‘The Whole Thing Is A Show’: Why the Love Affair Between F1 Racing and Music Just ‘Makes Sense’

The heat is kissing 90 degrees on a mid-October Friday in Austin, where Bobby Epstein is giving a Jurassic Park-style media tour through the perpetually under construction Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racing grounds.

Standing at the head of a moving shuttle bus like a safari guide, the circuit’s chairman points to piles of dirt. As he tells us in his easygoing drawl, a carousel and Ferris wheel will soon stand here; the skeletons of future roller coasters tower over the horizon behind him.

On the property’s great lawn, we pass two massive music stages and rows of vendors selling everything from LEGO race cars to cowboy hats. (About 6,000 of the latter, to be precise, are stocked for the weekend.) There’s a lucha libre wrestling ring, miniature golf and go-karts, and in one section showing off cutting-edge technology, a tent housing a life-size model of a six-propeller flying taxicab hailed as the “future” of air travel.

When I remark that it feels like we’re at the World’s Fair, a delighted grin flashes across Epstein’s face. “That’s exactly what we’re after,” he says.

In reality, we’re at the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, where hundreds of thousands of fans will soon pack in to catch flashes of race cars zipping through the course’s famously sharp corners and deceptively steep hills during one of the racing organization’s tentpole events. But for over a decade, COTA has been working to transform this annual affair — the biggest of about nine races held here each year since it opened in 2012 — into more than just a sporting event.

The COTALand theme park they’re in the midst of building is just COTA’s latest push to make motor sport a way of life in the United States, a market F1 in particular had long struggled to crack before it finally erupted in mainstream popularity at the end of the 2010s.

Now, the amount of U.S. Grands Prix has shot up from just one to three of the 24 total in-season F1 stops, with annual races introduced in Miami in 2022 and Las Vegas in 2023; this past November, Beyoncé and Jay-Z made appearances on the track in Sin City, and mgk, T-Pain and Zedd headlined a festival-like run of outdoor shows surrounding the race. What once was a niche sport predominantly associated with European car enthusiasts has exploded into an America-size media and entertainment spectacle. And — if the Academy Award-nominated, Brad Pitt-led F1: The Movie’s $189.5 million in domestic box-office revenue in 2025, and its star-packed soundtrack, which hit No. 13 on the Billboard 200, are any indication — it’s only getting bigger.

But while the rest of America might only just be catching up to speed, COTA has been in this race for years — and it’s been a key player in helping F1 achieve its own long-term goal of crossing over as a competitive force in the music business.

“They were far ahead of everyone,” F1 chief communications and corporate relations officer Liam Parker says of COTA. “Every time you go to COTA, the talk is around not only the racing but what’s the big act everyone is going to see that evening.”

Tonight, that artist is Kygo, set to perform after the evening’s weekend–opening sprint. After playing Grands Prix in Bahrain, Mexico City and Miami over the years (with more to be announced later), the Norwegian DJ has become an F1 devotee — but the chance to advertise himself to the sport’s diverse, rapidly expanding fan base at each race is more than enough reason on its own to keep coming back.

“If you play a music festival, a lot of people have already heard about you or your music,” Kygo tells Billboard in his trailer Friday night, just minutes before taking the Super Stage. “But if you go play at F1, that might be 80,000 people who don’t even know who you are.”

“Some other [venues] were doing it, but I think what [COTA] has done is help wake up the rest of the racing world within Formula 1 to realize: This has an impact,” Parker adds. “This makes you global.”

Ask any spectator milling about in Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren team gear beneath the unforgiving Texas sun this weekend how they became interested in F1, and it’s a good bet that three words will come up: Drive To Survive.

With seven seasons since its 2019 debut and an eighth on the way, the Netflix docuseries has introduced a horde of new American fans to the league’s once-insular world of high-class, high-stakes and high-octane drama, with cameras following top international drivers like Lando Norris (who, two months after racing in Austin, was crowned the 2025 F1 world champion), Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton on every stop of each year’s racing season. Viewers attend the Grand Prix in Texas hoping to see their favorites in action — and get hooked on the overall culture of race day that can only be fully experienced in person, not just because the cars roar past at truly dizzying speeds (like, so fast your eyes can barely even clock them) but also because of all the live music and entertainment opportunities between the stops and starts on the track.

After Kygo in Austin last October, that involved sets from country icon Garth Brooks following Saturday’s qualifying round and Americana band Turnpike Troubadours after Sunday’s main event, each attended by thousands of ticketholders who chose to stay and listen long after all the drivers had retired to their garages.

