$10billion F1 teams? Briatore's take on teams' spiralling values

Will Formula 1 teams soon be worth $10billion?

Flavio Briatore reckons so, and thinks nothing proves the huge escalation in teams’ values better than the potential selling price of minority shareholder Otro Capital’s 24% stake in the Alpine F1 team he runs.

Speaking in an exclusive interview for The Race Business’s ‘In Conversation With…’ series, Briatore give his own take on the team value question as someone who has made repeated returns to F1 team management since first winning championships with Benetton in the 1990s - during a period when at one point he part-owned not just Benetton but also Ligier and Minardi.

"I sold my share in Benetton, and the value of the team was $80million," said Briatore. "OK, now you're talking about $3.5billion, $4billion. And everybody’s predicting, you're talking with these finance people, talking about, "OK, Formula 1 in three, four years, the team is worth $10billion."

Asked if he felt F1 team valuations had "topped out", Briatore joked "if the team was mine, I'd have sold already!"

Part of Alpine is, of course, for sale right now.

Otro Capital - an investor group that includes NFL players Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, golfer Rory McIlroy and boxer Anthony Joshua - purchased its 24% stake in Alpine for €200million in June 2023.

In recent months, Otro has sought to sell its stake in Alpine - with Renault having intervened in talks to sell the share to Mercedes at the end of May 2026.

When Forbes’s valuation of Alpine at $2.45bn/€2bn was put to Briatore, he used the talks over the Otro shareholding sale to argue that actually the Alpine F1 team was now worth almost half the value of parent brand Renault itself.

"No, no, we are more, because we have an offer, we have an [offer] for the 24% of Otro, the valuation [is] 3.2. So we have 40% of the valuation of Renault.

"All [of] Renault is worth 8.3 [billion]. And we're working at this 3.5 [billion] valuation. So we're representing 40% or 50%."

Renault has a right of veto over any change of ownership of the Otro shares until September, and the firm’s CEO Francois Provost told The Race last month that Renault regarded its relationship with Otro as "not successful".

But Briatore played down the relevance of the September deadline on the Otro share sale decision, pointing out that given the likely massive asking price, it would be foolish for an investor to spend that much on what would only be a minority shareholding if it wasn’t actually aligned with the majority partner that held all the power. 

"Not really my problem, this is more the issue of Renault. Sure, to have a partner, of 24%, I expect somebody to give not only the finance, [but to] give some help in technology or whatever, or whatever in finance," said Briatore.

"But in September, I don't think nothing [will] happen dramatically, because I see it as very difficult for somebody to buy 24% of one company, with no agreement with the majority. I never see somebody spend 600 million to buy a minority, to be signed as partner, if you don't agree with the majority. See what happens.

"Renault is negotiating. For the team point of view, for me, it makes no difference. We have Otro, now tomorrow we have somebody else."

Briatore spoke about numerous topics in the exclusive and highly revelatory interview - including Benetton’s rise in F1, an astonishing F1 story involving Donald Trump, and his opinions on how to further grow F1.

Watch the full interview below or listen to it here, and read interviewer Darren Cox’s behind the scenes take.