Stefano Domenicali in New York: When Formula 1 Rewrites Its Own Record

New York, a Thursday evening in late September, during the high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly. On the stage of the Global Citizen Awards, hosted by the Atlantic Council, Keanu Reeves walked out to honour Stefano Domenicali, President and CEO of Formula 1. In the room that evening were Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and actress Cynthia Erivo. The congratulatory montage on the big screen featured Brad Pitt, tennis player Jannik Sinner and Prince Albert II of Monaco. I read the citation three times. The phrase chosen was “leadership beyond the race track”. Not one grand prix was named. Not one pit stop. Not one technical dispute. In my trade, a file without a single blemish is always more suspect than a messy one. An injury record does not lie — only the person reading it knows how to hide the truth. The file Formula 1 presented in New York that night was so clean that I had to reopen nineteen years of my own notes. ONE AWARD, TWO WORLDS The Atlantic Council is a geopolitical policy institute based in Washington, founded in 2026, focused on transatlantic relations and international security. Its Global Citizen Awards are not sports prizes. They go to figures the organisers judge to have global impact, and are usually scheduled during the week when heads of state descend on New York for the UN General Assembly. Placing an awards ceremony beside the UN calendar is deliberate: it pulls the prize into the orbit of political power. Stefano Domenicali is not an FIA official. He heads Formula One Management, the commercial rights holder of the sport, operating under Liberty Media. The FIA writes rules, polices them and issues penalties. FOM sells broadcast rights, sells races, sells the name of the championship. Two different bodies wearing the same shirt. The distinction matters, because the honour in New York landed squarely on the commercial half, not the sporting half. To understand why a broadcast-rights executive stands alongside presidents and prime ministers, look back a decade. Liberty Media completed its acquisition of Formula 1 in January 2026, at an enterprise valuation of roughly 8 billion US dollars. Domenicali took the CEO seat on 1 January 2026. Between those two markers sits Drive to Survive, the documentary series that premiered on Netflix on 8 March 2026 and radically changed the sport's audience profile. The 2026 season had 24 rounds, the most in the championship's history. Las Vegas joined the calendar in November 2026, giving the United States three races in a single season: Austin, Miami and Las Vegas. That is the part I can verify through contracts, annual reports and published calendars. The rest is politics, and politics never confesses on its own. READING A GUEST LIST LIKE A DATA SET Newcomers treat a guest list as decoration. I treat it as data. A guest list tells you which category the organisers want the honoree placed in, and how that category defines itself. Those honoured alongside Domenicali that night included a sitting president, a sitting prime minister and an Oscar-nominated actress. Three different kinds of power: state power, governmental power and mass-cultural power. Placing the head of Formula 1 in that exact group is a statement about rank. It says the sport now files itself under global institution, not under sports entertainment. Data has no gender. Only the reader of data carries bias. I looked at that list and saw something the organisers probably hoped nobody would notice: not a single representative of another racing series appeared. No World Endurance Championship. No Formula E. No MotoGP. No IndyCar. Absence is data too. If Formula 1 still defined itself as a racing series, its comparison set would be other racing series. But all evening, the comparison set placed beside it was tennis, cinema and government. Nobody from the racing world was invited. Jannik Sinner was. Brad Pitt was. Keanu Reeves was. I have sat through enough press conferences in Monza, Silverstone and Spa to know the paddock does not talk this way. In the paddock, people talk about aerodynamic load reduction, gearbox durability, how many laps a soft compound survives before it falls away. In New York, people talked about sport connecting human beings. Two different languages, and only one of them was spoken from the stage. Location is a data line as well. An award handed out in New York, during UN week, to an Italian executive working for an American media conglomerate, in a sport with three American races. That chain needs no further interpretation. It says the target market is not Europe, where the sport's traditional audience has saturated. It is where the sponsorship money, the large broadcast contracts and the audiences who have never heard of a corner name all live. “A FEW HUNDREDTHS OF A SECOND” AND THE ART OF OVERSIMPLIFICATION One line in the speech was quoted most widely: teams work for months, sometimes years, to find a few hundredths of a second. To a general audience, that sounds wonderful. To a working analyst, it fails on units. An aerodynamic upgrade package typically delivers tenths on track, under ideal conditions, and it usually takes two or three races before its real effect can be isolated from lap-to-lap noise and fuel-load differences. Hundredths belong to much smaller things: a trim change on the front wing edge, a minor shift in the energy-deployment map in race mode, one cleaner DRS tow on a decisive lap. Saying teams spend a year hunting hundredths is a flattering formulation for a room with no engineers in it. That does not mean Domenicali lied. It means he was addressing a specific audience, and that audience has no appetite for precision. A speech in New York is not a technical briefing in Brackley. I do not trust a medical report before I understand the pressure bearing down on the signature at the bottom. The same rule applies to a speech: you need to know whom the author is courting. “COMPETE WITHOUT LOSING RESPECT” — A DEFENSIVE SENTENCE The speech contained a passage about sport teaching people to compete without losing respect, and about difference being turned into division. I have heard this line many times, across many sports, and I have learned something about it. It almost never appears in calm weather. It appears when a sport is under scrutiny. When officials are being questioned. When teams publicly accuse one another. When on-track decisions spark disputes that run for several rounds without a clean resolution. Organisers summon it as a soft shield. I am not saying Domenicali was defending against a specific charge that night. I am saying the language chosen is not the language of a sport confidently displaying its sporting achievements. It is the language of a sport building a values shield. And there is a large gap in that