Motorsport is evolving. The electrification of racing may have met a few bumps along the road, but there are plenty of other innovations alongside changing powertrains. One company is pioneering new approaches revolving around the most important fuel for motorsport – fan engagement. Veloce Media Group has a portfolio spanning virtual to real racing. I talked to the team about the company’s innovative approach to motorsport.
Veloce’s Big Bet On Esports
“Veloce Media Group grew initially out of Esports and gaming,” says Daniel Bailey, CEO, Veloce Media Group. “Soon after CVC Capital Partners sold Formula One to Liberty Media, we recognized there was a massive audience interest in this area. Now we’re the biggest sim racing talent manager in the world, whether it’s the Veloce Elites team itself or our customer teams in Formula One. We also signed the biggest racing gaming content creator channels in the world, which now means that we’re the biggest racing gaming media network, with 55 million subscribers, north of 500 million views a month. Many modern motorsport fans consume racing in a more fanatical way. Content creators play these games, have fun, and distribute the videos on their channels. We provided an infrastructure network to consolidate those channels.”
Veloce saw an opportunity that wasn’t being exploited by traditional racing organizations. “The beauty of motorsport, if you want to build businesses in it, is the traditional rights holders tend to be quite slow to move away from focusing on just running racing cars on track and trying to sell sponsorship,” says Bailey. “There are always the peripheral areas in the industry that are moving fast. We recognized with Esports and sim racing, there was a new opportunity for accessibility, to democratize people’s involvement. Now, the modern consumer of motorsport is doing it in different ways. They’re watching their favorite gaming content creators, but they’re also watching Formula One, and they’re also watching F1 sim racing.”
Another Veloce project aimed at this modern type of fan engagement is Quadrant, initially set up as a separate entity with Lando Norris during the Covid pandemic, some years before he became 2025 F1 World Champion. “We had identified Lando, who was one of the first Formula One drivers to really look at streaming, creating content himself, to speak to that generation of fan,” says Jamie MacLaurin, CEO, Quadrant. “We approached him and his team with the vision. It was a strategy on the back of a napkin at the time. We were strong in gaming and content. He was the perfect fit. We could leverage his streaming and content creation. We had a hero we could position at the center of the business. It was his passion, so it felt authentic. We had the opportunity when Formula 1 was canceled, and Lando was at home, to invest proper energy and time into this as a project. From there, we snowballed off the back of its early success.”
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“From day one, it was Esports, it was gaming, it was content, it was apparel,” continues MacLaurin. “Fast forward to today, we are now a content brand. We’ve doubled down on that strategy to great success and grown a huge global audience. That has enabled us to speak to some huge blue-chip brands and companies along the way.” Apparel also provides a significant income for Quadrant. “Our clothing range serves two purposes. One is a major revenue stream. We’re positioned as a streetwear brand, harnessing Lando’s passion for fashion and our audience’s engagement in the brand, wanting to show off that they’re Quadrant fans. We do anywhere between six to eight collections a year centered around racing themes. We’ve got a Le Mans collection.”
Quadrant has some similarities to Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which has been so successful at expanding the F1 fanbase. “There are always fans that want to see more of those drivers, including off the track, because with Formula One, you really only see the drivers in the factories or at the racetracks,” says MacLaurin. “We show drivers in much more casual environments. The content we create transcends how fans engage with the sport itself. It might not be that they’re watching Formula One first. They might have found Formula One and Lando through our YouTube channel. Then they want to watch a race.”
Quadrant has become a strong content platform. “Now we’ve grown our audience to 1.3 million on YouTube,” says MacLaurin. “We’re doing roughly 60 to 75 million views a year on our channel, and that’s growing 50% year on year. This year, our ambition is to hit $7 or 8 million in revenue, which would skew to about 70% on partnerships and 30% to apparel. We want to be the biggest motorsport platform in the world, working with every driver on the grid and creating content with them. We worked with Ollie Bearman as a new driver in Formula One. He produced a video with us that achieved 11 million views and is our most watched video ever on the channel.” This involved Bearman entering a karting competition dressed as an old man, only revealing his identity after winning. Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris also had millions of views for a karting video with Quadrant, while Alex Albon took 25 kids on a karting experience in Dubai. “We’re gaining momentum. Lando is critical for the business as a founder. He has equity, he’s our biggest personal shareholder. But we can’t just be leaning on Lando. We need to be spreading the net far beyond him, working with the new drivers in Formula One, and legacy drivers like Valtteri Bottas, Sainz and Albon.”
