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

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

A few more numbers, before we go further:

• “World Cup shirt”: +840%

• “Baddie tracksuit outfit”: +276%

• Dad trainers: +906%

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

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

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

Pinterest just made that chart insufficient.

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

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

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

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

That sentence describes a new species of fan.

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

Sponsorships sell to lifestyles now.

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

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

Gucci just paid for an audience that Pinterest already mapped.

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

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

That era is over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Briatore Factor

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

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

Alpine Needs Stability

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

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

What It Means for the Grid

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

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

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

Two things I think are worth pointing out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need you to sit with how strange this is.

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

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

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

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

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

They booed him. Hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please consider donating to @bundleofjoyfund in honor of Rowdy.

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

That’s The Double.

History of The Double

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

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

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

Who is Katherine Legge?

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

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

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

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

The Brand Behind the Entries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What This Weekend Means

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

Finishing is the goal.

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

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

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

I’ll be rooting for them.

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Formula 1 lends its IP to Hasbro’s Monopoly

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big thanks to all of our subscribers, especially our Founding Members, for their continued support.

Founding Members: Andy Amendola, Web Smith, Alex Nunez, Hannah Elliot, Mark Boudreau, John LePore, Josh Felber, Marshall Pruett, Blake Plumley

Corporate Members: T-Mobile for Business, Electranet Inc., Bloomfield AI, HYTON

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Latest on the Business of Speed Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the deal. Plain and clean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full report here.

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

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

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

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

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

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FIA Confirms V8s Return by 2031

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

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Coca-Cola Returns to 23XI Racing

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

Miami Pulls 275K and Cadillac Debuts at Home

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

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Around the Horn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the garage, Russell is navigating something uncomfortable

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

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

The viewing data is where the commercial stakes become real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Field Notes - Miami Grand Prix

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

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.

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Apple Continues Building a Content Stack Around Its F1 Rights

The race is almost secondary.

Before a wheel turns in Miami this weekend, Apple has built an entire layer of original programming around its Formula 1 broadcast rights, and the talent it selected reveals exactly what the company thinks it’s building.

Circuits in Focus debuts April 30, pairing 2016 F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg with racing driver and YouTuber Emelia Hartford. The two analyze the track strategy and braking points using EA Sports F1 25, which turns a video game into a legitimate broadcast analysis tool and quietly co-promotes EA’s latest racing title to every F1 fan watching, a three-way arrangement dressed up as a television show.

The POV takes a completely different approach. Former Red Bull Racing technician Calum Nicholas and engineer Christina Roki run a post-race social series reacting to key moments and strategic decisions, two people who actually sat inside an F1 operation, describing what they saw in terms that make the sport legible to someone watching their third race ever.

The Tubi arrangement deserves attention. The Fast Lane: Miami runs on Fox’s free ad-supported platform, with YouTuber Michelle Khare, Jeremiah Burton, and F1 instructor Scott Mansell providing live commentary from a creator-centered perspective. Apple routes the premium experience behind its $12.99/month Apple TV+ paywall and pushes the influencer-adjacent content to a service that costs viewers nothing. That’s audience expansion by design, and coordinating it with Fox signals an unusual degree of alignment between two companies otherwise competing for the same living room.

Apple’s physical footprint around the race is just as deliberate. On May 1, the Aventura store becomes a full-day race venue, with oversized screens and stadium seating for Practice and Sprint Qualifying, a live performance by DJ Dímelo Flow, and an Apple Books conversation with Susie Wolff about Driven, her memoir on building a career inside a sport that spent years making clear she wasn’t welcome.

The Cadillac F1 special livery is on display, a well-placed reminder that the sport’s new American team exists, at an event specifically designed to grow F1’s American audience. Sergio Pérez, now driving for Cadillac, shares a personal playlist through Apple Music.

More than 50 IMAX locations nationwide are screening the Miami Grand Prix live, and Apple is running a public viewing of the race day in Times Square. Theatrical chains and streaming services have spent years in a low-grade war over the same eyeballs. Apple is routing a live F1 broadcast through IMAX infrastructure, which is a different kind of arrangement, and the Times Square screening makes the same point from street level: Apple wants race day to feel like something people show up for.

Talent architecture reveals Apple’s theory of long-term retention. Rosberg carries
championship credibility. Hartford brings accessibility and a female broadcast presence to a sport where the commentary booth has historically been narrow. Nicholas and Roki provide the technical granularity that converts a casual viewer into someone who actually understands what they just watched, which is the version of that viewer who clears their calendar the following Sunday.

Apple’s F1 deal spans a decade. Original programming is how a ten-year contract becomes a habit rather than a scheduled event, and getting someone to open Circuits in Focus on a Thursday afternoon builds a fundamentally different relationship with the sport than selling them a Sunday broadcast slot. The rights get you in the room. The programming, the store takeovers, IMAX partnerships, and public screenings are what keep people there.

