Formula 1

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I was just listening to the F1 theme song to get pumped up.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Me too, were you really?

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
Yes, it's so good.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
I just got new speakers here in Acquired HQ North, and actually thanks to a recommendation from a listener in the Acquired Slack, and yeah, it was bumping.

**David Rosenthal** (0:17)
Amazing.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:18)
All right, let's do this.

**David Rosenthal** (0:19)
Let's do this.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:38)
Welcome to the spring 2026 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
And we are your hosts.
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 engineers joined the sport to push the limits of technology and physics. It eventually became the sport of rich guys who want to own teams to gallivant around Europe, losing colossal sums of money along the way. And in fact, David, since the sport began, 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 managed and is now owned by the publicly traded US company that has owned the Atlanta Braves, Sirius XM, and Live Nation. That is Liberty Media. And against all odds, Liberty has managed to turn the sport, the teams, and the drivers into real, viable businesses. Today's episode, listeners, is on Formula 1, the world's premier motorsport series.

**David Rosenthal** (1:51)
Woo. I was going to save this for later in the episode. But do you know what else among the many other, like, hundreds of companies that Liberty has owned? Do you know what else they owned? You won't guess it because there's so many. Excite at Home. No way. From our Google series.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:07)
Throwback. That's awesome. Well, listeners, really what we're doing here today with Formula One, it's three sports in one. It is, of course, the world's best race car drivers showcasing their skills, but it's also the World Cup of Engineering. These days, it's fair to say that the races are more determined by the design feats of the thousand plus people that work on each car than the drivers. And Formula One is the only motorsport in the world that requires a team to design and build their own car from scratch, which is an insane engineering feat to enter the competition. And as one listener put it to us, it's also the World Cup of Office Politics, or as another one put it, it's Real Housewives of the Garage, which that makes for a fantastic Netflix show.

**David Rosenthal** (2:52)
Oh, does it ever. We might talk about that towards the end of the episode here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:56)
Yes, the sport itself is completely insane. It is a grid of 20 drivers competing at over 200 miles per hour in races that last 190 miles. And they do this every week or two in a different city around the world. They load the entire circus, the cars, the teams, the hospitality onto a fleet of seven Boeing 777s between races. And they set up shop in 24 different cities from Monaco to Bahrain to Melbourne, Australia. Each car costs 20 million dollars to make and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. The cars have three to six hundred sensors on them. And shockingly to me as an American, David, I don't know if you knew this before we started researching, it's actually the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million viewers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:44)
Yeah, I had no idea until we started researching because we're Americans.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:47)
And you know, the Olympics and the World Cup don't count because they're every two and four years. So pretty crazy. Listeners, starting in just five days, a season will kick off that's going to see some of the biggest changes in the sport in decades. So we've got new regulations, which means all new car designs, an expansion to an 11th team with Cadillac, Audi and Ford are also entering the sport, and a brand new broadcast partner in the US in Apple TV. And while everything got much more professionalized, it's still owned by a bunch of rich guys who love auto racing.

**David Rosenthal** (4:20)
They're just no longer money losing rich guys.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:22)
That's right. So listeners, just like our NFL, NBA, and IPL cricket episodes, this show is about the business of F1. So we apologize in advance if we don't spend time on your favorite rivalry or regulation detail or the V10 engine sound. You can join the email list to get updates every time an episode drops at acquired.fm slash email. You get to vote on future episodes and the email list is just getting much, much better. So we now have episode summaries, our big takeaways and exclusive photos from our research process. That's acquired.fm slash email. Chat about this afterwards with us, with the whole acquired community in the Slack, acquired.fm slash Slack. And before we dive in, we want to thank our presenting sponsor, JP. Morgan Payments.