Within the space of a week, Formula 1 confirmed a second season of its YouTube series with Amelia Dimoldenberg and Lando Norris dropped a collaboration with the Sidemen.
Neither is an isolated marketing moment and both sit within a much broader shift already under way across the sport, from team-run creator programmes to driver-led content built entirely outside official channels.
That shift is a genuinely recent one. As recently as 2016, Lewis Hamilton was sent cease and desist letters by then-F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone for posting onboard footage clips to his own Instagram account.
Ecclestone’s view of the sport’s digital presence was famously dismissive – he argued there was no clear way to monetise social media and preferred to focus the business on television rights, hosting fees and sponsorship.
When Liberty Media completed its takeover, one of its earliest moves was to relax those restrictions, loosening the rules that had prevented teams, drivers and outside creators from sharing original content at all.
Social media strategist Sophie Hunter told Sector the current wave of creator partnerships reflects a genuine trade-off working in both directions, rather than F1 simply buying reach.
The creator gains access to the scale and spectacle of F1, while F1 gains credibility and visibility with audiences it otherwise may struggle to reach through its own channels.
Sophie Hunter
“Content creator collaborations are audience crossover at their best,” she said.
“The creator gains access to the scale and spectacle of F1, while F1 gains credibility and visibility with audiences it otherwise may struggle to reach through its own channels.
“And crucially, the content has the potential to feel like entertainment first and marketing second, which is increasingly where the strongest brand partnerships sit.”
Aston Martin’s Creator Collective
The Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team has a number of groundbreaking partners, TikTok is one of them.
Now entering its second year, the Creator Collective is run with TikTok as a Global Partner, selecting five UK-based creators each season and giving them paddock access, mentorship and studio space, alongside an expanding international presence at races and off-track events.
Rob Bloom, Chief Marketing Officer, told Sector the programme grew directly out of listening to what the team’s TikTok community was already doing organically.
“I think the work we’ve done with TikTok is very much listening to the community,” he said.
“The kind of activations we’ve done, even when we’re talking about exact match nail polish, because we can see nail talk on TikTok going from cooking to F1.
“So we go out there and say this is your AMR25 exact match colour, and if you’re an IAM member, it’s your opportunity to get your hands on one of these limited edition products.”
Bloom was clear that the programme’s value lies in access rather than control, a distinction he said is central to why it works.
“We’ll provide a brief, we’ll say we feel this is a story, but you tell that story in your way,” Bloom said.
“We don’t provide editorial guardrails that prohibit creators from expressing themselves in their own way. That’s the authenticity, and that’s what makes it so special.”
We were a pioneer in bringing creators into Formula One…it’s not really about people who have made it. It’s about giving opportunities for new people to come and express themselves.
Rob Bloom
Bloom also positioned Aston Martin’s early move into this space as a deliberate first-mover strategy rather than a reactive one.
“We were a pioneer in bringing creators into Formula One,” he added.
“And even today we launch Creator Collective Season 2, expanding the search, new creators. It’s not really about people who have made it. It’s about giving opportunities for new people to come and express themselves.”
A sport-commissioned format
Where Aston Martin’s approach is structural, F1’s own deal with Amelia Dimoldenberg is closer to traditional content commissioning, built around a single presenter’s existing audience rather than a rotating cast of creators.
Season one of Passenger Princess drew more than 289 million views, pairing Dimoldenberg with a line-up of drivers as she worked toward her driving licence.
Season two was announced last week and will expand from four episodes to six, featuring Charles Leclerc, Franco Colapinto, Valtteri Bottas, Gabriel Bortoleto, Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Alex Albon.
Emily Prazer, Chief Commercial Officer of F1, said the format’s value lies in Dimoldenberg’s own connection with audiences the sport has historically struggled to reach directly.
“Amelia has a remarkable ability to connect with audiences through humour, authenticity and creativity,” she said.
“With Formula 1’s fanbase now exceeding 830 million worldwide, this series is a brilliant way to engage both existing fans and new audiences.”
A driver-led crossover
The third model sits outside any formal team or F1-run programme entirely.
The Sidemen, one of YouTube’s largest group channels, presented a collaboration with reigning world champion and McLaren Mastercard F1 Team driver Lando Norris.
The content landed as two distinct pieces rather than one. The first was a “Sidemen Sundays” episode, the group’s flagship series, in which Norris joined regulars Miniminter, Zerkaa, Vikkstar123, TBJZL, Behzinga and W2S to identify the real F1 driver from a masked line-up of six contestants.
The second was “Unboxed,” a behind-the-scenes companion piece published on McLaren’s own channel, following Norris through the day itself at the Sidemen’s Side+ Studio and billed as showing “every unscripted moment, from the first introductions to the final wrap.”
That second release is the more telling one. Rather than simply letting Norris guest on someone else’s show, McLaren treated the collaboration as content worth producing and distributing in its own right.
It isn’t a one-off crossover either – Norris’s own content brand, Quadrant, ran a head-to-head gaming challenge against the Sidemen back in 2023, making this an ongoing relationship between a driver’s personal content operation and one of YouTube’s biggest channels, built entirely outside the team’s conventional marketing output.
What connects a team-run TikTok programme, a commissioned celebrity format and a driver’s personal YouTube crossover is the underlying logic Hunter described – each trades access for reach, and each works precisely because it doesn’t look like advertising.
A sport that once sent legal letters over an Instagram clip is now actively engineering the conditions for exactly that kind of content to happen, at scale, across every level of the paddock.
