In December 2025, Formula 1 closed its season with numbers that would have seemed implausible a decade earlier: a record 6.7 million fans through the turnstiles, a title fight settled only at the final race, and a Brad Pitt movie about the sport sitting atop the all-time sports box office. For a championship that spent much of the 2010s fretting about aging audiences and empty grandstands, the turnaround has been striking. But a boom is easy to feel and harder to measure — so it is worth separating what the data actually shows from the marketing around it.
This is a story about media, fandom, and commerce in motorsport. It is distinct from the economics of football's mega-tournaments, from the commercial rise of women's sport, and from the sovereign-wealth investment reshaping golf and parts of football. F1 does race in Gulf states such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, but the engine of its current boom is audience and commercial growth under a US media owner, not state ownership. Keeping that frame in view helps to read the figures honestly.
The numbers behind the boom
Start with what can be counted. Formula 1 reported total season attendance of 6.7 million in 2025, the biggest combined attendance in its history, with 19 of 24 events sold out and 11 new track records [source: Formula 1, 2025]. The trend is not a one-year spike: paying crowds grew from 4.2 million in 2019 to 5.7 million in 2022, 6.0 million in 2023, 6.5 million in 2024 and 6.7 million in 2025 [source: Formula 1, 2025]. The British Grand Prix drew 500,000 over its weekend; the Australian Grand Prix, 465,000 [source: Formula 1, 2025].
Viewership tells a similar story. F1's cumulative global TV audience reached 1.6 billion in 2024, up from 1.5 billion in 2023, averaging around 66 million viewers per race on linear platforms [source: Formula 1, 2024]. Liberty Media, F1's owner, reported that live TV viewership grew 21 percent in 2025 [source: Liberty Media, 2026]. These are measured figures, not impressions — a useful anchor when "F1 is everywhere" starts to sound like a vibe rather than a fact.
The "Drive to Survive" effect — and its limits
No single explanation is repeated more often than Netflix. "Drive to Survive," which launched in March 2019, is widely credited with opening the sport to viewers who had never watched a race. The evidence for a real effect is genuine: Nielsen found that more than 360,000 US viewers who had not watched F1 in late 2021 tuned in during 2022 after first watching the series, and a 2022 poll found 28 percent of US adults identified as F1 fans, with more than half crediting the show [source: Nielsen Sports, 2022].
That is a correlation with a plausible mechanism, but it is not the whole cause. F1's US television audience on ESPN illustrates the nuance. It climbed from an average of 554,000 viewers per race in 2018 to 1.21 million in 2022 — then plateaued at about 1.1 million in 2023 and 2024 before setting a new record of 1.3 million in 2025 [source: ESPN Press Room, 2025]. If the docuseries alone drove viewership, the curve would likely have kept rising in lockstep; instead, growth arrived alongside streaming access, new US races, and a run of charismatic drivers and rivalries. As CNBC put it, the "Netflix effect" is only part of a broader shift [source: CNBC, 2024]. The show is a catalyst, not a sole cause.
Planting the flag in America
The clearest structural change under Liberty Media has been the deliberate build-out of the United States. F1 now stages three US races — the US Grand Prix in Austin, on the calendar since 2012; Miami, added in 2022; and Las Vegas, which debuted in November 2023 — more than in any other country [source: ESPN, 2023]. That the sport that once struggled to hold a single American date now supports three is itself a data point.
Las Vegas is the boldest bet, and the most instructive. Rather than sell the race to a local promoter, F1 promotes it directly, investing an estimated 400 to 500 million dollars, including roughly 240 million on about 40 acres of land and a permanent paddock building [source: ESPN, 2023]. The inaugural 2023 event was the most expensive Grand Prix to attend, with entry prices near 2,000 dollars — then those prices collapsed below 1,000 dollars amid soft demand and complaints from residents about disruption [source: ESPN, 2023]. Liberty Media later attributed a dip in fourth-quarter 2024 revenue partly to lower Las Vegas ticket and hospitality income [source: Liberty Media, 2026]. The American expansion is real and central to the boom, but it is not friction-free.
Follow the money: revenue, valuation, and LVMH
The commercial numbers are where "boom" is best documented, because they come from audited financial reports rather than promotional surveys. When Liberty Media acquired Formula One, completing the deal in January 2017, it valued the business at an enterprise value of 8.0 billion dollars and equity value of 4.4 billion [source: Liberty Media, 2017]. F1 revenue has risen from 1.83 billion dollars in that first full year to 3.2 billion in 2023, 3.65 billion in 2024 and 3.87 billion in 2025 — a 14 percent year-on-year gain, with operating income up 28 percent to 632 million dollars [source: Liberty Media, 2026].
