Formula 1 under Liberty Media is increasingly shaping its media ecosystem around reach, personality and algorithm-friendly content, while specialist journalism, technical expertise and traditional paddock reporting appear to be losing ground. The growing presence of influencers is not simply changing who gets access to the sport. It is also changing the way Formula 1 decides who is best placed to tell its story.
There is a new figure that has claimed an increasingly prominent place in the Formula 1 paddock in recent years: the influencer. Often lacking any clearly demonstrated specialist expertise, this person can nevertheless be extraordinarily skilled at the art of being present, backed by impressive virtual numbers. They enter the paddock, take photographs, produce content, describe the experience through stories and videos and, above all, bring a community of followers with them.
What they actually know about Formula 1 is not necessarily the most important factor. What matters is how many people they can reach. And that is gradually changing the way the championship chooses the people who are allowed to tell its story.
The problem is not the existence of influencers. The problem begins when they start occupying space that, for decades, had been reserved for journalists, correspondents, analysts and professionals who built their credibility through years of work and knowledge of motorsport. This is no longer simply an evolution in communication. It is, at least partly for now, a professional replacement: where Formula 1 once needed somebody capable of explaining a race, today it sometimes seems sufficient to have somebody capable of turning that race into content. For anyone who regards journalism as something fundamentally different from marketing, the distinction is enormous.
Liberty Media’s Formula 1 strategy is targeting new audiences
This process is not happening by accident. Since Liberty Media acquired Formula 1, the product has been transformed according to a very precise logic: expand the audience, enter new markets, multiply opportunities for consumption and keep the championship constantly present throughout the digital world. Formula 1, its teams and its drivers have recorded extraordinary growth across social media, and there is little point becoming lost in individual numbers.
Technological conditions are obviously very different from those of the Bernie Ecclestone era, but it would be too simplistic to attribute everything merely to the spread of the internet. Behind that explosion lies a deliberate marketing strategy. The same commercial logic can also be seen in the championship’s continuing geographical and format expansion, including the way Liberty Media is shaping Formula 1’s 2027 Sprint calendar around different global markets.
Liberty Media is an entertainment company and thinks exactly like one. It cannot simply preserve its existing audience; it must continuously attract a new one. In that sense, the traditional Formula 1 fan represents an almost mathematical constant. That supporter may complain about the Power Units, despise the increasing focus on spectacle, criticise the circuits, regard Madring and its racing characteristics as a questionable project and become furious with the FIA, but they will still continue following Formula 1.
Even their anger is useful because, in the age of algorithms, controversy also generates traffic, interaction and visibility.
The real target is therefore the people who do not know Formula 1, know little about it or have simply never had a strong enough reason to become interested. To attract them, the product needs to become immediately accessible, recognisable and, above all, emotional. The driver becomes a character, the teammate becomes an antagonist, a mistake becomes a controversy, a stewarding decision becomes a potential scandal and a rivalry becomes a war.
It is no longer necessary to fully understand what is happening on the track. It is enough to have somebody to support and somebody to attack. Technical complexity becomes an obstacle, while conflict becomes an extraordinarily effective communication shortcut.
That is why the paddock increasingly fills with figures from cinema, music, football, television and social media. Their presence does not necessarily need to have any direct connection with motorsport expertise. Their purpose is to bring attention, audiences and new users. The paddock becomes a shop window, while Formula 1 becomes content to be distributed through communities that, only a few years ago, had little or no connection with the sport.
At that point, the fan acquires another definition as well: a potential customer. They must click, share, buy merchandise, subscribe to a service, purchase a ticket, interact with content and continue feeding the enormous digital machine that has been constructed around Formula 1.
Conflict is more profitable than expertise
The system has also discovered something that has become elementary in the social-media world: conflict works better than explanation. Lewis Hamilton against Charles Leclerc works. Max Verstappen against everybody works — forgive us, Max. Andrea Kimi Antonelli against George Russell works. Ferrari against Mercedes works. And the FIA against somebody works even better.
It does not necessarily matter whether the reconstruction of an event is balanced or whether there is genuinely a substantial issue behind the controversy. What matters is whether it produces reactions. Content that divides an audience is often far more effective than analysis that simply tries to explain what happened.
We have seen this even in the surreal discussions that erupted around Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Lando Norris over the timing of the Safety Car during the Spanish Grand Prix. A racing incident was eventually turned on social media into a narrative in which the governing body had supposedly favoured one driver at the expense of another. A brief look around X is enough to find reconstructions that go far beyond what actually happened.
The point, however, is that this mechanism works. An algorithm does not distinguish between information and misinformation, between competent analysis and an absurd theory. It measures interaction. And absurdity can often generate more engagement than expertise. The circumstances surrounding the race itself, including the decisive intervention period and difficulties created by the circuit layout, were examined in greater detail in our Spanish Grand Prix technical and race analysis.
It is the same logic that can turn a red flag into something to hope for because it might shake up the race, or an accident into a spectacular element that finally “saves” an otherwise uneventful Grand Prix. Yesterday at Madring, we also witnessed this. Part of the Formula 1 narrative almost seemed to be waiting for the race to be interrupted, hoping that an unpredictable event could produce greater spectacle and perhaps even benefit Ferrari.
This tendency is becoming increasingly common because an accident is no longer described merely as a consequence of the inherent risks of motor racing. Instead, it becomes a narrative device capable of making the product more interesting.
