Formula 1 is already floating the idea of turning the 2027 season launch into another full-grid, made-for-television event — and it’s hard to ignore what’s really going on here. This isn’t just about “celebrating the sport”. It’s about finding fresh commercial surface area at a time when the calendar is basically capped and the championship’s growth machine has to keep feeding itself.
Stefano Domenicali has confirmed Formula One Management is discussing a return to the all-in launch format that debuted in London ahead of the 2025 campaign, when all 10 teams rolled into the O2 Arena for what was effectively a glossy livery show beamed to a global livestream audience. Domenicali called it “a big effect” — “a sort of 25th race” in communication terms — and said the concept is again on the table for 2027.
“We are also thinking about, as we did two years ago, a potential global launch with all the teams together,” Domenicali said. “It was a big effect… But it’s still a work in progress on that.”
The timing is telling. The collective launch didn’t happen for 2026, not because FOM lost interest, but because the new regulations forced everyone into survival mode. Teams needed the time; the sport expanded testing; and the whole pre-season rhythm was warped by necessity: private running in Barcelona at the end of January, then two three-day tests in Bahrain through February.
With rules now expected to remain stable into 2027 — cars “simply an evolution” of what’s racing this year — that pressure eases. And when the sporting urgency relaxes, the commercial imagination tends to sharpen.
FOM’s other move for 2027 points in the same direction. Domenicali has also indicated pre-season testing will return to a single three-day test, rather than the three separate outings used in 2026.
“We did these three sessions because we knew… the complexity of this big step change of regulation,” he said. “Next year, we go back to one single test before the season.”
On paper, that’s a straightforward reset to normality. In practice, it also clears space in the calendar and in the promotional build-up for a marquee, centrally controlled launch event — one that FOM can package, sell, sponsor, and scale.
And that gets to the real friction point: who benefits most?
For FOM, the all-in launch is clean. It’s a single global moment, a predictable media beat, and a product that looks a lot like an “extra race weekend” without the hassle of transporting a paddock across time zones. Sponsors love that. Hospitality loves that. Licensing loves that. It’s easy to understand why it’s back in the conversation.
For teams — particularly the smaller ones — the value proposition is murkier. A traditional team launch, done well and timed cleverly, still offers something precious: a full day where you own the news cycle, your partners get clean airtime, and your messaging isn’t instantly crowded out by the usual gravitational pull of the top three.
Put everyone on the same stage, and that disappears. The front-runners dominate the headlines by default, while the rest get whatever scraps of attention are left once the biggest names have spoken and the loudest storylines have been shouted into existence. That’s not a moral judgement; it’s just how the ecosystem works.
The 2025 O2 event also exposed a second problem: control. Not of the show, but of the room.
The night was divisive in the paddock, and not only for the predictable “too much showbiz” complaints. It produced moments FOM can’t fully script, including the jeering directed at Christian Horner and Max Verstappen during their appearances — a reception that later prompted Verstappen to suggest he’d skip future editions.
That’s a headache for a rights holder selling a premium, unified spectacle: the last thing you want is a star attraction signalling he might not turn up, or teams feeling like they’re being marched into an environment that doesn’t serve them.
Still, none of these hurdles are unsolvable. If anything, they’re the kind of issues that simply force an evolution of the concept — different venue, different ticket strategy, tighter control of the on-stage segments, more meaningful team content than a simple paint-job reveal. Domenicali himself hinted any return would not necessarily be a straight repeat of what happened in London.
All of this sits alongside the bigger commercial constraint: races. The 2027 season currently has 23 confirmed grands prix. Under the Concorde Agreement, the maximum is 24 unless all teams agree to go beyond it — and the consensus in the paddock remains that 24 is effectively the ceiling. So if FOM wants to push revenue higher, it either needs that 24th race, or it needs to invent additional tentpole events around the championship.
Another round is “expected” to be confirmed, and Domenicali has hinted at Turkey — while acknowledging internally it’s far from a done deal. But even if the calendar does reach 24, the launch event idea makes sense from FOM’s point of view: it’s additive inventory that doesn’t require permission from promoters, doesn’t strain the teams’ operational budgets in the same way, and can be shaped entirely around commercial goals.
The question, then, isn’t whether F1 can stage a collective 2027 launch. It’s whether it can do it in a way that teams feel is worth the compromise — and whether FOM can avoid repeating the parts of the 2025 experiment that left certain garages rolling their eyes.
If the sport really wants this to become a staple rather than a novelty, it’ll have to look less like a one-night livery parade and more like something that genuinely rewards all 10 teams for showing up. Otherwise, it risks becoming another F1 spectacle that looks bigger on a livestream metrics report than it feels inside the paddock.