Whether any of these specific formats survive long enough to compound is the real test. Creator talent moves. Production costs stack across ten seasons. Building a sustained audience for sports analysis content is genuinely hard. But the underlying logic of layering original content and physical presence around expensive rights is sound, and the mix of championship pedigree (Rosberg), technical credibility (Nicholas and Roki), and creator-economy reach (Khare, Hartford, Burton) suggests Apple is at least asking the right questions. Which of these formats gets renewed at the end of 2026 will tell you what Apple actually learned.

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Barilla Made a Pasta for Race Day

Angie Cotter, Barilla’s U.S. pasta category marketing director, launched Racing Wheels this week: a special-edition pasta cut shaped like an F1 wheel, ridged and circular, built for al dente texture and sauce pickup. Available on Walmart.com now, with broader retail through spring. Race weekend activation at the Miami Grand Prix includes two Lasagna Bars on-site and dishes in the Paddock Club.

Barilla holds the title of Formula 1’s official pasta partner, and Cotter’s team decided to build a product with it. Racing Wheels is a new SKU that exists because of the F1 relationship: it costs $1.17, it sits in a grocery aisle, and it puts the partnership in someone’s kitchen. That kind of move is rare in motorsport sponsorship, where the default is signage, hospitality access, and a logo on the broadcast.

The campaign wrapping it is called “Domenica Italiana,” built on the Italian tradition of Sunday meals shared while watching the race. It works because it describes what people already do on race Sundays.

Every food and beverage brand on the F1 grid should study what Cotter’s team built and ask the same question: what artifact of the partnership lives outside the circuit and inside someone’s daily life? Barilla’s answer is on Walmart.com right now and will be in Miami in three weeks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ocean’s Prequel in Monaco

Margot Robbie confirmed at CinemaCon on Monday that the Ocean’s 11 prequel takes place at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. She and Bradley Cooper play Danny Ocean’s parents, pulling a heist against the backdrop of the most glamorous race weekend in the sport’s history. Cooper is also directing. Warner Bros. has the release set for June 25, 2027.

Monaco in 1962 was pre-commercial F1: racing drivers and film stars shared the same hotel bars and the same headlines, and nobody had a title sponsor on their sleeve. The Brad Pitt F1 film already proved the audience exists by building itself around Silverstone, and now Warner Bros. is anchoring one of its most bankable franchises around Monaco, both films making the same bet that motorsport works as a cinematic destination.

The commercial ripple matters. A blockbuster heist movie set in Monaco is years of global brand marketing for the race, delivered free, and the Automobile Club de Monaco gets a campaign that no media budget could replicate. F1’s sponsorship market is approaching $3 billion, and another round of premium cultural reinforcement at this scale only pushes the ceiling higher.

F1 should have a playbook for moments like this by now. A major studio is about to spend hundreds of millions telling the world that Monaco is the most beautiful, high-stakes setting on earth, and the sport’s job is to convert that energy into partnerships and audience growth. History suggests it will mostly just enjoy the attention and move on.

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OpenAI Partners with Chip Ganassi Racing

OpenAI expanded its partnership with Chip Ganassi Racing to a two-race primary sponsorship on the No. 10 Honda, driven by four-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou, for Long Beach in April and Washington, D.C., in August.

Its researchers and engineers work at race events alongside the team, running data analysis, communication tools, and real-time decision support through OpenAI’s models. Ganassi posted nine wins, 17 podiums, and a championship in 2025, and those results now carry the footnote that OpenAI’s tools were part of the operation.

Rob Wills, the director behind Netflix’s Drive to Survive, has been hired to produce a documentary about how Ganassi uses AI for competitive advantage.

The partnership has three layers: car branding at two marquee races, a live technical integration with a defending champion’s team, and a documentary from the filmmaker who proved motorsport content can reach mainstream audiences. Hiring Wills is the tell. The branding and data work justify the spend to the finance team, and the film reaches a broader audience, including people who don’t follow IndyCar, have never heard of Chip Ganassi, and will absolutely watch a well-produced documentary about speed and technology.

Eight AI deals landed on the F1 grid in six months last year. Tech companies with marketing budgets in this range have historically put them there. OpenAI's choice of IndyCar, Long Beach, and D.C. suggests the series is becoming a credible alternative. If the Wills documentary reaches the kind of audience Drive to Survive built for F1, other tech companies will follow suit.

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Barilla Made a Pasta for Race Day

Angie Cotter, Barilla’s U.S. pasta category marketing director, launched Racing Wheels this week: a special-edition pasta cut shaped like an F1 wheel, ridged and circular, built for al dente texture and sauce pickup. Available on Walmart.com now, with broader retail through spring. Race weekend activation at the Miami Grand Prix includes two Lasagna Bars on-site and dishes in the Paddock Club.

Barilla holds the title of Formula 1’s official pasta partner, and Cotter’s team decided to build a product with it. Racing Wheels is a new SKU that exists because of the F1 relationship: it costs $1.17, it sits in a grocery aisle, and it puts the partnership in someone’s kitchen. That kind of move is rare in motorsport sponsorship, where the default is signage, hospitality access, and a logo on the broadcast.

