Zak Brown doesn’t overcomplicate why Formula 1 struggled to land in America for so long: it never stayed in one place, it vanished for years at a time, and it felt like a velvet-rope club.
Speaking on the How Leaders Lead with David Novak podcast, McLaren’s CEO laid out a blunt, three-point postmortem of F1’s decades-long misfire in the U.S. “We never really found a permanent location,” he said, rattling off a nomadic past that ran from Long Beach to Watkins Glen, Dallas to Phoenix, with a Vegas stint in a parking lot for good measure. Hard to build rituals when the circus keeps moving town.
Then came the disappearing acts. “You took five, six, seven, eight years off,” Brown noted, pointing to stretches with no North American round at all. Even when F1 returned to Indianapolis, “tiregate” wrecked the show and momentum evaporated again. Any sport will struggle to grow if fans can’t circle a date or a venue on the calendar with confidence.
But the most damaging issue, in Brown’s view, was cultural. F1 projected exclusivity and kept supporters at arm’s length. “We weren’t engaging with our fans. We weren’t letting them inside. We were ‘look, don’t touch,’” he said. Social media was underused, drivers were distant, and the paddock walls were high. It may have worked in an era of mystique; it didn’t in an era of access.
The reset came with Liberty Media’s takeover and a shift in attitude: embrace entertainment, open the doors, and meet fans where they are. Netflix’s Drive to Survive did the heavy lifting, turning unfamiliar faces into characters and off-track politics into plot. “We started letting people see behind the curtains,” Brown said. The result? Curiosity turned to commitment.
The calendar did the rest. Austin emerged as a banker, and the U.S. ultimately landed three grands prix. Consistency and scale gave the market something it had lacked since the days of Watkins Glen and Long Beach: permanence and personality.
There’s a broader lesson here, one F1 is still internalizing. “Sport is entertainment,” Brown said, pushing back at the purist reflex. He’s right. Whether it’s a movie, a ballgame or a night race under neon, fans are buying a show. F1’s American revival wasn’t an accident of Netflix hype; it was the product of being present, being predictable, and being less precious about the velvet rope.
For a championship that once treated the U.S. as a box to tick, the turnaround is stark. Keep the venues stable, keep the paddock open, and the audience will do the rest.
