2026 predictions | Motorsports edition
Shift Happens #10 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
Thank you for being here. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Idée Fixe, the newsletter for curious minds. I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past five years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, and technology of motorsports.
⏳ Reading time: 5 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.
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.
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.
One video worth your time
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.”
Quite an insightful read!
I loved your coverage of the Autonomous Racing League last year, and I hope to see those cars continue to improve over the course of this next year—maybe even to a point where they can be a testing ground for new car and engine designs that could push the envelope on what is possible in motorsports without risking driver safety