110. Formula 1 Teams

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 110: Formula 1 Teams

Host: Zachary Crockett, Freakonomics Network
Guest: Steve Cripps (CFO, Williams Racing)
Air Date: October 13, 2025

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Overview: Inside the Business and Economics of Formula 1 Teams

This episode dives deep into the high-octane, high-stakes world of Formula 1 racing—not the races themselves, but the business model that keeps these global speed machines on track. Host Zachary Crockett speaks with Steve Cripps, CFO of Williams Racing, to explore what it takes to build, finance, and compete with a Formula 1 team in the 21st century.

Crockett unpacks how teams operate as R&D engines, why F1 is booming, and the surprising mechanics behind everything from car construction and logistics to sponsor deals and the role of regulations. Williams Racing serves as a window into the economics, innovation, and ambition that power the sport.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Formula 1: The Pinnacle of Motorsport

• Spectacle and Scale:
  • F1 draws 820 million+ fans worldwide, thanks in part to Netflix’s "Drive to Survive" and a Brad Pitt movie (03:16–03:41).
  • Only 10 teams, fielding two cars each, travel to 24 races in 21 countries (03:57).
• Innovation and Engineering:
  • Each car is a unique feat, with ~20,000 individual components (03:57).
  • Downforce is key: “An F1 car has an upside down wing. It’s pushing the car down into the ground.” — Steve Cripps (08:06).

2. Williams Racing: An Independent Under Pressure

• History & Ownership:
  • Williams has nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ championships (05:01).
  • Team dominance faded after the 1990s; sold to Dorlton Capital for ~$200M in 2020 (05:43–06:01, 21:49).
• Business Model:
  • "Williams is the only truly independently owned F1 team that goes racing as its core activity." — Steve Cripps (06:44).

3. Design, Development, and Regulations

• Rapid Development Cycles:
  • Development for next year’s car starts midyear; only three days of preseason testing (09:47).
  • “You never know how good a job you’ve really done until you’re up against your competitors.” — Steve Cripps (09:47).
• Cost Cap Impact:
  • Spending capped at ~$170M for car-related R&D and operations (10:34–11:22).
  • “Prior to 2020, the sport is littered with teams coming and going…The cost cap has really helped.” — Steve Cripps (10:53).

4. The Costs: From Parts to Logistics

• Car Construction:
  • Building one car: ~£5M; but "the cost of car parts themselves" is ~£55M/year (~$75M) (12:01, 16:24).
  • Spare parts are continually manufactured due to frequent damage/upgrades (16:48).
  • "We have a pounds per millisecond metric" to weigh upgrade costs against lap time gain (17:20).
• Driver Salaries:
  • Not subject to cost cap; range from $500K to $80M (11:47).
  • Williams drivers reportedly make ~$8–10M (11:47).
• Crash Costs:
  • 2024 was costly for Williams due to frequent crashes:
    • “A front wing is £150,000…a set of front suspension is £200,000, a floor £150,000.” — Steve Cripps (15:52).

5. Technical Facilities and Partnerships

• Factory and R&D:
  • Williams spends £10M/year on its factory, testing components, and pushing them “to destruction” (18:13).
  • Aerodynamics developed using a wind tunnel—"a big building with a huge fan maybe 15, 20 ft across.” — Steve Cripps (18:36).
• Supplier Relationships:
  • Engines, gearboxes sourced from Mercedes (19:25).
  • "To develop a power unit...is a multiple billion dollar investment" — Steve Cripps (19:25).

6. The Logistics Challenge

• Global Operations:
  • 30 tons of equipment shipped per race weekend at a total yearly logistics cost of ~£13M (20:37).
  • Williams creatively maximizes costs by sea-freighting heavy, low-value items (21:26).
  • Tight turnarounds: “As the cars are going across the finish line, the team are packing up the garage… ready to be used again on Friday.” — Steve Cripps (20:57).

7. Revenue Streams: Prize Money & Sponsorships

• Broadcasting & Licensing:
  • F1 generated $3.5B in 2024; ~$2B profit, with 60% split among teams as prize money (23:03, 23:19).
• Sponsorships:
  • Main income driver for most teams.
  • Top car placements attract $60–80M per prominent sponsor logo (24:14).
  • Clever branding examples: Duracell’s logo on Williams’ air intake (24:57).

