revenue across just 180 million fans. So that's 4 times the revenue on 1 fifth the number of fans. The NFL monetizes a fan at $127 per year and Formula One monetizes a fan at $7 per year.”