A few years back, on a Sunday morning in December, I awoke to find Twitter in a state of unified frenzy. My feed had turned into a cascade of all-caps missives from friends and media peers, all reacting in real time to…a race? I learned soon enough what had captured the collective gaze of the Twitter hordes: the 2021 Formula 1 season had reached a dramatic (and controversial) conclusion at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where Max Verstappen of the Red Bull team dethroned Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion. After clearing that up, I had some more questions. Chief among them: When the hell did everyone get into F1?

It remains one of the more unlikely developments in sports this century. Formula 1, for so long a niche pastime of petrolheads and a symbol of European glitz, had somehow transformed itself into a mainstream spectacle with a now-sizable footprint in the United States. “The whiplash of a sport once watched almost exclusively by nerdy middle-aged men suddenly discovering that it was cool and young and online was perhaps the most disorienting moment in the series’s history,” write the authors Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg in their new book, The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport.

F1’s breakthrough in America was dreamed up by Liberty Media, the U.S. company that acquired the circuit in 2016 for $4.4 billion. Liberty, Robinson and Clegg explain, understood that the world’s premier motorsport “needed to be treated as the entertainment product it really was: a prestige television drama.” The company set out on what the authors call a “total reboot” of F1, modernizing how the races are broadcast and shifting the focus from the teams to the drivers. But Liberty’s slick rebrand was also bolstered by plain old good luck.

The company teamed up with Netflix to produce a fly-on-the-wall docuseries about F1 called Drive to Survive, which became a lockdown-era hit after the second season dropped on February 28, 2020, weeks before COVID ground life to a halt. “Against all odds,” Robinson and Clegg write, “F1 had carved out its own corner of the weirdest media landscape anyone could remember.” Drive to Survive proved to be the best advertisement the sport could have asked for; by the end of 2021, the authors note, F1 had added more than 70 million new fans in its 10 largest markets.

The Formula, which hits shelves on Tuesday, also provides a breezy accounting of F1 history prior to Liberty’s takeover, devoting ample space to the sport’s most consequential figures–– Enzo Ferrari and Bernie Ecclestone, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, I talked to Robinson and Clegg about F1’s improbable rise in the U.S., the potential of a Saudi takeover and a bubbling controversy that threatens to upend Verstappen and the reigning champion Red Bull team.

Vanity Fair: Formula 1 is currently gripped by scandal. Christian Horner, the principal of Red Bull, is facing allegations of misconduct. While he has denied the allegations against him and was cleared of wrongdoing in a probe initiated by the team’s parent company, there’s still a cloud hanging over the matter. The female employee who levied the accusations was recently suspended for reasons reportedly connected to the investigation, while the father of Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s three-time world champion driver, has insinuated that his son may leave the team if Horner is still in the picture. I wanted to start there. How big is this story, and how messy could it get?

Robinson: It’s clearly a huge issue within Red Bull and threatens to tear this team apart. When you look at the figure that is Christian Horner, he presents himself as a maverick who built this team and has always pushed things to the very limit as his modus operandi. If it does lead to him leaving, I think that is the biggest change in Red Bull’s Formula 1 history, since he basically embodies it. He’s the only team principal they’ve ever had since the team was founded in 2004. Obviously, the details are still unknown, and are dribbling out in some of the craziest ways. We had this anonymous leak of messages that are purported to be between Horner and his accuser. There’s been an internal investigation at Red Bull, but we have no idea how they came to the conclusion they did. There’s certainly more to come here.

Clegg: It just doesn’t feel like the present situation is tenable for much longer. It feels like there’s going to be some sort of resolution, whether that's Horner leaving or deciding to walk away at the end of the season or some sort of mutual agreement. I don't know exactly how it ends, but it does feel like the present situation can't continue much longer.

It feels like F1’s breakthrough in the U.S. was a case of lightning in a bottle. Drive to Survive became a massive hit, which in turn brought droves of new fans to the sport, but it was a massive hit in large part because of the pandemic. In your book, Mercedes principal Toto Wolff is quoted as saying that it’s unclear whether the deal with Netflix was “a genius move or a lucky punch.” If COVID doesn't happen, are we even having this conversation? Does F1 take off in the U.S. if people aren't stuck in quarantine desperate for something to binge?

Clegg: I think the short answer to that is no, at least not on the same timeframe, not in the same way that it has right now. Certainly the timing element was a huge factor in what's happened since, but I would say that as much as they did benefit from that convenient timing, they also made a lot of really smart decisions with Drive to Survive. They deserve a lot of credit for some of the decisions they took in building that show. The idea that anyone would be interested in what was happening at the back of the grid, that the mid-to-bottom ranking teams in F1 could ever be a source of drama for TV audiences, was so wildly anathema to the way that people consumed F1 in the previous 50 years. They were able to do that by unmasking the drivers––literally getting them to take their helmets off––and presenting these guys as personalities who, in addition to being young and telegenic and super fit, are also bitchy back-snipers who talk shit about each other all the time. I think some of those revelations, some of the way they played up that side of things, means they deserve a lot more credit than just saying they lucked into this thing landing at the time when COVID forced us to spend a year on the couch.

That recalibration, the shift in the focus from the teams to the drivers, seems like such a simple insight that they were just sitting on for a long time, and now it’s helped them unlock this massive new audience.