The campaign wrapping it is called “Domenica Italiana,” built on the Italian tradition of Sunday meals shared while watching the race. It works because it describes what people already do on race Sundays.

Every food and beverage brand on the F1 grid should study what Cotter’s team built and ask the same question: what artifact of the partnership lives outside the circuit and inside someone’s daily life? Barilla’s answer is on Walmart.com right now and will be in Miami in three weeks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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.

Imagine: it’s late-afternoon sun cutting through the Ardennes. A 2.4-liter turbocharged V8 hits full power out of Eau Rouge, and the sound reaches the grandstands a full beat before the car does. That guttural, chest-rattling scream that makes 120,000 people go quiet for half a second, then very loud. The fuel burning through those eight cylinders is 100% carbon-neutral, synthesized from non-food biomass and municipal waste.

This scenario is a real engineering proposal gaining traction inside F1’s manufacturer working group right now. While the paddock digests the controversial 2026 regulations and the April calendar break stretches on, the conversation that matters has already moved past this season’s power units. Multiple manufacturers are pushing a 2.4-liter turbo V8 running fully sustainable fuel as the next regulation framework. Stefano Domenicali is on the record supporting it. The engineering case is strong. The politics are messy. And the timeline keeps shifting.

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Where Things Stand with 2026

The current regulations are locked. A 1.6-liter V6 turbo hybrid, MGU-H deleted, roughly 50/50 power split between internal combustion and electric output, running 100% advanced sustainable fuels from race one. Aramco developed those fuels from non-food biomass and renewable feedstocks as part of F1’s net-zero 2030 commitment. The fuel chemistry works. Drop-in compatibility is genuine, per Formula1.com’s technical documentation. No engine redesign required.

The hybrid architecture is where the trouble lives. Pre-season testing surfaced behaviors that made drivers uncomfortable: super-clipping, which electronically curtails power to protect battery state; energy recovery sequencing through fast corners that disrupts the car’s feel; and a layer of software management that pushes decisions away from the cockpit. Max Verstappen publicly said what several others had said in engineering debriefs. The 2026 package addresses sustainability while creating a racing product that concerns the people who actually have to drive the cars.

What’s on the Table

Reporting from AMuS and The Race through April 2026 has put enough detail on the record to take this seriously.

The configuration gaining the most support: a 2.4-liter turbocharged V8 running 100% sustainable fuel, with a simplified hybrid component contributing between 10 and 30 percent of total power output, roughly 220 to 240 kilowatts. That’s a deliberate reduction from the 2026 architecture, where electric power handles nearly half the output. The design goals are specific: cheaper to develop, lighter to package, louder at full rev, and more reliable across a race distance. A naturally aspirated version remains in discussion, but the turbo V8 has the stronger coalition behind it.

The timeline has already moved twice. Early conversations targeted 2029, limiting the 2026 framework to just three seasons. That window closed when the engine summit was postponed. Consensus is now forming around 2031, though 2030 stays alive if this year’s racing product underdelivers badly enough to accelerate the political calendar.

Domenicali told The Race in August 2025: “Sustainable fuel, [and] a V8, I think, is great. And hybridization is, I do believe, the next step of the future.” Fan polling backs him up. An 86% approval rate for a V8 or V10 paired with sustainable fuel is about as close to a mandate as this sport’s audience ever delivers. That kind of consensus gives the commercial side powerful ammunition in negotiations with reluctant manufacturers.

What This Changes

Sound is the headline, and it matters more than the engineering community wants to admit. The 2.4-liter V8 turbo at high revs produces a visceral frequency the current V6 hybrids simply cannot generate. Fans have been saying this for a decade. Attendance and broadcast engagement both correlate with on-track spectacle, and acoustics are a bigger component of spectacle than any technical white paper will acknowledge.

The business case runs deeper. A simplified powertrain lowers development costs, lowers the barrier to entry for new engine suppliers, creates more competition on the grid, and generates more commercial value across the entire F1 commercial ecosystem. The MGU-H deletion in 2026 was already a step in this direction. A KERS-style hybrid in a V8 framework goes further. More manufacturers, more diversity, more sponsorship inventory, more deals.

Driver agency recovers, too. When battery management software handles less of the power delivery equation, throttle application, and braking precision carry more weight. That produces a more watchable race and a more marketable champion.

The risks are real. Audi structured its entire F1 entry around the 2026 hybrid architecture, matching Volkswagen’s electrification narrative. Rewriting the power unit regulations within five years forces Audi to either defend billions in sunk costs or publicly pivot its corporate story. Honda faces a version of the same problem. And F1 itself carries scars from rushed regulatory packages. The 2026 rules were themselves a response to the complexity and cost problems of the hybrid era. Repeating that cycle would be a governance failure, and the sport’s credibility with manufacturers would take years to rebuild.

