Acquired · 2026-03-02 · 4h 30m
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.
