I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator and the Editor-At-Large at Esses Magazine. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.

⏳ Reading time: 6 minutes

This is one of those pieces I’ve sat down to write a dozen times without ever finishing. Every time I think the research is done, or I’ve finally mapped all the layers, something new surfaces and my thesis starts to buckle. So let me start where I actually am.

Formula 1 has become the new honey, and everything is trying to get near it. Every sector, every brand, every marketer with a fleeting adjacent interest has decided that F1 is both a business tactic and a cultural shorthand. And with that has come a particular kind of opportunism: the expert who isn’t quite an expert. Podcast guests casually dropping that they “worked in F1” - only for a quick search to reveal they wrote a paper on an F1-adjacent topic and conducted a few interviews. This, apparently, now counts. The fact that it even needs to be said is its own kind of commentary.

The rise of AI-generated content has accelerated all of this. The barrier to entry - even to the fringes of this space - has collapsed. Anyone can have an opinion; the internet will happily distribute it. But here’s the flip side, and it’s the part I’m genuinely energised by: volume has never been a substitute for expertise. The people with real knowledge, genuine experience, and a distinct point of view will not just survive the noise, they’ll be the ones who last. It raises the floor for all of us, and I think that’s worth getting excited about.

But knowledge alone may not be enough anymore either. Which brings me to the question I keep circling back to: if access was once the cultural currency, and knowledge replaced it, is taste next?

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There's a particular image that lodged itself in the cultural imagination earlier this year: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan walking into the Prada show at Milan Fashion Week, dressed head to toe in the brand, filming themselves on Meta Ray-Bans, and posting it to Instagram. To be clear, they were not sporting the Meta Ray-Bans but they were front row at teh Prada show.

Every detail of that appearance was a product placement, and it was intentional from every angle; there is nothing really new there. But beyond the obvious commercial choreography, it felt like something else. Something more anxious. Something that rhymes with a question the internet has been asking for months: what exactly is taste, and why does everyone suddenly want it so badly?

Tech's relationship with fashion has always been one of quiet contempt - the industry that broke the world wore hoodies to prove it didn't need to care. A decade ago, many fashion insiders might have recoiled at Zuckerberg walking into the coolest runway show in the world. It would have been taken as corruption or hypocrisy. Real fashion was art. Self-expression. Not another way to hoard cash. And yet here we are. Bezos and Sánchez-Bezos have become front-row regulars, attending Schiaparelli and Dior during Paris Couture Week and co-chairing the Met Gala. The tech bros have discovered fashion - and fashion, hungry for capital and headlines, has let them in. Vanessa Friedman, in a piece for the New York Times, absolutely nails it.

Does fashion even need tech?

The question worth asking isn’t why fashion is letting them in. That answer is boring: money and power. The more interesting question is why they want in at all. Proximity to luxury brands is cultural capital and unlocks visibility. It signals taste and brings a certain coolness and exclusivity that money alone can’t buy. It’s a form of image-making that portrays them as someone culturally fluent.

But as Jade Conner writes in The Cheque Book, when everyone starts talking about taste, especially in the same aesthetic tone and on the same platforms, it stops functioning as a mark of discernment and starts reinforcing homogenisation. Sitting front row doesn’t give you taste. It gives you proximity to taste, which is an entirely different thing, and a much emptier one.

The Cheque Book

WTF is taste and why is it the new intelligence?

If you are on the same side of the internet that I am, you would have seen a lot of discourse about “taste” as the key distinction between AI slop and great work…

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8 months ago · 3029 likes · 119 comments · Jade Conner

In some ways reminds me a lot of a good portion of the people peacocking in the Formula 1 Paddock, where it is worth reminding them that proximity to power doesn’t actually mean power. As I’ve been watching this same energy flood into the paddock over teh past few years, it’s become apparent that it’s coming from the same place, and potentially, the same necessity.

Formula 1 as a taste proxy

F1 teams generated a record $2.04 billion in sponsorship revenue in 2024, with tech leading the pack. Total global F1 sponsorship spend is expected to exceed $3 billion for the first time in 2026, driven significantly by tech players. Then there’s fashion: LVMH signed a 10-year deal described as an unprecedented agreement between the world leader in luxury and the pinnacle of motorsport, reportedly worth more than $1 billion, with annual fees topping $100 million. Two industries, moving simultaneously, in the same direction. Two industries that probably need each other, although it may not feel like it right now.

Now, here’s where I want to push back slightly on the framing because I think the two industries are actually pursuing F1 for slightly different reasons, and that distinction matters. Tech’s investment in F1 has a functional logic: Oracle invests in cloud infrastructure and AI solutions to fine-tune car performance, while Google partners with McLaren to develop data analytics platforms and machine learning tools. These companies are using the sport as a laboratory. The ROI is real and measurable. The cultural cachet is a bonus, not the point.

Fashion’s investment is almost entirely the reverse. LVMH isn’t in F1 to make better handbags. It’s there because F1 has become one of the few spaces that still generates genuine aspiration - the kind that can’t be manufactured through content strategy or influencer seeding. Over half of new U.S. F1 fans are female, and 47% of those who have followed the sport for five years or less are aged 18-24. That’s not an audience luxury fashion already owns. That’s an audience they desperately want.

And so both industries have landed at the same destination via different roads: F1 as a taste proxy. A cultural object that is genuinely difficult to fake engagement with. You cannot simply show up to a race and absorb its credibility the way Zuckerberg tried to absorb Prada’s by sitting in the front row. The sport resists that. It’s too technical, too historical, too specific. True taste is stubbornly individualistic - it emerges gradually, through personal choices that might seem puzzling or eccentric to others but make perfect sense internally. It’s not sexy to build. It’s slow, frustrating, and sometimes embarrassing. F1 fandom, at its core, works the same way. What I’m trying to say is that I think we are going to see a rise of tastemakers and curators of taste in Formula 1, just like we saw the rise of educational content creators in sports over the past few years.

What tech and fashion are both discovering - somewhat to their discomfort - is that F1 offers something their own industries have been struggling to protect: the feeling that you earned your place in it. Fashion’s power needs to be coaxed out like a flame in the damp. You can’t do that with a wad of cash. Neither can you do it with a title sponsorship or a branded trophy trunk.

And the irony - rich and appropriate - is that the people who’ve spent the least time trying to own it understand it best.

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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.

⏳ Reading time: 8minutes

A few updates on my end. I’ve been playing catch-up today and just barely recovering from being absolutely knocked out by the flu - that was fun. This week will be a mad rush before I head to Europe for three incredible, but very different events - the Monte Carlo Masters, GT3 Revival and the WEC season opener in Imola. I’ve made a conscious effort to make time to see one of my oldest friends and family during this trip because I’m learning to work hard and enjoy life. Something I’m notoriously bad at combining.

I’ve added a new section to the newsletter - Bon goût, for those with an acquired taste. I read a lot, watch a lot, and notice more than most because it’s what my brain does. Bon goût is where I share the one thing that’s genuinely caught my attention and that I’m loving this week - a book, a collab, a quote, a career move - exactly why it deserves your attention. No fluff. Just the things worth your time.

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The [lead] lap

Speaking of taste and taste buds. This may be one of the strangest F1 stories I’ve ever talked about. KitKat confirmed that a truck transporting 413,793 units of its new F1 chocolate range was stolen during transit in Europe. The vehicle departed central Italy bound for Poland - a route of roughly 1,250–1,350km - and simply vanished. The truck and its contents remain unaccounted for, and an investigation is ongoing with local authorities, apparently.

Here’s where it gets weird (because no, that first part wasn’t the strangest bit), the stolen product is part of KitKat’s F1 partnership range: the first-ever chocolate moulded F1 car, featuring a milk chocolate shell with crispy cereal and wafer pieces, as well as the F1 KitKat Chunky launched in January 2026.

Nestlé’s response was notably playful - they told the New York Times they appreciate “the criminals’ exceptional taste,” but also used the moment to flag that cargo theft is an “escalating issue”. What if this was a PR stunt?

Here’s my case for this being a masterclass marketing play. This drops right at the 2026 season opener. KitKat is in only its second year as F1's official chocolate partner. The special edition F1 car bar is the hero product they need eyes on. And suddenly, every sports outlet, food publication, and meme account on the planet is saying the words "KitKat" and "F1" in the same breath. Organically. For free.

Nestlé’s statement reads less like a crisis comms team writing under pressure, and more like a brand team with a strategy in play and some great hooks. Part of the statement reads as follows: "We've always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tonnes of our chocolate.”

I don’t know about you, but in what can only be described as a very noisy space right now, getting your press release picked up as an F1 sponsor or an F1 team sponsor seems to be getting increasingly difficult. This is definitely one way to create awareness, hype and get the internet talking about your product launch.

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The [number] of the week

50G is the impact of Haas driver, Ollie Beraman’s collision into the barriers during the Japanese GP last weekend. You can read the full breakdown on F1’s website here.

Three [stories] that need to be on your radar

1. The $5 Million Blind Spot: Why 76% of Your Fans Are Strangers. This is a phenomenal breakdown by Dean at Regen Sports about how sports entities should be thinking about their fans but aren’t. One piece really stood out to me: “broadcast viewers are the hardest channel to convert anonymous fans into known fans, cited by 67% of respondents. Social media followers are second at 33%. The fans consuming the most content are often the ones you know least about. Broadcasters give you scale, but they don’t give you relationships.” Read the full piece here.

2. DS Penske is out of Formula E to focus on SailGP. DS Automobiles has confirmed it will depart the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship at the end of Season 12, citing an evolution of its “sporting and technology strategy.” DS established itself as one of Formula E’s most decorated manufacturers, amassing four championship titles, 18 victories, and 55 podiums across 142 races. The pivot is perhaps the more eyebrow-raising part. DS is partnering with SailGP Team France, where it says it will work on aerodynamic efficiency, drag reduction, lightweight composite materials, and software, framing competitive sailing as a new innovation laboratory. SailGP is definitely starting to feel like the new darling of tech giants. It marks the second manufacturer exit from Formula E in as many seasons, following NEOM McLaren’s departure last year, and this comes during some turbulent times at Formula E.

3. Adrian Newey stepped down at Team Principal at Aston Martin. Jonathan Weatley has stepped away from Audi after just two races. Is it to take the role of Team Principal at the Aston Martin F1 team? Here’s everything that we know about this episode of ‘Paddock revolving doors’. Adrian Newey is stepping down from the Team Principal role at Aston Martin to refocus exclusively on technical matters, as the team endures a deeply difficult start to the 2026 season, with Honda power unit issues preventing the Newey-designed AMR26 from completing full race distances. Jonathan Wheatley has left Audi with immediate effect, ahead of what is widely expected to be a move to Aston Martin but there are still no confirmations, only speculations. The approach is said to have been made by Newey himself in late 2025, with Wheatley identified as his primary target for the TP role - a position that would allow Newey to return to what he was originally hired to do. A lengthy gardening leave period is anticipated, meaning Newey could remain as acting Team Principal for the remainder of 2026.

One [video] worth your time

You’ll want to pivot your phone for this one. This video feels important and impactful for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a beautiful reminder that no, you absolutely do not need media/press credentials to shoot F1. On the contrary, in GA and as fans, you have a lot more freedom to shoot what you want. I previously wrote about this paradox in F1 that many accredited media experience. Secondly, I feel it’s time that big sports entities realise that attention, not IP, is the scarcest resource and the most valuable. This creator actually did a phenomenal job questioning whether or not IP is dead and goes on to shine a light on the power of highlights and how brands and sports entities should lean into them rather than sending Cease & Desist letters.

@adamkhanvisuals

Adam Khan | Filmmaker on Instagram: "Massive pinch me moment at…

One [event] that caught my eye

One event that should absolutely be on your radar, and I wish I were in town for this one, but unfortunately (and I use that word loosely), I’ll be gearing up for a back-to-back Monaco GP and the 24h of Le Mans trip. And that event is a live conversation between the CEO of McLaren Racing, Zak Brown and motorsport broadcaster and New York Times bestselling author, Will Buxton. For motorsport fans, business minds, and anyone curious about the mindset behind elite performance and the business of motorsports, this is a rare chance for an honest and unfiltered discussion with one of racing’s most influential figures of the past few decades.

When: Thursday, May 21, 2026, 7:00pm (during the Indianapolis 500 race week)
Where: Hilbert Circle Theatre, 45 Monument Circle, Indianapolis, IN 46204
Price: Tickets start at $55 (not an affiliate link)

[Bon goût] - for those with an acquired taste.

The GT3 Revival Series. Something is happening in motorsport right now that feels less like a new series launch and more like a correction. And with all the noise surrounding the current F1 season and disagreements over the new regulations, it feels like the right time for a revival series. A quiet, knowing, and very deliberate correction.

The GT3 Revival Series - a joint venture between SRO and Peter Auto, the same partnership that helped build the foundations of GT racing back in 1993 - is bringing back the cars that defined an era. We’re talking GT3 machinery from the first eight years of the category, 2006 to 2013, at circuits like Spa and Le Mans. Cars that raced before the algorithms, before the content calendars, before every race became content.

I think it’s worth our attention not just because it’s a beautiful idea, but because it tells you something about where the appetite in motorsport is actually going. The nostalgia economy is real, and GT racing is smart enough to lean into it with intention rather than desperation. These aren’t replicas. These are the real cars, the real drivers, the real Balance of Performance - just running on their own terms again. For those of us who fell in love with the sound and spectacle of GT racing in the early 2000s, this is a homecoming. For everyone else, this is your crash course in why that era mattered. I’ve been kindly asked to attend the first race of the season, so in exactly 10 days, you’ll find me trackside at Paul Ricard.

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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.

⏳ Reading time: 7 minutes

Let me start by saying that yes, this piece will be a short cultural criticism about how our misplaced anger towards influencers - often young women - is doing us all a disservice. I’m struggling to understand why we are still punching down at influencers when we should know better by now. I’ve been creating content online daily for over two decades. I still have my OG lifestyle website, which I created in 2008 because this space taught me so much. And some days it feels like not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, and I struggle with wrapping my head around this.

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Melbourne. The first race weekend of the 2026 Formula 1 season. The paddock is gleaming, the cars are new, the regulations have been overhauled, and most of us in the media centre are locked into the screens trying to understand the new cars and rules. And somewhere on the internet, someone is already furious that a woman with a ring light, an iPhone and a large following got a Paddock pass.

This happens every year like clockwork. Not just in F1. It happens at fashion week. It happened again at the Oscars, where Variety ran a piece titled “Jake Shane’s Questions at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party Prove Influencers Shouldn’t Be Red Carpet Reporters.”

The framing is always the same: there is a ‘sacred’ space, and the wrong people are in it. Where we see the failings of one individual as proof that an entire group in unworthy of being in a specific ‘sacred’ space. It’s gatekeeping revinvented and remastered. This year, all the aforementioned events happened in the span of a month and by the end, I found myself silently screaming that we are doomed because media literacy is nowhere to be found. It’s the framing and bias I want to focus on today, more so than some of the off-putting work by certain individuals who were most likely, in some cases, not up for the task or unprepared, and in others, just the wrong fit.

The ring light in the room

Influencers aren’t new. You just didn’t have a word for them. The influencer didn’t emerge from TikTok. She emerged from every era that ever had a person whose lifestyle, taste, or personality shaped what other people wanted - the tastemakers. In the 1990s, it was the athlete with the sneaker deal, the actress whose haircut launched a thousand salon appointments, the model on a billboard wearing Calvin Klein, the DJ who made a record label. They were paid to be seen with things and go places. They moved culture. We just called them celebrities, or personalities, or “brand ambassadors,” and thought nothing of it.

What changed isn’t the behaviour, it’s the visibility. Social media collapsed the distance between the influencer and the audience, which means the mechanics of the whole thing are now exposed in real time. You can see the ring light, the awkward pause before the scripted line, and the paddock walk filmed vertically for a Reel. You couldn’t see any of that when the arrangement was brokered through a PR agency, buried in a magazine spread and happening in spaces very few got to go and see. All of us now have cameras, so the casual bystander is offering the BTS of how all of this is being crafted in real time. The deal was always there. Now you just can’t ignore it.

Those seats were never going to be yours.

This is perhaps the most persistent myth in the whole conversation: that influencer access comes at the expense of “real fans.” It doesn’t. It never did.

The paddock hospitality suite that a content creator is standing in front of? It belongs to a sponsor. The courtside seats at the NBA game next to a YouTuber? A brand activation. The Vanity Fair Oscar Party invite list? Managed by publicists and shaped by what generates coverage. None of these access points were sitting in a pool waiting to be allocated to the passionate and deserving. They are marketing infrastructure, and they were always going to go to whoever serves the marketing goal. Even those incredible (and I mean it, I love them too) moments when fans get free VIP tickets or a Paddock pass for the day - these moments are filmed, they create content (even if it’s feel-good content - it’s still content) to feed the massive content machine these teams and series serve. We all play a role, and these roles are not interchangeable.

Brands and teams put influencers in those spaces because influencers reach audiences that traditional media doesn’t. That’s not a cultural catastrophe - it’s a distribution and marketing strategy. You can disagree with it, but you’re arguing with a spreadsheet, not a moral failing.

This frustration often highlights a failure of media literacy. Influencers, like celebrities before them, are part of the marketing machine - invited, paid, and positioned to serve a commercial purpose. Just like commentators, journalists and presenters are not interchangeable. Each one provides a very specific role within the ecosystem. Fans are not. Fans sit on the other side of that equation entirely, and that’s not an insult - it’s just the architecture of how modern sports and entertainment work. Knowing which side of the glass you’re on doesn’t make you a lesser participant. It just means you understand the room.

