The business of Formula 1

Formula 1 is booming, but that could change. Since 2018, F1’s fanbase has grown an extraordinary 68 per cent, thanks in large part to Netflix’s wildly popular Drive to Survive and new Grands Prix in the crucial (and still largely untapped) US market.

Some 827 million people worldwide consider themselves fans of the sport, according to data published by Formula 1 in 2025. That’s almost exactly 10 per cent of the global population, which seems scarcely believable to me. Statistically speaking, every tenth person you walk past in the street, wherever you are in the world, is an F1 fan.

Yes, other sports are far bigger. Football has around 3.5 billion fans around the world, but they’re divided across hundreds, if not thousands of professional clubs on every continent, each employing dozens of players who compete once or twice a week in what amounts to hundreds of thousands of fixtures each season across the globe. Meanwhile, Formula 1’s 11 teams employ just 22 full-time drivers who race only 24 times a season (or 22 this year, since the GPs in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t go ahead).