Katharina Nowak did not plan to become the President of the Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix.
She joined Hard Rock Stadium as a Special Events Staff Assistant in September 2019, at a point when the idea of a Formula 1 race in Miami was still little more than a vision held by a handful of people at the top of the organisation.
Born in Vienna and a first-generation college graduate, she had built her career on the commercial side of the Miami Dolphins operation before F1 arrived and changed everything.
When the race was announced, she raised her hand immediately. For the first two years she ran both jobs simultaneously – Dolphins sponsorship and F1 commercial – before eventually moving fully into the Grand Prix operation.
By 2024 she was Vice President. Then, last September, a calendar invite landed for an early morning meeting with ownership.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘8:15 in the morning, that’s an interesting time for a meeting’,” she told Sector’s The Business of Formula 1 podcast.
“I was thinking on my way in – ‘what did I do? Is there anything I could have done?’ So I sat down and thought, ‘OK, what’s happening?’ And then it was ‘wait, hold on, let me call HR’. And then I thought, ‘oh my God, what is happening!'”
What was happening was that her predecessor Tyler Epp – now at the Cadillac F1 Team, as it turned out – was moving on and Managing Partner Tom Garfinkel had already decided what came next.
“Tom, in the most casual way, just looked at me, shook his head, and was like, no, we’re going to be fine. You’re going to do it,” Nowak said.
At 28, she became the youngest President of an F1 grand prix in the sport’s history and one of only two women in the role worldwide.
She arrives at her first race in the job with the event heading into its fifth year, a contract extension through 2041 already secured, and an ambition to turn Miami into something that goes well beyond a round of the world championship.
“If I would have known, or somebody would have told me when I started here in September of 2019, that seven years later I’d be the president of the Miami Grand Prix, I don’t know that I would have really believed anybody,” she said.
The launchpad
Now in its fifth year, the Miami Grand Prix has developed an identity that sets it apart from almost every other race on the calendar.
Brands do not simply show up here and key moments happened because the audience, the market and the attention Miami generates made it the natural choice.
Nowak has watched that pattern develop and is now building deliberately around it.
“It just naturally happened a couple of years ago – Ferrari launched their HP relationship and you saw Ferrari show up in all blue in Miami, which was a massive moment,” she said.
“Then we had the LEGO drivers’ parade last year, which was also a massive moment. So naturally it’s been happening already within the industry, given the market that we are in Miami and also the level of audience that we attract.”
A lot of my communication with teams and the F1 stakeholders is about how we can support them further with our network and our channels to be that true kind of launchpad for anything that’s happening within the F1 industry.
Katharina Nowak
The ambition now is to formalise that dynamic – to make Miami not just a race that attracts big moments, but a platform that actively enables them.
“We’ve kind of started to embrace this launchpad, if you will, of what the Miami Grand Prix can become,” Nowak said.
“A lot of my communication with teams and the F1 stakeholders is about how we can support them further with our network and our channels to be that true kind of launchpad for anything that’s happening within the F1 industry.
“How do we use the audience that we have, the network that we have, the attention that the Miami Grand Prix drives around any type of key announcement or programming?”
Building a new audience
Central to the launchpad idea is the size and nature of the audience Miami can deliver – and this year’s fan festival on South Beach is the clearest expression yet of how deliberately the race is being built to grow that audience rather than simply serve the one it already has.
For the first time, the race promoter itself has taken activation beyond the Hard Rock Stadium campus, establishing a free-to-attend fan zone on South Beach with a main stage, driver appearances and programming running across the entire weekend. The decision to make it free was deliberate.
“We just didn’t want to create any type of barrier of entry,” Nowak explained.
“If you were at all curious about what the Miami Grand Prix was like, you can come get a little taste of it. We looked at the data of who these people are and they’re all net new people.
“The fact that we’re attracting a completely new audience is really interesting. And it’s going to be what drives us to continue to build on this, because we’re able to continue to grow the community that we’re building here.”
An identity taking shape
The Miami Grand Prix heads into its fifth year having won promoter of the year from both F1 and the Autosport Awards.
Two thirds of its audience now comes from the state of Florida – a figure that tells its own story about how the race has evolved from a glamorous novelty into a genuine fixture with a loyal, growing local base sitting beneath the global fanfare.
But Nowak is precise about what that local audience actually looks like and what it demands from the event in terms of hospitality and delivery.
“Knowing that two thirds of our audience is from the state of Florida, we know that we’ve got a very strong contingency of casual fan,” she said.
“And so part of our delivery for the Grand Prix is all about the experience that we deliver for them when they’re not watching track action.
“We programme the heck out of our schedule. There’s not a minute where there’s not activity happening.”
That programming philosophy runs through everything the race builds – from the new MSC Cruises Yacht Club hospitality structure, designed specifically to give fans views of corners unavailable anywhere else on the circuit, to the aforementioned fan zone that debuted this year.
For Nowak, sustaining that level of delivery is both the challenge and the opportunity.
The brands that choose Miami as their moment do so because the audience and the attention justify it. Keeping that proposition intact is what keeps them coming back.
“When you talk about sustainability, it’s on our part to continue to deliver that type of event where we do attract that level of audience, where a brand is enticed to do a launch or a big reveal in Miami because they want to be part of that big moment,” she said.
“It’s a sense of establishment a little bit. It’s starting to feel that around everything that we’re doing, that there’s really this hype and energy around Miami that obviously there’s lots of pressure to continue to deliver and make sure that we sustain that over the years to come.”
For Nowak, the commercial opportunity ahead is still far from fully realised – and that is the point she keeps returning to. Miami has proved what it can be. The next stage is proving how much further it can go.
“The way that brands show up and the way that we can engage with audiences and continue to customise that experience – I think there’s a tonne more growth and opportunity for brands to show up in different ways,” she said.
Listen to the full interview with Katharina Nowak as part of the latest episode of The Business of Formula 1