They’re not replacing journalists. They’re filling a different seat entirely.

There’s a legitimate question buried under the snark about red carpet reporters or Paddock influencers who ask celebrities to “act like a cat.” It goes something like: what is the purpose of this access, and is it being used well?

Fair. There is absolutely a time and place for incisive, informed, forensic journalism and that place is not a Vanity Fair party at midnight. There is also a time and place for chaotic, parasocial, unscripted content that makes a younger audience feel like they’re at the party too. These two things are not in competition. They serve different people with different needs, and the outlets commissioning them know exactly which one they’re ordering.

The problem isn’t that the influencer is there. The problem - if there is one - is when access that used to go to journalists who would do something substantive with it now goes exclusively to content creators who won’t. But that’s an editorial decision made by teams and rights holders. Direct your frustration accordingly. I actually think the social and editorial teams need to spend more time mapping out when, how and why certain content is captured and by whom.

And then there’s the part we’re not saying out loud.

Look at who we’re actually mad at. When you scroll through the comments - “she doesn’t even know what DRS is,” “he’s never watched a race in his life,” “this isn’t what the paddock is for”, “they’re not even a real fan'“ look at who the post is about. Young women. People of colour. People from communities that have historically been kept at arm’s length from the rooms where these sports are celebrated and monetised.

The ones who built their own platforms precisely because the traditional gatekeepers weren’t going to hand them credentials. And for what it’s worth, this is not unique to this space, and certainly not unique to Formula 1. I’ve seen this firsthand in politics, in tech, and in the broader media landscape. I’ve said this since day one. I started creating my content in 2019 out of necessity, not passion. I needed people to talk about politics, about technology, culture and even Formula 1 in a way that was digestible to me, even fun to participate in. I needed the sport framed in stories and anchored in human moments. I needed me to talk about this space to myself. And this is true for so many of us. In a recently published video, Eila Park Robertson (whom I’m obsessed with) says the following:

We don’t share and show that same anger towards every sponsor guest who has ever stood in a hospitality suite without knowing a gear ratio. We are not writing think-pieces about the C-suite executives in the paddock on corporate passes who couldn’t tell you the difference between an undercut and an overcut. We are specifically, repeatedly and viscerally angry at the ones who look like they don’t belong - and we have decided that “don’t belong” means “didn’t come up through the channels we recognise.” That’s worth sitting in my opinion, especially when this sort of gatekeeping is coming from the exact communities who’ve been kept on the outside for so long.

@eila2.2

eila park robertson on Instagram: "When WoC lead political comm…

The sport will be fine. The Oscars will survive Jake Shane. The paddock existed before influencers and will exist after whatever replaces them. But if we’re going to have this argument every single season, every fashion week, every awards cycle - the least we can do is be honest about who we’re actually angry at. It’s not the girl with the ring light. It never was.

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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.

⏳ Reading time: 8minutes

Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. And a quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport, you should be aware of, as they explain the cultural shifts we are seeing in this space.

When I attended the US Open last year with Rolex and IBM, J.P. Morgan pulled me into a small, carefully curated dinner to talk about investing in sport. It was one of those evenings where you look around the table and think: how is everyone in this room this smart and interesting?

Last Friday, Esses and J.P. Morgan hosted something in a similar spirit - an intimate drinks moment with some genuinely sharp women in motorsport. What I love about these gatherings is how rare they actually are: that perfect, slightly chaotic blend of business and culture, intellectualism and gossip, all in a setting casual enough that people actually say what they think. To everyone who came and showed up fully - thank you, and let’s do it again soon.

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The lead lap

Alpine F1 is apparently up for sale. BYD is interested in F1. And Genesis is about to kick off its WEC debut in Imola next month. Three stories on my radar this week that, taken individually, feel like motorsport news. Taken together, they feel like a shift in motorsports.

First: BYD, according to Bloomberg, is examining options to enter competitive motorsport, including Formula One and endurance racing and their preferred route would be acquiring an existing team rather than building a team from scratch. Meanwhile, Genesis Magma Racing, led by Cyril Abiteboul, is weeks away from its Hypercar debut at Imola. Two Asian manufacturers, two very different entry strategies, one very clear ambition: use motorsport as a global stage.

And that ambition has a familiar shape. When Renault rebranded its F1 team as Alpine in 2021, then-CEO Luca de Meo was explicit: he believed in “the connection between racing on Sunday and selling on Monday.” The plan was to use the F1 team to help Alpine grow - track results would build brand power, and a stronger Alpine would help justify continued backing for the team. BYD and Genesis are playing the same game, just from a different starting grid: both are brands with serious product ambitions outside their home markets, and motorsport is their most powerful tool for building the kind of emotional credibility that no marketing budget alone can buy.

The irony, of course, is that Alpine is now apparently up for sale. The rebrand was always as much about giving Renault’s underperforming works team a clean slate as it was about selling sports cars, and finishing last in the 2025 Constructors’ Championship is not exactly the “racing on Sunday” story de Meo had in mind. The strategy was sound. The execution, less so, for now anyway. What it does tell you is that the platform itself - an F1 team, a WEC entry, a grid slot - has never been more valuable. The asset appreciates even when the car doesn’t. China and Korea aren’t just eyeing motorsport. It seems like they’ve done the math, and I for one, cannot wait to be in Imola next month and see the GMR-001 out on track.

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The [number] of the week

80-90% of the car is developed over the year in F1. Just a reminder that the car that wins the championship in December won’t look much like the one we saw in Melbourne and Shanghai these past few weekends. In F1, the car never stops changing. See the car we just saw on teh grid in China, well, it’s already being replaced. F1 teams spend the winter building a car, go to testing and then go racing. And while that is true, it’s far from being that simple.

McLaren’s former COO once revealed that of the 16,000 parts on an F1 car, only 10% carry over from one year to the next. The other 90% gets Redesigned. Rebuilt. Replaced. As one F1 pundit and expert put it, teams will make changes to virtually every part on the car - most performance parts will change throughout a season.

To take this further, whilst bodywork, suspension arms etc, will be brand new drawings, there will still be a lot of smaller parts on the cars that are “carry-over” as they call it, from previous seasons. Mercedes once described their development process as “a continuous, cyclical process”.

However, as a former Red Bull mechanic explained to me, there is a distinction to be made. Because whilst the assemblies may be new, internally they will be constructed from many parts that the teams will be familiar with. Essentially, every team is racing two battles at once. The one in front of you, and the one happening in the wind tunnel and back at the factory right now. And this is yet another reason why I love this sport so much and dig for these stories - because there is so much more to it than meets the eye.

Three [stories] that need to be on your radar

1. Sephora x F1Academy should surprise absolutely no one. Back in October of 2024, I took a walk as I tried to make sense of the massive new LVMH investment into Formula 1, and shared a few thoughts. The main takeaway for me was that LVMH didn’t make a $1Billion investment into this space to not then use the sport as a platform for all its companies. I also mentioned that if I were a lifestyle, fashion or beauty brand not in the LVMH portfolio, I would be worried. Shortly thereafter, Moet & Chandon was announced as the Official Champagne of F1, TAG Heuer became the timekeepers of F1, and most recently Sephora has been announced as a partner for F1Academy. Out with Charlotte Tilbury and in with Sephora, although technically Charlotte Tilbury is sold in Sephora stores so that’s probably not the last of them in F1.

2. The wider consequences of a €1million Formula E influencer shunt. I’ve been a broken record on how Formula E missed the mark with their Evo Sessions - and boy did I want to love it. I championed the innovation and willingness to get creative from the series and the fearlessness of the participants. However, I also highlighted the flawed execution and, more specifically, the lack of proper training and preparation that went into this project. I was delighted when Formula E journalist Sam Smith wrote about the project and highlighted some of the same concerns I had. He didn’t hold back, nor should he. He writes, “What needs to be realised about the Evo Sessions initiative is that it was mostly unpopular with the teams even before the incidents in Jeddah last month. Lola-Yamaha Abt is a decent case study in that it has far better things to be doing with its car, its team and its image than allowing a Formula E novice with no prior experience of powerful single-seaters into a car.” Read the full piece here.

3. What do you mean the battery percentages shown during the F1 races are ‘guestimates’ and not actual data, in a data-driven sport? Similar to these guys, I thought the battery percentage levels shown during the race were quite interesting. I’ve found this both useful and fun in Formula E, and so very much enjoyed seeing this in F1 too. With that said, there has been some discussion since the Chinese GP about the accuracy of these percentages. A few people have claimed that it is guesswork by AWS vs. the actual data from the teams and cars. I actually don’t mind either way, and can understand why teams wouldn’t want the exact numbers (I think) out there, but I do think this needs to be made clear - is this data coming directly from the teams (and thus the cars), or does this data potentially contain a margin of error as it’s a deduction from AWS? I’ve put this question to AWS and will keep you posted.

One [video] worth your time

I will never skip a BTS video on how brilliant people do what they do - especially when they break down their creative process.

@danielsimondesign

Daniel Simon on Instagram: "F1 The Movie | Behind the scenes. A…

One [event] that caught my eye

SXSW was on my plans this year, and then, quietly, it wasn’t. Not because something went wrong, but because when I stacked it up against the furious excitement I feel planning for Web Summit Vancouver and Cannes Lions, the pull simply wasn’t there. So I didn’t force it. And honestly? I don’t regret it.

What did catch my attention, though, was the IBM crew arriving in force in Austin and building out their activation: the “IBM AI Sports Club” - a physical expression of their partnership with Scuderia Ferrari HP, and a pretty bold statement about where IBM sees itself going.

Here’s the thing about IBM: they’re not a consumer-facing brand, and that’s precisely why I love working with them. As my husband has taken to telling me: “Toni, you’ve just got to accept that you love a B2B2C corporate client.” And he’s not wrong. I love the complexity and challenge of helping tell the story about why some of these brands - their mission, their tech, their business - are so exciting. But over the past few years, IBM has made a genuine push to own the intersection of AI and sport - not just claim it, but make it feel cool and accessible to a wider audience. Their partnerships with Wimbledon, the US Open, the Masters, and Scuderia Ferrari aren’t decorative. They’re the vehicle.

Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s VP of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, put it well:

“Sports is having a real moment right now, and you could feel that energy all week at SXSW. From the core programming to conversations happening at ADWEEK, Brand Innovators, and The Female Quotient, sports and entertainment were some of the hottest topics in the room. At IBM, we sit right at the intersection of that momentum and the other big conversation right now, AI. Sport is one of the most powerful ways to make AI tangible for people.”

Final thought, I did a post on Instagram, at the start of the year, with all the culture, tech and motorsport events on my radar - many of which I’ll be attending - and it already feels out of date with the sheer number of new events on my radar. Please let me know what events I’m missing.

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⏳ Reading time: 4minutes

Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. The great thing about the internet is that we have access to almost everything. But that’s also the issue. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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The lead lap

Is Drive to Survive (DTS) still relevant? This is the question that has been top of mind for the past few weeks, ever since DTS S08 launched, and I still haven’t finished the season. I’ve written about Drive to Survive at length over the past six years, and the broken record that I keep spinning is the following. Drive to Survive was merely the spark, not the fuel for F1 that everyone thought and said it was. DTS merely kick-started conversations and interests that actually grew online - on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads and Twitch. As I mentioned previously in one of these newsletter pieces:

Eight seasons in, and Drive to Survive is still showing up. But the real question isn't whether the show is good - it's whether it's still necessary. When DTS launched in 2019, Formula 1 had a discovery problem. The sport was spectacular but impenetrable, its paddock famously closed off, its politics illegible to outsiders. Netflix didn’t just document F1 - it translated it. For a new generation of fans, the show was the door. That door is now wide open.

F1 in 2026 is one of the most culturally fluent sports on the planet. It has three races in the United States. Some of its drivers (and even Team Principals) are global celebrities with millions of social media followers and brand deals that rival pop stars. The F1 movie just spent a summer dominating the box office. TikTok creators, YouTube explainers, and a now decade-deep community of English-language F1 content have made the sport more accessible than it has ever been. The new fan funnel no longer runs exclusively through a Netflix series, and I would argue it never really did.

The show’s original superpower was access like never seen before - the sense that you were seeing things you weren’t supposed to see. But F1 has industrialised its own content machine since then. Every team has a media department. Driver personalities are carefully managed and meticulously distributed. The paddock that once felt secret now feels like a studio lot. When everything is content, “behind the scenes” loses its meaning. And I’m also being told that the DTS production company also has exclusivity on long-form “BTS” content (aka everything that happens off-track and in the Paddock).

There’s also the question of who DTS is actually for at this point. The show was built for newcomers - people who needed characters before they could care about results. But the newcomers it recruited in 2020 and 2021 are now seasoned fans. They’re very much watching qualifying on their phones and debating tyre strategies in Reddit threads. DTS hasn’t evolved with them, and yet it has had plenty of opportunities to do so. What remains is a product that services nostalgia more than curiosity - a highlight reel dressed up as revelation, watched largely by people who already know the ending.

That’s not nothing. Plenty of fans enjoy the recap, the drama amplified for television, the season compressed into a bingeable arc. But it’s a very different cultural role than the one the show once played. It’s no longer even the spark. At best, it’s the afterglow. The sport doesn’t need Drive to Survive to grow anymore. Season 8 will have its audience, its moments, its manufactured feuds. But the question the show’s producers probably don’t want asked is a simple one: if DTS launched for the first time today, in a world already fluent in F1 - would anyone notice?

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The number of the week

483,934 is the record crowd number of people that attended this year’s Australian Grand Prix, in Melbourne. This number covers the four-day event. According to the Australian GP, they saw individual day records on both Thursday and Friday before the second-highest figures for Saturday and Sunday. It’s also worth sharing that this is the Grand Prix with the highest number of female fans - a number that kept rising in the past decade. Last year, 45% were female fans, and that number is expected to be closer to 50% thsi year, although we are still waiting on the exact number.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. Cadillac honoured Mario Andretti during the Melbourne GP. As I was waiting to board my flight home to SFO from Melbourne on Monday morning, I smiled as I noticed the 1978 Formula 1 World Champion standing next to me waiting to board his flight. It reminded me that I haven’t yet spoken about the kind gesture from the Cadillac team this past weekend. They announced that their inaugural Formula 1 chassis will carry the designation MAC-26, for Mario Andretti Cadillac 26. As the team put it, “The chassis name recognises Andretti’s legacy while establishing a standard of excellence that guides the organisation as it prepares for its debut season.” As a reminder, Red Bull did something similar in honour of their late owner, Dietrich Mateschitz.

2. Apple and Netflix say ‘What streaming wars’. I joined a product overview and briefing a few weeks back with F1 and Apple, where they announced they had struck a deal with Netflix. This one move reminds me that Apple didn’t just buy F1 broadcast rights in America. They bought the future of how we watch sport. And there is so much more to this deal than meets the eye. I’ve been told by multiple well-informed people that this was one of the easiest deals Apple has ever done. And this doens’t surprise me - this was a no-loose situation for all parties involved. I broke this down further here.

3. The Middle East crisis and its impact on sports. We are reminded yet again that politics and sports are tied at the hip and continuously impact each other. In motorpsorts, this means that the WEC season opener in Qatar has been cancelled and both the Prologue and season opener will take place in Imola mid-April. For Formula 1, this means we may have two fewer races this season, with Bahrain and Saudi GPs most likely to be cancelled. This is also a reminder of the logistical complexity of this sport - we can’t just host a GP in Imola as the freights with the garage kits are on route to another destination as we speak, asking the Melbourne GP to take everything down in Albert Park merely to put it all back up in a few weeks with little time to sell tickets and actually make a profitable event is not going to happen…

One video worth your time

A nail-biting moment during the Australian Grand Prix, and a reminder of the exceptional reflexes these drivers have.

@alpinef1team

BWT Alpine Formula One Team on Instagram: "🫨🫨🫨 @francolapint…

One [event] that caught my eye

The team behind the Australian Grand Prix extended an invitation to Glamour on the Grid - and it turned out to be unlike anything I’d experienced at a race weekend before. Part of that was the setting: the circuit at night, stripped of its daytime urgency, used purely as a backdrop for extraordinary gowns and the kind of people who wear them well. For some guests, this may be their one and only time standing on an F1 grid, close enough to touch the garage infrastructure. For others, the entire point was the surprise of it - that something this cinematic could exist inside a motorsport venue. I had (and have always had) mixed feelings about motorsports being used as a backdrop for fashion, style and culture. I don’t think it bothers me - more so, I notice myself taking note of the feelings that come to the surface.

What struck me most was that this event belonged to Melbourne. I barely recognised a single person on the grid, and the handful of F1 faces I did spot were very much in the minority. I kind of loved it. It was a useful reminder that every race weekend contains multitudes - several completely separate programming worlds running in parallel, rarely intersecting. There’s the race itself and everything that orbits it: the stakeholder dinners, partner receptions, sponsor activations. There’s the fan-facing world - the fan zones, the festivals, the public fan-focused moments built for the people who saved up to be there or who could only attend the free events (making them that much more special and impactful). And then there’s a third layer, often the least visible from the outside: the lifestyle programming aimed at local celebrities and influencers, usually anchored by a brand that wants to be seen in the same frame as Formula 1 without necessarily being of Formula 1. These worlds occasionally overlap, but they’re mostly built for distinct audiences with distinct purposes. It feels like a necessary reminder when I hear the distant cries of fans lamenting that yet another celebrity who knows nothing about Formula 1 took a VIP ticket away from them - the loyal die-hard fan. Not only were those VIP passes never meant for fans and fall under teh marketing and editorial bucket, but it’s sadly just another form of gatekeeping.