8. The Future: New Regulations & New Opportunities

• 2026 Reset:
  • Both power unit and fuel regulations will change—50% electric/50% combustion and fully sustainable fuel (26:24).
  • Offers teams a chance to catch up: “It allows all the teams to start from the same position...” — Steve Cripps (26:24).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Investment and Competition:
  • “Almost every decision we make is based on how do we add performance to the car.” — Steve Cripps (04:32)
• On Car Development Timelines:
  • “If you compare that to a road car program...they would spend three to five years developing a car. So we do move pretty quickly.” — Steve Cripps (09:47)
• On Damage and Budgets:
  • “A front wing is £150,000... a floor £150,000.” — Steve Cripps (15:52)
• On F1’s Transformation:
  • “Liberty Media…has really invested in how the sport looks to the outside world and the commerciality of it, which has attracted a lot more partners, sponsors, fans…” — Steve Cripps (22:27)
• On Sponsorship Impact:
  • “Sponsorship is one of the key revenue sources for teams, and there is a correlation between how successful a team is and the amount of revenue it can generate…” — Steve Cripps (24:03)
• On Fans:
  • “Fans are what drives our sport.” — Steve Cripps (27:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:08] — Steve Cripps introduces Formula 1’s scale & Williams Racing’s place in history
• [05:01] — Team’s history and championship wins
• [06:44] — Williams vs. other F1 team business models
• [08:06] — The physical science of downforce and car design
• [09:47] — Rapid R&D cycle and testing limitations
• [10:34] — Impact of the cost cap on competition
• [12:01] — Economics of building an F1 car
• [15:52] — The high cost of crash damage
• [16:24] — Managing spares and annual car part costs
• [18:13] — Inside the Williams R&D facilities
• [19:25] — The necessity of buying engines and other components
• [20:37] — The vast scale and cost of F1 team logistics
• [23:03] — How F1 profits are distributed, and the secretive prize money
• [24:14] — Why successful teams attract the top sponsorship dollars
• [26:24] — How major rule changes offer new opportunities

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Final Thoughts

This episode reveals Formula 1—not just as a sporting spectacle, but as a business behemoth rooted in research, global logistics, and modern marketing. Williams Racing’s journey underlines both the challenges and opportunities facing “independent” teams, and the importance of strategic investment, relentless innovation, and spectacle in keeping the wheels (and money) spinning.

Best listened to if you’re curious what keeps the world’s fastest cars—and their billion-dollar teams—on track.

Transcript

[Jeff Bridges]

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[Zoe]

Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?

[Jeff Bridges]

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[Zoe]

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[Jeff Bridges]

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[Steve Cripps]

Nice.

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[Steve Cripps]

You heard them.

[Jeff Bridges]

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[T-Mobile Announcer]

Here come the lights for the Monaco Grand Prix.

[Zachary Crockett]

As the engines rumble at the starting line, five red lights will turn on one by one.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

3, 4, 5 red lights.

[Zachary Crockett]

When the lights switch off, the race begins in 2/10 of a second, all 20 drivers release the clutch, press the throttle and accelerate.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

And Formula One goes racing on the streets of Monaco.

[Steve Cripps]

Formula One is the pinnacle of global motorsport. It's got the fastest, most sophisticated cars and the best drivers.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Steve Cripps, the chief financial officer at Williams Racing, one of the oldest and most successful Formula One teams. In the past few years, Formula One's audience has grown to more than 820 million fans worldwide. That's largely thanks to the hit Netflix show Drive to Survive and this past summer's F1, the movie starring Brad Pitt.

[Steve Cripps]

The sport itself generated over three and a half billion dollars in revenue in 2024.

[Zachary Crockett]

At the heart of the sport are ten teams, each responsible for designing, engineering, manufacturing, and delivering two cars to compete in every race.

[Steve Cripps]

We race at 24 races around the world in 21 different countries, five continents. The cars reach speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. Each car is made up of 20,000 individual components, most of which are bespoke to Formula One and in most cases, bespoke to each individual team.

[Zachary Crockett]

Combined, these 10 F1 teams are reportedly worth $15 billion. And the faster a car is on the track, the better the finances. Look for a team like Williams.

[Steve Cripps]

Almost every decision we make is based on how do we add performance to the car.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, Formula One teams. Steve Cripps has worked in Formula One for 16 years on three different teams. In 2017, he joined Williams Racing, based in Oxfordshire in the UK.

[Steve Cripps]

Williams was founded in 1977 by Frank Williams and Patrick Head. Over those past 48 years, the team has won 114 races, nine constructors championships, and seven drivers championships.

[Zachary Crockett]

It owes this success to several of the sport's most famous drivers.

