Everyone in our industry is suddenly in love with Formula 1.
Operators are building outright markets, dusting off in-play models, lining up to put their logo somewhere near a fast car. The pitch is always the same: motorsport is back, the audience is exploding, get in early.
They’re half right. The audience is exploding. But they’ve misread why, and that misreading is about to cost a lot of people a lot of money.
F1’s betting boom isn’t a motorsport story. The cars haven’t got more interesting. The rules haven’t changed in a way that matters to a punter. If anything, hardcore fans have been growingly dissatisfied with recent changes. What changed is the story wrapped around the sport. And if you can’t tell the difference between a sport and a story, you’re going to bet on the wrong thing.
The sport didn’t change. The narrative did.
Look at the numbers, because they’re genuinely remarkable. F1’s global fan base grew 12% in 2025, past 826 million followers. US viewership hit records of over 1.3 million per race on average, in a country that historically couldn’t pick a Grand Prix out of a lineup. F1: The Movie grossed over $626 million worldwide. And Drive to Survive keeps quietly converting people who’ve never watched a full race into people who have opinions about tyre strategy.
Notice what’s on that list. A streaming series. A blockbuster. A viewership chart. Notice what isn’t on it: anything that happened on a track.
The product didn’t improve. The narrative machine got switched on. Liberty Media didn’t sell more racing, they sold more story, and the story did what good stories do. It manufactured demand for a thing that already existed.
This is the part our industry keeps getting wrong. We treat audience growth as if it’s a fact about the sport. It’s usually a fact about marketing.
Attention is an asset. And assets get inflated.
Byrne Hobart makes a point that every operator should tattoo somewhere visible: attention behaves like any other asset class. It can be cheap or expensive. It can be undervalued or overheated. And, crucially, it can be manufactured. When a property gets the full media-economics treatment; the documentary, the film, the algorithmic push, its attention doesn’t grow organically. It gets pumped.
Here’s why that matters to anyone running markets. When attention inflates, the betting volume that rides on top of it inflates with it. A property with 826 million followers and a hit film generates handle that has very little to do with the underlying competition and almost everything to do with how many people have been told to care.
That’s an opportunity. It’s also a trap. Because manufactured attention follows the same arc as any inflated asset; early money is cheap, late money is crowded, and the people who pile in after the documentary has done its work are buying at the top.
So the real question isn’t “should we offer F1 markets?” By the time that question feels obvious, the edge is already gone. The question is: which property is being inflated next, and are we positioned before the narrative peaks?
That’s a media-economics question. It is not a sports-trading question. And most operators don’t have anyone in the building who thinks that way.
Stop following the sport. Follow the machine.
Here’s the takeaway I’d put in front of any operator chasing the F1 wave.
Manufactured attention sits upstream of distribution. The documentary creates the fan. The fan creates the search query. The search query feeds the affiliate, the SEO page, the creator clip, the acquisition funnel you’ve spent years building. Streaming and creators aren’t replacing that machinery, they’re the new top of it. They decide what your funnel even has to work with.
This reframes how you should be reading the entertainment calendar. The signal isn’t the fixture list. The signal is what Netflix has greenlit, what’s got a film in production, which league or athlete or format the algorithm has decided to push. Those are the properties whose betting demand is about to be manufactured, whether or not the sport beneath them deserves it.
Get in while the attention is still being built and you acquire cheaply, rank early, and own the markets before they commoditise. Wait until the boom is undeniable, until every competitor has the same F1 lobby and the same affiliates bidding on the same terms, and you’re paying peak prices for an asset everyone else already holds.
F1 was the obvious one. It’s already crowded. The interesting question is what’s being inflated right now that still looks like a niche.
So here’s my challenge to you: go and find the next Drive to Survive before it airs. Look at what’s in production, not what’s in the standings. Because the edge was never in predicting the race. It’s in predicting the audience — and the audience is being written for you, in advance, by people who don’t care about odds at all.
The narrative machine is running. The only question is whether you’re reading the script or waiting for the reviews.
