Why Formula 1 Became Cool Again
The first Formula 1 World Championship race took place at Silverstone on 13 May 1950. Giuseppe Farina won in
In 2018, Formula 1 averaged 547,000 viewers per race in the United States. NASCAR drew three times that. IndyCar outdrew F1. The sport had a loyal European fanbase, a few iconic circuits, and almost zero cultural presence in the world’s largest economy.
By 2021, F1 viewership in the US had jumped 41% to nearly one million viewers per race. The 2022 Miami Grand Prix pulled 2.6 million, the largest live F1 audience in American history. US Grand Prix attendance went from 264,000 in 2018 to 400,000 in 2021. Liberty added a second US race in Miami. Then a third in Las Vegas.
F1’s revenue grew from $2.04 billion in 2017 to $3.65 billion in 2024. A Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt grossed over $614 million globally in 2025 and outpaced Superman at the box office.
None of this happened by accident. To understand why Formula 1 became popular on this scale, you have to look at a deliberate sequence of decisions, not a lucky cultural moment.
What F1 Was Before the Boom
The first Formula 1 World Championship race took place at Silverstone on 13 May 1950. Giuseppe Farina won in an Alfa Romeo. Royalty and a crowd of motorsport enthusiasts watched, treating the event as much as a social occasion as a race. That set the template for the next several decades: F1 was elite, European, and deliberately inaccessible.
The early sport was also genuinely dangerous in a way that attracted a certain kind of fan and repelled everyone else. Drivers raced without seatbelts, on road circuits with minimal barriers, in aluminium fuel tanks that had a habit of catching fire. Fatalities were common enough that everyone treated them as an occupational hazard. The audience this attracted was either genuinely fearless or genuinely callous, and neither made for easy mass marketing.
It was Michael Schumacher who first turned a driver into a global icon. His five consecutive titles with Ferrari from 2000 to 2004 created something the sport had never quite managed before: an international celebrity who happened to race cars. Ferrari’s brand power, already enormous in Italy, amplified his reach into markets across Asia and the Americas. Television deals expanded. Races moved beyond Europe. The sport became a billion-dollar business without ever quite becoming a popular one.
Then Schumacher retired, and for much of the following decade F1 settled back into comfortable European dominance. Sebastian Vettel won four straight titles between 2010 and 2013. Lewis Hamilton began his era of sustained brilliance. The racing was often technically extraordinary and visually spectacular. It was also, for large stretches, predictable. One driver, one team, pulling away from the field, lap after lap, race after race.
Liberty Media Changes the Equation
The single biggest reason why Formula 1 became popular in the markets it had previously ignored comes down to a change of ownership. Liberty Media, the American entertainment conglomerate, acquired Formula 1 in 2017 for approximately $8 billion. At that point the sport’s commercial structure had barely changed in thirty years. Bernie Ecclestone, who had run F1 for four decades, had built it as a closed, elite operation: high fees for broadcasters, limited digital access, almost no social media presence, and a philosophy that scarcity creates prestige.
Liberty saw it differently. They saw a sport with extraordinary raw material, speed, danger, money, personality, conflict, and a global calendar, that was packaging itself for the wrong audience in the wrong era.
The changes came systematically. F1 launched its own streaming platform, F1 TV. F1 loosened its social media restrictions, letting teams and drivers post freely for the first time. Race highlights that paywalls had previously hidden appeared on YouTube. The calendar expanded into new markets, adding races in Miami, Las Vegas, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. F1 redesigned Grand Prix weekends around entertainment. Concerts, celebrity appearances, and festival-style hospitality replaced the old paddock culture.
The race calendar went from 19 events in 2017 to 24 in 2024.
The Netflix Effect
If any single product explains why Formula 1 became popular with a brand new audience, it is a Netflix docuseries. In March 2019, Formula 1: Drive to Survive launched on the platform. It was the centrepiece of Liberty’s push into the American market, and it worked beyond almost anyone’s expectations.
The series did something that live broadcasts had never managed: it made viewers care about the people before it made them care about the sport. By following drivers and team principals through the politics, the arguments, the pressure, and the occasional genuine drama of a season, the show gave audiences unprecedented access. The exposure turned Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton into characters. It also transformed Guenther Steiner, the Haas team principal, into a meme. Audiences were introduced to the paddock as a world of ambition, rivalry, and occasionally outrageous behaviour, most of which was genuinely true.
What the Numbers Showed
By 2021, Drive to Survive had become one of Netflix’s most-watched series in the week of its release. The season three premiere reached the top of Netflix’s charts within days of launching. A Nielsen analysis found that more than 360,000 viewers who had not watched F1 at all in the latter part of 2021 began watching races after viewing Drive to Survive. Race day ticket sales for the first US Grand Prix held after the show debuted rose 15%.