[Steve Cripps]

Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet, Damon Hill.

[Zachary Crockett]

If you've heard of one historic Formula One driver, it's probably Ayrton Senna from Brazil. In 1994, he died when the Williams car he was driving crashed. The team still won the 1994 championship, called the Constructors Championship.

[Steve Cripps]

Williams was very, very successful and dominated the Sport in the 90s, but from 2010 onwards, started to suffer a bit. And poor on track performance can reduce your revenues. You then start to struggle to invest in the team, which ultimately ended up in the team being sold in early 2020.

[Zachary Crockett]

Private equity firm Dorlton Capital bought Williams for about $200 million in 2020. That's when Steve Cripps became CFO.

[Steve Cripps]

For the past five years we've been executing on a pretty major turnaround for the team. Williams has now grown to over 1,000 people to put two cars on tracks. And that's very typical of the teams that are running at the top of the championship. In some cases even higher than 1,000 people.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the past 30 years, the sport has been dominated by four teams. Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari. They're recognizable brands whose main business activities lie outside of Formula one.

[Steve Cripps]

Williams is quite unique in that we're the only truly independently owned F1 team that goes racing as its core activity. Other teams, some are parts of an automotive company like Ferrari or Mercedes, who have an F1 team as part of promoting their own brand. There are also other companies such as Red Bull, who are promoting their fizzy drinks. So Williams is quite different. We go racing for the sake of going racing.

[Zachary Crockett]

Formula one is the highest class of international racing for single seat cars. The modern era of the sport started with a seven race season in 1950. Today, there are 24 races in a season which typically last around 90 minutes each. Some of these races take place on specially built tracks, others on city streets like the Monaco Grand Prix. Each one is a unique combination of long straights and sharp turns. And that calls for a specially built car that's really fast and really expensive. An F1 car is a feat of aerodynamics. As the car speeds along, the air moving over its body pushes the car into the track. At top speeds, the car generates an amount of downward force that's five times the weight of the car itself.

[Steve Cripps]

It's the opposite of an aeroplane wing. On an aeroplane, the aerodynamics are lifting the aeroplane into the air. An F1 car has an upside down wing. It's pushing the car down into the ground. When you're going around a corner, it means you can go around a lot quicker than you might do in your road car because your road car will just slide off of the surface.

[Zachary Crockett]

But the downward force that gives cars grip for high speed turns can slow them on straightaways where teams want to achieve top speeds of 220mph.

[Steve Cripps]

So that's the big challenge that engineers have, is to find the right balance to allow the car to go around corners as quickly as possible, but to be quick enough down the straight as well.

[Zachary Crockett]

Like fighter pilots and astronauts, drivers have to go through extensive training to cope with the immense physical strain of racing. Some tracks are so physically taxing that drivers can lose 5% of their body weight through sweat during a race.

[Steve Cripps]

Going around A fast corner. In Formula 1, the driver might experience up to 5G on their head. So you can often see towards the end of a race, a driver leaning their head on the side of the cockpit because their neck has been under so much strain during the race that they've just got tired.

[Zachary Crockett]

The race's outcome depends on the driver's performance, the speed of the pit crews, tire choices, and decisions made by race strategists. But the biggest factor is the cars themselves. Each team designs and builds its own car, and every little tweak to the process is significant. Drivers aside, the difference in pure car performance between the fastest team and the slowest team is less than one second.

[Steve Cripps]

A Formula one team is an R and D company, so I'd argue that almost all of our costs are related to R and D itself. The lifecycle of a car really starts over a year before it goes onto the track. From about the middle of the year, most of your engineering resource will be focused on next year's cars. If you compare that to a road car program, they would spend three to five years developing a car. So we do move pretty quickly. Then in about February of each year, we'll do our first track testing. It's the first time the car will hit the track. We'll have about three days at a track like Barcelona or Bahrain where all the teams will go. So there's very, very limited time that we have to find out have we done a good job in designing and engineering the car? And you never know how good a job you've really done until you're up against your competitors.

[Zachary Crockett]

Historically, there was no limit to what F1 teams could spend on cars each year. Some teams, like Ferrari, could outspend teams like Williams threefold. But starting in 2021, the sports owner, Liberty Media, capped spending limits to make a more equal playing field.

[Steve Cripps]

Prior to 2020, the sport is littered with teams coming and going, largely because they ran out of money or the team wasn't commercially viable. The cost cap has really helped to improve that. It also has attracted lots of investment into the sport, both in terms of sponsors and partners, but also team ownership.

