Ask who owns Formula 1 and you will get a short answer and a long one. The short answer: Liberty Media, the Colorado-based group behind a portfolio of American media and entertainment assets, has controlled the sport’s commercial rights since early 2017. The long answer involves a former secondhand car dealer from Suffolk, a private equity firm, a century-old Paris federation, and a Netflix series that changed everything about how the sport is valued.
It is worth untangling, because Formula 1 is an unusual property. Nobody owns the teams that race in it. Nobody owns the circuits it visits. What Liberty bought was the right to organize the championship and sell it — to broadcasters, to host cities, to sponsors — and that right has turned out to be one of the better acquisitions in modern sports.
Understanding the structure also explains much of what you see on track: why the calendar keeps growing, why new races skew toward destination cities, and why the smallest team on the grid is now worth more than the whole enterprise once was.
The Ecclestone Decades
For roughly forty years before Liberty arrived, Formula 1’s commercial side was the personal project of Bernie Ecclestone. A former team owner, Ecclestone spent the late 1970s and 1980s consolidating the sport’s television and promotional rights, negotiating on behalf of the teams and, gradually, for himself. He grasped earlier than almost anyone in sport that the real product was not the race but the broadcast of the race.
Ownership of those rights passed through several hands — banks, holding companies, and from 2006 the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners — but Ecclestone remained the operator throughout. The CVC era was lucrative for its investors and famously frugal toward the sport itself: little was spent on digital platforms, marketing, or the American market. By the mid-2010s, Formula 1 was a profitable business with an aging audience and no social media strategy to speak of.
The Liberty Media Deal
Liberty Media agreed to buy Formula 1 in late 2016 and completed the takeover in January 2017, in a transaction that valued the business at roughly $4.4 billion in equity and about $8 billion once debt was included. The commercial rights sit inside the Formula One Group, which trades on the Nasdaq as a Liberty tracking stock — meaning that, in a small way, anyone with a brokerage account can own a slice of the sport.
Liberty’s first moves were managerial. Ecclestone was moved aside, Chase Carey took over as chief executive, and former Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali succeeded him in 2021. The strategic shift was just as clear: open up digital content, court the United States, and treat each grand prix as a week-long entertainment property rather than a Sunday television slot.
How Formula 1 Makes Money
The Formula One Group earns its revenue from three principal streams, with a long tail of smaller ones — hospitality, the licensed team merchandise business, freight, and the F1 TV subscription service among them.
| Revenue stream | What it is | Who pays |
|---|---|---|
| Race promotion fees | The right to host a grand prix | Promoters, often government-backed |
| Broadcasting rights | TV and streaming coverage | Networks and platforms worldwide |
| Sponsorship | Trackside ads and global partnerships | Brands buying worldwide exposure |
| Other | Hospitality, licensing, F1 TV, freight | Fans, licensees, subscribers |
Hosting fees explain the calendar’s geography. Established European venues with grandfathered deals pay relatively modest sums, while newer races backed by tourism budgets pay far more — which is why the schedule has tilted toward the Gulf and the United States. A deeper look at how venues differ is in our guide to F1 circuits.
CALENDAR INFLATION
The season Liberty bought, 2016, ran 21 grands prix. By 2024 the calendar had stretched to a record 24 — with three of them in the United States.
The Concorde Agreement and Team Payouts
The teams are not shareholders, but they are not mere contractors either. Their relationship with the commercial rights holder is governed by the Concorde Agreement, a periodically renegotiated contract that sets out how much of the sport’s profit flows back to the grid and under what terms the teams commit to race.
Roughly half of the sport’s underlying profit is distributed to the ten teams, split through a formula that rewards championship position and, in Ferrari’s case, simple longevity — the Scuderia receives a unique bonus for its unbroken presence since 1950. Those payouts, together with the cost cap, transformed team finances. Outfits that changed hands for a token sum in the 2010s are now valued in the billions, which is also why the question of whether you can buy a Formula 1 car has a more interesting answer than most fans assume, and the cost of actually building the cars is its own story — see how much an F1 car costs.
The FIA, the FOM, and Who Decides What
A common confusion: Liberty does not write the rules. The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body based in Paris, owns the world championship itself and sets the sporting and technical regulations — everything from engine specifications to what each flag means. Liberty’s Formula One Management leases the commercial rights from the FIA under a 100-year agreement signed in 2001, and runs the business side.
In practice the two negotiate constantly, with the teams as the third corner of the triangle. Regulations affect the show; the show funds the regulator; and nothing major happens without all three signing the same piece of paper.
The Drive to Survive Dividend
Liberty’s defining bet was content. The Netflix series Drive to Survive, launched in 2019, found an audience the sport had never reached — younger, more female, and heavily American. Combined with new races in Miami and Las Vegas and a genuinely competitive product, it pushed attendance, sponsorship, and rights fees upward in step. The market noticed: Formula 1’s valuation has multiplied several times over since the acquisition, and star compensation has followed, as our look at F1 driver salaries makes plain.
A Sport, Held in Trust
So who owns Formula 1? Legally, Liberty Media’s shareholders. Practically, ownership is shared among the rights holder, a federation that controls the rulebook, and ten teams whose consent is required for almost anything. That tension is the system working as intended. Ecclestone built the machine, CVC harvested it, and Liberty modernized it — but the sport’s real asset has never changed hands. It remains the seventy-odd years of accumulated meaning that make twenty cars going around in circles worth billions, and that part belongs to no one.