By Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg

Not so long ago -- before Formula One was organizing races down the Las Vegas Strip, or in the Miami sunshine, or for half a million fans in Austin, Texas -- the U.S. was the one place on earth that felt agonizingly out of reach for the world's most prestigious racing series.

It wasn't for lack of trying. Ever since F1 began in 1950, organizers had brought Grand Prix races to the U.S., desperately hoping to seduce the American market that understood and embraced its traditionally oval-track motor sports, Nascar and IndyCar. But everywhere they went, the F1 traveling circus ran into a mix of misfortune, incompetence and, worst of all, indifference.

In Vegas in the 1980s, F1 was relegated to racing in the parking lot of Caesars Palace. In Indianapolis, a tire fiasco led to a race featuring only six cars, instead of the planned 20. And in Phoenix, Formula One was once outdrawn by an ostrich festival held on the same weekend. To American fans, this English-driven sport might as well have been speaking a different language.

"In the old times, F1 was too presumptuous," F1 Chief Executive Stefano Domenicali says. "Formula One was coming to the U.S. [as if] there was nothing to explain."

Now, with F1 in its 75th season, the picture couldn't be more different. With a devoted stateside following and a genuine cultural toehold, the sport has gone far beyond simply cracking a U.S. market that former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone had all but given up on. In 2025, Formula One has put America squarely at the center of its business.

A new reality

This surprising turn toward the U.S. began when the series was acquired by the Colorado-based Liberty Media in 2017 for more than $4 billion. At the time, there was only one Grand Prix a year in America, in Austin, and ratings were almost negligible.

It took the sudden success of Netflix's F1 reality show, "Drive to Survive," during the early part of the pandemic in 2019 to jump-start interest from U.S. audiences. In 2022, F1 added a second American Grand Prix in Miami, and the following year it launched the Vegas Strip race.

Each one comes with a distinct vibe. If Austin is the closest thing to a race in the European heartland, with its petrolhead music-festival ambience, Miami was designed to be Monaco on Biscayne Bay. Vegas, meanwhile, was imagined as the over-the-top, one-of-a-kind spectacle created specifically for the "Drive to Survive" generation. Last season, those three Grand Prix weekends drew more than a million fans combined, on par with the most popular European races.

But the sport's brass isn't letting up on its American push. Its latest crossover project, a blockbuster movie called "F1" starring Brad Pitt and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, will hit theaters this summer. And next year the sport will expand to admit Cadillac, backed by General Motors, as the 11th F1 team.

The reason for such a concerted push on this side of the Atlantic is that in the U.S., F1 has tapped into the kind of audience that advertisers salivate over. They're young, affluent and more gender-balanced than your average sports crowd, with an average age of 35 and roughly 60% men and 40% women, F1 says.

Never mind that they might not have been watching during the heyday of such F1 luminaries as Michael Schumacher in the early 2000s, or even during Lewis Hamilton's prime in the 2010s. The new fans who surfed in on the "Drive to Survive" wave adopted the current cast of drivers as their own and helped F1 gain unprecedented cultural relevance in the U.S.

"We are feeling that explosion in the sport, of the popularity of the sport, and it's with a different generation," says Aston Martin team owner Lawrence Stroll. "They're able to follow it on their phone. They don't have to sit home at 2 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon or watch it on TV."

That's not necessarily ideal for a sport that hasn't entirely moved past the traditional moneymaking model of raking in cash through the sale of television rights. All of that stateside popularity has yet to turn into the American broadcast deal of F1's dreams.

ESPN, which was paying exactly $0 for the rights to the series as recently as 2018, chose to walk away from its exclusive negotiation window for a new package late last year. F1, which is reportedly seeking between $150 million and $180 million a season, declined to comment on negotiations with prospective broadcast partners, but said it was confident it would secure a contract soon.

Driver wanted

One thing that could change the calculus would be the arrival of an American driver.

F1 hasn't had an American world champion since Mario Andretti in 1978, and no one has come close. In fact, no American has won so much as a single Grand Prix since that season. The most recent driver to give it a try was the Florida-born Logan Sargeant, whose stay in F1 lasted less than two seasons. His best race finish was 10th place.

Everyone in the sport knows how much of an impact a competitive U.S. driver could have. When Schumacher dominated the series, he single-handedly revived F1 interest in his native Germany. Fernando Alonso did the same for Spain late in the first decade of the 2000s. And now that Max Verstappen is a four-time world champion, hordes of Dutch fans in orange gear are a fixture at circuits around the world.

The hope in F1 circles now is that Cadillac can be the team to foster the next promising U.S. racer. But Formula One isn't waiting around for that lightning to strike. Rumors have been circulating for over a year that the sport is on the hunt for yet another American track.

Email Joshua Robinson, a Wall Street Journal editor in New York, at joshua.robinson@wsj.com. Email Jonathan Clegg, the Journal's sports editor in New York, at jonathan.clegg@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 01, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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