Clegg: I guess it sort of makes sense when you think about the fact that F1, as a sport, at least partly exists as a branding mechanism for the automotive giants that make up the teams. So, of course Ferrari always wanted the sport to be about Ferrari and not the individual drivers because that's literally the main reason they're spending so much money to enter the sport.

TV ratings dipped a bit in the U.S. last year from 2022, and on an anecdotal level, it does feel like there’s less buzz surrounding F1 here in the states than a couple of years ago. Is it possible that this was a bubble? How much more growth potential is there in America?

Robinson: I think there was always going to be a leveling off period because you can't have that much growth without having a period where it plateaus for a while. I think F1 recognized that too, and is happy to consolidate the gains for now. It also so happens that we had a super dominant Red Bull team last year that won 21 of the 22 races. Without that competitive intrigue, you don't necessarily convince people to get up early on a Sunday morning to watch a race on the other side of the world. But that's also something that happens in the sort of normal F1 cycles, and there are intermittent ups and downs based on what's happening on the track.

Clegg: I mean, it definitely could be a bubble. It sort of feels to me that, just by virtue of maneuvering into the sports mainstream for the few years that they have, they've raised the floor so that if the ceiling does collapse, they have raised the bar a little bit. But definitely, the whole thing could burst.

Christian Horner has said that the U.S. needs a “home hero” in Formula 1 to push the sport to the next level here. There is an American team, Haas, and an American driver, Logan Sargeant, but neither are very good. Do you think the U.S. needs one of its own competing for championships in order for F1 to take another leap?

Robinson: It's definitely one of the things that F1 needs in America. F1 is kind of casting around for what comes post-Netflix. We've got things like the Apple project with Jerry Bruckheimer and Brad Pitt that will come out in 2025. They're looking for many different ways to connect with American audiences, and certainly an American driver who maybe crashes less often than the Logan Sergeant would help that along.

Clegg: Nothing draws people into F1 like having a driver from their country. If you look back at F1 history, the sport’s popularity in Germany is almost single-handedly traceable to Michael Schumacher’s years of dominance.

You wrote in the book that F1 under Liberty has felt like a “total reboot,” part of an effort to make the sport more accessible to the masses. Is there any wariness among the old guard that Formula 1 is losing its essence?

Clegg: Yeah, I think very much so. There are concerns about F1 leaving its traditional heartland behind as we get more and more races in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Invariably it means European tracks are being left behind, and I think that concerns a lot of the traditional F1 audience, which is mainly Europe-based.

One thing that stood out to me in your book was the line about how F1 has become a “post-sport sport,” meaning that it’s totally possible to call yourself a fan without even watching a race. I think there’s a similar phenomenon at play in other sports, including the NBA, which has fans who consume a ton of content about LeBron James and Nikola Jokic, but they aren’t necessarily watching them play. Why is this happening, and is this the future of sports fandom?

Robinson: With F1 at least, what they've done so successfully in the past five years is create many other ways and many other products that you can consume that are not the race. In F1, many new fans would tune into a race and find it admittedly quite boring. If you're not dialed into every pit stop and every tire decision, it does sometimes feel just like cars going around. So they created all these different ways to consume it, whether it's through Drive to Survive or following some of these very personable drivers on social media or buying $150 baseball cap. All of these things that are quite flashy and quite eye-catching make for new connections to the sport. What's amazing is that because those connections run so deep, you really can call yourself a fan even if you don't watch the races.

Clegg: I do think there is something about that being the future of sports. You mentioned the NBA, which I think is totally true. I think even with football, there are people who consume it purely through their fantasy teams and don't really watch the games. I do think there is a sort of new breed of sports fan who doesn't actually feel like watching the games is necessary. They follow the offseason season drama, they're aware of the results and who's where in the standings, but when it comes to actually committing two to three hours to watch a live sports event, it just feels like more of a time commitment than they're willing to give up nowadays.

Your book touched on how, under former F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, the series acquired this “rogues’ gallery of global partners,” holding races in Peron’s junta-controlled Argentina and apartheid South Africa. We're talking the day before the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix, which has drawn a ton of criticism. Is it fair to say that Formula 1 is ground zero for sportswashing?

Robinson: It certainly went there first in a lot of cases. As far back as the ‘70s and ‘80s Bernie Ecclestone was negotiating with the Soviet Union to have a race behind the Iron Curtain. At one point, there were talks with Brezhnev, and eventually he settled on having a race in Hungary, which still exists by the way. Ecclestone told us that he actually quite liked negotiating with the KGB because he thought they were straight-shooters. Then you look at the sport in the Gulf. Years before Qatar even won the bid to host the World Cup, Formula 1 was already racing in Bahrain. They just held the 20th Bahrain Grand Prix.

There were reports last year that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund explored acquiring Formula 1 for $20 billion. Liberty, according to your book, called the rumors “unfounded,” adding that $20 billion would have been “a little low.” Is that the end of this story? Do you think the Saudis are still circling F1?

Clegg: Yeah, I mean, probably. They’re circling most sports. Saudi is committing so much money to various domestic infrastructure projects. There’s obviously the soccer World Cup that looks like it’s going to take place in Saudi. I don’t know whether landing the World Cup leads to a retrenchment of their overseas investments as they struggle to fund these mega-metropolis projects that they’re engaged in. But yes, we know that they were interested in buying F1, and usually, when Saudi is interested in buying something they end up buying it.