Come for the driver, stay for the racing.
Shift Happens #22 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
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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: 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.
I just got back from Monaco for the E Prix (Formula E), where I worked with the Cupra Kiro team running an investor day, which was such an incredible experience. I feel like I learned a ton, which is time well spent in my books. It wouldn’t be motorsports if the complete run of show got tossed out the window for an even better one, complete with a series of surprise guests including the CEO of Formula E, Jeff Dodds, President of Liberty Global, Mike Fries and none other than Christian Horner whom I absolutely asked if he was planning in investing (time, money or effort) into Formula E and was promptly told I could not ask that, but I just had. I also had a phenomenal conversation with Idris Elba about the convergence of media, entertainment and motorsports. He is an investor and owner in the Cupra Kiro team, which is a story we’ll dig into next week as it’s absolutely fascinating and worth our time.
The [lead] lap
Does F1 want to be exclusive or accessible? And can it be both? To me, this is one of the more genuinely interesting brand paradoxes in sport right now, and it’s stuck with me since the Miami F1 GP is just how obvious it has become that F1 is trying to assess whether it can remain a niche, exclusive sport and brand whilst also taking on new partners and sponsors.
The short answer is yes, I do think F1 can be both accessible and remain exclusive, but only under a very specific set of conditions, and F1 is currently stress-testing whether it meets them.
The instinct is to treat them as opposites. They aren’t. They operate on different axes entirely. Exclusivity is about access to the thing itself. Accessibility is about awareness of and affinity for the thing. A brand can widen the latter without eroding the former, but only if those two planes never collapse into each other.
Ferrari is the proof of concept. The prancing horse is among the most widely recognised symbols on earth, worn on children’s backpacks and duty-free merchandise globally. Nobody questions whether Ferrari is a luxury brand, because the scarcity of the actual product is immovable. You cannot manufacture your way out of a 10,000-unit production ceiling. F1 has the same structural anchor: 22 cars, 11 teams, one world champion. Fixed. And only a limited number of Paddock Club passes.
The prestige layer is holding. LVMH signing on is a signal that the brand architecture is working, not bending. The audience reach story - Drive to Survive, gaming, social - is an unambiguous success. Netflix, in part, did in three years what thirty years of racing couldn’t.
The problem lies in the middle. When the paddock simultaneously hosts Tag Heuer and a branded activation for a product that feels categorically mismatched, the coherence starts to fray. The threat was never accessibility itself. It’s sponsor category bleed - the point at which “we’re an F1 partner” becomes noise rather than a status signal. Only recently, at an event, a CAA agent came up to me after a panel I was on and said something along the lines of “I was responsible for this F1 brand activation”, and my answer, almost immediately, was “You and everyone else”.
The Masters resolved this tension by simply refusing to enter the accessibility layer at all. One global sponsor. No title rights. F1’s answer has to be structurally different. But that doesn’t make the question any less urgent and complex.
The [number] of the week
352,000 spectators and fans descended at the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours this past weekend. The month of May saw quite the flurry of spectacular racing - Formula 1 in Miami, 6h of Spa-Francorchamps in WEC, the Monaco E Prix and the 24h of Nurburgring. And it’s precisely this last race I want to talk about.
The numbers don’t lie. The 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours drew a record 352,000 spectators, which is up from 280,000 in 2025, which was itself a record year. Online, the race peaked at 759,000 concurrent viewers, landing it among the five most-watched sports livestreams of the year. The entry list hit 161 cars - the largest field in over a decade. One man moved those numbers up and to the right.
The takeaway isn’t really about endurance racing. It’s about the oldest truth in sport: athletes are the product, not the series. The implosion of interest in the Nürburgring 24 Hours in 2026 comes down to one driver - a driver with enough star power to convert thousands of fans to whatever he turns his attention to. Verstappen didn’t win. A late ABS sensor failure snapped the driveshaft and ended his challenge in true endurance fashion. It didn’t matter. The crowd came for him, and they’ll be back because he’s given them a taste of what endurance racing is all about. And to be clear, endurance racing was already bringing in big numbers, but not at the level we saw this past weekend. The series is the stage. The star sells the tickets.
