How F1 teams went from £1 rejects to billion-dollar forecasts

Liberty’s arrival marked a significant break from the past, replacing Bernie Ecclestone’s wheeler-dealer and profit-focused approach with a broader view to growing the series.

Greg Maffei, the CEO of Liberty Media, made an interesting point to highlight F1’s growth over the past five years when speaking at the Business of F1 Forum held by the Financial Times and Motorsport Network in Monaco at the end of last month.

“One of the measures that is a real success is the health of the teams,” Maffei said. “When we entered in 2016, we made our first investment and closed on the deal in 2017, Manor, the 11th team, had just been sold in receivership for £1.

“Today, I don’t think you can buy a team for less than £500m, maybe £700m? You can try, but I think it’s going to be hard. It’s an amazing increase in value.”

Sat next to Maffei on the stage was F1 CEO and president Stefano Domenicali, who waved his hand upwards at the suggested valuations. It may have been tongue-in-cheek, but there was a serious point behind it: realistically, you’d be talking beyond those figures if you seriously wanted to get a team to sell up.

Last year, McLaren CEO Zak Brown predicted that in “three, four or five years’ time”, we would see “F1 teams trade [at] over a billion dollars, assuming anyone wants to sell. The fact that no one wants to sell drives a premium.”

It’s a challenge that anyone with designs on joining the F1 grid must negotiate, as Andretti is currently finding out. A push to take over Sauber, which operates Alfa Romeo’s F1 operation, fell apart late last year, and efforts to now secure an 11th entry are stalling amid uncertainty about the benefits from the rest of the grid and, it would seem, F1 itself.

But there are a number of key factors that have helped charge the valuation of F1 teams, even from two years ago when Dorilton Capital acquired Williams for $150m – something that seems like a bargain now.