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Welcome to my quarterly deep dive into how each of the eleven Formula 1 teams are engaging with their fans in the digital sphere¹. I’m about two months late in getting this out to the world, but I recently moved cities and got a bit behind in my workflow while trying to settle into my new routine. But better late than never!

The data in this post covers the period 1 January - 31 March 2026.

This post will not be looking at social media content (however, if you want a recap of recent accessibility practices, you can see my LinkedIn post on the topic). It will look at other fan engagement touch points such as:

Future editions will also look at written articles, but I wasn’t collecting this information as I went and it seems that teams don’t date-stamp their articles in a way that makes it easy to bulk categorise.

All data in this post was manually collected by me. As I am human, I’m sure there are minor errors (probably due to my counting skills!), but at least they’re not hallucinations from generative AI.

When it comes to newsletter data, I can only count the emails that reach my inbox. Therefore, due to various segmentations, A/B tests and other CRM fun, the numbers reported here may not capture every email shared by each team.

A majority of screenshots in this post come from May and June 2026, and as such the content is intended as broad representation rather than an exact example from the analysis period. Any major changes observed on the apps and websites during this period are not included in screenshots, so nothing should be misrepresented.

Word count: ~4,100 words (1,700 above the paywall).
Approx reading time: 15mins (grab a cuppa and settle in if you’ll be reading the full piece)

Before we jump into a team-by-team analysis, I’ve compiled some whole-of-grid charts to demonstrate some broad themes.

It can feel like every aspect of our lives needs an app these days, but only 3 teams on the grid have a dedicated team app. I wrote about these back in 2024, but will be doing an updated analysis later this season.

I have previously discussed fan clubs in more depth than I’ll go into in this post (see here for part 1 and part 2), but we can see that 7 of the teams have named fan clubs with a dedicated platform, while 4 have not invested in that area of their business.

Some of the most interesting data to look at is how teams are reaching their owned audience via email channels. Newsletters are an opportunity to directly reach fans without reliance on algorithms or losing an audience due to changing platform ownership or behaviours. And yet, there are significant differences in how each team approaches their email marketing.

Across the first three months of 2026, we saw a wide range of newsletter frequencies across the 11 teams. Mercedes led the pack with 41 newsletters sent, while new team on the grid Cadillac sent just 3.

In addition to counting newsletters shared, I’ve also been paying attention to the percentage of those newsletters that are focused on sales vs. those that cover broader content, including race news and updates. I’ve taken the names off the below chart (the info is included in my team-by-team breakdown, and no, they don’t match the alphabetical order above), but you can see there are huge variations in how much content each team devotes to pushing sales on their fans.

Finally, while I haven’t looked at videos shared across every platform, I did think it would be useful to use Youtube as an interesting content sample. For this post, I’ve just counted the number of videos posted (and the split between main feed videos and Shorts), but I may do an actual content analysis for a future post. When looking at upload numbers, there’s also a huge spread between teams, ranging from 18 videos (Alpine) to 203 videos (Red Bull).

As a heads up, the full version of this post will be behind a paywall. I usually discuss teams in alphabetical order, but so that it’s not the same 3 teams available for free every time, I’ve used a random list generator for today’s order. The 3 teams above the cut will change each quarter, but this month they are: Red Bull, Ferrari and Audi. You’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription to access the other 8!

Overview:

This may sound a bit odd, but Red Bull’s fan engagement always feels like it most matches the vibes of the team out of the entire grid. It’s quite masculine-coded, and geared towards those who like to compete. In many ways, it’s not welcoming to new fans, and assumes the aim of all participation is to be the best.

Team Apps:

Red Bull do not have an official team app.

Team Fan Club:

Red Bull have a fan club platform called My Paddock. As previously discussed, My Paddock is a heavily gamified form of engagement, where fans earn XP by taking part in quizzes, predictor games and reading content. Fans can then “spend” their points to enter competitions or for instant win prize packs.

In March, they launched badges as their latest feature, allowing fans to collect “awards” for reaching certain participation milestones. Unlike the race week badges offered by Williams, each Red Bull badge is tied to the collection of XP and game results within the platform.

One of the most aggressive aspects of the Red Bull My Paddock platform is that they don’t give fans participation points: if you fail their quizzes, you leave with 0 XP. While yes, this rewards fans with knowledge, it can also alienate fans who are dipping their toes into engaging with the team.

Team Podcast:

Red Bull are one of the few teams with a dedicated podcast. Cleverly titled Talking Bull, the podcast is hosted by Tommo McCluskey and Calum Nicholas and covers various aspects of the team and season.

Across the first quarter of the year, we saw:

Newsletters:

Red Bull shared 16 newsletters between January and March 2026.

7 of these newsletters were related to races, 3 were aimed at selling merchandise to fans, and 6 featured other content. This is a ratio of 3:13 for sales to non-sales content, or 18.8% of total content shared being aimed at encouraging purchases.

Youtube:

Red Bull shared 203 videos across the first quarter of 2026, with 22 of these being main feed videos, and 181 being Shorts. This was the most Youtube content out of any team on the grid.

Overview:

Ferrari know they are Ferrari, and this comes through in their fan engagement where it often feels as though they’re ticking a box rather than truly trying to build relationships with their fans. They know the Tifosi aren’t going anywhere. They know Lewis Hamilton has given them a huge boost. They know they can get away with existing without much effort more than anyone else, which may be true, but can feel a bit lacklustre as an overall approach.

Team Apps:

Ferrari’s team app has been created in partnership with IBM. As far as team apps go, it’s pretty standard. You can read news, watch video updates, see race weekend results, and access their online store.

Apparently the IBM updates to the app have seen a 62% increase in views and 35% lift in engagement since their launch in May 2025, but as with all stats, those percentages are pretty meaningless without further information on actual numbers and benchmarks.

There have been further updates to the app in recent months, but they fell outside of the Q1 period so we’ll have to wait until my Q2 update to dive into the changes.

Team Fan Club:

Ferrari do not have an official team fan club.

Team Podcast:

Ferrari do not have an official team podcast.

Newsletters:

Ferrari shared 22 newsletters in the first quarter of 2026.

Of these newsletters, 15 focused on sales while 6 were related to specific races. This is a 15:7 sales to non-sales ratio, or 68.2% of all emails sent to fans aimed at selling them merchandise. This is the highest percentage out of all teams on the grid.

Youtube:

Ferrari were on the smaller side of team Youtube uploads, with 31 total videos uploaded between January and May. 7 of these were main feed videos, while 24 were uploaded as Shorts.

Overview:

Rebranding from Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber at the beginning of 2026, Audi have been relatively slow off the mark when it comes to engaging with fans under their new branding. I’ll give them props for starting a newsletter, something they never managed under their previous iteration. However, if you take social media content out of the equation, the first quarter of Audi’s existence is close to non-existent, which isn’t ideal when you’re trying to get fans to give you their loyalty.

Team Apps:

Audi do not have an official team app.

Team Fan Club:

Audi do not have a team fan club.

Team Podcast:

Audi do not have a team podcast.

Newsletters:

Audi shared eight newsletters between January and March 2026.

Of these, 1 newsletter was sales-focused, while 7 were specifically focused on races. This is a 1:7 sales to non-sales ratio, or 12.5% of content aimed at selling merchandise to their fans.

Youtube:

Audi shared 97 videos on Youtube in the first quarter of 2026. However, just one of these was a longer-form video on their main feed, and 96 were short form video repurposed from social media and uploaded as Shorts.