Particle Data Platform
Acquired

Formula 1

3/2/20264 hr 30 min

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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‍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.

Clips

Post-Billion Triple Bypass
£1 Team To Champion
Paddock Becomes Party Central
Cigarettes Fund The Grid
Bernie’s Train Robbery Punchline

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. David Rosenthal· Host0:00

    I was just listening to the F1 theme song to get pumped up.

  2. Ben Gilbert· Host0:04

    Me too. Were you really?

  3. David Rosenthal· Host0:05

    Yes. It's so good.

  4. Ben Gilbert· Host0:07

    I just got new speakers here in Acquired HQ North, and, uh, actually, thanks to a recommendation from a listener in the Acquired Slack, and yeah, it was bumping.

  5. David Rosenthal· Host0:17

    Amazing.

  6. Ben Gilbert· Host0:18

    All right. Let's do this.

  7. David Rosenthal· Host0:19

    Let's do this.

  8. Speaker 2· Soundbite0:21

    Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

  9. Ben Gilbert· Host0:38

    Welcome to the Spring 2026 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

  10. David Rosenthal· Host0:46

    I'm David Rosenthal.

  11. Ben Gilbert· Host0:47

    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 one hundred 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

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