Sponsorship has grown in step. In October 2024, F1 announced a 10-year global partnership with the luxury group LVMH — bringing Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy and TAG Heuer, which replaced Rolex as official timekeeper — reported at around 1 billion dollars, though outlets differ on the exact figure [source: CNN Business, 2024]. Reporting has put F1's estimated enterprise value at roughly 17 billion dollars by 2023, more than double the 2017 purchase price [source: CNBC, 2024]. That valuation is an analyst and media estimate rather than a completed sale, so it belongs in the "claimed, not independently verified" column — a distinction worth keeping even when the direction of travel is clear.
A younger, more female, more global audience
The most-repeated claim about the boom is that F1's audience has fundamentally changed — younger, more female, more global. Here it matters which measurement you use. By F1's own fanbase-reach metric, the global fanbase reached 827 million in 2025, up 12 percent year on year and 63 percent since 2018 [source: Formula 1, 2025]. Fans under 35 made up 43 percent of that base, and women 42 percent, up from 37 percent in 2018; women accounted for 48 percent of new fans, and the under-35s for 57 percent [source: Formula 1, 2025].
A separate instrument, the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey run with Motorsport Network, drew more than 100,000 responses across 186 countries and reported that women were 25 percent of respondents — more than double the 2017 share — while the average fan age fell from 36 to 32 over four years [source: Formula 1, 2025]. Both datasets point the same way, but both are commissioned by F1, and the survey samples self-identified, highly engaged fans rather than a representative population. They are strong directional signals, not neutral census data — and reading them as company-supplied evidence, not independent proof, is the honest way to use them.
The case for caution
Every boom invites the question of whether it is a structural shift or a bubble, and F1 gives real material to skeptics. The most cited worry is calendar bloat: the schedule reached a record 24 races in 2024 and again in 2025, prompting rare public pushback from drivers. Max Verstappen called it "way over the limit," Fernando Alonso "well over the limit," and Carlos Sainz said it was "at the limit" for staff and drivers with families [source: RacingNews365, 2024]. CEO Stefano Domenicali counters that 24 is "an optimal number" [source: RacingNews365, 2024]. More races mean more revenue and more sold-out weekends, but also more strain and more travel emissions.
Competitive balance is the second concern. In 2023, Verstappen won 19 of 22 races — an 86 percent single-season win rate, a record — leading more than three-quarters of all laps [source: ESPN, 2023]. A sport whose champion is a foregone conclusion risks losing the newcomers it has just won. Here, though, the recent evidence cuts the other way: the cost cap introduced in 2021 (145 million dollars, later trimmed to 135 million) was designed to converge the field [source: GPFans, 2024], and by 2025 the racing had tightened dramatically. The title was decided only at the final round, where Lando Norris held off Verstappen and his own McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri to end Verstappen's four-year reign [source: RaceFans, 2025].
Then there are access and sustainability. Premium pricing — Las Vegas being the extreme case — raises fair questions about whether the sport is pricing out the ordinary fans it courts on screen [source: ESPN, 2023]. And a 24-race global circus sits awkwardly with F1's pledge to be Net Zero Carbon by 2030, announced in 2019; the sport says it cut more than 90 percent of carbon at European rounds in 2025 through biofuels, solar and batteries, and is shifting freight to sea and regional hubs, with 100 percent sustainable fuel arriving under 2026 engine rules [source: Formula 1, 2019]. Whether growth and decarbonization can accelerate together is an open, and closely watched, question.
Structural shift or bubble? What to watch
The honest read is that F1's boom is largely structural, but not immune to cooling. The measured evidence — record attendance, rising and now record US viewership, five straight years of revenue growth, a demonstrably younger and more female audience, and a record-breaking feature film — is broad, multi-year, and drawn from more than one source. It is not the fragile signature of a single fad. But the softest spots are exactly where a bubble would show first: speculative event economics like Las Vegas, ticket prices that outrun wages, calendar fatigue, and the ever-present risk that one team runs away with the championship.
So watch a few gauges rather than the headline vibe. Do the 2026 rule changes — new power units and sustainable fuel — keep the field close, as the cost cap has begun to? Does US viewership consolidate above its 2025 record now that rights move to Apple, or slip back toward the 1.1 million plateau? Do attendance and revenue hold once the novelty of new host cities fades? And can F1 grow its calendar and its audience while honoring a 2030 climate pledge? The boom is real and measurable. Whether it compounds or plateaus is the story of the next few seasons.