The second thing I kept coming back to: this was the tenth year of Glamour on the Grid. Ten years. So the next time we praise a newer promoter or partner for bringing fashion, culture, and lifestyle into the sport - and there’s been plenty of that conversation lately - it’s probably worth looking south first. The Australian GP has quietly been pushing that boundary for a decade. The innovation wasn’t imported. It was already here. And they should get some credit for it.

⏳ Reading time: 6 minutes

Let’s talk about what Apple and F1 pulled off, because I don’t think we’ve given it nearly enough credit. I remember walking the pit lane ahead of the 2024 Las Vegas GP and being impressed and confused by what I was seeing. It wasn’t the F1 cars that caught my eye, but rather the hyper complex, yet pretty compact nonetheless, Apple filming setup that was happening right before my eyes.

The F1 Movie wasn’t just a good film. It was a calculated and long-game business move dressed up as a Hollywood blockbuster. And it worked spectacularly. Apple - a company that still hasn’t fully cracked the streaming wars (but it seems to be taking a new approach) - co-produced a global theatrical release that grossed over $630 million at the box office worldwide, got the F1 teams to play along, and turned Damson Idris into a de facto brand ambassador for the sport. Meanwhile, Formula 1 got a two-hour global advertisement that no marketing budget could have bought. And let’s not forget teh big winner of teh movie - Expensify. Liberty Media must be absolutely delighted. And rumour has it that the sequel is already confirmed.

But here’s the thing that got lost in all the discourse about Brad Pitt’s age and whether the racing was “realistic enough”: to make this film, they had to invent things that didn’t exist yet. New cars. New cameras. New systems. And that’s the story I want to tell today. Oh and did you know that some scenes from the movie were filmed on the iPhone 15 prototype?

First, the car problem

You can’t just stick a film crew in the Paddock and hope for the best. Real F1 cars cost tens of millions of dollars, belong to the teams, and travel at speeds that make “just get a bit closer” a medically inadvisable suggestion. So the production did what any reasonable Hollywood team would do: they built their own.

Starting with a Dallara F2 chassis - the same platform that serves as the official F1 feeder series - they stretched and widened it to bring the proportions closer to a current-spec 2025 F1 car. Then Mercedes-AMG Applied Science (yes, that’s a real division) fabricated full F1-style bodywork to bolt on, complete with aero geometry that wouldn’t look out of place on the actual grid.

And they didn’t just build one version. They built several: a traditional gas-powered variant for high-speed track work, a hybrid version, and a fully electric one specifically designed for pit lane filming, where combustion engines aren’t permitted. That last detail tells you everything about how seriously this production took authenticity, which you have got to appreciate.

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Then, the camera problem

Director Joseph Kosinski has done this before. Top Gun: Maverick was essentially a proof of concept for exactly this approach: miniaturise cinema-grade cameras, mount them where no camera has ever been, and let physics do the cinematography. For the F1 Movie, he brought back his Top Gun DP Claudio Miranda and 1st AC Dan Ming, and they asked a simple, terrifying question: can we go even smaller?

The answer required Sony to build a camera that had never existed. The production went to Sony in late 2022 with a brief that probably went something like this: “We need a cinema camera that can fit inside an F1 car, survive 180+ mph, withstand extreme G-forces and vibration, and still deliver IMAX-quality footage.” Sony spent six months engineering a super-compact prototype. The camera head was physically separated from its recording body and connected via a tether cable - necessary because there simply wasn’t enough space in one place. The image performance matched Sony’s FX6 and FX3 cinema cameras, with remote operating capabilities borrowed from the FR7. The crew nicknamed it Carmen. Even director Kosinski called it Carmen on set.

Carmen was roughly half the size of the cameras used on Top Gun: Maverick. Panavision then custom-manufactured the panning heads - capable of rotating 720 degrees - that would mount Carmen at up to 16 different positions designed into the chassis. The lenses needed custom focus rings fabricated by Panavision because the Voigtländer primes they selected weren’t built to accept standard focus gears. Every single component of this system was purpose-built for this film. So if you are accustomed to watching F1 races on TV, you watched the movie and felt this was like nothing you had ever seen before. Well, it’s because they put cameras in places we had never had them before.

Productions typically ran four cameras per car simultaneously. The recording brains, batteries, and transmitters were housed in the sidepods - specifically under the radiators - to keep mass centralised and minimise aerodynamic disruption. Back at “mission control,” Miranda and Kosinski could monitor feeds from all cameras across multiple cars on track, adjusting framing, focus, and exposure in real time over a mesh IP network covering the entire circuit. They were, in effect, operating cameras at 200 miles per hour from a TV truck in the pit lane.

Then Apple went further

Here’s where it gets really interesting for anyone who follows Apple as a technology company rather than just a phone manufacturer.

The standard FIA regulations require that F1 cars carry a camera pod - a housing for onboard cameras and transponders - in a prescribed location. These normally contain 720p broadcast cameras. For the F1 Movie, Apple worked with the FIA to replace those standard units with something far more capable: a custom camera built on iPhone-class sensor technology, shooting 4K ProRes RAW, running on iOS with custom firmware, and controlled via a custom iPad app over USB-C.

Some of those onboard shots you saw? The ones that felt impossibly intimate, like you were somehow inside the cockpit? Those came from a deconstructed iPhone - or more precisely, an Apple 15 prototype - mounted where the broadcast camera would normally sit. It shot in log format for maximum colour grading flexibility in post, and because it was physically in the regulation camera pod position, it integrated seamlessly with actual race footage from real grands prix.

The cameras were strategically placed to avoid interfering with the car’s aerodynamic integrity, which meant Apple’s engineering team had to think not just like camera designers but like aerodynamicists.

The combined camera system - Venice 2s for dramatic scenes, Carmen for in-car cinema footage, DJI Ronin 4Ds for additional angles, and Apple’s custom iPhone units for the regulation onboard positions - gave the production something no F1 film had ever had before: the ability to roll up to 16 cameras at once across five vehicles, all remotely operated, all delivering cinema-grade footage, all while the cars were actually racing.

Why this matters beyond the movie

So even if you didn’t enjoy the movie, you’ve got to admit that teh technology and production behind it is absolutely incredible. And even more impressive is that what Apple and the F1 production team built isn’t just state-of-the-art film tech; it’s a roadmap. The Carmen system demonstrated that a cinema-grade, remotely operated camera can survive the most hostile environment consumer electronics will ever face. The iPhone-based onboard unit proved that smartphone sensor technology can deliver footage suitable for the largest IMAX screens in the world.

And the sequel is coming. Which means they’ll iterate. Whatever Carmen 2.0 looks like, it’ll be smaller, smarter, and mounted in places that will make the first film look positively conservative.

For Apple, this was never really about making a film. It was about demonstrating - at blockbuster scale, in front of a global audience - exactly what their technology can do when the constraints are extreme, and the stakes are real. That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s a proof of concept. A perfect segue into Apple now having the broadcast rights in America for F1.

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⏳ Reading time: 4minutes

Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. The great thing about the internet is that we have access to almost everything. But that’s also the issue. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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The lead lap

When the 2026 Formula 1 season gets underway in Melbourne on March 8th - International Women’s Day - Turn 6 at Albert Park will carry a name that has never appeared on an F1 circuit before. Under the “In Her Corner” initiative, a partnership between Engineers Australia and the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, the corner will be dedicated to Hannah Schmitz, Head of Race Strategy at Red Bull Racing, and Laura Mueller, Race Engineer at Haas. They are set to become the first women to have an F1 circuit corner named after them, a distinction that, in a sport with over 70 years of history, speaks volumes about how long this recognition has been absent.

Mueller made history as the first full-time female race engineer in F1 history when she took on the role at the start of the 2025 season, while Schmitz, who began at Red Bull in 2009, is one of only 11 women ever to have stood on an F1 podium to accept the constructors’ trophy. Because sadly this still needs to be said, these are not token appointments - they are two of the sharpest minds in the paddock, finally getting the kind of recognition their male counterparts have long taken for granted. And that alone slaps the biggest smile on my face.

But this moment of celebration arrived in the same week as a stark reminder of where we still are. When the United States women’s ice hockey team won Olympic gold, President Trump called the men’s team - who also won - and invited them to the White House, then casually added that he supposed they’d have to invite the women too. Not a separate call. Not equal fanfare. An afterthought, tacked onto the end of a celebration that wasn’t really about them. The contrast is almost too on-the-nose: in one corner of the sporting world, two women are having their names etched into a racing circuit; in another, a gold medal-winning women’s team is being treated like an obligation.

This is the tension that defines this moment in women’s sport. The symbolic gestures are getting better, and “In Her Corner” is genuinely meaningful. The initiative’s guiding principle, “if you can see it, you can be it,” reflects something real: visibility matters, role models matter, and naming a corner after a strategist and an engineer rather than a driver is itself a quiet act of redefinition. But symbolism only carries weight when it’s backed by structural change. Women remain drastically underrepresented in F1 leadership, in coaching and management roles across elite sport, and in the pay structures and broadcast investment that signal what an institution truly values. A corner renamed is a start. Equal treatment, equal pay, and equal respect - not as a concession but as a baseline - is the destination. Until that gap closes, every celebration like “In Her Corner” deserves both our applause and our continued pressure.

The number of the week

30 years after winning the 1996 Formula 1 world championship with the team, Damon Hill has rejoined the Williams F1 team as an official ambassador. This is a similar role that Jenson Button had before he moved over to the Aston Martin F1 team this year. Hill will be fulfilling this duty alongside three-time W Series champion Jamie Chadwick.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. Gentle Monster Circuit Collection⁣⁣ Disney x Formula 1⁣⁣. Here’s a sentence I never thought I would be saying, then again, F1 has been keeping us on our toes and full of surprises recently. Looks like the popular sunglasses brand - Gentle Monster - just teased a potential collab with Disney and F1. Gentle Monster is a South Korean luxury glasses brand which has become very famous for its elaborate and incredibly Instagrammable brick-and-mortar shops.

2. F1 launched its 2026 teaser this week, and just like the official picture, it missed the mark for me this time. Again, I can see the concept and the idea, but the execution feels so fabricated and corporate. In other words, it feels like they wanted to do something edgier but played it too safe. Does anyone remember when, twelve years ago, George The Poet was invited by F1 and asked to write a poem about the Monaco GP - the lifestyle, the race, the culture, the politics? I’ve added the video just below. Bring back those moments, please.

3. Disney just did something no other streaming platform has done yet, but certainly should. Just like the NBA understood that highlights were the more affordable form of marketing so why would they ban fans from making highlight reels on social, Disney has understood that Gen Z and Gen Alfa are discovering music, books and movies through short-form snippets on TikTok. So to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the movie High School Musical, Disney released the full 2006 movie in 52 parts, alongside nostalgic content featuring iconic scenes. Now you may think this is strange, but as Sam highlights correctly, all it takes is one look at the comment section to understand that the reason why this is so popular is that it creates a social and engaging experience. We saw this most recently with the success of Heather Rivalry; this is how fandoms are built and grow - at scale - and with it, the movie, the music, the show or the sport they are discussing and sharing.

One video worth your time

One [event] that caught my eye

I’m beyond thrilled that I’ll be going to the Australian GP with Esses next week (well, that’s if they validate my visa in time). It’s my first time attending this GP specifically, and I’ve never attended a season opener, so it’s safe to say I’m pretty excited. I’ve heard McLaren and Audi are doing a lot, and so is the Australian GP, as ever, and specifically around International Women’s Day.

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⏳ Reading time: 11min

For three years, Sauber’s F1 cars carried logos that should have raised more eyebrows than they did (in my opinion, anyway). Still to this day, I’m at a loss as to how two interconnected companies - Stake and Kick - plastered their brands across Formula 1 with remarkably little scrutiny. As Audi prepares to enter F1 with a clean slate, it’s worth asking: how did sponsors facing class-action lawsuits, regulatory crackdowns, and accusations of operating unlicensed gambling operations glide through the sport almost entirely unexamined? And why didn’t a single F1 pundit or motorsport journalist (that I could find) look into, question and report on these sponsors?

The answer reveals something slightly uncomfortable about modern F1 media: we’re excellent at covering the sport we know, but remarkably blind to controversies emerging from worlds we don’t know, which is just one reason why I love how much mainstream, tech, culture and even fashion media are now covering this sport, as well as non-motorsport creators and influencers. One of the reasons sponsorship (especially controversial sponsorships) in F1 fascinates me so much is that one of my very first introductions to the sport was in the early 90s, when my dad - also a massive F1 fan - was working in the European Parliament and working specifically on getting tobacco advertising banned - and that also meant banned from sports like F1.

I’ve covered these sponsors multiple times back in 2024 and 2025, but I’ve never written about them in depth. So here goes.

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What are Kick and Stake, really

Let’s start with the basics, because if you’re primarily an F1 fan, there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of either platform - Kick or Stake - outside their racing sponsorships.

Stake is an Australian online casino founded in 2017 by Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven - a crypto-gambling platform operating from the regulatory haven of Curaçao.

Kick is a video livestreaming service backed by Stake and streaming personality Trainwreckstv, founded in 2022 as a competitor to Twitch. The two aren’t just business partners; they’re essentially a vertically integrated gambling-to-eyeballs pipeline. Stake co-founder Ed Craven is an investor in Kick, and the streaming platform’s entire economic model depends on funnelling viewers toward Stake’s casino.

Think of it this way: Kick offers streamers an impossibly generous 95/5 revenue split -and any streamer will tell you there are far better terms than what Twitch offers. Why? As Concordia University assistant professor Andrei Zanescu noted, this can be explained by the influx of new users that Stake receives as a result of gambling streamers broadcasting themselves on Kick while using the gambling platform.

Critics have characterised Kick as existing primarily as a Stake advertisement designed to reach a broader, younger demographic. You’re not watching a neutral streaming platform; you’re watching an elaborate funnel designed to normalise gambling to audiences that skew young and male - and well, that’s precisely one of F1’s target demographics, although I would argue that’s somewhat of a misconception these days.

The legal quicksand

Here’s where things get genuinely strange - even for me. These weren’t just ethically grey sponsors; they were companies facing serious legal challenges that any due diligence process should have flagged.

Switzerland, 2024: The Federal Gaming Board opened proceedings against Sauber over concerns that the team’s use of the Stake logo might constitute advertising, potentially violating the Federal Gambling Act, since Stake does not have a Swiss license. The team, based in Switzerland, was potentially breaking Swiss law by advertising its own title sponsor. You might have noticed over the past few years that, depending on the market, the team kit and car lively changed from Stake to Kick.

United Kingdom, 2025: The UK Gambling Commission ordered the shutdown of Stake’s UK website following a controversial advertisement involving an adult performer outside Nottingham Trent University that violated advertising standards. Not a fine. A shutdown. This case tied Stake to the English Premier League Football Club Everton where their logo was prominently displayed on the front of their shirt.

United States, ongoing: The legal situation gets murkier. Multiple class-action lawsuits allege that Stake.us, the company’s American subsidiary, is actually an unlicensed online gambling operation violating state laws while marketing itself as a harmless “social casino”. The “sweepstakes” model Stake.us uses where you theoretically buy virtual tokens, not gamble, is under sustained legal attack. Lawsuits claim that despite Stake’s assertion that players purchase harmless virtual tokens, the pricing structure reveals that “Stake Cash” is the real product being sold to entice real-money gambling. By 2025, Los Angeles sued Stake.us, asking the court to shut down operations and require the company to refund player losses, with the city attorney describing it as “especially pernicious and addictive because players can access the casino 24 hours a day, seven days a week, directly from their mobile phones”. And all of this feels pretty newsworthy, but almost all of it went unreported by the F1 and motorsports community.

The influencer playbook gone wrong

The celebrity angle makes this even messier. Drake signed a deal with Stake reportedly worth $100 million per year. You may remember his countless social posts where he shared himself livestreaming and wagering huge amounts on Stake games and promoting the site on his widely followed social media accounts. But lawsuits allege that on many occasions, Drake and influencer Adin Ross were not wagering their own money but “house money” provided by Stake, which if not disclosed would violate Missouri state law.

One of the world’s biggest music stars, livestreaming gambling sessions to millions of young fans, potentially using house money without disclosure, all while promoting a platform sponsoring an F1 team. Allegations include “glamorising gambling to millions of impressionable fans who treat his betting habits as gospel”.

Drake later deleted his Kick account in 2025 after venting anger at the platform’s owners, calling Stake co-founder Ed Craven a snake and claiming “they treat us like shit”. When your $100-million-per-year celebrity ambassador publicly calls you a snake and rage-quits your platform, that’s typically a red flag about business practices. That being said, Drake was back pushing his bets on Stake during the Super Bowl, so maybe some agreement has been met.

The silence that speaks volumes

So why didn’t F1 media cover any of this? Here are my theories, from most to least charitable:

The Knowledge Gap: F1 journalists are brilliant at decoding tyre compounds and technical directives. But Twitch culture? Crypto gambling? Influencer marketing economics? That’s a different expertise entirely. I suspect most F1 journalists simply didn’t understand what they were looking at. Stake and Kick emerged from a digital subculture - gaming streams, crypto gambling, Discord communities - that exists in a parallel media universe. If you don’t follow that world, you might see “Stake” on a Sauber and think “oh, another betting sponsor” without realising you’re looking at something far more complex and controversial.