[Zachary Crockett]

The first cost cap was set at $145 million. This year, it's around 170 million.

[Steve Cripps]

Anything that is spent on designing the car, developing the car, building the car, and running it at the racetrack is captured within the cap. But teams spend between 200 and over £400 million.

[Zachary Crockett]

Costs like marketing and administration are exempt from the spending limit.

[Steve Cripps]

The big exclusion is that the cost of the driver themselves is not included in the cap.

[Zachary Crockett]

The 20 drivers salaries vary from half a million to $80 million a year. It's reported that the Williams drivers make around 8 to 10 million. But what does one of these cars cost?

[Steve Cripps]

About £5 million.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's just to build one car with one set of parts for one season. Each team has two cars and spare parts for one driver's crash.

[Steve Cripps]

The teams can completely rebuild a car overnight.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by SurveyMonkey. Look, we get it. You can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about AI this or AI that. And if you're like most people when it comes to AI, you're impressed but have a few concerns. But what if AI was used not as a tool to replace people, but as a way to help understand people better? AI from SurveyMonkey is designed to do just that. From crafting the perfect survey, which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep, finds patterns and surfaces trends quickly. SurveyMonkey's powerful suite of AI capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insights from real people, helping you make confident decisions for your business. Try it [e-mail] Economics.

[Jeff Bridges]

Morning Zoe. Got donuts.

[Zoe]

Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?

[Jeff Bridges]

Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me.

[Zoe]

So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly AT T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.

[Jeff Bridges]

Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

[Zachary Crockett]

Nice.

[Zoe]

Jeffrey, you heard them.

[Jeff Bridges]

T Mobile is the best place to.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

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[Jeff Bridges]

So what are we having for lunch?

[Zoe]

Dude, my work here is done.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

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[Zachary Crockett]

1H 2025 is@t mobile.com the Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by LinkedIn Ads the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people when you Want to reach the right professionals? Use LinkedIn Ads, the platform that has the highest B2B ROAs of all online ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Economics terms and conditions apply. Like most other sports, Formula One is physically combative. In a typical season, there are dozens of collisions, both minor and major. Any amount of damage can ruin a race, so drivers do their best to avoid harming the car. But 2024 was a difficult year for Williams Racing. Their drivers crashed a lot. Here's team principal James Vowles speaking during a press conference in a clip from Drive to Survive.

[Steve Cripps]

If we go through the damage record we've had, it's three front wings, three rear wings, three floors, two and a half car sets of suspension, three gearbo boxes destroyed and then some miscellaneous bits. That's normally what you would expect to get through in 24 races, not two.

[Zachary Crockett]

Steve Cripps says the team was fearful of breaking the cost cap due to the amount they had to spend each weekend to fix the cars.

[Steve Cripps]

A front wing is £150,000, so if you're watching TV and you see cars go off and a front wing ends up in the barriers, that's £150,000 on its own, if they've done a very good job and hit the barriers hard, a set of front suspension is £200,000 a floor, £150,000.

[Zachary Crockett]

All in all, the budget for cars is much higher than 5 million pounds a year. Each team brings spare car parts to every race.

[Steve Cripps]

In most cases, there's three, four or five of most spares. The cost of the car parts themselves, that's about £55 million a year.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's about US$75 million. And it's a recurring cost because each car is only used for one season before it's retired. In addition to needing spare parts for car rebuilds, teams also upgrade components throughout the season.

[Steve Cripps]

We never end the season with the same car that we started with the current formula. The aerodynamics is one of the key areas of competition, so we're frequently changing the front wings, rear wings. The floor under the current regulations is a key contributor to performance. So if we think about upgrading the car during the season, we were looking and going, okay, this is going to cost us a million pounds for this upgrade package. How much time does that take off the car to get around the track and is it worth it? So we have a pounds per Millisecond metric, which helps us on those short term decisions.

[Zachary Crockett]

A key component of every race weekend is tires. Pirelli, an F1 sponsor, supplies 20 sets to each driver every race weekend. And these aren't your run of the mill tires. Each set reportedly runs around $2,700. During a race, drivers go through at least two sets each, and a pit crew in top form can change all four tires in under 2.5 seconds. But not every part of the car is an equal playing field. Like tires, F1 teams have their own manufacturing and testing facilities to design, construct and upgrade the components on their cars. Williams spends £10 million a year to run its factory. It's where they make the car's carbon fiber body and metallic parts that add structural strength to the car.

