It was 9 a.m. on a Monday in Manhattan, 3,406 miles from Aston Martin F1 Team’s headquarters in Silverstone, and Jimmy Horne found himself in a party store. The team’s TikTok following teetered on 999,999. The face behind the account glanced from one party horn to another.
As the number ticked to one digit, Horne began filming.
“I still love the video,” he says, grinning as he remembers the TikTok. “It was literally very mundane… and then everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s who it is.’”
The 12-second video was simple: Horne engulfed in white bedding in a dimly-lit New York apartment, fully clad in his emerald green uniform and blowing a party horn in celebration of reaching one million followers. Half a million viewers tuned in to watch the team’s senior content creator lift his figurative mask.
A true first-look behind the scenes of F1
When Netflix released “Drive to Survive” in 2019, a new era unfolded for the upper echelon of motorsport: fans had a front-row seat to watch their favorite athletes. Cameras barged into driver rooms, childhood bedrooms and daily commutes to team factories. The subsequent swell of social media activity allowed spectators to do what they do best: spectate. But this time, with more access than the sport previously allowed at the circuit.
Horne quickly caught on to the high demand for engagement, initially met with a low content supply. As the sport’s social media star power grew, so too did its fleet of chronically online staff members. In 2020, he was contracted to work as a social media admin for the Aston Martin team. Four years later, he officially joined the payroll at Aston Martin as their art director.
But Horne wasn’t expecting that the content fans desperately craved was getting to know the intermediary, the voice behind the lens and social media handle. Breaking the fourth wall quickly became not just good for the business of content creation, but making fans feel a personal connection.
In F1 circles, Horne, affectionately known just as “Jimmy” to fans, is a household name. His face graces spectators’ ‘For You’ pages and his personal Instagram account has amassed 40,000 followers—all eager to peek behind the curtain of a career on track.
From videos titled “Admin Tries Paddock Tacos” at the Mexican Grand Prix to a step-by-step guide on how Horne shoots, edits and publishes content, Aston Martin was the first team to lean…
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