Formula 1

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it. Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1. Sponsors: Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners: J.P. Morgan Payments ServiceNow Vercel Statsig Links: Sign up for email updates and vote on future episodes! The Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg Drive to Survive on Netflix F1 The Movie on Apple TV Adrian Newey, How to Build a Car Senna documentary Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Formula One Study All episode sources Carve Outs: Cirque du Soleil Echo Super Bowl LX Mic'd Up Tonal Princess Peach: Showtime! on Nintendo Switch Daloopa for historical financial data More Acquired: Get email updates and vote on future episodes! Join the Slack

You can listen to Formula 1 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Formula 1 is an episode from Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

This episode is 269:31 long.

This episode was published on Mar 2, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Acquired when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.