Formula 1

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Ma, Business, Technology, Acquisitions, Startups, Venturecapital, Vc, Investing, Investment

4.7 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 270 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

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00:00:00 Start
00:00:37 Intro
00:05:52 Origins of F1: Britain, Italy, and Monaco
00:30:43 Bernie's Entrance
00:37:42 Bernie Consolidates Power
00:50:33 F1 as a Global TV Sport (Except America)
01:08:08 F1's Incredible Engineering Achievements
01:19:34 Senna's Crash and a New Era for Safety
01:33:18 The Many Owners of F1, and Bernie's Liquidity Drama
01:57:48 FOTA: The attempted breakaway series
02:05:07 RedBull, Mercedes, and Reinventing the Sport
02:42:33 Liberty Media buys F1 and Brings it to the Modern Era
03:05:03 Drive to Survive
03:26:45 Apple, TV Rights, and Success in America
03:41:52 F1: The Business Today
03:56:23 Analysis: Why Did F1 Work… and Was Bernie Necessary?
04:05:40 7 Powers
04:08:23 Bear vs. Bull Cases
04:16:32 Quintessence
04:20:08 Carve-Outs + Outro

‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was just listening to the F1 theme song to get pumped up.
0:04.2	Me too. Were you really?
0:05.3	Yes. It's so good.
0:07.3	I just got new speakers here in Acquired HQ North.
0:12.4	And actually, thanks to a recommendation from a listener in the Acquired Slack.
0:16.2	And yeah, it was bumping.
0:17.4	Amazing.
0:18.1	All right. Let's do this.
0:19.8	Let's do this.
0:20.7	Who got the truth? Is it you? was bumping. Amazing. All right. Let's do this. Let's do this.
0:31.3	Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?
0:44.8	Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth? Welcome to the spring 26th season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
0:45.9	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:47.2	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:48.7	And we are your hosts.
0:56.6	Today, we dive into a sport that started in the 1930s that began for the pure love of auto racing, extremely dangerous auto racing. Then, after World War II, the British Air Force veterans and mechanical
1:02.1	engineers joined the sport to push the limits of technology and physics. It eventually became the
1:07.4	sport of rich guys who want to own teams to gallivant around Europe,
1:15.7	losing colossal sums of money along the way. And in fact, David, since the sport began,
1:21.6	over 100 separate teams have entered and exited the competition, mostly because they went bankrupt. And today, the sport has been dragged kicking and screaming into being professionally
1:26.7	managed and is now owned
1:28.5	by the publicly traded U.S. company that has owned the Atlanta Braves, Sirius XM, and Live
	...

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