What Happens Next

No final decision exists. The signal to watch is whether Honda and Audi soften their opposition before the end of this year. If both hold firm through 2026, the 2030 window effectively closes, and 2031 becomes the default.

The 2026 racing season is the other variable. If the on-track product confirms what pre-season testing hinted at, political will for an earlier reset builds fast. If the cars produce great racing despite the software-heavy architecture, urgency fades.

Here’s where I land: the V8 happens. The timeline falls to 2031, with an outside chance of moving to 2030 if this season disappoints. The bigger question is whether Audi’s participation survives the transition. We’re watching the early stages of the next engine war form in real time. We can only hope this quiet phase of F1 engines ends soon.

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IMSA’s Record-Breaking Sebring Weekend

The 74th Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring drew over 115,000 fans across four days, March 18 through 21, shattering the event’s all-time attendance record. This follows a record-breaking Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, and the trajectory is accelerating in a way that deserves attention from anyone tracking where motorsport audiences are actually showing up.

On the bumpy concrete of Sebring International Raceway, Roger Penske’s Porsche Penske Motorsport squad locked out the top two positions in the GTP class. Porsche’s 20th overall Sebring victory, executed over twelve hours with the kind of clean strategy that reminded everyone why Penske bought into prototype racing this aggressively.

IMSA shares a weekend with IndyCar at Long Beach coming up next. If that event continues this attendance curve, the growth story around U.S. sports car racing moves from promising to undeniable. Great racing, sustainable fuel programs, and fan-first event production. Full grandstands. F1’s future engine planners would be wise to study why.

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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.

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The Feature

Melbourne produced 120 overtakes in the 2026 season opener. The same circuit generated 45 the year before. Shanghai delivered similar numbers. Two races in, and the FIA’s new regulations are producing exactly what Liberty Media ordered: more action, more highlight clips, more reasons for a casual fan scrolling Apple TV to stop and watch.

Max Verstappen thinks you’re an idiot for enjoying it.

“Anybody who enjoys this doesn’t understand motor racing,” the four-time world champion said after Round 1. Charles Leclerc called the overtaking “artificial.” Lando Norris pointed to dangerous speed differentials between cars running different power modes on the same straight. George Russell, who won in Australia, has been the loudest defender of the new formula, but Russell winning tends to correlate with Russell approving of the rules, so take that endorsement with appropriate seasoning.

How the Boost Button Works

The 2026 power unit regulations tripled the electrical output of the MGU-K from 120kW to 350kW, creating a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical power. That’s the single biggest shift in F1’s hybrid era. Drivers now manage when to charge and when to deploy through a manual boost button that unlocks the full 350kW from the MGU-K, giving them a burst of speed that tapers off above 290 kph.

The catch: using it drains the battery and leaves the car vulnerable on the next straight. Leclerc described the pattern after Shanghai. You boost, you pass, you become a sitting duck. The other driver boosts past you on the following straight. Then you do it again. The racing looks frantic on camera. In the cockpit, drivers say it feels like managing a video game power-up cycle rather than actually racing.

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“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.

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F1 had just announced revenue rising 14% to $3.87 billion in 2025. Shanghai was selling out tickets and hospitality as China’s expanding middle class and Gen Z caught the F1 bug.

Yet, as Thomas wrote, brand sponsorship from China has “slowed to a trickle,” with Lenovo standing “almost alone” as a major Chinese global F1 partner and no team on the grid currently carrying a major Chinese name. Thomas was at the first Chinese Grand Prix in 2004 and was part of the commercial gold rush that followed. His framing of “full grandstands, growing fanbase, empty sponsor pipeline” stuck with me, and I wanted to understand the structural reasons behind it.

Then the race happened, and everything he described played out in real time. 230,000 people attended the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. They packed Metro Line 11 in Ferrari red caps and McLaren papaya tees, carrying handmade banners, some with Labubu dolls dressed as their favorite drivers dangling from their backpacks. Lewis Hamilton, who has raced in Shanghai for two decades, said he had never seen crowds that large.

Tickets across every price tier, from ¥330 ($45) practice day passes to ¥42,800 ($5,860) premium packages, sold out, and gate revenue hit ¥190 million ($26 million), up 35% from last year. After the weekend, Thomas posted again, writing that sales records were smashed across sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, merchandise, and concessions, with “literally not a free seat in the house.”

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Where the Money Went Instead

China generates close to $20 trillion in annual GDP, and around 130 Chinese firms sit in the Fortune Global 500. Nielsen reports Chinese F1 fandom grew 39% year over year. Over half of fans in the country discovered the sport in the past four years, and the audience skews young with a 50/50 gender split, a demographic profile that should have every sponsorship broker in the paddock on a plane to Shanghai.

F1 generated $3.65 billion in total revenue in 2024, and its global partner roster has nearly tripled since 2020, from 12 to 31. LVMH signed a 10-year global deal. American Express, LEGO, Sony, and Santander all entered.

