The man who ran F1’s comeback is bringing its franchise model to horse racing

Horse racing had a different future once. The sport’s biggest events now pull audiences a fraction of what they drew in their heyday, the betting pools have fractured, and the average racetrack fan is aging faster than the average horse.

Greg Maffei knows what a moribund sport looks like from the outside and what it can become. As chief executive of Liberty Media, he spent seven years watching Formula One transform from a wealthy man’s hobby into a streaming-era phenomenon, powered partly by a documentary series that introduced racing to people who had never cared about lap times. He left Liberty as the sport’s value had roughly tripled.

Now Maffei is applying that template to the turf. His new venture, Horsepower, is structured around the same mechanics that made F1 legible to non-fans: team ownership, consistent franchise identities, personality-forward storytelling, and a media-first calendar designed to compete with the NFL for attention rather than merely with other horse races.

The case for it is real. Horse racing owns one commodity no other sport can manufacture: genuine animal athleticism in conditions that have not changed in centuries. What the sport has failed to do is give a streaming audience someone to care about before the two-minute race begins, a problem that is structural rather than intrinsic.

What Maffei brings to Horsepower is not a love of horses. It is an infrastructure for attachment: the team format creates allegiances that single-race wagering never could; the franchise model makes owners investable characters; the media rights structure that comes out of an F1-style deal can turn a regional tradition into a global broadcast event.

The structural question is whether horse racing’s regional character survives the F1 treatment. Formula One had circuits in 20 countries before it became a global brand. Horse racing has Churchill Downs, Ascot, and the Dubai World Cup — scattered landmarks without a shared season or a coherent narrative spine. Horsepower would need to build that narrative from scratch.

He is seeking $30 million in seed capital to build the league, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

The last sport to cross this kind of reinvention gap was Formula One itself. The bet is that the gap only needs to be crossed once.

Tags: Formula One, Greg Maffei, horse racing, Horsepower, Liberty Media, sports venture