On 27 June 2025 a film opens in American cinemas about a racing driver long past his best season, called back by an old friend to save a team stuck at the back of the grid. Brad Pitt plays the lead, Joseph Kosinski directs. By the end of its run F1 has taken more than 630 million dollars worldwide and become the highest-grossing sports film of all time.

Ten years earlier it would have looked like a reckless bet. Formula 1 was a sport for connoisseurs, with a loyal but ageing audience, little presence on social media and barely a following in the United States. Today, according to F1’s own figures, it is the annual sporting series with the most fans in the world. So the question is a fair one: why is F1 so popular, and why has it become so popular right now?

The numbers behind a popularity that keeps growing

According to Formula 1, in 2026 it has more than 830 million fans worldwide, 64% more than in 2018. The most striking figure, though, is not the total but the make-up: women account for 42% of the audience and fans under 35 for 43%. For a sport that grew up for decades around a male, older audience, that is a change of skin.

Television tells the same story. In 2025 the season’s cumulative audience, meaning the sum of viewers of every race on TV and digital platforms, reached 1.83 billion, around 76 million people per Grand Prix. On social media the official channels have passed one hundred million followers, and in 2025, for the fifth year in a row, F1 was the fastest-growing sports league.

Open-door popularity

To understand where this growth comes from, you have to go back to 23 January 2017, when Liberty Media completed its purchase of Formula 1 at an enterprise value of around 8 billion dollars. It was the end of the Bernie Ecclestone era. He had built a formidable business on television rights and race hosting fees, but he looked at young people and social networks with barely concealed suspicion: in 2014 he explained that kids could not afford a Rolex and that he wanted nothing to do with tweets and Facebook.

The new owners did the simplest and hardest thing: they opened the doors. Let’s call it open-door popularity, the kind that is born when a sport stops guarding its secrets and starts telling them. On 8 March 2019 Netflix released the first season of Drive to Survive, which takes viewers into the garages, into team principals’ meetings, into fights between teammates. You don’t need to understand DRS to get hooked on a rivalry, and the series has proved it season after season.

The Brad Pitt film is the next chapter of the same strategy, and it is no coincidence that it carries Apple’s name: from 2026 Apple TV shows every race exclusively in the United States, under a five-year deal estimated at around 150 million dollars a year, against the roughly 90 million ESPN used to pay. We covered it in our piece on the agreement between Apple and Formula 1.

America, at last

For decades the United States was Formula 1’s great frustration: the richest market in the world, and a sport that simply would not take root there. Austin’s Circuit of the Americas has hosted a race since 2012; Miami arrived in 2022, the night race on the Las Vegas Strip in 2023. That makes the United States the only country with three Grands Prix on the 2026 calendar, which has 23 races.

In 2026 the grid has grown on the team side too: Cadillac has made its debut as the eleventh team, with Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez at the wheel. An American brand entering Formula 1 with a team of its own says more than any statistic about how much that market now matters.

Is Formula 1 a sport?

Plenty of people still ask, and the answer is yes, without hesitation. In corners and under braking a driver endures forces of up to five or six times their body weight: at 5 g, the head and helmet, which together weigh about seven kilos, weigh almost thirty-five. The heart stays between 150 and 190 beats per minute for the whole race, and in the hottest races drivers lose two or three litres of sweat, sometimes more. That is why they train like endurance athletes, with specific work on the neck muscles that few other sports demand.

There is also a misunderstanding about the name. “Formula” has nothing to do with mathematics: it means the set of technical rules every car must comply with. The first Grand Prix to count towards the world championship was held at Silverstone in May 1950, and since then the formula has changed many times while the name has stayed the same.

The laboratory you can watch on television

In 2026 the power units changed profoundly: the electric side now supplies about half of the power and the fuel is 100% sustainable. For carmakers and technology companies Formula 1 has gone back to being what it was in its best years, an open-air laboratory where solutions are tested in front of hundreds of millions of people.

It is something that is often forgotten when we talk about popularity. Audiences do not only watch who wins: they also watch how people win, and the stories of engineering, development and technical choices have become part of the narrative, no longer a subject for a handful of experts.

What it means for a brand

A bigger audience means more value, and more value means higher prices. According to our September 2026 survey, today you cannot get into Formula 1 for less than 2 million dollars a year, almost every team asks for a minimum commitment of two seasons, and sponsoring a single race no longer exists. If you want to understand how that figure is made up, you will find the details in our guide to how much it costs to sponsor Formula 1.

The price, though, only tells half the story. The other half is told by the fans: in the 2025 global survey by Formula 1 and Motorsport Network, 76% of respondents said sponsors enhance the F1 experience. Few settings welcome a brand this readily.

A popularity to handle with care

The open doors have brought in a new audience, younger and more varied. They brought it in through stories, even before races, and that is the point anyone investing in Formula 1 should think about: an audience that fell in love with the narrative asks brands to be part of it, not to watch it from a sticker on the sidepod. What remains to be seen is how long a sport can keep growing at this pace, and who will manage to climb aboard before the door, inevitably, starts to narrow.