Gambling Fatigue: F1 has, in one way or another, been ‘dealing’ with gambling sponsors. Various regional betting companies. Historical partnerships with Monaco casinos. Perhaps Stake felt like just another betting logo in a sport already comfortable with the industry. The sport’s long history of morally complicated sponsors - tobacco, oil states, crypto exchanges - may have created a numbness. Another questionable sponsor? Sure, whatever, at least it’s not Mission Winnow pretending not to be Philip Morris.

Geoblocking Made It Invisible: Stake advertising on Sauber’s website was not viewable in Switzerland and other restricted countries due to geoblocking measures taken by Sauber to ensure legal compliance. The team constantly swapped between Stake and Kick branding at roughly eight races where gambling ads were prohibited. This shape-shifting sponsorship may have made it feel less prominent, less permanent - background noise rather than a story worth investigating.

The Lame Duck Factor: Everyone knew Audi was coming in 2026. The team was in financial limbo after losing Alfa Romeo, but was unable to invest in long-term partnerships due to being subject to an Audi takeover. Stake felt like a stopgap sponsor, money to keep the lights on until the German manufacturer arrived. Why investigate deeply when it’s clearly temporary?

Access Journalism: For many, F1 journalism depends on paddock access. Aggressively investigating a team’s title sponsor could damage those relationships. Smaller outlets, especially, can’t afford to be frozen out. This creates a climate where certain questions don’t get asked.

Regulatory Complexity: The legal status of these companies is genuinely complicated. Operating from Curaçao, using sweepstakes models, geoblocking different territories, navigating crypto gambling laws that barely exist - it’s a regulatory maze. Maybe journalists simply didn’t have the time, bandwith or couldn’t figure out whether these were illegal operations or just sleazy-but-legal ones.

What this reveals about F1 media

The Stake/Kick story does, however, expose a structural weakness in how F1 is covered. The sport is globalising, attracting younger and more diverse audiences, partnering with companies from emerging industries. But F1 media largely remains what it’s always been: specialists in motorsport, engineering, team politics, and driver psychology.

When controversies emerge from worlds we don’t naturally follow - streaming culture, crypto ecosystems, influencer marketing, AI and LLMs - they are often overlooked or ignored. Not trained to recognise the red flags. Don’t have sources in those industries. Don’t even speak the language.

Compare the Stake/Kick silence to how F1 media covered FTX. When Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange collapsed, it was front-page news everywhere, and F1’s Mercedes partnership became part of the story. But FTX’s fraud was so spectacular, so mainstream, that you couldn’t miss it. Stake and Kick’s controversies were more insidious - regulatory fights, class-action suits, influencer marketing scandals that played out in courtrooms and on gaming forums, not CNN.

The sport aggressively courted tobacco money for decades, and journalists rightly documented every controversy. Crypto sponsors received heavy scrutiny after the FTX collapse. Even Mission Winnow faced persistent media questioning about whether it was just Philip Morris trying to circumvent advertising bans. Yet Kick and Stake quietly exited F1 when Audi took over, with little fanfare or retrospective analysis.

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The bigger question around accountability

The sport is signing sponsorship deals with Web3 companies, NFT platforms, emerging fintech firms, sports betting apps, and technology companies whose business models aren’t always immediately transparent. F1’s expansion into new markets - particularly the U.S. - brings exposure to industries and regulatory frameworks that European motorsport journalists may not fully understand.

We can’t credibly claim to hold the sport accountable if we’re only equipped to scrutinise the controversies we’re already familiar with. Tobacco? We know that playbook. Oil and gas? We understand those politics. Traditional gambling? That’s familiar terrain. But crypto gambling platforms operating from tax havens while funnelling users through influencer-backed streaming services? That’s not in our wheelhouse. And that ignorance is a vulnerability that sponsors can exploit.

As the sport signs increasingly complex commercial deals with companies from industries we don’t traditionally cover, the motorsport media landscape needs to adapt. That might mean F1 media hiring people with expertise in adjacent fields. Having someone on staff who understands fintech, crypto, gaming, or digital marketing. Creating partnerships with journalists from those beats. At minimum, it means recognising our blind spots and doing basic Google searches before accepting sponsor announcements at face value.

Because here’s the thing: Stake and Kick weren’t hiding. The lawsuits were public. The regulatory actions were announced. The controversy around Drake’s gambling streams was covered extensively - just not by F1 media. The next Stake is coming. It might be an AI company with questionable data practices, or a crypto firm operating in regulatory grey areas, or a sports betting platform with concerning addiction rates.

The Stake/Kick story is a reminder that understanding modern F1 requires more than understanding F1. It requires understanding the broader economic and technological forces reshaping sports, media, and fan experiences. I wasn’t writing about Formula 1 in the 70s, 80s or even 90s, but I can’t help but feel like we used to notice and speak up more about these topics.

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. The great thing about the internet is that we have access to almost everything. But that’s also the issue. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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The lead lap

First, I love that Snapchat is expanding its presence in sports and collaborating with more athletes - congrats to Alba on this partnership. Now for this week’s lead lap - Formula 1 has entered its most radical new era in over a decade, with sweeping changes to the power unit, aerodynamics, and car dimensions all arriving at the same time. The F1 teams are still out in Bahrain for another week of pre-season testing, and here’s what we know so far - the good, the bad and the truth.

The good

Let’s start with the fact that the ICE side of the power unit can run on 100% sustainable fuels, as F1 tries to meet its self-set goal of carbon neutrality by 2030. These advanced sustainable fuels were already trialled in F2 and F3 in 2025, and are made from sources such as carbon capture, municipal waste, and non-food biomass. I’ll also say that there seems to be a consensus that cars being shorter, narrower, lighter, and nimbler, with a shortened wheelbase, making them more responsive through corners, is a good thing.

The Red Bull Ford power unit was the story of the week. You’d struggle to find someone in the paddock who was not impressed - after running reliably throughout, it displayed impressive energy deployment on the straights to give Red Bull a significant advantage there. It ran for 670 laps across the Red Bull and Racing Bulls cars, turning a lot of heads. That said, World Champion, Max Verstappen, had some strong words about the new cars. He called them “Formula E on steroids”, “anti-racing”, “not fun”, and “not like F1” - with the Red Bull livery and the cars’ proportions the only redeeming features in his view. Strong words heading into the final test, but fear not, Formula E was there to turn these comments into marketing dust.

Ferrari quietly impressed. Lewis Hamilton completed a long run on the final day that was quicker than Oscar Piastri’s McLaren while they were both on track, and Charles Leclerc had compared favourably to Lando Norris on the second day. Ferrari also appeared to be on top of the chaotic 2026 start procedures, with its engine seeming able to minimise turbo lag better than rivals.

And then there’s the feel-good story of Cadillac. The American squad ran reliably and consistently throughout, completing more than 1,700km - around five race distances - as they focused on refining balance, set-up, and energy management.

The bad

Mercedes arrived in Bahrain following a very smooth run in Barcelona, but suffered a series of problems - first with the suspension, then with their power unit - which hampered their mileage. Kimi Antonelli managed just 33 laps across two days, compared to 110 for team-mate George Russell. They remain a strong overall package, but it was a frustrating week for a team many had pegged as favourites. To make things a little worse for Mercedes, the five engine manufacturers will vote next week on a potential mid-season rule change addressing the compression ratio row centred on Mercedes.

Aston Martin. Early indications suggest the AMR26 is too slow and very difficult to drive. And it’s worth repeating - it’s far too early to make any real assessments. The team’s development fell around four months behind schedule while they waited for Adrian Newey to finish his gardening leave, and new engine partner Honda appears significantly behind the curve on power unit development.

I’m also going to put this year’s driver picture in the bad section because this is simply not it and it’s been getting some heat on social media too, and rightly so.

The truth

The second and final test runs from February 18–20, also in Bahrain, before the season opens in Australia on March 8.

On February 18th, there was a Formula 1 Commission meeting and here’s what we know so far: As per the FIA’s press release, there will be “further evaluation and technical checks on energy management matters”, and these will obviously be carried out this week during the second week of testing. There will be no immediate major regulatory changes, “given that initial evidence and feedback remain immature and that premature change carries the risk of increased instability ahead of the first race.” A new race start procedure is currently being evaluated as we speak - specifically, the light sequence.

And in case you missed it, Apple TV now has an F1 section (clearly the F1TV migration is in full swing) and there is lots of content from pre-season testing now available to the American audience.

The number of the week

$1,000/seat was the starting price for the main All-Star Game in Los Angeles this past Sunday. The NBA All-Star weekend was this past weekend and a lot of people had a lot to say about it - mostly that the games looked very empty, attendance seemed low, and that may have something to do with the fact that the ticket prices were incredibly high. Now, I know very little about basketball, but I do know that if the demand isn’t there, the ticket prices shouldn’t be that high because it ends up being a loose/loose situation.

As The Athletic put it, the all-star weekend was simply not an in-person event for the fans - not anymore anyway, and empty stadiums like this is what happens when events become too corporate. And then there is the room that is made to accommodate the made, and this quote stood out:

And speaking of the NBA, just weeks after his legal battles with NASCAR, Michael Jordan’s team just won the Daytona 500 in one of the most insane finishes I’ve ever seen, and as Thandie put it, what a win in the midst of Black History Month.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. The second FE Evo session happened in Jeddah this past weekend, and I’m at a loss for words if I’m being completely honest. I was looking forward to doing a write-up on teh event and seeing how it compared to last year’s session, but I’ve decided against it. Leading up to the first Evo session last year in Miami, I was full of excitement and optimism. However, similarly to last year, it seems that the highlight of the weekend (or rather the piece of content being pushed far and wide on social channels) is a crash from one of the content creators who, after half a day in a simulator, took to the track. And the whispers from the FE Paddock are very much that this event should probably not happen again, and on this, I agree. That is, not until a proper training and safety programme is put into place. And I’ll leave it at that.

2. The World Endurance Championship is losing two significant names from its Hypercar ranks, with Alpine confirming just last week that it will exit the series at the end of 2026, following Porsche’s departure that was announced late last year. Together, they represent the third and arguably most consequential wave of manufacturer withdrawals since the Hypercar era began in 2021. Alpine joined the Hypercar class in its inaugural year and has competed in every season bar 2023, but with minimal success. The root cause of the exit is financial and strategic rather than purely sporting. Parent company Renault has been cutting down many of its motorsport projects across the board: in Formula 1, Alpine closed its power unit project to become a Mercedes customer team, while Dacia also ruled out a return to Dakar despite winning the most recent edition. The decision to focus exclusively on F1 rather than run a two-pronged motorsport programme reflects a leaner, more survival-oriented mindset from a brand that has been navigating a difficult period commercially and in terms of leadership. Porsche’s exit carries even more historical weight. The German marque has 19 outright Le Mans victories - more than any other manufacturer - making it the most storied name in endurance racing history. Porsche’s departure, like Alpine’s, stems from the same broader forces reshaping the automotive industry: rising costs, a difficult EV transition, and parent group Volkswagen navigating significant financial turbulence. The underlying theme with both exits is that running a top-level Hypercar programme is enormously expensive, and the return on investment - in terms of both sporting results and brand exposure - has proven harder to justify than anticipated. The silver lining is that the WEC’s top class remains well-stocked: Aston Martin entered in 2025, Genesis joins this season, and both McLaren and Ford have announced they will arrive in 2027.

3. When car events look nothing like our parents’ car events. Hypebeast did a great write-up on last week’s event - Lucid showed up in style at Berlin’s International Film Festival. The event was described as “a cinematic multisensory event stepping into the world of its new all-electric Gravity SUV.”

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   Hypedrive | Last week, @lucidmotors brought Berlin closer to th…

One video worth your time

One thing we knew was coming and we could count on was that the 2026 engines would sound different, and potentially a little louder (to the delight of many F1 fans). Simply put, the removal of the MGU-H means the turbo no longer has to drive an electric motor, which reduces backpressure on the exhaust.

According to Mercedes engine boss Hywel Thomas, "the backpressure is reduced because the turbo doesn't have to drive the electric motor. This results in a slightly louder sound.” So no, the 2026 power units are not going to sound like the old V8/V10 era - there should only be a slight ‘improvement’. On top of that, the combustion engine will be burning less fuel, meaning it will be working less hard, which actually reduces noise in some respects.

But because the MGU-H is gone, teams can't recover enough energy from braking alone. So the engine now switches to full-throttle mode even while braking and cornering to generate extra electricity for the battery. This means we will hear high-rev engine noise in slow-speed sections, which is an unfamiliar sound compared to previous cars. So in short: the cars sound a bit more aggressive due to less exhaust backpressure, but the bigger story is the character of the sound changing - high revs in corners, a "different soundscape" - rather than a return to the roaring V10 days.

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FORMULA 1® on Instagram: "Sound on for the roars of all five Po…

One [event] that caught my eye

Just your weekly reminder that we cannot separate sports from politics, the two are very much tied at the hip - whether you like it or not. This incredible video from Caolan is a great recap of how and why big sporting events have been used for political means. This is a topic I’ve spoken about in some detail previously, and will continue to do so.

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The lead lap

We always knew the 2026 F1 season was going to be messy, complicated, interesting and a rollercoaster ride. And I would say that things are just kicking off, and right now, ahead of the pre-season testing in Bahrain, all teams seem to be focused on one engine in particular, so let’s talk about it.

Formula 1’s 2026 regulations lowered the maximum engine compression ratio from 18:1 to 16:1 - a change meant to ease development and align with sustainable fuels. But Mercedes (and to a lesser extent Red Bull, and we’ll come back to that) have found an ingenious workaround: the rules measure compression ratios “at ambient temperature” when engines are cold and stationary. By using materials with specific thermal expansion properties, their components expand at operating temperature, effectively pushing compression ratios back toward 18:1 during actual racing while still passing the static 16:1 checks. Clever, really, and a very literal translation of the FIA rules.

The potential advantage is significant - reports suggest 10-13 horsepower, worth two to three tenths per lap. As a reminder, Mercedes is also supplying McLaren, Williams, and Alpine, so eight cars total could benefit from this ‘loophole’. Ferrari, Honda, and Audi have jointly complained to the FIA, arguing this violates the spirit of the regulations. Mercedes argues they’ve followed the letter of the law, and technically, they’re right.

Red Bull’s position in this controversy is particularly interesting. The knowledge likely reached Red Bull Powertrains through former Mercedes personnel - hardly surprising given Red Bull’s recruitment from Mercedes High Performance Powertrains for their in-house engine project. But here’s the twist: paddock rumors suggest Red Bull attempted to replicate Mercedes’ approach but couldn’t match the gains. This matters because forcing a regulatory change requires a supermajority -four of the five engine manufacturers plus the FIA and Formula One Management. Audi, Ferrari, and Honda needed Red Bull onboard, and now they have them. Red Bull’s flip could be the deciding vote that outlaws Mercedes’ clever engineering. if, and big if, it comes to this.

The FIA is caught between precedent and intent. Changing rules mid-stream because rivals missed the same loophole could set the wrong standard, in my opinion, as we want teams to constantly push the boundaries of the sport and regulations. Yet the governing body clearly intended to reduce compression ratios across the board.

FIA director Nikolas Tombazis wants a resolution before the Australian Grand Prix, with multiple manufacturer meetings underway. The goal: keep this out of the courtroom and find a solution before the season starts - though any meaningful technical response from competitors wouldn’t be feasible until 2027 at the earliest - making any changes to a power unit is no small feat.

The number of the week

135 million. That’s potentially how many people tuned in on NBC to watch the 2026 Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny. This would make it the most-watched halftime show. This is according to a report by CBS News, although they did not say how they arrived at this estimate.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. The Cadillac F1 Team launch happened, and they did something no team has ever done before. Cadillac isn’t asking for permission anymore. They paid $450 million. They satisfied every requirement. Now they’re introducing themselves the only way that makes sense for America’s team in a European sport: loudly, proudly, during the most American cultural moment of the year. Cadillac’s launch involved a reveal in Times Square and an ad at the Super Bowl. I wrote about the business case for both of these in the newsletter. Link

2. The Aston Martin F1 Team launch happened, and design legend Adrian Newey insists that the 2026 Aston Martin car is one of the more extreme interpretations of the new rules. The team decided to hold their launch in Saudi Arabia - home to their title sponsor, the Saudi Arabian national oil company, Aramco. The AMR26 is definitely the talk of the town and will feature a matte satin finish for the first time, which raised all kinds of questions for me around paint finish and the use of vinyl versus paint on F1 cars. In a strange update, however, Newey admitted during Monday's launch that the team had no time to paint the car for the Barcelona shakedown, which is why it ran in black livery instead.

3. The McLaren F1 Team launch happened, and well, that’s about it. In some way,s they are the reigning World Champions, so they probably don’t need the eyeballs and press, but then you could also argue that this is the exact reason they should go all-out with their lively launch. By all standards, the launch was a success and the livery itself drew lots of chatter. However, one announcement stood out to me, and that was the announcement of a new global initiative aimed at helping redefine fan access and transforming race-day energy into unforgettable experiences. They created two new positions of Team Priceless captains of the McLaren F1 team - another way of bringing in creators and getting fans involved.

