Formula 1 sells proximity. Journalism pays the price.
Not everyone deserves a press pass. But when F1 markets proximity as proof of worth, it cannot act innocent about the scramble to get close.
At 18, I spent my summer knee-deep in journalism. It changed my life.
For the first time, I’d left home entirely by myself, flying 2,251 miles (around 4,000 km) for the sole purpose of writing. I worked days that lasted longer than 10 hours, creating and editing articles from sun-up to sun-down and learning the ins and outs of reporting from the best of the best. I was forced to overcome my fear of pulling aside a stranger for an on-the-street interview. I went undercover, posing as a student on a field trip while secretly investigating whether convenience stores in Trenton were selling expired products. It was, honestly, the privilege of a lifetime.
What stayed with me was not some romantic fantasy of the newsroom. It was not the idea that journalism would make me glamorous, or cool, or important, or close to the people I admired. It was something simpler and much more complicated than that: that asking questions well is difficult, and that saying what needs to be said — especially when it would be simpler not to — is even harder.
I carry this standard with me when I write about Formula 1. As such, it’s easy to get angry at the lazy conversation around access.
It’s no surprise that Jake Shane’s poorly received job as an interviewer at the Oscars and Max Verstappen’s removal of Giles Richards at the post-Suzuka press conference go hand-in-hand. The common idea floating around both of those incidents? Not everyone deserves a press pass.
To a degree, I concur — journalism has boundaries, as it should. A press credential is not a cute little object or a souvenir of your proximity to fame. It is a working tool, and if that sounds severe, that’s because it is. The FIA’s own 2026 guidance says as much: media accreditation is restricted to those they deem to be professional journalists and photographers. Social media managers and influencers are, unsurprisingly, explicitly excluded.
F1 sells the paddock as a closed door. But when it spends years conflating proximity with legitimacy, it cannot turn around and act innocent when people start clawing at it.
The easy version is to sneer at creators, wannabes, fans, or young media workers who are trying to get as close as they possibly can to Formula 1. The smarter version — the more honest one — is to ask why they were taught that getting close was the thing that mattered most.
Formula 1 did not accidentally create a culture obsessed with access. It branded one.
Let’s FaceTime.
The paddock: a workplace, and a fantasy
The paddock should, in theory, be one of the simplest spaces in the sport to understand.
It is a working environment before anything else — a restricted space behind the garages where the sport actually lives when it is not on camera. Team hospitality structures and motorhomes, engineers bent over laptops, mechanics moving between the garages and the back of house, drivers slipping between debriefs and media obligations, and the press doing its best work under time pressure and bad coffee.
The garages themselves open onto the pit lane; the paddock sits behind them as the moving city that supports the weekend. It is also where team personnel, FIA officials, PR staff, sponsors, and accredited media circulate in overlapping rhythms — all separated by badges, permissions, and an invisible but very real hierarchy of who is allowed where.
The paddock is incredibly different from the fantasy version that gets sold at prices most people will never touch. While in reality, it is a workplace built on logistics, routine, hierarchy, and exhaustion, the sport prefers to market it as something closer to a passport stamp for significance.
F1 has spent years selling it as exactly that.
Official F1 hospitality language promises fans they can “step behind the scenes,” “walk among the teams and stars,” hear from drivers, access pit-lane walks, and get closer to the “backstage” area of the sport. The F1 Experiences page advertises VIP access to the paddock itself, where guests can get exclusive access to see “each team’s Grand Prix weekend home base”, stand in a viewing terrace above a team garage, and potentially grab a selfie with a driver.
It works the way invitation economies always work. The paddock is, to F1, as the Met Gala and Paris Fashion Week are to the world of fashion. Long has the Anna Wintour-adjacent dream existed — the one where being invited to sit in the front matters almost as much as what you wear once you are there. The front row is never just a row of seats; it is a public ranking system. It’s no different with F1. When a sport repeatedly presents closeness as the most seductive form of belonging, people stop seeing access as a neutral logistical category. Instead, it becomes something symbolic. A marker, or proof — the thing that separates the people who are really “in it” from the people who are merely watching from outside the ropes.
That is not a side effect. It is part of the product. And, unfortunately, once proximity becomes one of the sport’s most powerful symbols of worth, the scramble toward it stops being a mystery and starts looking rational.
There is a lazy version of the story: shout all influencers are bad! and call it a day. The much more unsettling truth? Younger audiences increasingly do not recognize the line between journalism and PR, and that sports media offers one of the clearest windows into that collapse. Journalist Olivia Hicks describes cousins and friends who assumed teams, drivers, or the sport itself must be paying her — and who, more disturbingly, did not instinctively find that arrangement strange.
F1 itself is a perfect case study in the broader crisis of media literacy and ethics — where access, sponsorship, branded content, and reporting now often occupy the same visual and cultural space.