More than 110 U.S. brands now sponsor F1, more than double the figure from 2017, and forty-five percent of McLaren’s 57 sponsors are American. The world’s second-largest economy contributes one name to that roster, and the reason has far more to do with how F1 sells than with whether Chinese companies are buying.

Put the 2004 and 2026 numbers side by side, and the reversal becomes clear: two decades ago, the arrival of F1 in Shanghai triggered a wave of Chinese commercial interest that Thomas described as a gold rush with “some pretty hefty deals” getting signed across the paddock. The fanbase today dwarfs what existed then, the sport’s global revenue has multiplied several times over, and Chinese corporate presence in F1 has moved in the opposite direction.

Chinese Brands Are Choosing Different Global Sports

The idea that Chinese companies haven’t figured out international sports sponsorship is easy to believe if you only look at the F1 grid.

Look wider, and the picture changes fast.

Five Chinese companies, Ant Group, Hisense, AliExpress, Vivo, and BYD, served as official global sponsors of UEFA Euro 2024, accounting for a third of the tournament’s entire sponsor pool. Alibaba holds a top-tier Olympic partnership running through 2028. Hisense has been embedded in FIFA and UEFA cycles for the better part of a decade and reported a 274% year-over-year sales surge during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. BYD replaced Volkswagen as UEFA’s official vehicle supplier and, in February 2026, Stella Li traveled to Manchester to personally finalize a multi-year deal making BYD the official automotive partner of Manchester City, following an earlier partnership with Inter Milan.

These are substantial commitments. The money exists. The appetite for global platforms exists. What Chinese companies have repeatedly and deliberately chosen are properties with massive single-event reach, concentrated activation windows, and straightforward ROI measurement. A month-long football tournament with 5 billion cumulative viewers and a fixed host market is a different proposition than a 24-race global calendar that requires year-round activation across 180+ broadcast territories. Thomas, who has watched this dynamic play out from Shanghai for more than two decades, identified the core tension on LinkedIn: F1’s commercial model remains “too Western-centric” while Chinese brands continue to prioritize domestic digital platforms, short-form media, and performance-driven spend.

Matthew Marsh, an F1 sponsorship broker covering Asia, told Autosport that Chinese company leadership approaches sponsorship like a commodity purchase, evaluating it the way they’d evaluate a shipment of steel, with a focus on measurable returns. The Apple model of building margin through brand association and long-term equity hasn’t taken hold in most Chinese boardrooms, and that framing clashes with how F1 partnerships actually function, which is largely through compounding brand presence over multiple seasons, hospitality relationships, and the soft power of being seen inside a global entertainment property week after week.

Jason Du, GM of global brand marketing at Join-Cheer Digital Group, which works directly with Chinese EV brands on overseas campaigns, told The Current that increased global marketing spend from Chinese companies is inevitable, given how saturated the domestic automotive market has become. The question was never whether the money would move outward. The question is which platforms capture it first, and F1 has been losing that race to football for years.

The Activation Gap in Shanghai

Look at the race week activation schedule in Shanghai during the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. F1 teams sent their drivers all over the city to front brand events. Max Verstappen appeared at an ExxonMobil event alongside actor Daniel Wu. Charles Leclerc visited a PUMA store. Fernando Alonso showed up at the BOSS flagship in Jing’an. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli hosted an IWC Schaffhausen event at Taikoo Hui. Jiemian News, one of China’s most prominent business outlets, covered the full circuit of appearances, and every brand the drivers were activating for was Western.

The commercial infrastructure of F1 in China is designed to serve sponsors who already exist, all of whom are based outside the country. Nobody from the teams is building relationships with Chinese corporate leadership on Chinese terms, using Chinese commercial logic, through Chinese digital platforms.

F1 poured enormous energy into its American expansion, and Liberty Media invested years of strategic effort into understanding how American brands think, what American audiences consume, and how to build a commercial bridge between the two. That pipeline brought in more than 110 U.S. sponsors. No one has attempted anything comparable in China, and the difference shows in every race week activation schedule Shanghai produces.

F1’s Growth Engine Doesn’t Reach This Market

Drive to Survive is the single most effective fan-acquisition tool F1 has ever deployed, and Netflix penetration in China is zero. The show simply doesn’t exist in the market. The F1 movie starring Brad Pitt pulled ¥328 million ($44.9 million) at the Chinese box office, a solid number that still accounts for only a fraction of its global $633 million haul. Tencent signed a multi-year broadcast renewal through 2027 to carry every race, and CCTV has expanded coverage, but the storytelling pipeline that converted casual viewers into obsessive fans across the U.S. and Europe hasn’t been replicated on Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, or any other Chinese platform.

Without a Chinese-language content ecosystem that builds emotional connection to drivers, teams, and paddock culture, fandom stays broad and shallow.