One video worth your time

With profitability now within reach for every team on the grid, Formula 1 has evolved into a sophisticated multibillion-dollar ecosystem. This episode of the Performance Layer explores the three core revenue pillars - media, promotions, and sponsorships - that are fueling the sport's massive financial turnaround. It’s a decent overview of the landscape without getting too granular.

One [event] that caught my eye

For anyone based in San Francisco, it looks like the Red Bull F1 team will be hosting a showrun, presented by Ford, in the city on February 21st (next weekend). This is a free-for-all event that you won’t want to miss. Yuki Tsunoda, a fan favourite, will take centre stage at the Red Bull Showrun, driving Sebastian Vettel’s championship-winning RB7 along the San Francisco waterfront. This city-first exhibition will transform the urban streets of the Marina into custom-built tracks, where championship-winning F1 cars and Ford vehicles will unleash their power. I always love the concept of putting an F1 car where it doens’t belong, and no one does that better than Red Bull.

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⏳ Reading time: 8minutes

Normally, these deep-dive stories go out on Thursdays. So first, thank you for bearing with me. I really wanted this week’s topic to cover Cadillac’s presence at the Super Bowl, as well as the other ways F1 teams and their sponsors had a presence there. The Athletic wrote a great piece that answers the question - why did Cadillac pick a Super Bowl ad and a Times Square reveal for their livery launch? - and it’s also well worth reading.

When Cassidy Towriss, Chief Brand Advisor for the Cadillac F1 Team, posed the question “what’s the most American thing we can do?” The answer that followed was: a Super Bowl commercial watched by 127 million people, combined with a Times Square spectacle that brings Formula 1 directly to the masses. And that’s exactly what we got this weekend. This Sunday, F1 witnessed something it’s never seen before - a team announcing itself not in a factory hangar or at an invite-only media event, but during the most-watched television broadcast in America. It’s audacious, expensive, unexpected, and that’s exactly the point.

Note: the Cadillac F1 Team asked me to attend the launch in Times Square, but with the Super Bowl on my doorstep, I decided to follow along from the comfort of my home. I am, however, working with the team on my takeaway of the launch, which will be live soon on Instagram.

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The countdown & the reveal

Since Friday, a giant frosted glass box appeared in Times Square, and it’s impossible to ignore. Inside sits a replica of Cadillac’s 2026 F1 car, obscured behind frosted panels, with a countdown ticking toward Super Bowl Sunday. This Cadillac Countdown Box represents a philosophical shift in how F1 teams introduce themselves. Livery reveals traditionally happen behind closed doors - exclusive media affairs, hospitality suites, YouTube streams for the converted. Cadillac brought F1 to the people instead.

“A Super Bowl spot is a one-way conversation,” Chief Marketing Officer Ahmed Iqbal explained. “You get seconds on a screen, then it’s gone.” Times Square gives the reveal physical permanence and creates genuine intrigue - the glass will become transparent in sync with the commercial, allowing anyone to see the livery in person. On February 9th, the car will remain on display for public viewing. No credentials or special access required. In an era when democracy is being tested, this feels, in some way, very democratic.

And this certainly is one way to bring Formula 1 to the average American - and the many tourists - and create intrigue and interest to a potentially curious fan. It’s also worth pointing out that they are not the only team present in Times Square, the Aston Martin F1 Team has also taken over Times Square with a massive ad, featuring none other than the face of design legend Adrian Newey and driver lineup - Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso.

The ‘all-American’ ad

Now, for the Super Bowl commercial, with a potential 130 million viewers, it certainly was the answer to “what’s the most American thing we can do?” - a question Cassidy Towriss, Chief Brand Advisor for the Cadillac F1 Team, had put on the proverbial table.

For some context, especially for my fellow Europeans, Super Bowl commercials cost approximately $8 - $10 million for 30 seconds - that does not include production, celebrity fees, or pre-game marketing. For perspective, Apple’s legendary “1984” Macintosh ad cost the equivalent of $2.7 million today. Amazon’s 2022 Alexa spot reportedly cost $26 million for two minutes.

But Cadillac isn’t selling a product available tomorrow. They’re selling a dream that won’t manifest until March 2026. As Madeline Coleman wrote in The Athletic, they must convey “the racing, the underdog story, its determination, to create this big, unifying moment” in 30 seconds. The ad played at around 6:40 pm PT in the fourth quarter of the game, to the sound of President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech about going to the moon. A statement about being bold, daring, and starting from scratch. A statement about racing against European giants who’ve perfected their craft for decades. A statement about being unapologetically American.

The ad, directed by Sam Pilling with a score by Oscar nominee Max Richter, prominently featured Apple TV+, F1’s exclusive U.S. broadcaster - a clever cross-promotion that gives both brands a stake in each other’s success. The gamble: convince America that Formula 1 matters, and that they should care when an American works team takes the grid for the first time in decades.

The story begins here | The legacy

To understand Cadillac’s approach and why the above ad makes so much sense, you need to understand how improbable their presence on the grid actually is. In January 2023, Michael Andretti announced his intention to bring an American team to F1, backed by GM and Cadillac. The FIA approved it. Liberty Media rejected it, stating the Andretti name wouldn’t “provide value to the championship.”

What followed was Shakespearean. Mario Andretti lobbied Congress. The DOJ opened an antitrust investigation. At a 2024 Miami party, Liberty CEO Greg Maffei allegedly told Mario: “I will do everything in my power to see that Michael never enters Formula 1.”

In October 2024, Michael stepped back. Dan Towriss took control. The Andretti name vanished from materials. GM committed to building its own power unit by decade’s end, investing $140-150 million in a new engine facility. The team paid a $450 million expansion fee - more than double the original demand.

November 2024: provisional approval. March 2025: official confirmation. The investigation dissolved. Michael Andretti, at St. Petersburg, said he’s “very happy” now. Mario, 86 and on Cadillac’s board, was poetic: “My first love was Formula 1 and now - some 70 years later - the F1 paddock is still my happy place.”

The story Cadillac tells isn’t about an ad or installation. It’s about an American manufacturer that refused to take no for an answer, that endured a lot to get here, that paid every toll until the door opened. And now that it’s been opened, you can best bet they will do everything they can to stay and build a legacy worth talking about. It’s the underdog narrative that American sports culture was built on.

Now they’re announcing themselves to 130+ million people who might not know what DRS is, but understand what it means when someone fights for their seat at the table.

So much more than a football match | The fashion

There is another, just as strategic but maybe less obvious, aspect worth talking about and that’s the fashion aspect of it all. Thom Browne skipped New York Fashion Week entirely to show his Fall/Winter 2026 collection at the GQ Bowl in San Francisco during Super Bowl weekend. Not a capsule collection - his entire main line, presented at the Legion of Honor Museum on February 6. I also noticed that the Audi Revolut F1 Team was out in force, too, in San Francisco with a show car, which I absolutely loved.

GQ selected Browne for his football connection - he’s served as artist-in-residence for Notre Dame. But the real reason is simpler: “Every Sunday, you see NFL players wearing Thom Browne,” said Will Welch, GQ’s outgoing editor-in-chief. He’s also dressed the likes of Daniel Ricciardo, Morgan Riddle, Serena Williams... and rightly named the ‘king of sports-fashion crossover’. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told The Business of Fashion, the league is “putting increasing focus on the intersection between sports and fashion, because we think our fans care deeply about it, our players care deeply about it.”

The numbers validate this shift. In 2023, Instagram reported that posts featuring NBA and WNBA player tunnel looks had 25% higher engagement than regular sports content. A Shopify report found 40% of users under 30 purchased items they’d first seen on athletes, and fashion houses responded en masse. The convergence, some have argued, may have reached saturation.

Which brings us back to Cadillac. Their Tommy Hilfiger partnership for team fanwear isn’t just merch - it’s part of this cultural moment where sports entities are aiming to claim fashion legitimacy. The reality is that even though the collection is a lot more thoughtful than most team kits (and I believe we have Cassidy Townriss to thank in large part for this), it’s still very much merchandse, not a fashion collection. That being said, I’m excited to see what else we can expect from a team that is willing to disrupt the status quo.

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Creating a new blueprint

From the start, Cadillac ignored the script. They hired veterans Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas instead of chasing the romantic notion of an American driver. They partnered with Tommy Hilfiger for fanwear. They built facilities in Indiana, Michigan, and North Carolina - not just the UK motorsport valley - making this genuinely transatlantic.

They revealed their livery in a Super Bowl ad, rather than at the factory or a fancy exclusive event. They’re putting their car in Times Square instead of hosting a press conference. They’re treating F1 not as a gentleman’s club requiring polite entry requests, but as a global sport that happens to have an American team now.

Ahmed Iqbal said it plainly: F1 launches aren’t accessible. “They live in environments that require context to enter: press rooms, private invitations, and million-dollar sponsorship deals.” It acknowledges a truth: F1 has tried to crack America for decades with limited success. Drive to Survive changed that. The Brad Pitt movie helped. But to truly cement F1 in American culture, you can’t just host races in Miami, Austin and Vegas. You have to go to living rooms during the Super Bowl, to Times Square, to Instagram feeds.

Cadillac isn’t asking for permission anymore. They paid $450 million. They satisfied every requirement. Now they’re introducing themselves the only way that makes sense for America’s team in a European sport: loudly, proudly, during the most American cultural moment of the year. Whether the car is fast remains to be seen - and that’s the case for all eleven teams on the grid. Whether this works - whether Super Bowl viewers become F1 fans, whether Cadillac becomes synonymous with American motorsport - that’s a question for the 24 races that follow.

But for one night in February, Formula 1 didn’t just happen somewhere else. It was in the middle of the Super Bowl, in the heart of Times Square, on America’s doorstep - unapologetically American and impossible to ignore. And that might be the most revolutionary thing Cadillac brings to Formula 1.

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⏳ Reading time: 4 minutes

Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

If you don’t have the time to read or watch anything today, please make 60 seconds for this masterclass in storytelling and the eye-opening reality that we are potentially all living inside a ‘casino’.

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The lead lap

There is no Nike x Cadillac partnership. Let me be clear, it’s a great story, but it would make for a terrible business case, which is precisely why I don’t think the team is teasing an up-and-coming partnership. I saw one too many videos in the past week of people saying that a Nike x Cadillac F1 Team collaboration was inevitable. Why? Well, merely because a handful of team members were sporting matching panda low dunks.

However, Nike was once in the Formula One Paddock and that one partnership explains why a Cadillac x Nike collab isn’t in the works. But first, yes, the all-American” narrative, Nike’s nostalgic F1 history with Schumacher, and the massive streetwear/sneaker culture crossover opportunity would be huge.

However, Nike walked away from F1 in 2003, and their recent failed pursuit of Sir Lewis Hamilton (2023-2024) and to me, this proves that what Nike wants more than anything is individual athletes, not team deals.

Puma and now Adidas pretty much already dominate F1’s ecosystem, making this an already very crowded space with just eleven teams and 22 drivers. And the ROI just doesn’t justify the operational complexity.

Nike made their only foray into Formula 1 with Schumacher. In other words, this was Schumacher’s personal deal and sponsor. In 1996, they unveiled his signature racing boot at a press conference in Germany. Nike hand-made every pair at their Oregon headquarters and gave Schumacher fresh boots for every race.

The partnership lasted six years - from 1996 to 2001. Schumacher loved them so much that when FILA bought the Ferrari footwear rights in 2002, he made them replicate the Nike design. By 2003, Nike pulled out of racing entirely.

To this day, that era remains Nike’s only chapter in F1 history. That is, until now, when the Cadillac F1 team seem to be pushing them, but to me this is a clever play from the team to ‘show not tell’ Nike what a potential collaboration could look like.

Daniel (from Sports Verse) wrote about this extensively last week, and it’s well worth the read.

The number of the week

68,000 is the total number of tickets for sale for Super Bowl LX - price anywhere between $950 and $8,500 in the general sale. And if it feels like it’s almost impossible to get a ticket, that’s probably because 75% of these 68,000 tickets go to the NFL’s 32 teams.

As a true European, I know very little about the Super Bowl, and teh piece of this event I’m most familiar with is, of course, the half-time show. There is nothing more quintessentially American than American football and the Super Bowl. As Ben and David, from the Acquired podcast, have pointed out, it generates more revenue than any other sport in the world, and the team valuations are through the roof.

No wonder the Cadillac F1 Team decided to go with a Super Bowl ad for their livery reveal. As Madeline Coleman, from the Athletic, mentions, the team will be “revealing its livery in one of the most American ways possible: Through a Super Bowl ad.” Cadillac’s play here is clearly to pick up new non-F1 fans (but die-hard sports fans nonetheless) vs. trying to appeal to an existing crowd and audience - a smart move if you ask me. It’s also worth noting that this is a very expensive bet from the team so certainly not one they took lightly. According to a handful of sources, multiple 30second ad units were priced above $10 million each.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. There is a new documentary on Cadillac’s Formula 1 journey in the works. It will be a brand-new documentary series that will chart the journey of the Cadillac Formula 1 Team as they prepare to join the grid in 2026, fronted by filmmaker and motorsport enthusiast Keanu Reeves. I, for one, am really keen for this documentary because I worked on a story for the upcoming issue of Esses Magazine about Pirelli, but it was also about the work required from the Cadillac team to prepare to join the grid and be ready for Melbourne 2026, and everything I learned was absolutely fascinating.

2. The Double-Edged Sword of Casual Betting. There's no question Fanatics is breaking the mould by ditching ex-athletes and cash bonuses for Kendall Jenner and self-aware irony. I actually creatively loved their campaign - it's fresh, it's culturally fluent, and it will likely work. And that’s what has me worried, because marketing that makes gambling feel like a joke - literally built around a curse meme - raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility. The sportsbook industry already faces scrutiny over how it reaches new users; repackaging betting as celebrity entertainment rather than a serious financial activity doesn't help. Fanatics may attract new bettors with this approach, but will those bettors understand what they're actually getting into?

3. AI has commercially entered the grid. Williams F1 team announced just yesterday that Claude will become the team’s “thinking partner”. I’ve always loved and thought that Formula 1 - and especially its sponsors - are a reflection of its time. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was tobacco. Then came spirits. Oil giants. The crypto boom and somewhat bust. Then big tech arrived and has been stamping their logos on the fastest machines on earth for a few decades. And now it’s very much AI. Almost all of the F1 teams have an AI sponsor and/or partner. And as ever, the question isn’t whether AI belongs in F1. It’s who’s going to use it best.

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Simply a beautiful story, incredibly well told and a great way to spend five minutes of your time. Videos like these make me want to buy that vintage Alfa GTV.

One [event] that caught my eye

I loved seeing the Formula E cars out on track at the Miami International Autodrome this past weekend. A far cry from last year’s venue, which wasn’t bad, just simply not the right track for an FE race. A few days prior, I was asked by JPMorgan Chase (a new team sponsor) to moderate a conversation between Team Principal, Jaguar TCS Racing and Managing Director, JLR Motorsport, Ian James and Jaguar TCS Racing driver Mitch Evans. The single biggest takeaway from this conversation was the sheer amount of time the drivers spend in the simulators.

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Traditional concours like Pebble Beach risk becoming automotive nursing homes - beautiful, reverent, but disconnected from the next generation. Then there is The International Concours of Elegance St. Moritz, otherwise known as “the I.C.E'“ (a clever double-meaning acronyme). And it might just be showing the way forward.

Young collectors believe in driving them. Modifying them. Using them. They’re more interested in experience than provenance, more concerned with how a car makes them feel than whether every bolt is original-spec.

The question isn’t whether to design for social media. It’s whether you’re willing to let your cultural tradition die because you found the medium distasteful. And so I decided to speak with one of the key people, Marco Makaus, who, along with his partner for this project, Ronnie Kessel, has designed a new way for car collectors to come together.

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I was initially drawn to this event for its undisputed beauty, but as I dug into the event - the why, the how, the what and the who - I had many more questions than I initially thought I would. Because this event is like nothing I’ve ever seen before - and I think that’s by design.

See, there’s a moment in every cultural tradition when we must decide whether to ossify or evolve. For the world of concours d’elegance - those manicured lawn gatherings where collectors display vintage automobiles like jewellery - that moment is now. This was already made very clear during Pebble Beach this year, with the influx of TikTokers and YouTubers clearly disturbing the peace and the ‘usual’ way of doing things. And here’s the thing: the question isn’t whether these events will survive the next generation. It’s whether they deserve to.

Enter The I.C.E. St. Moritz, a concours that swapped grass for ice, stasis for motion, and quiet reverence for adrenaline. Held on the frozen lake of St. Moritz each January (weather permitting, more on that later), it represents perhaps the most radical rethinking of automotive gathering since the first Pebble Beach Concours in 1950. But more importantly, it might be the blueprint for keeping classic car culture alive.

When Makaus first had the idea that would eventually lead to The I.C.E. St. Moritz, he would never have imagined the result we are seeing today. And this, as he explains, “is mainly due to the vision and drive of my partner-in-crime, Ronnie Kessel, and his talented team. Not surprisingly, they are much younger than I am, and this explains how we as a team have been able to read the spirit of the new generations...”

Assumptions and the data that changes everything

Here’s an interesting paradox: the classic car world is far healthier among young people than most expected, but traditional concours events are struggling to evolve. The I.C.E. might be uniquely positioned to bridge this gap. So let’s start by dispelling the conventional wisdom that young people don’t care about old cars. The numbers tell a different story.

