Adam Minter: F1's growing pains with Apple TV+ would be worth it

Adam Minter, Bloomberg Opinion on Jul 19, 2025

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Fresh off earning a box-office hit with "F1," the movie, Apple Inc. has reportedly outbid ESPN for the U.S. broadcast rights to F1, the actual sport.

While F1 has not announced that it has accepted the deal, the nine-figure offer would enrich the elite racing championship. But it comes with a painful trade-off. Since 2018, F1’s American viewership has more than doubled on ESPN. Requiring those casual fans to buy an Apple TV+ subscription will throw that cable-led growth into sharp reverse.

F1 needs to do the deal anyway. To grow, the racing series requires young and affluent fans who are attracted to its personalities, luxury branding and cool factor. Apple can deliver that audience better than any traditional sports broadcaster — even one with ESPN’s reach.

F1 has always run a distant second in the U.S. to homegrown NASCAR and IndyCar. There are several reasons for this, including the sport’s lack of prominent American drivers and teams, as well as the difficulty of scheduling the series’ overseas races at times convenient for US fans.

Liberty Media Corp., the American cable and media giant, acquired F1 in 2017 and went to work changing the model. There are now three American races (up from one), including the glamour-tinged Las Vegas Grand Prix. Just as important, U.S. rights were given — literally for free — to ESPN in 2018 (some races are broadcast on ABC). At the time, NBC, F1’s previous partner, wasn’t happy about F1’s plans to launch its own streaming service, F1 TV.

The partnership has worked out well. In 2018, ESPN reported that an average of 554,000 viewers tuned in to races. By 2025, the number had jumped to 1.3 million. That larger audience is worth more money. The network is paying around $85 million (up from nothing) for the series, according to Yahoo.

Credit is due to ESPN’s parent company, Walt Disney Co., which has invested in promoting the sport. But there are additional factors in play. In 2019, Netflix Inc. premiered Drive to Survive, a docu-series that highlights the personalities, rivalries and tensions that define an F1 season. The show, which became popular during COVID lockdowns, drew a new and younger generation of fans who aren’t traditional motorsports enthusiasts.

F1’s own 2025 survey found that over half of its fans’ interest in the sport is shaped by fashion, style and social status.

At a time when sports of all kinds face increasing competition from other forms of entertainment, synergy with fashion builds fan bases, especially on social media.

The challenge for leagues is how to capture and monetize that fusion. Younger fan bases are far less likely to subscribe to cable and have access to ESPN or even ABC than earlier generations of fans. Instead, they’re online and streaming.

So that’s where sports are moving, too, even at the risk of alienating older fans. For example, this year, NASCAR saw a 17% viewership decline after it moved five races from Fox, FS1 and the USA Network to streaming-only platform Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video.

Apple has reportedly experienced this trend, too. In 2022, it became the exclusive streamer for Major League Soccer, taking over the league’s rights after they’d been spread across national and regional networks. Although the company doesn’t release viewership figures, Puck recently estimated that the 2024 MLS Cup Final delivered all-time low viewership for the match, despite being available to stream for free.

F1 will almost certainly lose viewers, too, if it shifts to Apple TV+. But for the tech giant and the sport, the sacrifice is poised to pay off in the long term.

For starters, the racing series’ luxury branding perfectly aligns with Apple’s innovative and upscale image. That should help F1 further differentiate itself from other sports (especially American motorsports), all the while attracting the young, digital-first fans necessary to keep the racing series growing.

Meanwhile, a partnership with a streamer that’s already making hit F1 content off the track provides the racing championship with a platform to become a year-round fan fixation. The F1 movie, and an upcoming feature documentary on the championship’s superstar driver and fashion icon Lewis Hamilton, are just the start.

Likewise, Apple technology — especially its forays into virtual and augmented reality, such as the Vision Pro — is a potential game changer for how fans experience motorsports. While promoting F1, for example, Brad Pitt and Tim Cook debuted a breathtaking immersive video that sends the viewer hurtling around a track with the actor. It’s not hard to imagine such videos becoming a new baseline for experiencing races in the future.

To be fair, ESPN and other sports broadcasters are also shifting into streaming. ESPN, for example, is launching a new flagship app this fall. What differentiates Apple is that it has established itself as an entertainment lifestyle brand beyond racing and other athletic events. For a new generation of fashion-first open-wheel racing fans, that’s a more valuable subscription than one that’s sports-first. For F1 and Apple, it’s a match made at the track.