[Steve Cripps]

We also have a large physical R and D department and that includes all sorts of rigs which allow us to test parts to destruction so that we can find their limits. The chassis are put onto rigs and squeezed with something like three double decker buses worth of weight.

[Zachary Crockett]

And they have a special facility to test the car's aerodynamic performance.

[Steve Cripps]

Where the real R and D is happening is when we're testing parts in a wind tunnel. And we also do a lot of computer simulations to understand what parts are going to work best before we incur the cost of making them. So the wind tunnel is probably the size of half of a football pitch. And it's a big building with a huge fan maybe 15, 20ft across.

[Zachary Crockett]

A model of the car is fixed into position on a conveyor belt. A huge fan blows air over the car, causing the wheels to spin as the conveyor belt moves.

[Steve Cripps]

And then we have some very sophisticated tools that can then measure what happens to that air as it goes over the car, and also how much downforce is created when that air goes over the car.

[Zachary Crockett]

Williams doesn't design and develop all parts of the car.

[Steve Cripps]

We buy our engine from Mercedes. And the reason for that is that to develop a power unit, which is what we call the engines in Formula one, is a multiple billion dollar investment. Sport wouldn't necessarily survive if it needed all 10 teams to spend multiple billions on power units. So there are four or five power unit suppliers on the grid currently. Williams also buys their gearbox and up until recently, the rear suspension from Mercedes as well. Otherwise, most of the components, we design them, build ourselves.

[Zachary Crockett]

The other cost of all these parts, the car spares, computers, mechanics, equipment, is shipping them from race to race.

[Steve Cripps]

The logistics of a Formula one team is probably the most impressive thing that nobody sees when they're watching the sport. We race in Las Vegas one weekend, and then we're in the Middle east week later.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Formula One calendar is punishing. From March to December, there are 24 races in 21 countries. Each team is allowed to have 58 employees work on their cars at each race. And to do their jobs effectively, they need a lot of equipment.

[Steve Cripps]

We fly about 30 tons of equipment to each race. We'll spend about £13 million a year just on moving our equipment from one race to the next.

[Zachary Crockett]

A normal race weekend starts on a Friday. There are three practice sessions, a qualifying session to determine start positions, and the Grand Prix on Sunday.

[Steve Cripps]

The team pack up straight after the race. Literally. As the cars are going across the finish line, the team are packing up the garage, putting it into freight boxes. That goes on a plane on the Monday, flies over to the next destination, and has been unpacked at the next circuit on Tuesday or Wednesday, ready to be used again on Friday.

[Zachary Crockett]

Equipment is shipped mostly by air or truck. DHL is an F1 sponsor and provides logistics support for the teams. Teams also get creative.

[Steve Cripps]

If we have some equipment, which is relatively inexpensive to buy but very heavy, we'll buy six sets of it and we put it into sea freight, and at the start of the year, we'll put it into six different ships and they'll go off around the world. So some of that equipment might only go to three races a year, but when we look at the economics of it all, it's just cheaper to do that than buy one set and fly it via air freight.

[Zachary Crockett]

Darlton Capital's $200 million investment five years ago has proven wise. The sport has been booming. In 2017, Liberty Media bought Formula One Group, the commercial rights holder of the sport, for $8 billion. They're responsible for licensing the brand to Netflix and Apple Studios and attracting an American audience, something the sport lacked for most of its history. Recent years have seen the addition of more U.S. races, Miami and Las Vegas. Today, Liberty Media claims the entity is worth twice what it paid.

[Steve Cripps]

They've really invested in how the sport looks to the outside world and the commerciality of it, which has attracted a lot more partners, sponsors, fans, all things that have improved the sporting spectacle.

[Zachary Crockett]

And the valuations of teams have skyrocketed.

[Steve Cripps]

In terms of valuing a team, the best way to do that is to have a look at some of the transactions that have taken place over the last few years. So a couple of years ago, Alpine sold a share of their team, which valued them at $900 million. More recently, Aston Martin sold a small share which valued them at $3.2 billion.

[Zachary Crockett]

Formula One made over $3.5 billion last year from broadcasters, race promoters and sponsors. About 2 billion of that was profit. Part of that profit gets distributed to the teams in the form of prize money.

[Steve Cripps]

And in 2024, Formula One kept 40% of those profits and the team shared 60%. So about $1.2 billion was shared as prize money to the teams. Now, how that is distributed across the teams is a closely guarded secret.