According to Hagerty’s research, Gen Z expresses greater interest in classic car ownership than Baby Boomers - 60% versus 31%. Even more striking: classic car ownership is already highest among Millennials, with 25% owning a classic compared to lower rates in older demographics. Since 2016, Millennial-owned classics insured through Hagerty have increased 270%, while Boomer ownership grew a modest 39%.

The narrative of dying interest is not actually accurate. What’s actually dying is the format through which that interest has traditionally been channelled. Because here’s the catch: young collectors want fundamentally different things than their predecessors. They want to drive their cars, not merely preserve them. They see cars as part of a broader lifestyle aesthetic, not isolated trophies.

Traditional concours events - those static displays on pristine lawns, celebrating pre-1975 coachbuilt masterpieces, judged by panels of grey-haired experts - were never designed for this audience. They were designed for their grandfathers, and it’s time to move on.

Reinventing the concours d’élegance for the Instagram age

How do you preserve automotive heritage when the next generation of collectors wants to modify and drive their cars, not keep them museum-perfect? The I.C.E.'s dynamic format might be the answer.

What became clear to me as I was doing my research is that the I.C.E formula is incredibly intentional and the uniqueness surrounding the event serves a specific purpose. When I asked Makaus if he was intentionally trying to solve something, he explained how he had become increasingly frustrated with the fact that traditional car shows were the same. He went on to explain that “the more I saw, the more I found that the fun factor was diminishing. It all worked in one direction: a car show where there is more fun to be had than just kicking tyres.” Beyond this statement, four things became apparent:

The dynamic element: make them move. As younger affluent consumers prioritise experiences over possessions (yet paradoxically are buying more classic cars), events must offer more than static displays. The I.C.E.’s takeover of the entire town is the concours equivalent of Coachella’s evolution from music festival to cultural happening. Unlike most major concours, the I.C.E. doesn’t just display cars. On Saturday, owners drive their million-dollar machines across the frozen lake in what the organisers call “free laps”.

This isn’t just spectacle (though it is certainly that). It’s philosophical alignment with how younger collectors actually want to engage with cars. The “drive it, don’t hide it” ethos that defines Millennial car culture finds its natural expression here. When a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB slides across frozen water with the Alps as backdrop, it stops being a museum piece and becomes a living object again.

The risk is real. But the message is clear: these cars were built to be driven, even if that means occasionally on surfaces they were never intended for.

The experience economy, aka “sell the moment, not the machine” The I.C.E. explicitly describes itself as evolving “from an automotive event into a true cultural movement.” Throughout the weekend, St. Moritz becomes a canvas for art installations, design exhibitions, exclusive dinners, and cultural programming that extends far beyond the cars themselves.

Recognising that younger audiences don’t attend events for single-purpose consumption. They want totality of experience, Instagram-worthy moments at every turn, the feeling of participating in something culturally significant rather than merely observing it. The 2025 edition drew over 20,000 visitors, record-breaking attendance for an event that limits access to protect the lake environment. People aren’t just coming to see cars. They’re coming to be at The I.C.E., and collect that specific memory. Traditional concours treated the car as the entire point. The I.C.E. treats it as the anchor for a broader lifestyle proposition.

Beyond those “picture-perfect and designed-to-share” moments. The I.C.E. has an inherent advantage that few concours can replicate: it’s almost impossible to take a boring photo there. Cars on ice, mountains behind, dramatic weather, motion, risk -every element conspires toward visual drama. But this isn’t accident. The entire event is architected for the social media era. The limited-time nature (the lake only freezes for weeks, not months) creates scarcity and FOMO.

To older collectors, this might feel like pandering. But here’s the educational truth: visibility is preservation. If classic car culture lives only in the physical presence of increasingly elderly collectors, it dies with them. If it lives on thousands of Instagram feeds and TikTok videos, reaching young people who didn’t know they cared about a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 until they saw one powersliding across a frozen lake, it survives.

The preservation paradox. If the point is to maintain automotive heritage for future generations, does it matter if the cars survive if the culture around them doesn’t? What good is a perfectly preserved 1961 Ferrari in 2050 if nobody cares?

This is the paradox at the heart of all cultural preservation: the very act of keeping something alive requires changing how it lives.

The logistics angle: engineering an event on disappearing ice

By this point, it should be obvious that The I.C.E. isn’t just a car show - it’s a complex engineering project that requires unprecedented collaboration between luxury event organisers and glaciologists. Not a sentence I ever thought I would be writing and here’s where the whole enterprise tips into tragicomedy.

So let’s talk about the logistics of pulling off this event because they truly are one-of-a-kind. Makaus kindly reminded me that “very successful Polo and horse racing events have been organised on the frozen lake of St. Moritz for more than a hundred years: consequently, there is a local world-class know-how regarding safety, organisation and logistics” for running such an event.

The I.C.E. depends on a frozen lake that’s freezing for 12 fewer days than it did 50 years ago. Alpine lakes are shrinking their ice season at an accelerating rate, warmer winters producing thinner ice with reduced load-bearing capacity. The window for hosting events is closing, year by year, while the costs of ice monitoring and preparation climb. This isn’t theoretical. It’s an engineering reality that plays out in real-time every winter. The process begins when ice reaches just 6cm thickness - barely enough to support a person standing still.

As Makaus points out, a very interesting quantitative monitoring system is in place, which tracks the ice thickness and its conditions during the formation period (from mid-December to the end of January) and during the event. Ground-penetrating radar sweeps the surface, and electromagnetic waves create colour-coded maps that show thickness variations down to the centimetre. Makaus explains further, “hundreds of sensors are distributed on the lake and coordinated by a computer system that gives a constant real-time vision of the lake, the ice – with the possibility of checking the various areas where different parts of the event are taking place.

At 27cm, Infra AG - the specialised company that monitors lake conditions - requests approval for the “Green Phase” from St. Moritz authorities. But approval isn’t granted until crash tests are conducted with a 7,700kg snow grooming machine fitted with safety floats and a 3,500kg snow-track vehicle. These machines must successfully traverse the entire event area multiple times before construction begins.

By event day, the ice reaches approximately 45cm thick. For context, standard safety guidelines recommend 20cm for a small pickup truck, with vehicles parked 50 feet apart and moved every two hours to prevent sinking. The I.C.E. is putting multi-million dollar irreplaceable automobiles on this surface, along with hospitality villages, tents, spectators, and infrastructure.

Then there’s the snow problem - a paradox that feels designed to test your understanding of physics. Snow acts as an insulating blanket that slows freezing; ice under snow is thin and weak. So the organisers must actively groom the surface, using machines to compact snow to facilitate ice growth. Too much snow prevents adequate freezing. But the event’s entire aesthetic depends on that pristine white surface.

In 2024, despite efforts beginning at 5am to prepare the lake village, 60cm of fresh snow fell in 16 hours. The event was cancelled for safety reasons. Nature, it turns out, doesn’t care about your sponsorship commitments. Makaus and the wider team responded by moving the 2026 event forward three weeks to late January. The official reason is “strategic positioning settled in agreement with St. Moritz and other lake events to optimise logistics.” The unstated reason might be simpler: get the event in earlier when ice conditions are more reliable, before the season gets too warm.

Now here’s the detail that turns this from light irony to fascination: the glaciologist ensuring The I.C.E. can safely happen is Felix Keller, who spends the rest of his time trying to save Alpine glaciers from the effects of climate change.

Keller leads the “MortAlive” project, attempting to delay the melting of the Morteratsch Glacier by 30-50 years using innovative snow-making technology that requires no electricity, buying “breathing space” for 800 million Himalayan people who depend on glacier water. He’s also part of the world’s only “glaciologist tango duo” who perform music to raise awareness about glacier conservation.

So the man enabling a luxury car event celebrating combustion engines is simultaneously fighting to save ice from the emissions those engines produce(d). He’s both facilitating the spectacle and documenting its inevitable obsolescence. He’s making the party possible while knowing exactly when it ends. And yet I see the rhyme and reason to it all.

The imperfect metaphor

This temporal limitation might be precisely the point. Young collectors have grown up with climate anxiety as an ambient condition; the knowledge that nothing lasts is woven into their understanding of the world. An event that might not exist in 20 years, that depends on natural conditions growing increasingly uncertain, carries its own kind of urgency.

Which makes it, accidentally or deliberately, the perfect metaphor for everything it celebrates: beautiful, excessive, temporary, and running on borrowed time. For Makaus though, “this may give an additional ‘now or never’ push to some car collectors, but I believe this to be a background threat. As far as I know most of our participants just see The I.C.E. as a novel proposal and the opportunity to enjoy and use their automobiles in a new and different way, which is just not available elsewhere.”

My biggest takeaway from The I.C.E is that we need more cars to live dangerously than die beautifully in a garage. Scarcity and impermanence create meaning. Traditional concours assume permanence. The I.C.E. knows better. I am not sure if this was the intent as a message when this concours was created, yet somehow this juxtaposition is what really tied it all together for me.

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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After the Ford press trip in Detroit last week, I have just landed in London for the Autosport Business Exchange summit and the Autosport Awards. I’ll be moderating a panel on brand partnerships in motorsports and the shifts we are seeing here, and I’m also presenting a few awards, which is a first. I’m then off to Monte Carlo for the WRC rally, also a first, and then a quick stop in NYC for an exciting panel discussion. It’s safe to say that 2026 is very much in full swing.

The lead lap

I got to speak with Yohana Belinda a few weeks ago about the F1 female fan economy for a piece in Jing Daily. The piece explores how Formula 1 has transformed into a cultural and commercial juggernaut, propelled by its rapidly expanding female fanbase. I highly recommend reading it.

The article examines the intersection of luxury, fashion, and motorsport, positioning F1 as a premium marketplace where brands like LVMH are making significant long-term investments. As someone interviewed for the piece, I wanted to share some of the core insights and expand on what this shift means for the broader sports and culture landscape.

The economic case for the female fan is compelling and often misunderstood. During my conversation with Yohana Belinda, I emphasised a point that brands frequently overlook: when you convert a female fan, you’re not simply adding one consumer to the ecosystem. Women self-organise. They plan for friends and family. They travel as groups. This creates a multiplier effect that transforms individual engagement into collective movement, exponentially increasing both reach and spending in ways that traditional fan acquisition models fail to capture.

Women control two assets that brands are perpetually chasing - money and cultural relevancy. With women (in America, for example) accounting for 80% of all purchasing decisions, their growing presence in F1 represents far more than demographic diversification. It signals a recalibration of how the sport positions itself commercially and culturally. According to F1’s own survey data cited in the article, 75% of new fans are women, predominantly young and concentrated in key growth markets like the U.S., India, and Southeast Asia. These aren’t passive spectators; they’re active participants in shaping what F1 means beyond the track.

Esme Buxton, founder of The Paddock Journal, articulated this shift perfectly in the piece: “For many female fans, F1 is a lifestyle. They want to immerse themselves in the world as much as possible.”

But there’s also a critical historical context that risks being lost in the excitement around F1’s “new” female audience. As I stressed in the interview, women have always been integral to Formula 1. The narrative that women are suddenly discovering motorsport erases decades of contribution. Women served as timekeepers in the sport’s early days - Judy Stropus was legendary in this role. Perhaps more tellingly, F1 featured more female drivers in its first 30 years than in the last 40. We’re not witnessing the arrival of women in F1; we’re witnessing the conditions that finally make their presence visible and valued. This distinction matters because it shapes how we approach systemic change. Token representation - a female driver here, a beauty brand partnership there - isn’t sufficient. For meaningful transformation, we need women at every level of the sport’s architecture: drivers, engineers, team principals, race promoters, series holders, and ownership. The current moment offers an opportunity to build on a legacy that’s always existed rather than pretend we’re starting from scratch.

The article also tackled the problematic language that has historically surrounded women in sports which I found interesting. The term “WAGs” - wives and girlfriends - carries decades of stereotypes and reductive assumptions. The broader implication extends well beyond motorsport. Across industries, we’re witnessing a fundamental restructuring of how cultural institutions approach female audiences, not as secondary markets or “girlfriend demos” but as primary drivers of trends, community, and commerce. The traditional playbook of treating women as ancillary consumers is being exposed as not just ethically limited but commercially shortsighted. The female fan doesn’t just participate in culture - she very much shapes what becomes culturally relevant. In sports, entertainment, and beyond, that’s a market force that can’t be ignored.

The number of the week

45 days until we go racing in Australia for the first Grand Prix of the 2026 season.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. Look at the Audi Revolut F1 team kit. Really look at it. Monochromatic. Greyscale. Clean lines. White logos only. It’s a thing of beauty. Now think about what they just replaced: the Stake Kick Sauber era. Black base, neon green accents, a collision of sponsor logos fighting for attention. It wasn’t bad, it was simply normal. Normal for F1, where team kits typically look like a sponsorship Tetris game where every brand demands their own colour. To me, It signals that Audi entered F1 on their terms. They’re not cobbling together a grid of sponsors -they’re curating a premium brand experience. In a sport where visual chaos is the norm (and at a time when Pepsi Co., KitKat and Doritos joined the grid), Audi just reminded everyone: true luxury whispers. Link.

2. Inside Red Bull’s mammoth power unit project with Ford. Red Bull's powertrain, an incredible project in partnership with the American car giant, Ford, received a lot of airtime during the Formula 1 team launch event in Detroit last week. As part of the press trip, we got lots of insights into how they worked together, how Ford contributed and what this all means. Link

3. What the two Red Bull Racing drivers are most curious about when it comes to the 2026 car. Any guesses?

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What if I told you a Formula 1 team with no factory, zero discipline, and a crew that cared more about partying and drinking than racing still managed to challenge - and even defeat - the biggest names in the sport? This is the unbelievable story of Hesketh Racing.

One [event] that caught my eye

It’s launch season in Formula 1, which means the start of the 2026 season is official in full swing. I was fortunate enough to attend the Ford press trip last week in Detroit to attend the Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls livery launch. Over the years, launch season has become somewhat of a carefully choreographed spectacle. What began as modest factory presentations in the 1980s and 90s has evolved into a big marketing exercise, with teams investing time and money in theatrical reveals that generate headlines and social media buzz weeks before the first race. These events serve as the opening salvo in F1’s perpetual battle for attention, transforming what could be simple car unveilings into elaborate productions complete with augmented reality, celebrity appearances, and cinematic production values.

Yet paradoxically, as the spectacle has grown, many teams now reveal render cars or show cars rather than their actual challengers - the real machinery often doesn’t appear until the first test session, preserving some competitive mystery while still feeding the pre-season hype machine. Thus, the focus has pivoted to the livery itself, which does have a particular significance beyond mere aesthetics. These paint schemes represent hundreds of millions in sponsorship dollars and often signal major partnership shifts that can reshape a team’s competitive trajectory. So as we moved away from factory presentations where we may see glimpses of the actual car, now we are presented more with the ‘marketing’ and business direction of the teams.

McLaren’s return to papaya orange in 2017 wasn’t just a colour change, it was a statement of identity and ambition. Mercedes’ decision to run a black livery in 2020 to highlight racial justice issues demonstrated how these reveals can transcend sport entirely. For fans, the livery is often the first tangible sign of change, whether it’s a title sponsor departure, a technical partnership announcement, or simply a fresh visual identity for the season ahead.

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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Both newsletters this week will land in your inboxes a day later than usual as I’m on-site all week in Detroit, Michigan, for the Detroit Auto Show, a full Ford immersion and press trip and the launch of both the Red Bull and the VCARB F1 teams. It’s a packed agenda for the week ahead, and there is a lot to share - but that’s all for Friday’s newsletter.

The lead lap

Let’s talk about fuel, as I have realised that just like Daniel Ricciardo circa 2020, most of us are confused by the fuel used in Formula One. The 2026 season promises a power unit revolution that goes far beyond the headline numbers. Yes, the electric component will triple from 160 to 470 horsepower, creating an almost 50-50 split with the combustion engine. And every car will run on 100% sustainable fuel. But the most fascinating competitive dynamic might be the one happening in chemistry labs (remember this video about the FIA’s mobile fuel lab) rather than wind tunnels.

While all teams must use FIA-mandated sustainable fuel derived from “atmospheric carbon capture, non-food biomass, and municipal waste”, six different fuel suppliers will be competing for performance advantages. Shell supplies Ferrari power units (used by Ferrari, Haas and Cadillac), Petronas powers Mercedes power units (used by Mercedes, McLaren, Williams and Alpine), ExxonMobil fuels Red Bull Ford power units (Red Bull and Racing Bulls), BP Castrol serves Audi, and Aramco backs the Aston Martin team (A Honda power unit).

The FIA sets strict sustainability criteria and performance boundaries, but within those constraints, different fuel chemistries can create up to 20% difference in energy flow. When you’re limited to just 70kg of fuel per race - down from 100kg today and 160kg in 2013 - every molecule matters. Different sustainable fuels have fundamentally different energy densities, combustion speeds, knock resistance, and thermal efficiency characteristics.

Teams can’t simply switch suppliers; engines are optimised for specific fuel chemistry, often developed through partnerships spanning decades. Ferrari and Shell have worked together since the 1930s. These relationships now take on new significance as manufacturers navigate a completely reimagined fuel-engine relationship, and the challenge is to extract maximum performance from a fuel formula that didn’t exist three years ago.

The irony? Aramco worked with F1 to develop the sustainable fuel standards and prove their viability already in Formula 2 and 3, yet they’re just one competitor in 2026. There’s already speculation that their fuel chemistry is the most developed, potentially giving Aston Martin’s Honda power unit an unexpected advantage.