Veloce Returns To Real-World Racing With Extreme H
Veloce is also now returning to more direct involvement with real-world racing. Not only does the company sponsor an E1 electric powerboat racing group, Team Miami, Bailey is considering acquiring an E1 team outright. Veloce has also just announced its entry into Extreme H. The company had been an Extreme E team owner for most of the series’ existence, with considerable success, but didn’t end up participating in the first round of Extreme H in 2025. “Veloce acquired Quadrant last year,” explains Bailey. “We were structuring the sale to SEGG. If you do too many things, you don’t do enough of them, so we sat on the fence. But adding Extreme H now positions us as a new media sports rights holder. We’re across all the growth areas of motorsport, which is why we get to have a partnership with E.ON, for example.”
One of the biggest recent Veloce deals was the collaboration with Polymarket to create a new sports prediction platform via the sports.com website, which resulted from Veloce’s acquisition by Sports Entertainment Gaming Global Corp (SEGG). Veloce had dabbled in Web3 before with its VEXT token, from which the company has now divested itself, but the Polymarket partnership is much more mainstream in focus. “Sports.com is an asset that we own with SEGG,” says Bailey. “Polymarket is a generic prediction site, whereas we’re trying to create the home of sports predictions. They handle the backend technology. We provide a perfect funnel to bring our audience to it.”
“We launched in the sports prediction market just before the World Cup in America,” says Marc Bircham, Chairman of the Board, SEGG Media. “We’re an American-based company. Other sports that we can attack with it is E1, motorsports, and especially cricket, which a lot of our North American friends don’t know about. In India, you’re not allowed to sports bet, but you can sports predict, so that’s a market that we’re looking to attract as well.”
“Under 25% of Polymarket’s predictions are sport,” adds Bailey. “They wanted to grow their sports prediction market. The traditional gambling franchises are recognizing that this isn’t gambling, because there’s no house. It’s peer to peer transactions.” While Polymarket is still obscure to many, Sports.com aims to bring predictions technology to a more mainstream audience. “Sports.com Predict is a massive opportunity, because you can pull in general sports fans who don’t know a lot about crypto or stable coins.”
“Accessibility is key,” adds Jack Clarke, Chief Strategy Officer, Veloce Media Group. “You don’t get more accessible than sports.com if you’re a sports fan. That accessibility is the number one driver, bringing audiences. At Veloce we’ve spent a long time aggregating these audiences. It needs to be intuitive, it needs to be accessible, and the sandbox that we’ve created optimizes that, makes the migration process easier, and gives fans a place to invest even further.”
“There will come a time when we start encouraging our audience to come across to Sports.com Predict from racing,” says Bailey. “We also have some of the biggest FIFA content creators in the world. We’ve only launched Sports.com Predict initially as a World Cup prediction platform, but we’re going to be expanding it into motorsport, into cricket, into golf, into tennis, into anything you can think of. We have a massive audience segment who are digitally native to start pushing across. From SEGG’s perspective, the Veloce acquisition makes even more sense, because not only are we bringing $20 million revenue, we’re also bringing an audience base that we can convert in very favorable terms to a prediction platform.”
Veloce: Motorsport For A Digital Era
“The definition of motorsport doesn’t always have to be a motor being active at the time,” says Bailey. “It’s like football. If you’re consuming football, it comes in multiple different ways. You could be watching a FIFA content creator. Our real-world side of competition, that’s pure motorsport in its most modern form, especially with hydrogen racing. Our digital media ecosystem across Esports, gaming and content is beneficial to the Formula One world, the IndyCar world, the WEC world, because it’s a way of allowing that audience who might be interested in watching a Formula One race to continually quench their thirst for consuming racing content beyond a traditional racing platform. We’re providing modern touch points for the modern consumer to continually consume motorsport. In the same way that Drive to Survive is a documentary series, it’s not showing live motorsport. Instead, it’s giving people access to things in their interest.”
“Under Quadrant we’ve got your Hiltons, your Legos, and we’ve got Formula One teams partnering with us for Esports,” says Bailey. “The beauty of our business is we started off in Esports, and now we’re a new media sports rights holder, biggest sim racing talent manager, biggest Esports team owner and operator, a significant Esports League and event operator for a blue chip team, biggest racing gaming media network in the world, fastest growing, if not one of the biggest racing content brands in the world, with Quadrant. We’re even looking at future AI initiatives, where invariably Veloce will move quickly. This will be to do with fan engagement and AI. We’re constantly looking to innovate.” The entry into Extreme H and potential E1 team ownership further blur the real and virtual boundaries, and there’s more to come. “We’re looking at an acquisition in football in the UK to come under the SEGG Sports umbrella.” The Veloce empire could soon extend to soccer too.
