The new American F1 fan

Why I'm writing this

I don't travel to races. Most fans don't. That's not a disclaimer, it's the point of this report.

I watch Formula 1 the same way the fastest-growing part of its American audience does: through a screen, through clips, through a feed, not from a paddock pass. That vantage point isn't a limitation on this research. It's the research. I'm the audience I'm describing, and I've spent the past year paying close attention to how people like me actually found this sport, why they stayed, and where the industry still isn't quite speaking to them.

This report is my attempt to put that observation into something useful: where American F1 fandom stands right now, who the newest wave of fans actually is, where the gap between that audience and the sport's marketing still sits, and what teams and brands can do about it.

Where American F1 stands right now

Formula 1 is bigger in the United States than it's been in decades, and the shift isn't subtle.

The calendar tells part of the story. The US now hosts three Grands Prix a year, in Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas. No other country hosts more than one. That's a direct bet by the sport on American demand.

ESPN has held the US broadcast rights since 2018 and has kept investing in the sport's American coverage since. Netflix's Drive to Survive, which premiered in 2019, is widely credited across sports and entertainment media with pulling in a wave of viewers who'd never watched a Grand Prix before, and a large share of them were American.

F1 itself has also put real weight behind growing its female fanbase and its female talent pipeline. F1 Academy, the all-female racing series the sport launched in 2023, exists specifically to build a path for women in racing and to give female fans a more direct reason to invest in the sport beyond watching from the sidelines.

None of that happened by accident. It happened because F1 decided America, and a broader fanbase within it, was worth building for. The next question is whether the marketing around the sport, team by team and sponsor by sponsor, has actually caught up.

Who the new fan actually is

Talk to enough people who found F1 in the last few years and a pattern shows up fast.

• They didn't grow up with it. Most didn't inherit the sport from a parent or grow up near a track. They found it through a show, a clip a friend sent, or a driver whose personality caught their attention before the racing did.
• They follow people before they follow the sport. A new fan's first loyalty is usually to a driver, sometimes to a team's whole culture, not to the sport's history. That loyalty builds in short, personal moments: an interview clip, a reaction, a driver being funny or awkward or real online. Race results deepen that loyalty. They rarely start it.
• They're not waiting for race day. A lot of this audience engages with F1 constantly between races, not just for two hours every other Sunday. Recaps, reaction content, and community conversation carry the sport through the gaps in the calendar.
• They are disproportionately young and disproportionately female, and neither of those things is a coincidence. This is the same audience that made Drive to Survive a hit outside the sports section, and it's still underestimated by a lot of the industry built around the sport's older, more traditional fanbase.

The gap: where teams are missing this audience

Most official team content still reads like it's written for the fan who already knows everything. Technical breakdowns and results-first recaps are valuable, but they assume a level of context a new fan doesn't have yet, and they rarely explain why any of it should matter emotionally.

Meanwhile, a huge amount of the content that actually reaches new fans, especially new female fans, is unofficial. It's fan edits, reaction videos, community threads, and independent creators filling a gap that official channels leave open. That's not a failure of the fans. It's an opportunity teams are leaving on the table.

Short-form video is where this audience actually spends its time, and a lot of official team content still treats it as an afterthought: a clip cut down from something built for broadcast, instead of something built for the format itself.

There's also a trust gap. A lot of new fans, especially women who've felt talked down to in other corners of sports fandom, trust creators and communities who talk to them like peers more than they trust official brand accounts. That trust is earned by tone, not by budget.

What actually works

A few things consistently move the needle for this audience, based on what I've watched work across the creators and communities I follow closely.

• Lead with people, not results. Personality is the on-ramp. Results are what keeps people once they're already in.
• Build for the format, not just the broadcast. Vertical video made for the platform it lives on will consistently outperform a broadcast clip cropped down after the fact.
• Meet new fans where they actually are. Explainer content that doesn't assume years of context does real work, especially early in a fan's first season.
• Back F1 Academy loudly. It already draws exactly this audience. Amplifying it is one of the lowest-effort, highest-trust moves available to a team or sponsor trying to reach female fans specifically.
• Work with the creators this audience already trusts, instead of only talking louder from official channels. That trust took years for some of these creators to build. A bigger media budget can't shortcut it.

Where this goes next

I wrote this because I think the opportunity here is real and still open, not because I think anyone's gotten it fully right yet, including me.

If you're a team, a sponsor, or a brand trying to reach this audience and want to talk through what that actually looks like, that's exactly the conversation I want to be having.