Francis Lee first watched a grand prix as a peace offering. He’d been a NASCAR fan as a teen. Kansas Speedway sat only a few minutes’ drive from Lee’s Overland Park hometown. But America’s favored racing series carries a reputation to match his Southern roots. Lee’s father never openly disapproved, he remembers. But he recommended the boy watch a round of the FIA Formula One World Championship, nonetheless.
“So I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll check it out,’” said Lee, now a freshman mechanical engineering student, standing in the cluttered garage near the entrance to Temple’s engineering building. “And oh, my God.”
The world’s most-watched motorsport has become culturally ubiquitous stateside after years in the back of U.S. audiences’ minds: Students routinely crisscross campus clad in firesuits. Their hair often smushes beneath the psychedelic Mercedes caps seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton sold in tribute to two of his favorite races — in Austin, Texas, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
And some enthusiasts, like Lee, are clustering in clubs like Temple Formula Racing, the university chapter of Formula SAE.
“I had known that I wanted to do engineering for a while, but I had bounced around a lot,” said Anders R. Olson, another freshman mechanical engineering major, at TFR. The degree can lead to a career in several different professions, Olson added, but “I think Formula One and FSAE have kind of put me on a path that I can envision myself on in five or ten years.”
Cheyenne Schulte remembers little of her first time watching F1. Her mind kept the sharp, bright parts: She was the age of a first-grader, and the hour was that of a rooster — 6 or 7 a.m. And she recalls the sight of Hamilton, resplendent and triumphant in the Silver Arrows as the Mercedes that would carry him to six of his seven titles zipped across the screen.
“I’ve watched every race since I was, like, six years old,” Schulte said. “My family, that’s kind of a thing we do.”
For some time, Schulte and her family might have felt alone in their dedication. But when F1’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix began at midnight March 16, it counted among its viewers an American fanbase twice the size of its 2018-era forerunner. And it did so with a growing power to reach even U.S. fans who didn’t want to stay up until race’s end, after 2 a.m. Eastern time.
The culture capture represents the summit of a meticulous strategy from F1’s American owners. After the Colorado-based firm in charge of SiriusXM paid $4.4 billion for it, the world’s most-watched motorsport gave ESPN its TV rights for free. Its officials collaborated with Netflix on a series designed to bring fans into the minds of Formula One’s key players.
When the lights darkened on F1’s March 16 season opener in Australia, grands prix averaged 1.1 million viewers in the United States — half as many as NASCAR but twice as many as during its years on the doomed NBC Sports Network.
Down the hall from the entrance to the engineering building, TFR’s 30-odd members craft a car they’ll race only a handful of times all year. The tires racked against the wall are Firestones, not Pirellis. The competition unfolds not as wheel-to-wheel position racing — with college students? — but as timed trials and quality control tests. And Temple’s team shakes down their prototype not on some private circuit in Maranello, but in a parking lot in the exotic locale known only by its English name: Ambler.
It’s not Monaco. Neither is Formula SAE’s national event at Michigan International Speedway, or even its smaller, regional meet in Pittsburgh. But it’s close enough, for now: Some events draw European teams, funded by the continent’s top automotive engineering firms.
“I mean, it’s definitely nerve-wracking at competition,” said Fred Marcks, one of three senior mechanical engineering majors responsible for leading the team and driving the car. “You work the entire year, 60, 80 hours a week to get this car built and designed and tested.”
Even the fancy, well-heeled European clubs don’t necessarily serve as F1 feeder teams. That’s a completely different pipeline — the ever-more-absurdly expensive universe of elite go-karting.
“But this is definitely a springboard to anything else you want to do,” said Bernadette Mooney, another of the club’s leaders. “Especially automotive.”
TFR boasts connections with major car brands, Mooney added. And its focus on solving problems as they arise in the world form often proves decisive when other kinds of companies scour the ranks of Temple grads for technical expertise.
F1 even influenced Chulte’s choice of major. The freshman opted to study sport, tourism and hospitality management because she wanted to engage with the World Championship’s reticular economy.
“I was like, ‘Hey, maybe I can do the business side of this,’” Chulte said.
Ben Mattice’s brother embraced grand prix racing a half-decade ago. But it was a family road trip from Virginia to California that got the junior advertising major hooked on the Netflix show, “Drive to Survive.” Eventually, Mattice began binge-watching the sport with his partner.
“Normally, I wouldn’t get out of bed until one, two, three in the afternoon,” Mattice said. “Now, I’m waking up early and I’m watching stuff. So, now I can get breakfast and I can be productive and clean the house and things like that.”
F1 has long been a global sport. Grand prix’s connections to a kind of reality TV and luxury automakers offer it extraordinary visibility. Sophia Tronnes never even watched “Drive to Survive.” A lifelong student of high-speed consumer cars, the junior public relations major followed the McLaren racing team on Instagram by mistake. F1 cars’ top-of-the-line technology, among other things, drew Tronnes in. She’s been a Formula One fanatic ever since.
“Everything’s so intricate,” Tronnes said. “The tire strategy, when they were going to do pits — all that kind of stuff was just really, really interesting to me.”
Formula One may be nearing its American limit, its fans on campus acknowledged. Three grands prix now occur in the United States, up from zero between 2006-12. U.S.-based manufacturer Cadillac’s debut in 2026 promises to bring the last stateside stragglers on board. The nation’s lone F1 driver, Logan Sargeant, and its only current constructor, Haas F1, have accomplished little of note.
Yet the sport has inspired loyalty from those who have embraced it: They’ve reoriented their date nights, their career paths and their Sunday wake-up calls for the thrill of chasing The Limit.
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