Congress Is Spoiling for a Fight With Formula One

Plus: Have you lost your toupée?

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

Members of Congress have important special interests back home in their states and districts. For some, it’s the cattle industry, grape growers and wine manufacturers, chip makers, big oil, big coal, or even lobster. For a certain pocket of the Midwest, it’s automobile manufacturers, particularly General Motors. This is why a handful of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are using their platform and power to pressure Formula One into allowing an Andretti Cadillac team into the circuit.

It began when legendary motorsport driver Mario Andretti attempted to support his son Michael’s bid to have the Andretti-Cadillac team added to the Formula One circuit. The current setup is ten teams with two drivers each, a total of twenty cars. Formula One Group CEO Stefano Domenicali quickly dismissed the proposal, suggesting more cars on the track is not the answer. 

Then, for some reason, Congress got involved. Rep. John James (R-Mich.) sent a letter to owners of Formula One demanding answers to why Andretti can’t have his team in F1. He also held a press conference on Capitol Hill alongside Andretti to give the issue some extra visibility with the media.

The United States hosts races in cities such as Las Vegas, Austin, and Miami. Because of the sport’s growing stateside presence, James argued, F1 needs to let American vehicles into the races. Gaining unqualified access to F1’s level of competition doesn’t remotely fit the “free market” paradigm, but it’s how James characterized it:

This is a big opportunity for Formula One. But if they want access to American markets, if they want free markets, then they have to play fair, American autos should have the opportunity to compete against any other autos across the world. And that’s why we're here: Fairness. Free trade.

Since then, other lawmakers have gotten involved. In his capacity as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter to the head of F1 and the head of the company that owns F1 informing them he would be launching an investigation into potentially “anticompetitive conduct”:

If Formula One must hinder competition and harm consumers to protect failing competitors, then the entire Formula One model may be broken and the entity cannot hide behind the necessity of a sports league to pursue anticompetitive conduct. Delaying Andretti Cadillac’s entry into Formula One for even one year will harm American consumers to benefit failing Formula One teams.

While Jordan brought a lot of heat to his letter, his accusations of an American lockout by the Eurocentric F1 doesn’t really hold up. It’s already known that Oracle Red Bull and Scuderia AlphaTauri will be transitioning from Honda to Ford powertrains for the 2026 season through at least 2030. So the idea that American motors won’t be on the track at all is false. 

No one on Capitol Hill seems to care about those details. Because after Jordan and James shot their shots, still more lawmakers decided to get in on the action. A bipartisan group of senators called on the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to investigate Andretti-Cadillac’s exclusion from F1. 

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) led the group’s initiative of writing a letter in which they speculated that “it is possible that such a refusal to deal—especially if orchestrated through a group boycott—could violate U.S. antitrust laws.”

The day after Klobuchar and co. published their letter, Andretti revealed a tense conversation between himself and Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei during the Miami Grand Prix just a couple weeks prior. (Liberty is the owner of F1.) According to Andretti, Maffei told him:

Mario, I want to tell you that I will do everything in my power to see that Michael never enters Formula 1.

Michael Andretti, Mario’s son, currently runs Andretti Global and led the team’s bid for F1 access. 

“I could not believe that. That one really floored me,” Andretti told NBC. “We’re talking about business. I didn’t know it was something so personal. That was really—oh, my goodness. I could not believe it. It was just like a bullet through my heart.”

That was two weekends ago. This past weekend, during the Monaco Grand Prix, Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) boss Mohammed Ben Sulayem offered advice to Andretti, telling Reuters:

I would advise [Andretti-Cadillac] to go and buy another team, not to come as the eleventh team. I feel that some teams need to be refreshed. What is better? To have eleven teams as a number or ten and they are strong? I still believe we should have more teams but not any teams. The right teams.

The FIA is Formula One’s governing body, and while Sulayem has advocated for expanding the number of teams and drivers, the snipe at American quality is something I’m sure American lawmakers will handle in a calm and normal fashion.

When Congress returns from the break, more action could follow. I’ve been told the possibility of hearings is on the table. Andretti has also enlisted help from two lobbying shops in Washington, Miller Strategies and the Tiber Creek Group, according to recent filings. 

It’s no surprise that one of the lobbyists with the latter firm is Klobuchar’s own former chief counsel, Tim Molino. These firms also represent clients like Comcast and health insurance giant Cigna, and they specialize in getting lawmakers to attract media attention to issues by doing things like holding press conferences and writing letters. 

The F1 fiasco is a perfect example of how special interests push U.S. lawmakers to demand access to something on their behalf. In an election year without much non-election-related business on the calendar, this sort of low-stakes cause célèbre also provides an easy way to score political points and court attention from journalists who are often as bored as the lawmakers they are covering when it comes to the pattern of the election-focused news cycle. 

The Whig Party

Capitol Hill is an exceptionally weird place. Beyond the antics of our more eccentric lawmakers you might see on C-SPAN, the complex itself is a source of fascination: It contains a massive network of connected office buildings, and those buildings are filled with more than 17,000 staffers—some of our country’s most politically ambitious, stressed, and overworked citizens.

When Congress is in recess, and particularly when the recess goes longer than usual, strange things happen here. Here are two moments from this week:

This is why I recommend Veep as the most accurate television show ever made about Washington. Sometimes it’s a little too on the nose.

You LOVE to see it

Philadelphia’s LOVE Park—officially called John F. Kennedy Plaza, but popularly named for the famous LOVE sculpture placed there—was an iconic public space that played a pivotal role in the history and growth of street skateboarding in the Eastern United States during the 1990s. In later years, the city tore it down and made it unskateable. 

But the obsession with the park has endured, with some skaters even searching out the old blocks of granite collecting moss in a waste zone outside the city. Now the whole park is being recreated in Malmö, Sweden, brick by brick. According to the Philly Voice:

When LOVE Park was renovated between 2016 and 2018, skaters mourned the loss of the ledges, steps and planters that made it the perfect place to shred. But the old skating destination is now getting a second life across the Atlantic in Sweden.

The city of Malmö, located along the southern coast of the country, will open a re-created version of the park on Saturday. LOVE Malmö was constructed with granite slabs and ledges, a lamppost and two trash cans salvaged from the Philadelphia site and designed according to the original 1965 blueprints by Edmund Bacon and Vincent Kling. The project is the culmination of a years-long collaboration between the two cities, as well as Skate Philly and Bryggeriet, Malmö’s skateboarding association.

Skateboarding is the only Olympic sport with no actual rules or set field of play, even if governing bodies attempt to impose some amount of structure during these competitions. It’s also the only Olympic event that is actually illegal in many of the places where it is most commonly practiced—public plazas. Maybe that’s why many skateboarders—myself included—do not care much for its role in the Olympic games.

Cities can build all the skateparks they want; it’s good, and it serves a real purpose. But officially sanctioned skateparks will always function more like sweaty gymnasiums than exciting places of discovery and joy, while architecture not intended for skateboarding will forever remain the preferred option. It’s coded into the sport’s DNA. There really isn’t anything a local government can do about that, except perhaps recreating historic pedestrian plazas just for the skaters who used to terrorize the originals.

Read more about the park’s reconstruction in Sweden at Jenkem Magazine.