There is also no emotional anchor on the grid. Zhou Guanyu, the first full-time Chinese driver in F1, raced for Alfa Romeo and Sauber between 2022 and 2024, and when Frederic Vasseur signed him, he publicly dismissed the idea that the move was commercially motivated. He also later admitted to Autosport that tapping into the Chinese market had been “difficult” even with Zhou in the car. SenseTime and Yili both came on board during Zhou’s tenure, and both are gone now that he’s been reduced to a reserve role at the Cadillac F1 Team.

The Ground Is Moving Faster Than the Paddock

The most interesting commercial signal from the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix came entirely from outside the paddock. Taobao Instant Commerce, Alibaba’s on-demand delivery platform, became an official race partner through a sequence that F1’s commercial team should study. Last August, the company redesigned its delivery rider uniforms in orange and black, and Chinese internet users immediately spotted the resemblance to McLaren’s livery. The comparison went viral, the company leaned into the moment, and a partnership with the Chinese Grand Prix followed.

That deal was born of organic cultural momentum on Chinese social media, and it reveals how commercial energy actually moves in this market. Chinese consumers are ready to connect brands with the sport when the connection operates on their terms, through shareable identity, cultural resonance, and a logic that ties back to something measurable rather than abstract brand equity.

China Daily reported on a broader consumer shift that accelerated during COVID, away from conspicuous luxury consumption and toward health, lifestyle, and premium experiences. Their reporter described fans on Metro Line 11 wearing full team kits, carrying homemade signs, treating the race weekend as a destination event in a way that looks more like what F1 has cultivated in Austin and Miami than the corporate-hospitality model of a decade ago. F1 as a live experience fits that shift, and the commercial opportunity attached to it remains almost entirely untapped.

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BYD Is Coming

Stella Li attended the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last December and was in the Shanghai paddock last week. In 2025, she became the first woman and first representative of a Chinese brand to be named World Car Person of the Year. She is the person most directly responsible for BYD’s international expansion, and she is spending time in F1 paddocks.

BYD is already the largest electric vehicle seller in Europe by unit volume, operates in more than 110 countries, and has built a production facility in Hungary. Its sports sponsorship portfolio now spans UEFA Euro 2024, Manchester City, and Inter Milan. Huu-Hoi Tran, managing director and global VP at Capgemini Invent China, told The Current that Chinese EV brands like BYD have the superior product but need to integrate themselves into consumer consciousness in new regions, and Prof. Holger Görg of the Kiel Centre for Globalization told the South China Morning Post that sports sponsorship helps Chinese brands appear “less threatening” in European markets where they face persistent perception barriers around quality and market competition.

So far, BYD has deployed that strategy through football. Motorsport.com reported this month that the company is now actively assessing F1 entry options, from team acquisition to a 12th entry application to a title sponsorship modeled on what Alfa Romeo did with Sauber for six seasons. The Geely Group, which controls Lotus, Volvo, and Polestar, attempted to acquire a team two years ago and was priced out by the surge in F1 valuations, though a title sponsorship remains on their table.

What makes BYD’s entry feel inevitable rather than speculative is the convergence of several forces. The 2026 regulations shift F1 toward a 50/50 split between electric and combustion power, making the sport far more relevant to an EV manufacturer’s narrative.

The Chinese consumer base is already engaged. BYD has entered the growth phase where purely domestic brand investment hits diminishing returns. And behind BYD sit 10 to 20 more Chinese EV brands preparing to compete internationally, all of which will eventually need to differentiate against each other on something other than price and will run out of UEFA and FIFA inventory before they get there.

Revolut’s deal with Audi showed what a modern F1 partnership looks like when the partner embeds itself into the team’s operational infrastructure rather than buying logo space, and Toyota’s embedded approach with Haas offers another template built on lower risk, high learning, and room to scale. BYD is sophisticated enough to study both models and build something that aligns with Chinese commercial priorities rather than imitating a Western playbook designed for companies with a different relationship to brand equity.

The Call

F1 is running a global commercial operation that has cracked the U.S., consolidated Europe, and aggressively expanded into the Middle East, but it has not built the muscle to compete in China. The partnership model assumes sponsors already think in terms of long-term brand equity, that they want global category exclusivity across 180+ broadcast territories, and that they’re comfortable spending $30 to $70 million per year for a position on a car they can activate at 24 race weekends across five continents.

That model works for LVMH, HP, and Oracle, but it does not work for Chinese companies that operate primarily in domestic markets, prioritize measurable return on investment, and view marketing as performance-driven spend. Thomas laid out what the alternative looks like on LinkedIn: China-first commercial strategies, modular sponsorship models, localized digital and social solutions, and deeper integration with Chinese tech and commerce platforms. That list should be pinned to the wall of every team’s commercial office. Teams need on-the-ground leads in Shanghai and Shenzhen year-round, not executives who fly in for race week and leave, and F1 itself needs content creation pipelines in Mandarin that do what Drive to Survive did in English.