The number of the week

~8,000km is the total distance of the Dakar - the extreme off-road endurance race held in Saudi Arabia, currently happening right now (a 14-day format), and we still have three full days of racing. It’s got about ~5,000km of competitive stages (13 stages), and there are over 800 competitors across the various categories and vehicle classes.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. The trick up Mercedes and Red Bull’s sleeve - or engine - explained. There has been a little controversy surrounding Mercedes and Red Bull's 2026 F1 engines and their compression ratio. As succinctly as possible, the FIA regulations stipulate a maximum compression ratio of 16:1, measured at ambient temperature, but there are suggestions that Mercedes and Red Bull have found a way (loophole) to achieve higher compression ratios at operating temperatures while still complying with the static tests. A higher compression ratio could provide better fuel efficiency. The controversy centres on how the regulations should be interpreted: whether engines must comply with the 16:1 limit at all times during competition, or only during static testing at ambient temperature. The FIA has stated it has no immediate plans to change testing procedures, but may consider adjustments in the future. Link

2. Why Every Sports Organization Needs Its Own Definition of F.A.N.S? A good deep-dive into the history and meaning of the word ‘fan’. Link

3. Why Sport Has Become Luxury’s Biggest Stage. If you are covering sports, you’ve probably noticed just how much luxury brands have shifted from traditional elite sports like polo and sailing to mainstream sports such as football, basketball, and Formula 1. As David Skilling points out, this change reflects economic necessity rather than a shift in taste - the modern luxury industry has grown too large to rely on quiet prestige alone. The strategy is paradoxical: brands use sport's mass visibility to defend their positioning and relevance while simultaneously narrowing their actual customer base through pricing and distribution. Formula 1 has become particularly attractive because it combines global reach with a premium visual language and narratives around performance and precision. Link

One video worth your time

Give these women their own show, now. Meet the first British Women’s team - aptly named, Gazelles Off Road - who prepared and entered the Dakar Classic in 2026 in their Land Rover 110 Td5 rally car. They had never built a car before this, and in their own words, “how difficult can it be?”

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One [event] that caught my eye

Not one event per se that caught my eye this week, but rather the profoundly disorienting feeling of going through the motions - answering emails, attending meetings, hitting deadlines and in my case this week, joining a press trip, attending an auto show and F1 team launches - while the world outside feels like it’s careening off a cliff. You can’t just stop everything. Bills don’t pause, responsibilities don’t evaporate. But you also can’t pretend it’s all normal, that the weight of what’s happening doesn’t seep into every mundane task.

I have no answers and absolutely no moral high ground to stand on, but I did want to share this constant tension I’m feeling - and honestly, one I have been feeling for, gosh, probably six years now. It’s the tension between necessity and awareness, between functioning and feeling. You show up because you have to, because others depend on you, because life stubbornly continues. But there’s a part of you that wants to scream: How are we all just doing this? The world asks us to be productive while also being human, to keep our heads down while keeping our hearts open, to move forward without moving past what matters.

During the Golden Globes, Mark Ruffalo spoke about empathy, and it struck a chord with me. Empathy isn’t a luxury we indulge when things are calm - it’s the fragile thread that keeps us tethered to each other when everything else feels untethered. It’s what allows us to do our jobs and hold space for what’s breaking. Not switching off, not burning out, but somehow doing both: carrying on and caring deeply, even when -especially when - it feels impossible.

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Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Formula 1 pit stop choreography is now optimising pharmaceutical manufacturing lines, and race engineers are building machines to save the Great Barrier Reef.

Welcome to McLaren Racing’s wildly unlikely last few years, where the same team chasing constructor championships (and has successfully done so, two years in a row, having just clinched the World Constructor Championship 25’ in Singapore and Lando Norris finally securing himself in the history of Formula 1 with his first World Driver Championship 25’ in Abu Dhabi) is simultaneously tackling coral restoration and the circular economy design.

It’s weird. It’s ambitious. McLaren’s sustainability playbook could redefine what innovation spillover means and what it looks like. And it might actually rewrite how we think about the relationship between elite motorsport and everything else.

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Note: This piece, research and videos produced are part of a partnership in collaboration with McLaren Racing during New York Climate Week 2025.

Formula 1’s most unlikely project

How McLaren’s engineers went from on-track success to growing a million baby corals. Let’s start with the most surreal partnership: McLaren’s collaboration with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. I also had the pleasure of facilitating a discussion during NY Climate Week (at Goals House) between Kim Wilson, Sustainability Director at McLaren Racing and Anna Mardsen, Managing Director at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

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You would be forgiven if your immediate reaction was scepticism - another sports team greenwashing with a trendy environmental cause. But dig deeper, and it gets genuinely interesting. Not only that, the numbers and results so far are impressive.

McLaren Accelerator, the team’s in-house team of experts offering the know-how and expertise we apply to delivering results on the track, to our partners, is working with marine scientists on a project to accelerate coral reef restoration at scale and speed. They’re not just slapping a logo on existing research. McLaren engineers, along with 300 marine biologists, have helped build “Machine One” - a system designed to boost coral output from 100,000 to one million baby corals while slashing costs from AUD$10 to just $2 per coral.

Think about that economic shift for a second. Cost reduction at that magnitude doesn’t just make restoration feasible, it makes it scalable. And that’s pure F1 thinking: how do you make the impossible merely difficult, and the difficult routine? The machine is set for testing during November’s coral spawning season, applying the same iterative, performance-obsessed approach that shaves milliseconds off lap times to a problem that exists on geological timescales.

Circular by design, not by slogan

McLaren’s engineers are rewriting F1’s manufacturing model to highlight that performance and circularity are not mutually exclusive. The partnership with Deloitte UK on building a fully circular F1 car by 2030 is another fascinating pivot. Together with Deloitte, McLaren Racing is looking at ways to supercharge efforts in developing a circular F1 car and help unlock more opportunities for circular practices across the sport. In other words, McLaren is attempting something structurally different: reimagining the entire “take, make, dispose” model that has defined F1 since its inception.

In 2024, McLaren achieved 37% material circularity in their F1 constructor activities and pioneered the use of recycled carbon fibre in performance parts. That last part is crucial - performance parts (non-safety critical), not just cosmetic bits. They’re highlighting that recycled materials can meet the absurd tolerances and safety requirements of cars travelling at 350 km/h. And as ever, if it’s successful testing under the extreme pressure of an F1 race weekend, then we know it can be applied elsewhere - and not just on road cars.

The team trialled recycled carbon fibre at Silverstone in 2024 and Austin in 2023, which feels appropriately McLaren. And let’s not forget, they were the first team to race a fully carbon fibre chassis back in 1981. Forty-plus years later, they’re trying to close the loop on that same material.

Speed as a transferable skill

McLaren’s process engineering is now accelerating vaccine production - a real-world example of F1 innovation spillover. The Sanofi partnership might be one of my favourites because it’s so specific and measurable. Inspired by McLaren’s 2023 world-record pit stop, Sanofi optimised their manufacturing line changeovers and cut times by up to 40% through video analysis and standardisation. That’s not metaphorical collaboration - that’s literal technology transfer.

Think about the implications: the same optimisation processes that get four tires changed in 1.8 seconds are now accelerating pharmaceutical production. The skills are fungible. The mindset transfers. This is what genuine knowledge spillover looks like, and it’s happening in real-time. This way of thinking can easily be replicated and applied to so many different areas.

Fueling the Future, Literally

Sustainable aviation fuel as a test case for scaling real-world climate infrastructure. With support from partner Ecolab, McLaren funded one million US gallons of sustainable aviation fuel in 2024, covering 100% of their business travel by air across all racing series. The team also achieved a 23% reduction in emissions per race compared to 2023 and cut road freight emissions by 48%.

Here’s where scale matters: Individual companies buying SAF certificates helps, but McLaren’s commitment matters because it signals demand. SAF has the potential to cut aviation emissions by up to 90% compared to conventional jet fuel, but the market needs anchor customers to prove viability. Which is where the likes of McLaren Racing comes in. When high-profile organisations commit at this level, they’re not just reducing their own footprint; they’re helping build the infrastructure that makes alternatives viable for everyone else.

The case for Formula 1 as the world’s most unexpected innovation lab and it matters

One of my favourite things about Formula 1 since I started watching the sport back in 1991 is precisely this spillover of R&D and incredible innovations built by some of the most brilliant minds, into all these other spaces.

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F1 has always been a laboratory for extreme engineering. Carbon fibre, hybrid powertrains, materials science, aerodynamics - the sport pushes everything to its absolute limit.

What McLaren are doing is systematising the spillover effect and applying the same marginal gains philosophy - obsessive focus on tiny improvements that compound into massive advantages - to problems well outside the paddock. They’re not waiting for innovations to accidentally drift into other industries. They’re actively translating race-day thinking into climate solutions, manufacturing efficiency, and materials innovation.

Is it perfect? No. Is there a brand benefit and positive PR? Obviously. But the projects are real, the metrics are specific, and the potential impact scales beyond what one racing team could achieve alone. When F1 engineering helps save coral reefs and optimises pharmaceutical manufacturing, that’s innovation arbitrage. And we should be seeing a lot more of it in the coming years - especially from within the Formula 1 ecosystem. McLaren’s Secret Weapon Isn’t Speed, It’s Systems Thinking

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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Bold ideas for 2026

At the start of 2025, I laid out my pretty bold Formula 1 predictions for 2025. And let’s just say that almost all the non-insane predications came true in one way or another. I mean, we obviously didn’t go racing on the moon.

I didn’t want to redo bold predictions this year but instead, I wanted to focus on trends that I think will happen in the Formula 1 (motorsports) media landscape that will have an impact on the business, the marketing and the operations of the sport.

I would love to hear your predictions or trend forecasts you think we’ll be seeing in Formula 1 in 2026.

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Influencer marketing will be unapologetic

We already know (and can see) that the sanitised, “authentic” influencer era is ending. Formula 1 finally realised that traditional gatekeeping wasn’t growing the audience -creators were, and specifically non-motorsports creators. This is not to say that motorsports and F1-specific creators aren’t adding tremendous value to the sport; they absolutely are. But they (we) are preaching to the choir, making existing communities stronger, adding value to existing spaces…

In 2026, expect to see even more influencers who have zero motorsport credentials sitting in the paddock, and teams won’t apologise for it. They’re all still chasing eyeballs, not credibility with longtime fans. F1, as a series, wants even more eyeballs. Cadillac, as a brand new American team, wants a whole new American demographic of F1 fans, and they are all being unapologetic about it.

This creates a bifurcation for motorsport creators: either you get absorbed into the official ecosystem (team creator programmes, which offer access but most likely constrain independence) or you pivot toward journalism - not in a traditional media landscape kind of way but in a new media kind of way. Breaking news, deep dives into broader topics, investigations, and analysis that traditional motorpsort media seems to be abandoning, and mainstream media seem to be picking up on. But you become part of the F1 media landscape. 2026 feels like the year where we’ll see a split - you’re either entertainment or information, but you aren’t both.

More creators will enter into the realm of ‘journalism’

Fan appetite for sports coverage has never been higher. Following up from the above trend prediction, creators with production skills and audience relationships will increasingly be doing the work of journalists - attending press conferences, getting scoops, breaking stories…

What makes this different from “citizen journalism” buzzwords of the past is that these creators have business models that work which is something that traditional media is still struggling to figure out. Creators are coming to teh table with an existing loyal audience, while traditional media are constantly having to identify and convince a new audience.

Creators are not waiting for a media company to hire them; they’re building sustainable operations through memberships, sponsorships, and direct audience support. By the end of 2026, at least one major sports story will be broken by someone who would have been called a “YouTuber”, “ Tiktoker” or “influencer” five years ago, and legacy media will be citing them as a source. I actually think this will happen in Q2 of 2026, to be specific.

Long-form content will make a comeback

AI can generate a thousand mediocre 300-word articles, but it can’t replicate hours of genuine human conversation with all its tangents, contradictions, and moments of unexpected (and very human) insights and exchanges. Long-form video podcasts work because they’re a verification of humanness - the inefficiency is the point. I also think this is a direct consequence of the above prediction - we are going to see more non-traditional sport media personalities become the go-to or preferred journalists for some of these teams and drivers.

The key shift: creators will stop chopping these up for TikTok scraps. The long-form piece becomes the primary product, and social clips become marketing for that experience rather than the product itself. Audiences are exhausted by the dopamine slot machine; they’re ready to invest attention again, but only in things that feel like they are adding value.

Curation > Content

We’re drowning in content but starving for guidance on what’s worth our time. The pandemic gave us a preview of this with newsletters and recommendation threads going viral, but that was when everyone was stuck at home with time to explore. Now we’re overwhelmed and desperate for someone we trust to just tell us what matters, what’s important, what’s a must see/read/listen.

The difference between now and 2020: brands have more or less lost credibility as curators. They’ve been caught gaming algorithms, buying influence, and optimising for engagement over quality too many times. Only individual humans with track records - tastemakers who have earned trust recommendation by recommendation -can credibly curate in 2026. Think less “brand partnerships” and more “here are five things I genuinely loved this month (unsponsored).” In 2026, we will experience the rise of the sports curators and tastemakers.

If Apple is smart, they will create a post-race weekend show that is exactly this - a curation of all the highlights, main topics and interesting discussions from within this space. A show hosted by tastemakers that we look up to and would actually take recommendations from.

IRL experiences and highlights reign

The counterbalance to all this digital evolution: a craving for physical, tangible, analogue things and shared experiences. But here’s the twist - these IRL moments only matter if they generate a real experience - something worth our time. Highlights that can be experienced and re-experienced online are no longer enough. It’s an intellectual evolution of the “you had to be there” experience. It’s certainly no longer merely about creating moments designed to be captured, shared, and remixed.

The best creators and brands will master this duality - creating worthwhile experiences that are genuinely special in person while creating physical goods and memories, built not just for the digital afterlife but for that “trinket/souvenir” box.

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One [article] that caught my eye

This piece has nothing to do with Formula 1 or even motorsports. Still, it does sit at the intersection of sports and politics, and with Venezuela being in the news recently, this felt like the right time to share a story about the popularity of baseball in Caracas.

As the author writes, “Until a few minutes ago, you were likely unaware that baseball is the most popular sport among Venezuelans. I imagine this news surprises you, considering we are talking about Latin America, a region globally renowned for its passion for football. But around Caracas, that is not the case. Venezuelans love and live for baseball.”

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A quick check-in. Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you spend the holidays exactly the way you wanted with the people you love and matter to you. If that wasn’t the case this year, I hope you got moments of peace and joy nonetheless.

I, for one, am excited to leave 2025 behind and step into a new year. 2025 was full of highs and incredible firsts but also full of low points that broke me in more ways than one. Time seems to be very much top of mind during this period, so let’s talk about time and Formula 1 through the lens of a ‘not-so-new’ sponsor.

In Formula 1, thousandths of a second separate triumph from oblivion. It’s fitting, then, that the sport’s newest - or rather, returning - Official Timekeeper is a brand that has spent over half a century trying to prove that luxury and precision aren’t mutually exclusive.

TAG Heuer’s return to F1 in January 2025, displacing Rolex, which has found success in the world of endurance, arrives wrapped in LVMH’s audacious $1 billion, ten-year bet on motorsport. It’s a homecoming, yes, but one that raises a big question: in an era where clocks sync to satellites and race telemetry runs on AWS infrastructure, what exactly does a luxury watchmaker bring to the timing conversation beyond heritage and marketing muscle?

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The heritage play (and why it actually matters)

TAG Heuer’s motorsport credentials run deep. In 1969, it became the first luxury brand to slap its logo on an F1 car - a move that was equal parts audacious and prescient. By 1971, it was sponsoring entire teams, and in 1973 came the game-changing partnership as described in this piece in Lux Magazine.

From 1992 to 2003, the brand served as Official Timekeeper, supplying the pit lane clocks and trackside displays that powered broadcasts before the sport’s digital revolution.

But nostalgia only gets you so far. What makes this partnership more than a glossy throwback is the current context: F1 is experiencing its most dramatic cultural shift since the turbo era. “Drive to Survive” and TikTok didn’t just bring in new fans; they fundamentally rewired how the sport thinks about storytelling, accessibility, and brand positioning. LVMH isn’t buying into the F1 of yesteryear; it’s betting on what the sport is becoming. And very much paying attention to the audience it’s attracting.

The $1 billion question

The LVMH deal isn’t just about TAG Heuer. It’s a portfolio play that puts Louis Vuitton trophy cases in parc fermé, returns Moët & Chandon to the podium (finally, actual Champagne again), and makes TAG the first-ever title sponsor of the Monaco Grand Prix - a race that, in 75 years, has never sold its title until this year (2025). That alone tells you something about the deal’s scale and F1’s shifting relationship with commercial partnerships.

But here’s what’s interesting: while Rolex brought gravitas and understated prestige, TAG Heuer brings something F1 desperately wants - technical credibility with a younger, digitally native audience. I think we will be seeing a lot of this, too, with the recent Apple media rights deal. TAG Heuer is the watch worn by the founder, who just raised a Series B - its demographic skews younger and more tech-savvy.