But what many Drive To Survive bandwagoners may not realize is that COTA, the site of the U.S. Grand Prix since the year it opened, had been preparing for this surge in demand well before the show premiered in 2019.

“I honestly believe we were right at the front end of that,” COTA senior vp of music and entertainment Glynn Wedgewood says over Zoom a few weeks after the U.S. Grand Prix. “We just fully went for it in 2016 and haven’t looked back.”

The turning point he’s referencing was swift — Taylor Swift, to be exact. After testing out adding live music to COTA’s F1 race weekend with an Elton John performance that was dampened by Hurricane Patricia rainfall in 2015, Wedgewood says that COTA took a gamble on inviting the pop star, fresh off her 1989 world tour, to headline its first-ever festival-style lineup the following year, which also featured Usher and The Roots.

Swift is known for backing the right horses, and F1 turned out to be one of them. That October, she played her first and only show of 2016 at the U.S. Grand Prix for a crowd of 80,000 fans, helping COTA set a then-record for overall weekend attendance (270,000, which would skyrocket to 440,000 by 2022) and paving the way for the event (and ultimately, F1 as a whole) to rebrand as a premier concert outlet.

“To just go, like, ‘We’re doing the biggest pop star in the world’ — nobody [in F1] was doing that,” Wedgewood recalls.

Ten years later, it seems like everyone’s doing that. It’s now common for A-list artists to perform on multiact Grand Prix bills, with the sport’s numerous host cities all over the world following COTA’s lead. And in the decade since Swift performed, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Britney Spears, Billy Joel, Ed Sheeran and more have each headlined an F1 weekend in Austin.

Like Kygo, many artists are also now F1 fans themselves; as Wedgewood notes, he doesn’t have to field nearly as many questions from prospective performers before booking. (“What is this? We’re playing around cars?” he recalls people asking in the past with a laugh.) But previously, a big way COTA enticed musicians was by investing in a main stage that appealed to performers as much as it did fans, constructing its now-signature Super Stage in 2015 between turns 11 and 12 on the track — not far from its 14,000-capacity open-air Germania Insurance Amphitheater, which was built in 2013 — so that audiences could watch shows while standing exactly where their favorite drivers had raced just hours prior.

“When an artist and their crew walk in and get on that stage and look out, it’s like, ‘Oh, we get this. This was built for this,’ ” says Wedgewood, who is the talent buyer for both the Super Stage and amphitheater for F1 weekends. (Live Nation handles the majority of other bookings for the amphitheater.) “It’s not just trying to shoehorn an act into a venue that doesn’t make any sense. It makes sense because it was built that way before we even started doing it.”

Whether it’s the novelty of the Austin venue or the massive exposure an F1 gig now guarantees, more stars than ever want a slot at the U.S. Grand Prix. But Wedgewood says a key element of his job is curating a lineup that appeals to the broad, undefined music tastes of racing fans. (To wit: F1 The Album was about as eclectic as soundtracks come, featuring Sheeran, Rosé, Chris Stapleton, Peggy Gou, Burna Boy and Doja Cat among many others.)

“A large part of what we do [is] having something for everyone there,” Wedgewood says. “Like, the contrast between Kygo with the crazy loud, visually stunning dance show, or someone like Garth Brooks, who’s a legacy, legend, [one of the] biggest-selling country artist of all time — that is 100% intentional.”

Ultimately, the biggest payoff from COTA’s pioneering efforts in the space might just be that, as the highest–attended event on its calendar, the U.S. Grand Prix is also the circuit’s best opportunity each year to advertise itself to the public as a music venue, with dozens more concerts and festivals programmed annually beyond those attached to races. In the coming months, mgk and Wiz Khalifa, Jack Johnson, Toto, Subtronics and Five Finger Death Punch will all perform as part of COTA’s extensive run of amphitheater shows following the F1 weekend.

“We’re just constantly busy every year,” Wedgewood says. “It’s just this beast that keeps going … [The U.S. Grand Prix] is, without a doubt, the biggest event, but it’s just a part of what we do.”

On Sunday morning, COTA’s paddock is buzzing with team staff, engineers, media personnel and even what appears to be a few Netflix cameramen, all milling about, the pre-race energy palpable.

Flashes bombard Mercedes team principal and F1 royalty Toto Wolff as he makes his entrance for the day. Alexandra Saint Mleux, the fiancée of Monégasque driver Charles Leclerc, stands by the Ferrari garage holding the leash to the couple’s beloved blonde dachshund, Leo, over whom VIP pass-wielding fans gasp and squeal like he’s an A-list celebrity. Later, Hamilton parts the sea on his kick scooter, speedily escaping from the hectic press area.