That is the version of the problem that’s absolutely worth taking seriously, for all its messy and multi-faceted truth — because in Formula 1, the word “reporter” exists in a very crowded room.
At its best, it can mean a credentialed journalist trying to hold the sport accountable. It can mean a presenter or a team-affiliated host. These days, it can mean a content creator with a phone, a sponsored trip, and a very polished edit cadence. It can mean someone in a branded partnership making highly watchable, low-friction access content that looks adjacent to reporting — even when it is not accountable to the same standards. The lines are encouraged to blur because blurred lines are commercially useful.
The incentives for playing your part in the paddock are not random. They are constantly being built.
It’s terrifying to consider the ways sports media is broadly becoming a place where access, hospitality, and influence blur into one another. This year, NBCUniversal announced that its 2026 Winter Olympics coverage would again include a Creator Collective, giving more than 25 creators “unrivaled on-the-ground access” to tell the story of the Games through their own eyes. That may not be inherently sinister, but it is proof that major sports properties now understand creator access as a core part of their media strategy, not an add-on.
Formula 1 is not outside that trend. Lifestyle media gets promised “unique, never-before-seen” content to the sport through partnerships like the 2024 Formula 1 collaboration with Condé Nast, as referenced by Hicks. Official hospitality products sell closeness as aspiration too, with the biggest example being the Paddock Club itself, or at least the minutiae of it — such as special-edition purchases like House 44, a collaboration with Soho House and Lewis Hamilton built around track and paddock experiences that will put fans out $20,000.
Sponsors host people. Lifestyle publications get “exclusive access.” Hospitality packages sell closeness as aspiration. Brand collaborations create their own paths inward. Publications and personalities who are not doing independent beat reporting still end up close enough to touch the mythology of the thing. Teams and promoters hand over time and faces to creators who can produce fast, digestible, highly shareable content, understanding perfectly well that TikToks and Instagram posts can do things for the brand that independent reporting often cannot.
The sport may keep the formal accreditation gate narrow, but around that narrow gate sits a much larger informal economy of access. That matters because access is not only about who gets into the media center — it’s about who gets to feel inside the sport. If one route inward comes with difficult ethical obligations, while another comes with better vibes, nicer lighting, and fewer uncomfortable questions, then of course the ecosystem starts tilting toward the second one.
That is not journalism’s fault. It is not the creators’ fault either — at least not primarily.
It is an ecosystem problem.
Not everyone deserves a press pass
At its core, true journalism is not just “content, but closer.”
It comes with obligations: verification, independence, conflict-of-interest discipline, skepticism, and the willingness to ask questions that may not make you popular in the room you are standing in. Receiving freebies (or even disclosed perks) in exchange for a good word can hang over coverage. The point is that there is no clean binary — one where journalists are pure, and content creators are corrupt. Rather, it is that the system rewards blurred lines, inconsistent disclosure, and access itself as one of the most valuable currencies in the room.
Not everyone who wants proximity deserves media accreditation. A press pass is not a reward for good vibes or fandom, nor is it a backstage souvenir or a prettier version of VIP access. If journalism is going to mean anything in Formula 1 — and I think it absolutely has to — then the answer cannot be that everyone with a camera, a following, and a brand deal is functionally the same thing as a journalist.
They are not the same thing. Saying that is not elitist — it is ethically necessary.
That being said, there should be zero smugness after that point is made. The sport sells exclusivity. It sells the paddock as the place where the real version of Formula 1 lives, and then it sells access to that place at $18,000 a piece. The machine keeps telling people that closeness is not just glamorous, but meaningful. Even worse, it puts monetary value on the word “meaningful” itself, asking its fans to prove just how much they’re willing to pay for a slice of the glitz.
So, when fans, creators, ambitious young media workers, and everybody else with eyes and a pulse start trying to get as close as possible, what exactly are we pretending to be shocked by? Are we supposed to be shocked that people responded rationally to the incentives in front of them?
The problem is not that too many people want in. The problem is that F1 has made getting close feel like the only way to count.
Look at who is actually working their way up the creator economy in the first place. For plenty of people — especially those who did not inherit old media access, institutional pedigree, or family money — building an audience online is one of the few ladders available. For women, queer creators, creators of color, and anyone else who has already had to fight for visibility in rooms that were not designed with them in mind, social media can be less a shortcut than a workaround. It is accessible, it is clickable, and, if played right, it is fast. As such, it’s not hard to understand why people might try to leverage the platform they’ve built to get closer to a sport that markets itself as something so far away.
In the eyes of many, F1 is a luxury dreamscape, and if it keeps telling the world that the paddock is where significance lives, it should not act scandalized when people who were never going to be gently ushered through the front door start looking for another entrance.
When you love something, you are able to point out its pain points — not as flaws, but as room for growth. The sport’s most easily identifiable pain point? It was built around privilege long before a single influencer ever pointed a phone at it.