file. Every subject any fan is currently discussing — ticket prices, a congested calendar, an ever-expanding round count, cost-cap disputes, contentious penalty decisions — appears not once. A medical report that omits the injury is not a medical report. It is a brochure. HOW TO MOVE FROM ONE DRIVER TO AN ENTIRE CONTINENT One small detail strikes me as the most important of the whole event: how the organisers assembled the imagery. The congratulatory montage combined Brad Pitt — star of the Formula 1 feature film — a reigning Grand Slam tennis champion, and a European royal. The presenter was Keanu Reeves, a famous actor with a known motorsport interest. Three layers stacked together: mass entertainment, elite sport and traditional European prestige. That arrangement is not accidental. In media, we call it narrative adjacency engineering. You place your product next to things the public already loves, and in the viewer's mind the two gradually merge into one group. After a few years, audiences no longer remember why they started watching racing. They only remember that racing is where famous people go. This effect has a name in the industry, and it has been measurable in audience data since 2026. What is notable in New York is not that it exists, but that it has matured to the point where it can stand on a stage tied to the United Nations and be recognised by a policy institute. WHO GETS HONOURED, AND WHO DOES NOT There is a distinction I want to make clearly, because much of this industry writes about it carelessly. The FIA is the sporting regulator: it writes technical, sporting and financial rules; it appoints stewards; it issues penalties. FOM is the commercial rights holder: it negotiates broadcast contracts, sells sponsorship packages, decides the calendar and session formats. The honour in New York went to the second half. That means the sport, at this moment, is recognised by the outside world mainly through its commercial face rather than its sporting face. In this particular case that is not automatically bad. But it says something about proportion. When a sport receives more attention at the institutional level than at the competitive level, the organisation's centre of gravity has already shifted. There is also a timing problem. Institutional awards tend to arrive late. Organisers wait until a trend is mature and safe enough to celebrate, then they hand out the prize. In other words, this honour confirms a thesis that had already formed; it does not open a new direction. Its value is not predictive, it is normalising: after that night, placing Formula 1 alongside global institutions becomes a permitted, legitimate phrasing that needs no footnote. THE BLIND SPOT: WHEN AN AWARD CONFIRMS ITSELF This is where I want to slow down, because it is the type of error I encounter most in this trade. An award given by an organisation to an individual is a statement by that organisation. When the organiser declares that the honoree has global influence because he turned Formula 1 into a global cultural force, the organiser has simultaneously made the claim and handed over the evidence for it. I am not saying it is false. I am saying it cannot be used as independent proof. Testing that claim requires things absent from the event: revenue broken down by market, audience data by age and geography, newly signed sponsorship deals, brand value across seasons. None of that was presented that night. The event delivered a conclusion and left the audience to find the proof. I call that a file that is too clean. A file where every conclusion has already been written in advance, and every inconvenient data line has been stripped out. A second problem is structural: Formula 1's soft power is currently pinned to one person. Honouring Domenicali honours him, which means that when he leaves the seat, much of that institutional standing has to be rebuilt from scratch. A healthy leadership does not park its collective identity inside one personal file. A third blind spot is reputational. An awards ceremony staged during UN General Assembly week, by a policy institute, for a sports executive, carries a perception risk. In several markets the sport is now targeting, the combination of sport, politics and international prestige will be read differently. People may see a sport seeking legitimacy in a place where part of its own fanbase does not see itself. And the largest gap of all: not a single sentence about the people in the grandstands. A PROFESSIONAL MEMORY In 2026, when I was twenty-six, I was the team doctor liaison reporter for Hamburger SV in the Bundesliga. In a match against RB Leipzig, midfielder Aaron Hunt tore a hamstring in the 34th minute. The coaching staff told him to play on. I recorded his deceleration data from the GPS system: from 7.2 metres per second down to 5.8. I filed a warning. When I went to the dressing-room door to speak with the team doctor, an assistant coach shouted in my face that women do not understand tactics, and told me to get out. I did not argue. I stood and waited for the doctor to confirm. From that day I wrote drier, slower, and only from sourced numbers. Male colleagues had to read carefully before pushing back. I bring that up because it connects directly to the night in New York. The same logic runs through both: a person outside the circle is deemed unqualified to judge, while a medal handed out in a room far from the track is deemed qualified to define the sport itself. When the dressing-room door closes, I understand that tactics are not drawn on the board. And when an awards ceremony closes, I understand that what was never said on stage is the part worth recording. WHAT IS WORTH WATCHING FROM HERE The honour changed not a single second of racing. It altered no technical regulation, no driver contract, no cost-cap allocation. Read purely as sports news, it is almost empty. Read as a trace, it is something else. It shows Formula 1 has chosen its arena: not other racing series, but the global attention market, where the rivals are tennis, cinema and politics. That is a strategic choice with a price attached, and the price has not yet been paid. What I will watch over the coming seasons is not the next round of speeches. I will watch whether those speeches turn into measurable things: a sponsor portfolio broader than technology and finance, a new revenue stream from content rights, a younger audience in markets that have never watched a race. And I will watch whether, when the leadership changes, that institutional standing travels with the sport. An identity built out of medals has to be re-examined every time the person wearing them walks away. Three years of pandemic taught me that the gap between two teams can always become a bridge. But a bridge only holds if there are real people at both ends. In New York that night, one end was crowded. At the other end, I saw no one.