[Zachary Crockett]

While the specifics of prize money distribution are closely guarded, you can still get a sense of the big picture from published reporting. Every team gets some money for competing and the higher a team places in the Constructors Championship, the bigger its piece of the pie. And Ferrari, the oldest team in the sport, gets a special entitlement worth tens of millions. F1 teams also make money through sponsorships.

[Steve Cripps]

Sponsorship is one of the key revenue sources for teams and there is a correlation between how successful a team is and the amount of revenue it can generate from sponsorship.

[Zachary Crockett]

F1 cars and their drivers essentially serve as billboards. Logos cover the driver's suit and helmet and nearly every inch of the car's chassis. The better the team, the more eyeballs on the car. During broadcasts, a prominent logo on a top performing car will run a sponsor 60 to 80 million dollars. The same spot for a team at the back of the grid, 20 to 30 million. Williams Racing's official title this season is Atlassian Williams Racing. Atlassian is an Australian American software company that pays to be the team's title sponsor. Duracell is another major sponsor of Williams Racing.

[Steve Cripps]

Just behind the driver's head, there's what we call the air intake of the air box. And conveniently, it's shaped a bit like a battery. So we managed to put the visuals of a battery onto the car and gave it the Duracell branding and also run TV adverts with the Duracell Bunny and the Formula one car. So you're mixing the two brands just to make it ever more exciting and increase that brand awareness.

[Zachary Crockett]

Drivers themselves might have personal sponsors. Their contracts usually reserve the right to share real estate on the car, their helmet or jumpsuit. Historically, teams needing to generate revenue would accept drivers who were willing to pay for a seat. The financial support could be family funding or a sponsor.

[Steve Cripps]

Those drivers weren't always the best drivers out there. With the health of the sport today, one of the big improvements we've seen is teams aren't being forced to take drivers because they're able to bring revenue. Teams take drivers because they're the best drivers in the world.

[Zachary Crockett]

So far this season, Williams Racing has had its best performance in years, its fifth in the championship, just behind the four dominant teams. That's a big step up from last year's ninth place finish. And next season things could get even better for them. Every five years, a new set of regulations is released challenging teams to re engineer their car to a different formula.

[Steve Cripps]

2026 is one of the years in which there is a whole new set of regulations. We have a bit of a reset. It allows all the teams to start from the same position because we're changing both the rules around the power unit. So the power unit will be 50% electrical and 50% normal combustion engine. We'll also be running fully sustainable and synthetic fuel which is new to the sport. And that's technology that can be deployed into normal road cars, which is one of the great spin outs from Formula one.

[Zachary Crockett]

The hope remains the same as ever. Build the fastest race car and be world champions, but also attract a lot of eyeballs.

[Steve Cripps]

That's a lot of the focus here. Just to make sure that we're delivering a great sport and spectacle to our fans because that's the most important thing to us. Fans are what drives our sport.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from from Dalvin Abuadji and it would help us so much if you could fill out our super short survey. You can find [e-mail] everydaysurvey we appreciate it so much. All right, until next week.

[Steve Cripps]

I think you've allayed my fears that I can stop and start and screw up and it won't be broadcast to the world.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything Stitcher welcome.

[Steve Cripps]

Back to listen to your heart.

[Zachary Crockett]

I'm Jerry.

[Jerry]

And I'm Jerry's heart.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today's topic, Repatha Evolocumab heart.

[Steve Cripps]

Why'd you pick this one?

[Jerry]

Well, Jerry, for people who have had a heart attack like us, diet and exercise might not be enough to lower the risk of another one.

[Zachary Crockett]

Okay.

[Jerry]

To help know if we're at risk, we should be getting our ldlc, our bad cholesterol checked and talking to our doctor.

[Zachary Crockett]

I'm listening.

[Jerry]

And if it's still too high, Repatha can be added to a statin to lower our LDL C and our heart attack risk.

[Zachary Crockett]

Hmm.

[Steve Cripps]

Guess it's time to ask about repatha.

[Zachary Crockett]

Do not take Repatha if you're allergic to it. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing or swallowing swelling of the face, lips, tongue, throat or arms. Common side effects include runny nose, sore throat, common cold cold symptoms flu or flu like symptoms back pain, high blood sugar and redness Pain or bruising at the injection site Listen to your heart.

[Jerry]

Ask your doctor about Repatha. Learn [e-mail] or call 1-844-repatha they say.

[Zachary Crockett]

If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. At Amica Insurance we're built for our customers and prioritize your needs. Amica empathy is our best policy. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

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