The road to the grid has always been brutally expensive. As far back as 2015, families were reported to already be spending six-figure sums annually at the top levels of karting, with a single European race weekend capable of costing tens of thousands. That was a decade ago, and nothing about the ladder has become less financially punishing since, with fans pointing out not just impossibly high ticket prices to attend in person, but impossibly high prices just to stream the sport. The sport where the stars of the show own $3.5 million yachts (€3.9 m), have car collections worth $6.4 million (€5.8 m), or live within miles of each other in the most expensive place in the world. So, no — I am not terribly interested in a moral panic about people trying to get close to a group of men who were born with silver spoons in their mouths, each one with “F1” engraved on the handle.
That does not erase what drivers have worked through. It does not mean they have not suffered, sacrificed, or earned their place, nor does it flatten the human difficulty of elite sport. What it does mean is that we should be careful about pretending Formula 1 is some egalitarian meritocracy suddenly under threat from the wrong kinds of people wanting access. The sport has always been stratified. The difference now is that the outer rings of that hierarchy are more visible, more online, and more contested.
Once a sport turns proximity into status, fogs the distinction between journalism and branding, and rewards access-adjacent storytelling with glamour, visibility, and social capital, it simply cannot turn around and dump all the moral responsibility on the people trying to build careers inside the world it made.
Work for your press pass — but don’t give up your dignity for it
It’s easy to talk about how unclear everything feels, but if that’s all that this article is does, it’s failed to do the job I created FaceTime for. The point is not just to call out that the system is warped. The point is to say how to correct that. I say a better version of this ecosystem is a great place to start.
Formula 1 needs to draw much clearer distinctions between:
independent reporting,
branded content,
team-affiliated storytelling,
creator access,
and hospitality-driven promotional work.
Those distinctions do not need to be punitive — they just need to be real.
The sport would benefit from demanding stronger disclosure norms. The FTC’s guidance for influencers and endorsers is clear that material connections to brands should be disclosed, because audiences deserve to know when a recommendation or a moment of coverage is shaped by a relationship. F1’s ecosystem does not need less creator work. It needs consistent honesty around how that work is funded, facilitated, or rewarded.
Fundamentally, F1 needs to protect journalism more deliberately than it currently does.
That means protecting reporting access as a working necessity, not treating it like one flavor of lifestyle credential in a buffet of branded closeness. There is so much power in recognizing that the people asking difficult questions are not ornamental to the sport, but are part of how the public understands it.
The conversation around F1 needs to be grounded in the fact that everyone — fans, reporters, and creators alike — needs to refuse the cheap binary. Nobody can be the enemy in a system that fails to provide the right resources to the people who keep it alive. Creators are not the enemy, journalists are not relics, and hospitality guests are not automatically unserious. Fans who want “in” are not pathetic for desiring what the sport has spent years teaching them to want. The real problem is a sport that keeps monetizing intimacy while getting fuzzier and fuzzier about what that intimacy is for.
I do not think wanting a press pass is embarrassing.
I do not think it is shameful to want into the room where questions can be asked properly. I do not think it makes young, aspiring journalists unserious (nor does it make content creators delusional) to say plainly that they intend to get there. I have always been a firm believer that if something exists for other people, it is not unrealistic to believe you can have it for yourself. Some things are difficult, but that does not necessarily make them impossible.
Still, no person should feel like they have to dissolve into the machine to get there.
Chasing a paddock pass should not be done because you believe proximity itself will save you, validate you, or magically make you more worthy. You should chase it because journalism matters. Because the questions matter, and because asking better ones from further inside the sport will always be one of the best reasons to want access at all.
I refuse to accept the framing that the only available choices are to worship the closed door, become another polished cog in the brand machine, or give up and sneer at it from the outside. There is a fourth option: to know exactly what the machine is doing. To understand why it is seductive, and to defend the standards of journalism anyway. It’s only then that you can walk toward the door with your dignity still attached to you.
💌 Thanks for picking up my FaceTime! This one has been sitting with me for a while. Is it clear that I F1 almost as much as I love honest, true journalism?
If you’d like, you can subscribe to FaceTime for free so you don’t miss the next one, share this with the friend you debrief F1 with, or send me a message — I want to hear from you!
Really enjoyed reading! The journalism vs content creation binary is a bit of a red herring. The harder question is disclosure, not whether creators belong in the paddock, but whether audiences can tell the difference between a sponsored trip and independent reporting when both produce the same type of content.
Good read. I personally don’t think journalism and content creation need to be mutually exclusive – I like to think I do a mix of both. But I agree entirely with your conclusion!
Also, I’m not a coffee drinker myself but have listened to enough colleagues talking about it to know there is usually some good coffee around if you know where to look (Ferrari hospitality!)