And this is where Formula 1 risks losing part of its identity. Roosters fighting each other in an arena work much better than a sport described with restraint. An internal war between teammates works better than explaining an aerodynamic difference. The suspicion of a conspiracy works better than analysing a race-control decision. Online flame wars work better than technical analysis.
The first-lap contact and subsequent discussion involving Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen in Madrid provided another example of how quickly an on-track episode can become a wider talking point, with the Hamilton-Verstappen Spanish GP incident rapidly developing into one of the weekend’s major narratives.
Nobody even needs to explicitly order Formula 1 to be covered in this way. It is enough to create a system in which this type of content earns greater visibility, greater attention and therefore greater commercial value.
When the journalist becomes an influencer
And this is where the more serious issue comes into play: journalism. It is one thing for an influencer to arrive in the paddock and describe their personal experience. It is another for a journalist gradually to abandon the characteristics that make their profession distinctive in order to compete on exactly the same terrain.
The influencer primarily sells themselves. The journalist should be selling knowledge, method, credibility and the ability to interpret events. But when journalists begin chasing the same language, the same mechanisms and the same dynamics used by influencers, that professional dividing line disappears and the system gets exactly what it needs.
If every statement has to become a headline, every gesture a controversy, every radio message a war, every mistake a scandal and every episode a confrontation between heroes and villains, journalism slowly stops being journalism and becomes continuous content production. Formula 1 is stripped of its complexity at exactly the same time as its cars become technologically more sophisticated.
Power Units require enormous expertise. Strategies are becoming increasingly complicated. Aerodynamics are difficult to interpret and the regulations grow ever more complex. Yet the way Formula 1 is told is heading in precisely the opposite direction: simpler, faster and more emotional.
The same pattern can be seen whenever a sporting or strategic Ferrari episode immediately becomes framed around personal tension or internal conflict, as happened during the recent discussion surrounding Fred Vasseur, Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari’s team-orders dilemma.
When Stefano Domenicali argues that people are more interested in sport and entertainment than in technical details, he is not merely describing a change in audience preferences. He is also defining a very precise hierarchy of values. If technical detail attracts little interest, the professional capable of explaining it becomes less necessary. If the audience wants entertainment, entertainment has to become the centre of the narrative. If conflict generates more attention, conflict becomes an asset.
And that leads naturally to a question: if this is the direction Formula 1 is taking, what space remains for the specialist journalist?
The answer risks being uncomfortable: less and less.
No longer necessarily the programmes in which strategy, regulations and technical solutions are analysed, but TikTok. No longer in-depth coverage, but a clip on Facebook. No longer structured reasoning, but an Instagram story. No longer the professional who spends years developing expertise, but the personality with a sufficiently large following to be considered valuable to the product.
It is a transformation that does not only concern people arriving from outside journalism. It is also changing the behaviour of part of the profession itself.
Formula 1 journalism also carries responsibility
And this is where journalism carries an enormous responsibility. Liberty Media is entitled to pursue its commercial strategy. It is a private company and its objective is to maximise the value of the Formula 1 product. But a journalist should fulfil a different function: protecting their profession and, above all, protecting the public’s right to receive competent information.
If journalists instead begin speaking like influencers, chasing online conflict, constructing headlines designed exclusively to provoke reactions and transforming every episode into a digital war, they eventually become little more than influencers with a greater knowledge of the subject.
At that point, the problem is no longer how to distinguish the journalist from the influencer. The problem is that the distinction no longer exists.
The journalist has accepted the influencer’s rules and chosen to play the game on the influencer’s territory. But on that terrain, the influencer is naturally stronger because that is where they built their profession. The journalist should instead offer something different: verification, context, historical memory, technical expertise and the ability to question the dominant narrative.
If journalism abandons all of that in order to chase the algorithm, it cannot then complain when the algorithm decides that journalism itself is no longer necessary.
Formula 1 can grow as a product while losing something as a sport
The trajectory therefore appears increasingly clear: more influencers, fewer journalists; more spectacle, less expertise; more controversy, less analysis; more content, less information.
It is a trajectory perfectly compatible with Liberty Media’s industrial model. There is not even any need to imagine instructions being issued in secret rooms of power, although such directives have existed. It is enough to observe which behaviours are rewarded, which forms of content receive visibility and which personalities are considered strategically important to the growth of the product.
The selection happens by itself, through the market, algorithms and commercial interests.
The risk, ultimately, is that Formula 1 continues growing as a product while retreating as a sport that is properly explained. It may attract millions of new users, generate engagement, sell more tickets, more subscriptions and more merchandise. It may become increasingly global and increasingly embedded in popular culture.
But we should be honest enough to call things by their proper name: this is not necessarily growth in motorsport culture. It is growth of the Formula 1 product.
Those are two profoundly different things.
If attracting new customers requires gradually eliminating everything that makes Formula 1 complex, technical and difficult to understand, then sooner or later only the arena will remain: the driver to support, the enemy to insult, the teammate to turn into a rival, the accident to wait for, the conspiracy to invent and the content to share.
A Formula 1 perfectly suited to algorithms, tailor-made for marketing and designed for the people whose job it is to sell it. But one increasingly distant from the Formula 1 that needed knowledgeable journalists in order to be understood.
This is the direction. And it is not an accident along the way. It is the project.
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