By Joshua Robinson
As Apple gradually threw itself into Formula One, the connections between the tech company and the pinnacle of motor sports were plain to see. Both were known for their sleek design, their game-changing user interfaces, and a compulsive push for constant upgrades.
The difference was that unlike the iPod, the iPhone or any MacBook, F1's product went 200 miles an hour and occasionally burst into flames.
But that hardly deterred the executives piloting the relationship in Cupertino, Calif., from spending nearly a decade deepening their ties to international motor racing. And today, F1 isn't merely one of Apple's glossiest global partners with a blockbuster movie to show for it. The sport also represents a long-term experiment for the company as it ventures into livestreaming. In 2026, Apple entered the first season of a five-year contract as Formula One's exclusive broadcaster in the U.S. worth around $750 million.
"I've personally thought about this for a long time," Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said when the deal was announced.
'A fruit company'
Apple had begun circling F1 long before the racing series was acquired in 2017 by U.S.-based Liberty Media. During their first casual visits to Grands Prix, in the mid-2010s, executives met with Bernie Ecclestone, F1's former longtime boss, who referred to the Apple brass as dignitaries from "a fruit company."
Ecclestone, however, was famously cool on developing the sport in the American market. It took the arrival of Liberty and the series' surge in popularity in the 2020s for the Apple relationship to take root. And once it did, it produced one of the most ambitious entertainment projects ever attempted by what is nominally a sports league: a quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood movie.
The result, after four years of development, hit theaters last summer as an Apple and Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, 2 1/2 -hour feature -- called, appropriately enough, "F1" -- that married the pulsating action of "Top Gun" with the real-life universe of F1. They shot at circuits such as Silverstone and Monza. There were on-screen cameos for world champions Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. (Hamilton also was a co-producer and technical consultant.) And, most important, it didn't require anyone who bought a ticket to have ever watched a single minute of racing.
F1 the Movie, as it was known, ended up grossing over $630 million at the box office.
"I always said to Eddy [Cue], we have a dream that is more than a dream, " F1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali says. "It's an obligation to our fans to develop the sport, to make sure that F1 is becoming a part of the culture here in the United States."
The bigger bet
But if Apple could be fairly certain a one-off popcorn flick would capture the public's attention for a summer, the commitment to air five seasons of racing was an entirely different bet.
Not so long ago, F1 had been giving away its U.S. broadcast rights free, simply in the interest of having a television foothold. In 2018, ESPN's deal was worth exactly $0 -- which was still somehow an improvement on the days when Ecclestone would buy American airtime to show a handful of Grands Prix on a tape delay.
By the end of the ESPN deal, however, the U.S. rights were worth roughly $90 million a year and the broadcasts averaged over 1.1 million viewers per race. It ranked behind ESPN's "Sunday Night Baseball," which averaged 1.8 million viewers last season, but Apple plowed ahead.
F1 followed Major League Soccer onto Apple TV and tied its U.S. future to the streaming platform.
"We were opening a new way of living our sport," Domenicali said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year. "Trying to be not only a sport, but a sort of platform that could cut across a lot of other elements of entertainment, of lifestyle, of technology."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 29, 2026 10:25 ET (14:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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