00:00In January 2017, an 86-year-old man handed over the keys to the most exciting sport on
00:06earth.
00:08His name was Bernie Eccleston.
00:11For 40 years he had run Formula One like a private members club.
00:15And his final defining act as its ruler was this.
00:20He banned it from the internet.
00:23No race highlights on YouTube.
00:25No paddock footage on social media.
00:27Drivers received legal letters for posting clips they had filmed themselves.
00:34He once said, and this is a real quote, that he wasn't interested in young fans because,
00:41in his words, most of them haven't got any money.
00:45Phew.
00:46Then Liberty Media walked in.
00:49And everything, every single thing about this sport changed.
00:55826 million fans.
00:583.9 billion dollars in annual revenue.
01:02A billion dollar alliance with the world's most powerful luxury house.
01:06And a fan base that is 42% women.
01:11Up from 8% just seven years ago.
01:15This is the story of how one sport didn't just survive the digital age, it reverse engineered it.
01:23Consider the scale of what Formula One is today.
01:27Not to impress, but because the numbers are, by any honest measure, disorienting.
01:33826 million people followed this sport in 2024.
01:39That is nearly twice the combined population of Europe.
01:42The average Formula One fan is 32 years old.
01:4643% of the entire fan base is under 35.
01:50In 2017, Formula One generated 1.8 billion dollars in revenue.
01:56Last year, that number stood at 3.9 billion.
01:59The sport more than doubled in under a decade.
02:04Every team is now valued above a billion dollars.
02:07Nations are forming orderly queues to host future Grand Prix.
02:12Luxury houses, fashion brands and film studios are competing openly, expensively to attach themselves
02:19to the sport.
02:21None of this was inevitable.
02:23None of it was even probable as recently as eight years ago.
02:26To understand how it happened, you have to go back to the man who, for four decades, made
02:33absolutely certain it couldn't.
02:37Bernie Ecclestone ran Formula One's commercial operation for 40 years.
02:42He built it into a global television property.
02:45He negotiated the agreements that placed it on screens in every country on earth.
02:50By any measure, he was one of the most formidable sports promoters in history.
02:55And then, the internet arrived.
02:58And Bernie Ecclestone decided the internet was, simply, not his problem.
03:04Race highlights were blocked on YouTube.
03:06Teams were forbidden from filming inside the paddock.
03:09Drivers who posted their own content received formal legal notices from the sports commercial
03:14office.
03:16Lewis Hamilton, the most decorated driver in the history of Formula One, was sent a stack of them.
03:23Ecclestone's reasoning was consistent, if not correct.
03:27Digital content would eat into television rights.
03:30And television rights were where the money lived.
03:34The consequence was that the most exciting motorsport on earth was also, functionally,
03:39invisible, to anyone who wasn't already watching it on a legacy broadcast deal.
03:44In 2016, the year before Liberty Media arrived, Formula One's global television viewership had
03:52fallen 40% from its 2008 peak.
03:56An entire generation of potential fans had grown up and moved on, never having been given
04:02a reason to look.
04:03Then, in January 2017, Liberty Media completed its $8 billion acquisition.
04:12Ecclestone was out.
04:14And the door, the one he had spent a decade nailing shut, was, at last, opened.
04:21Liberty Media's first move was almost embarrassingly straightforward.
04:25They let people in.
04:28Teams could film.
04:30Drivers could post.
04:31Race highlights went up on YouTube the moment the checkered flag fell.
04:36The second move was Netflix.
04:38In 2019, Drive to Survive launched, a behind-the-scenes documentary series built around the human stories
04:45inside the sport.
04:46The rivalries.
04:47The failures.
04:48The personalities that broadcast television had never been permitted to show.
04:53The show didn't simply grow the audience.
04:56It changed who the audience was.
04:59Nearly half of Drive to Survive's viewers were women.
05:02A third were between 18 and 29.
05:05This was not the Formula One demographic of the previous 30 years.
05:09What the show built was not just a fan base.
05:12It built a community.
05:15Content creators, podcasters, fan accounts across every language and every platform, constructing
05:21an entire ecosystem around a sport they had, finally, been given permission to care about.
05:28The data behind this shift is unambiguous.
05:30Ticket purchasing for the Australian Grand Prix, the season opening race, used to run at
05:3575% male, 25% female.
