Lock in fans, then make everything worse: F1 risks falling into Big Tech trap

Cory Doctorow has a word for what happens to platforms that stop putting the people who use them first. The term is ‘enshittification’ and, clearly, it is not a very polite word.

Doctorow, a Canadian author and technology critic, coined the term in 2022 and it has since escaped the confines of tech talk to describe something more universal: the slow, incremental degradation of a product or service that once worked well, carried out by the very institutions responsible for protecting it.

You will be familiar with plenty of platforms that have embraced enshittification: Twitter, Google, Microsoft, any streaming service that plays ads despite making you pay for a monthly subscription… to name a few.

The mechanism Doctorow describes in his latest book (appropriately titled Enshittification) has three stages.

First, a platform is good to its users; it builds loyalty, grows its audience, and justifies its existence through the quality of what it offers.

Second, it begins to abuse those users in order to serve its business customers: the advertisers, the broadcasters, the sponsors, and the corporations that pay for access to the audience that the platform has already captured.

Third, it abuses the business customers too, extracting maximum value for itself until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own decisions.

Doctorow calls the mechanism ‘twiddling’: the continual, barely perceptible adjustment of parameters that, taken individually, seem trivial, but that accumulate over time into a product the original audience no longer recognises.

The process is enabled by one simple precondition: locked-in users. Once people can’t easily leave, the degradation can begin. The cost of switching is too high. The emotional investment is too deep. And so they stay, even as things get worse.

If you are still using some of those products mentioned above, you know what we are talking about here.

Doctorow’s term originally referred to Big Tech products, but there’s a certain, growing connection to Formula 1.

Good to its users

It is tempting, and immediately flawed, to invoke a golden age, because Formula 1 has never been perfect, regardless of how nostalgic one might feel about the ‘good old days’.

F1 has produced processional races, politically driven rule changes, poorly thought-out technical regulations, and periods of one-sided dominance so complete that the sporting contest became almost irrelevant.

Anyone who tells you it was ‘better back then’ is usually measuring from a starting point that flatters their own nostalgia.

But we don’t need a golden age to make our point. All it takes is looking at the direction of travel.

In that sense, the direction Formula 1 was travelling before the hybrid era began in 2014, however imperfectly, was, or at least felt, oriented primarily around the race, and the on-track contest was the main product.

There was a greater feeling that it all existed in service of what happened on track for 90 minutes on Sunday.

The race was the thing, the drivers were the stars, and fans were the audience upon whom everything else depended.

It wasn’t paradise. It wasn’t without fault. But, looking back now, it does feel like the interests of the championship and the interests of the fans and drivers were aligned. Or at least more aligned than they are now.

Serving the business customers

Liberty Media acquired Formula 1 in 2017, and the transformation since then has been massively impressive by most commercial standards.

Global revenues have increased, global audiences have grown, and the American public has been captured in a way that eluded F1 for decades.

Drive to Survive brought F1 into the living rooms of people who had never watched a race, turning drivers into characters and races into episodes of a weekly show.

As a brand, Formula 1 has never been more visible.

But the growth, like any growth, has not come cost-free.

Sprint races were introduced, fragmenting race weekends and subordinating the integrity of the format to the demand for more content.

The calendar has expanded to 24 rounds, with circuits selected at least partly on the basis of hosting fees and new audiences rather than racing heritage.

Races like the Las Vegas Grand Prix have such commercial intent behind them that it’s hard not to laugh.

The paddock, and this is not exclusive to F1, has become content.

None of this is inherently wrong, and to some, all of that may even be positives.

Businesses grow, and audiences diversify as the world changes, and almost no sport that a new viewer consumes on a streaming platform is the same sport that the 30-year fan watches.

And there is no reason it should be, really. The world, and so consumer habits, is very different.

But Doctorow’s framework identifies what happens in the middle stage: the original fan, the sporting purist, the person who was there before the all the growth and before Drive to Survive, becomes a secondary concern.

It’s all about endless growth and about attracting more people.

The original fan’s loyalty is taken for granted because they are already locked in. This applies to both tech products and to a sport like Formula 1.

The product is increasingly designed around the new audience: the casual fan, the business customer, not the loyal fan who was there from the start.

Formula 1 has been twiddling, incrementally and persistently, and most of its original audience has stayed, because, well… where else would they go?

Going a step too far?

The 2026 technical regulations were supposed to be F1’s most ambitious reinvention. A new power unit philosophy, centred on an equal split between internal combustion and electrical power.

An active aerodynamics framework designed to make following another car easier, eliminating the dirty air problem that has plagued racing quality for decades.

The promises made during the design process were explicit.

The reality, through the opening races of 2026, has been considerably more complicated, leading to anger from both drivers and fans alike.

The power unit architecture has led not only to safety concerns but to a kind of racing that most drivers are not enjoying and that fans are struggling to understand.

There’s already talk of changing the rules to solve some of the issues, so there is an acknowledgement that something is not completely right.

You only need to look back at 2023 to see hints of something not having gone as expected.

Three years ago, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said: “Do you think that, in all reality, we are not innovative in this sport to come up with chassis, engine regulations, that can avoid drivers shifting down on the straight? It just isn’t real.

“I don’t want to give anybody ideas that we really need to downshift. That’s not going to happen.”

That has happened.

One of the most uncomfortable arguments in Doctorow’s book is that enshittification is very often not accidental.

It doesn’t happen because platforms become incompetent, or because the people running them stop caring. It happens because of specific policy choices made by people in charge who heard the warnings about the consequences and overrode them anyway.

The 2026 rules were not produced in a vacuum. They were the output of years of negotiation between the FIA, Formula 1’s commercial rights holder, and the manufacturers who lobbied for a framework that suited their road car programmes and sustainability narratives.

They are the product of a regulatory process that had, by design, to satisfy too many competing interests simultaneously.

The on-track product, the thing that the original fan came for and that drivers were used to, was not at the top of that list of interests.

It would be somewhat delusional to argue that the on-track product was the only priority above anything else in the ‘good old days’, but, as drivers and fans have argued at the start of the season, there appears to be a bigger disconnect between the commercial interests and the racing product now, as if a line had been crossed.

It would also be unfair to deny that part of the audience has enjoyed what F1 has offered so far in 2026.

But Max Verstappen, disillusioned with the racing and his Red Bull‘s poor form, is threatening to leave F1.

Reigning world champion Lando Norris answered “Clearly not” when asked during the Japanese GP if the drivers needed to enjoy the racing.

Fernando Alonso, the most experienced driver in the history of Formula 1, said on the Suzuka grid that the current racing was “no fun at all.”

“Where’s the fun in overtaking accidentally? The overtakings we have now are accidental,” he told Spanish TV. “You suddenly find yourself with a superior battery than the car in front, so you either crash into him or you overtake him. It’s an evasion manoeuvre more than an overtake.”

That all points to a fundamental problem that it’s impossible to ignore, regardless of how many people tune in to watch.

The switching cost 

The condition that makes enshittification possible is the absence of a credible alternative.