Three [stories] that need to be on your radar
What Fashion Can Offer Fencing as the Sport Eyes Growth. Fencing has an aesthetic problem - not with the sport itself, but with how it’s been packaged, or so that’s what I have come to understand. The kit is striking, the movement is balletic, the culture is old money and older Europe. Fashion has known this for years. The sport has barely noticed, and it almost feels like the same story as Formula 1. Miles Chamley-Watson has been doing the noticing for both. A two-time World Champion and the first African American to win the title, he’s also appeared at Vogue World, walked teh steps of the MET gala, collaborated with Nike on a signature sneaker, and carries a sponsor roster that includes Richard Mille and Mercedes. He is, by most measures, what a modern athlete-brand looks like. His World Fencing League debuted last month at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles - not a sports venue choice by accident. The goal, in his own words, is to take fencing from niche to mainstream. Fashion has always been the fastest route there. The question is whether the sport will follow where he’s already pointing LINK
You’ll be able to watch the Canadian GP on Netflix this weekend. As a reminder, for the first time, US viewers will be able to watch the Canadian Grand Prix live simultaneously on both Apple TV+ and Netflix, making it the most accessible race of the season for American audiences. Apple TV+ is the exclusive US home of Formula 1 in 2026 under a five-year agreement. The Netflix slot is a one-off - part of a content-swap arrangement that also brought Drive to Survive to Apple TV+. The logic is deliberate: millions of Drive to Survive viewers have never watched a live race, and in my opinion, this is still one of the biggest gaps that has yet to be filled. One high-profile broadcast is a low-risk way to find out how many of them will. For the sport’s US growth story, this weekend functions as much as a marketing experiment as a race broadcast.
His gardening leave from Red Bull has now expired, and Horner is clearly making up for lost time. First, a carefully placed appearance in the Formula E paddock in Monaco - as a guest of Liberty Global, naturally. Then a BYD activation at the Cannes Film Festival, complete with photographs alongside vice-president Stella Li. Speculation ranges from a Horner-backed twelfth F1 team to a play on Alpine’s available 24% stake currently held by Otro Capital. The BYD talks, at least, appear genuine. Whether the Monaco FE cameo was strategic ambiguity or just a man enjoying the Riviera is, frankly, the more interesting question. Either way, the paddock and media clearly missed him, even if they won’t admit it.
One [video] worth your time
One [event] that caught my eye
I wanted to talk about Web Summit, Vancouver, as I spoke on the Centre stage again this year with the CMOs of the Cadillac F1 team and the Aston Martin F1 Team, namely Rob Bloom and Ahmed Iqbal. Our conversation mostly focused on the juggernaut that Formula 1 has become, and the crucial role Marketing now plays to both grow the sport and capture the hearts and minds of fans. You can watch the full conversation on YouTube (see video below).
[Bon goût] - for those with an acquired taste.
After previous editions celebrating British and Italian automotive culture, FuoriConcorso turned its attention to Germany this year, and the result was exactly as uncompromising as you’d expect. Rooted in Bauhaus principles and the era when Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche were building some of the most acclaimed cars ever made, KraftMeister framed German engineering not as cold utility but as its own distinct aesthetic language.
What makes FuoriConcorso worth watching beyond the cars is what it signals about who car culture is for. The KraftMeister identity - industrial orange, Bauhaus geometry, a Helmut Newton photography exhibition running alongside the concours - reads less like a motor show and more like a well-edited concept store. The audience arriving on those lawns increasingly looks like one that navigates between design weeks, fashion months and racing paddocks without treating any of them as separate worlds. And one thing I’ve noticed is just how packed every weekend seems to be these days with events happening all around the world - events that are no longer just for tech execs, sports enthusiasts or fashion aficionados. They’ve somehow merged all into one.
In a short time, FuoriConcorso has grown from a side event during the Concorso d’Eleganza weekend into one of the genuinely unmissable fixtures on the calendar.