05:39After Drive to Survive, that split moved to 60-40.
05:42The average age of a Formula One fan dropped from 44 to 32.
05:48Today, there are an estimated 71 million Americans who have never watched a single race, but know
05:54exactly who Lando Norris is.
05:57McLaren CEO, Zac Brown, speaking in 2024, described what the sport had become.
06:03It had found a female audience, a younger audience, a North American audience, and, he said, they were
06:10only just getting started.
06:11The cars hadn't changed.
06:13The racing hadn't changed.
06:14What had changed was the permission to tell the story around it.
06:18And the story, it turned out, was the product all along.
06:22By 2025, the numbers had crossed into territory that demanded a different vocabulary entirely.
06:29Women now account for 42% of Formula One's total fan base, up from 8% in 2017.
06:37Women make up three out of every four new fans the sport is adding.
06:41This is not a minor demographic adjustment.
06:45This is a sport that became something categorically different.
06:49The fashion industry noticed, the film industry noticed, and then, in late 2024, the most powerful
06:57luxury group on the planet decided to make it official.
07:01LVMH, the conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy, and Tag Heuer, signed a 10-year
07:08partnership with Formula One valued at $1.1 billion.
07:13From the 2025 season, Louis Vuitton became the title sponsor of the season opening race
07:19in Melbourne.
07:21Moet Hennessy-Champagne sits on the podium at every Grand Prix.
07:25Tag Heuer is the official timekeeper.
07:28The deal was described, internally, as the convergence of two worlds that had been running
07:33in parallel for decades, luxury and speed, finally deciding they were, in fact, the same
07:41thing.
07:42And then came the film.
07:44In June 2025, Formula One, the movie, opened in cinemas worldwide.
07:51Directed by Joseph Kaczynski, who made Top Gun Maverick, co-produced by Lewis Hamilton, shot
07:57inside actual race weekends with real teams on the live grid.
08:02It grossed over $630 million globally.
08:06It became the highest-grossing original film of the year.
08:11In a marketplace dominated by sequels, remakes, and franchise properties, a film about a sport,
08:18a sport that eight years ago couldn't post a clip on YouTube, outsold nearly everything
08:24released alongside it.
08:25The revenue from races, $3.9 billion in 2025.
08:31The sponsorship portfolios, the streaming agreements, the film rights, the fashion collaborations.
08:39This is no longer a sporting organization with a media division.
08:43Formula One is a media organization that happens to hold races.
08:48Bernie Ecclestone once ran Formula One as a private club.
08:51What it is now is something closer to a cultural institution.
08:56One built almost entirely by opening a door.
09:01Which brings us to India.
09:04The Bhud International Circuit, just outside New Delhi, hosted the Indian Grand Prix in
09:092011, 2012, and 2013.
09:14All three races were won by Sebastian Vettel.
09:16All three drew enormous crowds, and then, over a dispute about entertainment tax, it was
09:23gone.
09:24The track has been silent for over a decade.
09:27Yet in 2025, India had 78.8 million Formula One fans, more than the entire population of
09:35France.
09:36A fan base that did not exist in any meaningful commercial sense when the last race was held
09:42there.
09:42Travel booking platform Skyscanner recorded a 189% spike in flight bookings from Indian cities
09:50to the Singapore Grand Prix weekend in 2024, then 188% to Abu Dhabi.
09:58Indian fans are flying to watch Formula One in other countries, because Formula One is not
10:05yet in theirs.
10:06Negotiations to bring the Indian Grand Prix back are active.
10:10No date is confirmed.
10:13But the sport that was once too distant, too expensive, and too inaccessible for most of
10:18the world's second largest country has, in the span of a few years, become something
10:24those same people are booking international flights to see.
10:29That is the story of Formula One in the digital age.
10:33Not the lap times, not the constructors' standings.
10:37The story is this.
10:39A sport discovered that the most powerful thing it could do was let people in.
10:44And the world walked through the door.
10:48Bernie Ecclestone built the machine.
10:51Liberty Media turned on the lights.
10:54Drive to Survive invited the world to watch.
10:57And now, in living rooms in Mumbai, in grandstands in Singapore, in sports bars in Los Angeles,
11:04the race is still going.
11:09The race is still going.
11:10Formula One.
11:11The car was never the product.
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