Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio)

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it. Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1. *Sponsors:* Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners: - J.P. Morgan Payments https://bit.ly/acquiredJPMPf1yt - ServiceNow https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26 - Vercel https://bit.ly/acquiredvercel26 - Statsig https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 *Links:* - _The Formula_ by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg https://www.amazon.com/Formula-Rogues-Geniuses-Reengineered-Fastest-Growing/dp/0063318628 - _Drive to Survive_ on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/us/title/80204890?s=i&trkid=13747225&shareType=Title&shareUuid=45562EBF-7469-47D9-AB12-03CEEEAD7505&trg=cp&unifiedEntityIdEncoded=Video3A80204890&vlang=en - _F1_ The Movie on Apple TV https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/f1-the-movie/umc.cmc.3t6dvnnr87zwd4wmvpdx5came - Adrian Newey, _How to Build a Car_ https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Car-Autobiography-Greatest/dp/000835247X - _Senna_ documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424432/ - Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Formula One Study https://worldlypartners.com/businesshistory - All episode sources https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ysqphcScUdKoP3zTyGEqyrlZK3_m_YVhgjfXp7sTNZ8/edit?usp=sharing *Carve Outs:* - Cirque du Soleil Echo…