BYD will enter F1. When it does, it will open the door for a wave of Chinese EV brands behind it, just as Liberty Media’s American expansion turned a trickle of U.S. sponsors into a flood. The question is whether F1 will be ready to receive them with something more than the same pitch deck it uses in London and New York, or whether 230,000 fans will keep filling the grandstands while the commercial model stays a decade behind the audience it already has.

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IndyCar just raced between a football stadium and a baseball stadium in Arlington, Texas. Sold-out grandstands. Up to $100 million in projected economic impact. Drivers who’ve raced all over the world say it felt like a completely different series.

The Java House Grand Prix of Arlington, held March 15, ran a 2.73-mile, 14-turn street circuit threading between AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field. Longest street course in IndyCar history. Kyle Kirkwood took the win.

The real story, however, is what the track was built on. Parking lots. Service roads. The kind of infrastructure that exists for one reason: moving 100,000 people in and out of a building on a Sunday afternoon. Penske looked at that and saw a racetrack.

Let’s talk about the money. Penske Entertainment, the Dallas Cowboys, the Texas Rangers, and the City of Arlington split the $50 million build cost four ways. For context, building a permanent racing circuit from scratch runs anywhere from $250 million to over $1 billion. Arlington’s math looks very different.

Mark Miles, Penske Entertainment CEO, put it plainly: the existing pavement, roads, and parking lots “require relatively little expenditures to get into racing fitness.”

The infrastructure was already there. It just needed a different purpose for one weekend.

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Why a Stadium District Changes Everything

Street racing has always carried logistical baggage. You shut down a city center. Reroute traffic. Negotiate with local businesses losing foot traffic. Relocate utility access. It’s expensive, politically messy, and the goodwill runs out fast.

Nashville learned this the hard way. The Music City Grand Prix ran downtown across the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge starting in 2021. Then construction began on the new Titans stadium, displacing the circuit. The race hasn’t returned.

Arlington sidesteps all of it. The entertainment district exists specifically to absorb massive crowds. Wide roads. Modern pavement. Hotels, restaurants, and convention infrastructure are already operating at scale. Sixteen million visitors come through that district annually. Doug Boles, IndyCar’s president, put it simply: “You are in and amongst the community, but you have the benefit of these massive parking lots.”

Scott Dixon, six-time champion, said after the race: “I didn’t think I was turning up to an IndyCar event. I thought it was maybe an F1 event.” Then he added something that should probably hang on a wall somewhere at Penske Entertainment headquarters: “I think this is the new standard. This is what IndyCar needs to stick to.”

Santino Ferrucci called it IndyCar’s “first Formula 1-style street course.”

The closest comparison in American motorsport is the Miami Grand Prix, which races around Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Dolphins. Stephen Ross built that model from scratch, turning a stadium parking lot into a temporary circuit surrounded by a multi-day festival. The result: $449 million in economic impact and a race weekend that sells out months in advance. Arlington took that same stadium-as-backdrop concept, applied it to an entertainment district that already had two venues instead of one, and executed it for a fraction of the cost. Where Miami spent years and hundreds of millions building its footprint, IndyCar walked into an infrastructure package that was already assembled.

Motorsport’s push into American culture has largely been driven by spending into new markets. IndyCar is finding a different entry point. Same instinct, leaner execution.

Fox’s Role

In July 2025, Fox Corporation acquired a one-third interest in Penske Entertainment for roughly $125 to $135 million. Bundled with a multi-year extension of IndyCar’s media rights.

Think about what that means for venue selection. A broadcast partner wants compelling television. Fine. An ownership partner wants compelling television in top-10 media markets, with iconic visual backdrops that enhance the value of their investment. Different conversation entirely.

And this goes beyond corporate strategy. Fox CEO Eric Shanks is an Indiana native who used to go to the Speedway as a teenager and tell people Rick Mears was his uncle to try to impress girls. As Will Buxton put it on the Business of Speed podcast: “What better platform could you have than the boss of the network being this huge fan who just wants to do it right and wants to tell the story and promote it and make it as big as he thinks it should be and should always have been.”

Fox ran IndyCar commercials during the Super Bowl. Think about what those slots cost. Eight figures, easy, for airtime they could have sold to advertisers. That tells you something about conviction.

DFW is the fourth-largest metro in America. AT&T Stadium is one of the most recognizable buildings in professional sports. Fox didn’t need much convincing.

The early returns are worth noting. The 2025 Indianapolis 500, Fox’s first as broadcaster, averaged 7.01 million viewers. A 41% increase. A 17-year high. The full 2025 season averaged 1.36 million viewers per race, up 27% over 2024. Buxton offered a stat that doesn’t get enough attention: in 2025, IndyCar and Formula 1 both averaged 1.3 million viewers in the United States. The same number.

Fox is also reviving the SPEED brand as a cross-series motorsport media platform, pulling NASCAR, F1, and IndyCar content under one roof. Own a piece of the series. Broadcast the races. Build the media ecosystem around them. Stadium-district races in major markets feed every layer of that stack.