A 2022 poll found that 28% of American adults considered themselves F1 fans. By 2023, ESPN was averaging 1.1 million viewers per race in the US alone.
The show was not without its critics. Veteran fans complained that it manufactured drama, exaggerated rivalries, and occasionally misrepresented what had actually happened. Some drivers, including Verstappen, refused to participate in later seasons citing inaccurate portrayal. Season six, covering the 2023 season which Verstappen dominated with record-breaking monotony, saw viewership drop around 30% compared to the previous year.
But the broader impact had already happened. Drive to Survive had demonstrated that there was an audience for F1 that had nothing to do with understanding tyre degradation or DRS zones. It was an audience that wanted personalities, conflict, and access.
The Drivers as Pop Stars
Any honest account of why Formula 1 became popular has to credit the cast of characters that most sports could only dream of, which Liberty and Netflix together put on full display.
Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion, sits at the intersection of sport, fashion, activism, and celebrity in a way that almost no other athlete manages. His fashion sense draws coverage from Vogue. His political statements generate news cycles. When Ferrari announced he was joining them for 2025, it became one of the biggest sports stories of the year across outlets that had never previously covered Formula 1.
Lando Norris has a gaming and streaming following that pulls in audiences well outside the traditional F1 demographic. Charles Leclerc is a genuine celebrity in Italy with the kind of fan base usually reserved for footballers. Max Verstappen, despite his reluctance to play the media game, is one of the most dominant sportsmen of his generation and carries the weight of that in every race.
These drivers are not just racing. They are posting, appearing, collaborating. The sport’s aggregate social media following hit 49 million with 40% annual growth and over 1.5 billion engagements. Almost everything F1 posts goes viral.
The F1 Film and What It Signifies
In 2025, the Brad Pitt film simply titled F1 became the clearest signal yet of where the sport now sits in global culture.
The producers made the film in collaboration with Formula 1 Management, the FIA, and all ten teams. Director Joseph Kosinski filmed at 14 real Grands Prix across three continents, inserting the fictional APXGP team into live race weekends at Silverstone, Monza, Spa-Francorchamps, and Abu Dhabi. Brad Pitt and co-star Damson Idris raced alongside actual cars in front of actual crowds. Lewis Hamilton served as executive producer, personally coaching Pitt on driving technique and working with the production to represent the sport’s culture accurately.
The film’s soundtrack featured Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Hans Zimmer, and Rosé. Collaborations with Tommy Hilfiger produced limited-edition merchandise. It grossed over $614 million globally.
A sport that could not get consistent television ratings in the US a decade ago is now producing blockbuster Hollywood films. That is not a small shift.
The Business Behind the Cool
It is worth being clear that the real answer to why Formula 1 became popular is not simply a story of organic cultural drift. It was a deliberate business transformation executed with significant resources and strategic clarity.
Liberty Media identified a sport with undermonetised commercial rights, underdeveloped digital infrastructure, and an existing audience far smaller than its potential. They invested in storytelling, opened access, redesigned the fan experience, expanded the calendar into high-value markets, and let the sport’s natural drama do the rest.
The results are measurable. Revenue grew 79% between 2017 and 2024. Liberty’s F1 stock returned over 60% in the years following Drive to Survive‘s launch. The sport now operates in markets it had barely touched a decade ago.
The one unresolved tension is between growth and authenticity. Traditional fans who watched qualifying in the rain at Spa for thirty years have watched their sport turn into a content machine. Some of what made F1 compelling, the technical obsession, the genuine danger, the exclusivity of the paddock, has faded as the sport chased broader appeal.
The sport has to decide how far it goes. Whether the Las Vegas Grand Prix, which runs on a strip circuit designed for spectacle rather than racing, represents the future or the limit of the experiment.
For now, the numbers suggest that question does not need an immediate answer. Formula 1 is bigger than it has ever been. It is also, for the first time in a long time, genuinely cool again.
Key Sources
- Sandy Times. Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With Formula 1 in 2025?
- Audiense. How a Netflix Docuseries Set Off a Rise in F1 Popularity
- CNBC. F1’s Fanbase Is Shifting — and the Netflix Effect Is Only Part of That
- Boss Hunting. The Netflix Effect: How Drive to Survive Changed Formula 1 in Numbers
- AInvest. Liberty Media’s Strategic Expansion in Motorsports
- Nielsen via Media Play News. Netflix’s Drive to Survive Ups Sport’s Popularity in US.