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Beyond the billboards: here’s where it gets interesting

Strip away the press releases and a few things key things emerge:

First, there's an interesting tension here. TAG Heuer's actual role appears to be primarily ceremonial - custom pit lane clocks and branding - while AWS, for example, handles the real computational heavy lifting of processing 1.1 million data points per second from race cars. But perception matters. By positioning itself as the "Official Timekeeper" in an era where timing means machine learning models and cloud infrastructure, TAG Heuer is attempting to claim ownership of precision itself by proxy, even if it's not doing the backend work. It's a smart play: let AWS build the invisible infrastructure while you put your logo on the physical manifestation of time. The question is whether fans will buy the association. It is worth pointing out that in their previous stint (1992-2003), they introduced transponder systems for automatic car identification and lap time recording.

Second, the F1 Academy partnership is shrewder than it looks. TAG Heuer is also the Official Timekeeper of F1 Academy, the all-female racing series launched to address motorsport’s glaring diversity problem. On the surface, this looks like textbook “do good/feel good” window-dressing. But there’s a sharper play here: by aligning with the sport’s future talent pipeline rather than just its current stars, TAG positions itself as essential infrastructure for F1’s next generation. It’s the same strategy tech companies use when they give free tools to students - capture them early, and they’ll stay loyal.

What I think we can expect: predictions and strategic implications

Expect TAG Heuer to lean heavily into limited-edition timepieces that blur the line between mechanical watches and connected devices. The real test will be whether they can create smart-analogue hybrids that integrate live race data without feeling gimmicky.

More broadly, this partnership is a test case for whether traditional luxury brands can remain relevant in sports increasingly defined by data, technology, and digital engagement. Rolex bet on timelessness. TAG Heuer is betting on velocity.

The verdict (so far)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we won’t know if this partnership succeeds for at least three seasons. Brand integrations take time to mature, and F1’s audience - both the die-hards and the Netflix and social converts - are paying closer attention than ever before to the brands associating themselves with the sport.

But if they use this platform to genuinely innovate, if the timing systems become meaningfully better, if the fan experiences feel richer, if the F1 Academy partnership produces tangible results, then this could be remembered as the moment when luxury and technology stopped pretending to coexist and actually merged. In F1, timing is everything. TAG Heuer has ten years to prove it’s playing a central role.

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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The lead lap

A recent article announcing Carmen Jordá’s involvement with a new motorsports project identified her as a “former F1 driver.” This seemingly small error has left me - and many other readers - genuinely infuriated. Not because we want to diminish Jordá’s accomplishments, but because we’re just one word away from pure fabrication. So let’s talk about the cost of careless words and how women don’t need false representation.

Carmen Jordá was a development driver for Lotus and Renault Sport Formula One teams between 2015 and 2017. This made her the eleventh woman in history to be part of a Formula 1 team’s driver lineup - an achievement worth recognising. But she never competed in an F1 Grand Prix. She never qualified for an F1 race. She never took part in an F1 race weekend. The difference between “F1 team member” and “F1 driver” isn’t semantic hairsplitting. It’s the difference between truth and fiction.

This is exactly why clickbait culture is so corrosive and why I bang on about it so often. Publications chase engagement by stretching, bending, and eventually breaking the truth. One word - ”former F1 driver” instead of “former F1 development driver” -transforms reality into something else entirely. It’s not an exaggeration; it’s a fabrication. And once we accept that level of imprecision in reporting, we’ve normalised lying.

This achieved the opposite of its intended effect. As someone genuinely interested in motorsports, I would have been curious to learn more about this project. Carmen Jordá has been involved in various aspects of motorsport throughout her career. Many other readers have reported the same reaction. Rather than generating interest, this careless exaggeration killed it.

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Here’s something the article’s authors seem to have missed: women aren’t so desperate for representation that we’ll forgo the truth. We don’t need inflated credentials or manufactured achievements. What we need, and what we deserve, is accurate recognition of real accomplishments and honest discussion of the genuine barriers that exist. Calling Jordá an “F1 driver” doesn’t empower women in motorsport. It undermines them. It suggests that actual achievements aren’t impressive enough on their own. It implies that we need to embellish reality to make women’s contributions seem worthy of attention. That’s not representation. That’s condescension dressed up as progress.

Finally, if we’re going to talk about women in Formula 1, let’s talk about the actual women who have participated - on the grid - during an F1 race weekend, which brings us to our number of the week.

The number of the week

Five, is the number of women who have participated on the grid during an F1 race weekend.

Maria Teresa de Filippis (1958-1959) was the first woman to compete in a Formula 1 Grand Prix. She entered five races and started three, achieving a best finish of tenth place at the 1958 Belgian Grand Prix. When she attempted to enter the French Grand Prix, the race director infamously told her, “The only helmet a woman should wear is the one at the hairdresser’s.”

Lella Lombardi (1974-1976) entered seventeen races and started twelve. At the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, she finished sixth - earning half a championship point because the race was stopped early following a fatal accident. She remains the first and only woman to have scored points in a Formula 1 World Championship race. Half a point.

Divina Galica (1976-1978) was a professional skier who attempted to qualify for three Grand Prix but failed to make the grid in all three attempts.

Desiré Wilson (1980) attempted to qualify for the 1980 British Grand Prix but did not succeed. However, she did win a non-championship Formula 1 race at Brands Hatch in the British Aurora F1 Championship that same year, making her the only woman to have won a Formula 1 race of any kind.

Giovanna Amati (1992) is the last woman to have entered an F1 race. She failed to qualify for three consecutive Grand Prix with the Brabham team before being replaced mid-season. Notably, her replacement - Damon Hill - also struggled to qualify the same uncompetitive car.

That’s it. Five women. Three who successfully started a race. One who scored points -half a point, to be exact. In 75 years of Formula 1. These numbers don’t represent a lack of talent among women. They represent decades of systemic barriers: limited access to karting and junior formulas, lack of funding and sponsorship, deeply entrenched assumptions about who belongs in a race car. The story of women in Formula 1 is one of extraordinary individuals fighting against enormous structural obstacles.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. How the sports stadiums went luxe. This piece caught my eye as someone who has highlighted at length how sports stadiums were initially built with political means in mind. Modern stadiums have evolved from democratic gathering spaces into stratified monuments to global affluence, where premium experiences now dominate both the architecture and economics of sports venues. We are watching an intricate revenue-maximisation system come to life where stadiums like SoFi feature twelve categories of premium seating layered throughout the lower bowl. Owners have discovered that removing seats and selling space generates more revenue than cramming in bodies, while sophisticated pricing algorithms and long-term suite leases (some approaching $1 million annually) have turned venues into “the most rigorously monetised spaces on earth.”

   Premium seating at places like SoFi accounts for just 20% of seats but generates over 50% of ticketing revenue. F1 circuits face the same calculation whereby we maximise revenue per square foot rather than per spectator. The danger is building venues that optimise for corporate entertainment rather than passionate fandom. As one architect notes, the “oceanic feeling of celebrating...with tens of thousands of people who are having the same fan experience as you” is what makes stadiums special. Yet the economic imperative pushes in the opposite direction—suites are “for corporate schmoozing and sips and bites, not bonkers fandom. Money prefers quiet.” F1’s challenge is acute: the sport’s mystique depends on the roar of passionate fans creating electric atmospheres but the financial model increasingly prioritises quiet luxury over raucous enthusiasm. LINK

2. F1 2026 Regulations – Terminology Update. With the 2026 F1 season just around the corner, this feels like a good time to go over everything that will change in 2026 and how we will be referring to these updates. LINK

3. Niche fandoms beat mass audience. This is more of a broader media story but one that got me thinking about the future home - in the USA - for F1TV and how F1 has struggled to convert newer fans into paying subscribers. A new survey of media executives reveals what many suspected but few wanted to admit: the future belongs to specialised verticals and superfans, not undifferentiated scale. The message is clear: audience revenue will eclipse advertising, and the companies with the strongest relationships will win. This should be a wake-up call for Formula 1. Despite the sport’s explosive growth in the USA - driven in large part by Drive to Survive and Liberty Media’s savvy marketing - F1 has struggled to convert casual fans into F1TV subscribers. Even though it’s maybe one of the best products F1 has created to date, F1TV offers an often confusing option to fans. Instead of fighting for bundled distribution or broad television deals, F1 should double down on what makes it unique: technical depth, driver access, onboard cameras, team radio, and real-time data that superfans crave. In a media landscape where loyalty trumps reach, F1’s challenge isn’t attracting attention. It’s capitalising on the obsession it’s already created.LINK

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Not a video, but this image of a Cadillac that has been turned into a cactus has been living rent-free in my mind. And somehow, this one image made me very excited for the new Cadillac F1 team in 2026.

@complex

COMPLEX on Instagram: "Not gonna lie, the ‘Cadillactus’ is a ri…

One [event] that caught my eye

Last Sunday in Dubai, the Battle of the Sexes took place, and I really wish I had been there. This tennis showcase drew so much talk and controversy, and I’m squarely in the camp of those who don’t understand why. But then again, I’ve always been fascinated by events that push teh boundaries of what we are comfortable with - often meaning just what we are used to.

As the BBC put it, “when murmurs began about Aryna Sabalenka facing Nick Kyrgios in an exhibition match billed as the new 'Battle of the Sexes', many wondered what it was setting out to achieve.” The why was - and I think very much still - up for debate and most likely what was missing. After all, though this was an exhibition match designed for fun and entertainment.

By no means is this perfect, and I wish that they hadn’t changed the court size, but I know practically nothing about tennis, so I’ll avoid diving into this element. I think Western bias has a lot to do with the dislike that people have shown towards this event, as it was held in Dubai. It’s been dubbed a cash grab, which to me simply highlights again that we need to pay our female athletes better so that they are maybe less tempted by these ‘cash grabs’. At the end of the day, I don’t think it harmed women’s tennis - she gave it her all and gave us a great game, and Nick was just there.

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Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.

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Another Podcast. For those who are new here, I’ve been hosting a tech podcast for over four years now with tech analyst Benedict Evans. For the past year, our conversations have very much centred around AI - because at this point, there is nothing as complicated and fascinating in tech.

The lead lap

The Concorde Agreement: Formula 1’s constitutional foundation renewed through 2030. As a quick refresher, the Concorde Agreement is the binding contract between the FIA (motorsport’s governing body), Formula 1’s commercial rights holder, and the teams that dictates how they compete in races and how television revenues and prize money are distributed. Named after the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where the first agreement was hammered out in 1981, this document represents Formula 1’s constitutional foundation. That original deal ended the bitter FISA-FOCA war, a power struggle that had threatened the sport’s commercial viability and even led to race cancellations. After thirteen hours of negotiation, all parties signed the first Concorde Agreement, which required teams to appear and compete in every race to assure television audiences they would have races to watch. The terms have traditionally been kept strictly confidential, though they’re understood to cover everything from calendar structure and prize money distribution to entry fees and governance procedures.

The ninth edition of the Concorde Agreement was finalised in two stages throughout 2025. In March, all eleven teams signed the Concorde Commercial Agreement ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, with Formula 1 confirming the sport had “never been in a stronger position.” Then on December 12, the FIA and all teams signed the Concorde Governance Agreement, completing the package that will run through 2030. This timing is significant - the commercial terms were settled first, presenting a united front from teams and Formula One Management before the FIA negotiated its governance role.

Why This Agreement Matters. The 2026-2030 Concorde Agreement arrives at a pivotal moment for Formula 1. The sport is experiencing unprecedented commercial growth, and this deal cements stability as it enters a new regulatory era with sweeping technical changes, including revised hybrid power units and active aerodynamics. A newly defined percentage of F1’s revenues will be allocated to the FIA, with funding intended to bolster race direction, stewarding, and technical development. This addresses persistent calls from drivers and teams for more consistent officiating, such as permanent steward panels rather than rotating officials.

Under the new governance structure, team entry fees will now scale based on championship position (worth approximately $9 million per midfield position), bringing them in line with how prize money is distributed. The agreement also accommodates Cadillac’s entry as the eleventh team in 2026, expanding the grid while maintaining the financial protections for existing constructors that were introduced in the 2021 agreement.

The number of the week

19.9% is the minority stake that ByteDance will retain once the new TikTok deal is closed.

Incredibly silently, it looks like TikTok has just signed a deal to create a U.S. joint venture with American investors, with a target closing date of January 2026. More specifically, Oracle will be the anchor partner in the deal, leading a buyer group that includes the Abu Dhabi-based MGX and the private equity company Silver Lake. One thing I noticed is that all three TikTok buyers have direct or family-linked connections to Formula 1 - Oracle as Red Bull's title sponsor, Silver Lake as a major investor in the Al Nahyan family's Manchester City (whose family hosts the Abu Dhabi GP), and MGX as an investment vehicle of that same royal family.

These connections reveal some fascinating dynamics about where tech, sports, and geopolitical influence intersect. The Al Nahyan family's involvement through both MGX and their existing F1 presence (via the Abu Dhabi GP) reflects a broader Gulf strategy of using sports and technology investments to diversify away from oil dependence. They're not just hosting races - they're becoming stakeholders in the digital infrastructure (TikTok) that drives global sports consumption. This vertical integration is strategic: own the venue, influence the platform where fans consume content about that venue.

Three stories that need to be on your radar

1. Helmut Marko is out. Christian Horner rumours galore. Red Bull Racing is experiencing a leadership transformation just as Formula 1 enters one of its most significant regulatory overhauls in decades. Following the conclusion of the 2025 campaign, Red Bull announced that Marko will leave the team six months after Team Principal Christian Horner departed. During his tenure, Marko oversaw the progression of 20 drivers to Formula 1, including Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel who won eight world titles between them. However, the departure wasn’t entirely amicable. The relationship between Marko and the Red Bull organisation had become strained after the death of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz in late 2022. Most recently, Red Bull CEO Oliver Mintzlaff moved to distance the company from Marko’s explosive remarks, where he accused Christian Horner of “dirty games” and suggested Verstappen would have won the title had Horner been removed earlier. Speaking of Horner, his potential return has become one of the paddock’s hottest topics. Horner agreed a $100 million settlement with Red Bull, which will allow him back in the paddock as early as next spring, and he is seeking business partners who might help him buy a stake in a team that would return him to a significant role of power. The sport will see its biggest shake-up to the technical regulations for several decades in 2026, with the debut of Red Bull Ford Powertrains on track. Yet dismissing Red Bull would be foolish. They’ve proven resilient before, and Verstappen remains one of the grid’s most formidable competitors. The question isn’t whether they’ll be competitive, but whether they can hit the ground running in an era where early advantages could compound across the five-year regulation cycle. With Mercedes’ engine expertise, Ferrari’s development resources, and Honda’s partnership with Aston Martin all threatening to shake up the established order, 2026 promises to be one of Formula 1’s most unpredictable seasons in recent memory.

2. The lost art of 90s courtside & trackside fashion. Somewhere between athleisure and luxury streetwear, we’ve collectively forgotten that the 1990s delivered the greatest era of sports spectator fashion. It’s time we acknowledged the crime of letting it slip into obscurity. Courtside at the NBA, you had Spike Lee in Versace shirts loud enough to distract free throws, Jack Nicholson in sunglasses that cost more than season tickets, and an entire generation that understood showing up to watch sports was itself a performance. The sidelines demanded oversized blazers with T-shirts, chunky gold jewellery that caught the arena lights, and an unshakeable confidence that dressing down meant vintage denim and pristine Air Jordans. Trackside was no different. Formula 1 paddocks hosted a parade of supermodels in slip dresses and celebrities in leather jackets that somehow worked in Mediterranean heat. There was no pretence of “functional” fashion - you dressed like you mattered because being there mattered. Today’s courtside aesthetic -hoodies, minimalist sneakers, muted tones - feels safe by comparison. And the trackside fashion we are seeing feels forced and out of place. The 90s understood something we’ve forgotten: when you’re watching greatness, you should look like you belong in the moment. Bring back the chaos.

3. Why creator-journalists, not brands, will get invited to the party. Not a motorsports-specific story, but as the F1 launch season looms upon us, I’ve noticed a shift away from traditional media-only invites to such events, to a much broader scope where creator-journalists and creator partnerships seem to be taking a front seat. This piece argues that journalism's future belongs to individual personalities, not institutional brands. The analysis draws on Reuters Institute data showing audiences increasingly trust personalities over traditional news brands, craving human connection in an algorithmically-curated content flood. The implications are stark: legacy media organisations that fail to recognise this shift risk becoming irrelevant as their most talented voices walk out the door, taking their audiences with them. It's a paradigm shift that rewrites the power dynamics between journalists and the institutions that employ them. LINK

One video worth your time

@martysupreme

Marty Supreme on Instagram: "Original ball for an original guy …

One [event] that caught my eye

This week, Timothée Chalamet became the first person to ever stand atop the Las Vegas Sphere, with the venue's massive LED exterior transformed into a giant orange ping-pong ball promoting his Christmas Day release, Marty Supreme. The stunt is brilliant and finally, someone has gotten really creative with the Sphere.

This stunt capitalises on the Sphere's cultural moment - the $2.3 billion venue has become social media catnip since its 2023 opening, generating viral moments simply by existing. It also perfectly embodies the film's central theme. As Chalamet told Jimmy Fallon, Marty Supreme is about sacrifice in pursuit of a dream and serves as an antidote to bleakness for young people, encouraging them to believe in themselves and dream big. What better way to literalise "dream big" than by standing atop the world's most expensive entertainment venue? The stunt also cuts through the noise in an era when A24 is competing against algorithmic content and repurposed franchise tentpoles. In a media landscape drowning in safe, manufactured moments, putting a movie star in a harness atop a giant glowing orb is refreshingly unhinged and audacious - and that's precisely why it works. LINK

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