The Audience Was Already There

The series has a well-documented structural problem. Eighty-seven percent of its television audience disappears after the Indianapolis 500. 87%. The series has struggled for years to build sustained fandom in individual markets.

Marshall Pruett, who’s covered IndyCar longer than most people have watched it, framed the challenge on Business of Speed: “IndyCar’s greatest problem is not the quality of the drivers, racing, none of that. The product’s phenomenal. Not enough human beings know that it exists.”

Tony Kanaan said nearly the same thing from the team operations side: “Fox bought into the series. I think we need to get known. The series is great, the cars are great. It will not matter if people don’t know who we are.”

NFL stadiums offer a shortcut to that awareness problem. And a pretty elegant one.

The Cowboys’ marketing machine, their sponsor network, their fans. These are assets IndyCar could never build on its own in a market like Dallas-Fort Worth. Jerry Jones showed up in hospitality. Pudge Rodriguez and DeMarcus Ware gave the start command. That kind of crossover doesn’t happen organically. It gets engineered through partnership.

Pruett sees this as the real unlock for IndyCar’s growth: getting big partners with big marketing machines to tell the story for you. “What’s more important,” he asked, “IndyCar adding a lot more money to its bottom line or figuring out ways to use big companies with big marketing machines to say, hey, you probably know F1, you probably know NASCAR. Let us tell you about this American tradition.” The Cowboys and Rangers are exactly that kind of megaphone.

Arlington’s entertainment district draws from a metro of 8 million people. Roughly 40% of race weekend visitors came from outside Texas. IndyCar didn’t build that audience. The Cowboys and Rangers had already built it. IndyCar just showed up with cars.

Conor Daly put his finger on what Arlington delivered that most IndyCar weekends still lack: “We just got to figure out a way to get more of the, ‘Hey, whoa, what’s happening there? We got to go there.’ That factor. Right now, it’s really cool to go to an F1 race. We just need to have a little bit more of that as well.”

Arlington had it. The question is whether it can travel.

And for brands looking at the series, the sponsorship entry point starts around $500K. The venue economics are built on splitting costs with partners who already own the real estate. When you’re trying to attract commercial partners and grow the grid, that accessibility matters.

Denver, D.C., and What Comes Next

Arlington looks like a proof of concept. Not the endgame.

Promoters in Denver have proposed a 1.8-mile street circuit around Empower Field at Mile High, home of the Broncos. They’re targeting 2027 and seeking a four-year commitment from the city. Same model: NFL entertainment district, existing infrastructure, major media market.

Washington, D.C., follows a different version of the same logic. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix, scheduled for August 23, 2026, will run a 1.66-mile circuit near the National Mall. Pennsylvania Avenue. The Washington Monument. The Capitol. Free to the public, with over a million spectators expected. No NFL stadium, but the principle is the same: race in front of something iconic. Make the broadcast impossible to ignore.

IndyCar also just restructured its relationship with Honda and Chevrolet, offering transferable equity-like charter stakes through 2030. The manufacturer deal, the Fox ownership stake, and the stadium venue strategy. All load-bearing walls in the same structure that Penske is building.

The Template

Roger Penske bought IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2020. Since then, the strategic direction has been consistent: raise the floor on every dimension of the product. Broadcast quality. Venue quality. Partnership quality.

For years, the results lagged behind the ambition. Pruett was blunt about it: “Looking for moves, looking for big things to happen. They’re not happening. 2024, hey, okay. We’re now many years into owning IndyCar. Big things? Nothing happened in there as well.” But 2025 changed the trajectory. The Fox deal landed. Arlington got announced. D.C. materialized. New cars and a new engine formula began to take shape. The momentum everyone hoped for in 2020 finally arrived, just five years late.

“We don’t have this kind of commitment any place that we go as we do here,” Penske said in Arlington. “The investment by the partners along with IndyCar is amazing.”

Stadium entertainment districts give him something he can replicate. A venue template. Existing infrastructure, shared costs, built-in audiences, broadcast-ready backdrops. Every NFL city in America has one. Not everyone will get to race in IndyCar. But the ones in the right media markets, with the right ownership groups willing to invest, just got a glimpse of what’s possible.

Buxton, who left F1 broadcasting to join Fox’s IndyCar coverage, sees this as an inflection point: “I see so many parallels between what Fox wanted to do with IndyCar and what Liberty did with Formula One.” He pointed out that when he was broadcasting F1 in the States on Speed Channel and NBC in the early 2010s, the series averaged around 400,000 viewers. Liberty took over in 2017, and it still took 3 to 4 years before F1 broke the million mark. IndyCar is already averaging 1.36 million in year one with Fox.

Zak Brown was at the race. His review: “Fantastic event. Drivers loved it, sponsors loved it, and it was packed.”

Pato O’Ward called it the best street course and event in IndyCar. Period.

Penske found his template. Now the question is: how many times can he stamp it?

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