And whereas 2000s pop hits had blared over the speakers on Friday and Saturday, today the playlist has changed to match the stakes: “Lose Yourself” by Eminem (who headlined the 2024 U.S. Grand Prix) greets everyone as they arrive.

When the lights go out and the sound of 20 engines thundering to life cuts through the crowd’s silent anticipation, all eyes in the grandstands will fix on the race for 56 laps. Most of the rest of the weekend, however, will be busy with not just the big headline shows, but all the other ways F1 is integrating music and brand partnerships.

“Events you saw five years ago, [the promoters] just thought this was all about racing,” Parker recalls. “You turn up, you watch a race, you go home. Now, seeing what others have done — particularly in the U.S. — elevating and bringing music and festivals and environments into their world, it’s core to the overall weekend.”

Like COTA, F1 has been cultivating a wider cultural presence for years, though Parker concedes that even his fellow higher-ups, including CEO Stefano Domenicali (one of Billboard’s 2026 Sports Power Players), weren’t fully prepared for the speed with which Drive To Survive — which debuted a year before the coronavirus pandemic, when Parker posits people stuck at home were more inclined to tune in — helped them grow. Tapping into the American market through entertainment–focused crossover was key, but made difficult by the fact that, to this day, none of the drivers on the grid are from the United States. Parker remembers one of F1’s first ventures into music: “F1 Tracks,” a series of themed playlists curated by artists such as Mumford & Sons, Feeder and more that launched in 2019.

From there, the company booked increasingly well-known artists to sing different countries’ national anthems or to simply appear at races to boost the races’ profile. This year in Austin, it debuted a new “Grid Gigs” series featuring performers who would open races with miniconcerts performed on the actual track, starting with Texas singer–songwriter Drake Milligan.

“From a pure business point of view … you want to keep people there as long as possible to enjoy the event,” Parker says. When F1 offers music programming, fans “spend longer at the event. They obviously come away from it with a bigger recognition of how good the event was, so they come back again. But at the same time, it’s the cultural area as well. You’ve got celebrities in attendance, there’s huge media coverage of that event and broadcast coverage — you’re appealing to a brand-new and different audience.”

At the 2025 U.S. Grand Prix, artists from Shaboozey to Adele to Kane Brown were all on that attendance sheet. And at one point, legions of reporters gathered for a news conference in COTA’s media center, where Domenicali, Apple senior vp of services Eddy Cue and Liberty Media CEO Derek Chang announced the newest development in their entertainment strategy: building on the success of Apple Studios’ F1: The Movie and its Billboard-charting soundtrack, the tech company will serve as the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 races for the next five years, in a deal Variety has valued at $750 million. The deal may eventually tap into the possibilities offered by Apple Music, but Parker tells me later that in its first year, the focus will mostly be on delivering the highest quality race coverage possible.

F1’s crossover with entertainment has also allowed drivers to grow their personal brands and establish themselves as multifaceted public figures beyond the sport. Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson shares videos of himself playing guitar and recording in the studio on social media. He tells Billboard in the paddock that he’s still wrapping his head around the possibilities, but to have music “aligned with my career, my world in racing, is something very important to me.”

Williams Racing’s Alex Albon has seen firsthand how the sport has changed since his rookie year, particularly stateside. “I remember coming into Austin in 2019 and [COTA] already had the stage over on the other side of the track,” he says, noting that while the drivers are always too busy to catch the post-race concerts, they’re enjoyable for his fiancée (pro golfer Lily Muni He) and other family traveling with the drivers.

“I remember thinking, like, ‘Oh, what’s this about? I’ve never seen such a huge music stage situated beside the circuit,’ ” he continues. “It just feels like every year it gets bigger. The whole thing is a show.”

With Verstappen cruising past the checkered flag with an eight-second lead over Norris, securing one more win for Red Bull, another Grand Prix is in the books. For the drivers and teams, it’s already on to the next one in Mexico City, even as the audience here heads over to the amphitheater to watch the Turnpike Troubadours set — or try out the Circuit Breaker, the first of COTALand’s roller coasters to open to the public.

As for F1, it’s on to the next big advancement in music and entertainment, whatever that might be. “Ten years ago, we were a different sport,” Parker says, noting the uptick in female viewers and fans under age 35 in recent years. “We can’t, and we shouldn’t, and we won’t keep going down the same old route, doing the same old things.”

This story appears in the Feb. 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.