The Formula

An NPR Best Book of 2024 A Sports Illustrated Best Book of 2024 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Wall Street Journal reporters and authors of The Club, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg tell the riveting motor racing saga of how Formula 1 broke through in America, detailing the eclectic culture of racing obsessives, glamorous settings, gearheads, engineering geniuses, dashing racers, and bitter rivalries that have made F1 the world’s fastest growing sport. For decades in America, car racing meant NASCAR, and to a lesser extent IndyCar, with Formula 1—the wealthiest racing league in the world—a distant third. Fast forward to 2023, and F1 has emerged at the front of the pack powered by a passionate yet nascent American fanbase. The F1 juggernaut has arrived, but this checkered flag was far from inevitable. In The Formula, Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg tell the epic story of the business of F1, detailing how the league saved itself from collapse and finally conquered America through guile, fearlessness, and above all, reinvention. With fast cars, big money, glamorous locales, and beautiful people as the backdrop, The Formula reveals how F1’s sudden arrival in the US was actually decades in the making, a product of the sport’s near-constant state of transformation and experimentation. Bringing unique insight and access to F1’s most storied teams and personalities—from Ferrari to Bernie Ecclestone to Christian Horner to Lewis Hamilton—this definitive F1 history offers a riveting portrait of the drivers, corporations, cars, rivalries, and audacious gambles that have shaped the sport for half a century. The end result is a high-octane history of how modern F1 racing came to be—the first book to tell the story of the outrageous successes and spectacular crashes that led F1 to this extraordinary yet precarious moment. More than just a sports story, The Formula is a gripping corporate history and the tale of a disrupter that broke into the crowded American sports marketplace and claimed its place through cash, personality, and a new understanding of what a sport needs to be in the age of wall-to-wall entertainment. This definitive history of Formula 1’s rise reveals: The Bernie Ecclestone Era: Learn how one man’s audacious gambles and under-the-table deals transformed a chaotic circus into a billion-dollar global empire. Legendary F1 Rivalries: From Senna vs. Prost to Hamilton vs. Verstappen, uncover the bitter feuds, spectacular crashes, and psychological warfare that defined the sport. Engineering and Innovation: A deep dive into the technical moon shots, rulebook loopholes, and design geniuses who bent the laws of physics to find an unfair advantage. Conquering America: The full story of F1’s decades-long struggle to break into the crowded American sports market, from disastrous races in Las Vegas to its recent explosive growth.