It was 9 a.m. on a Monday in Manhattan, 3,406 miles from Aston Martin F1 Team’s headquarters in Silverstone, and Jimmy Horne found himself in a party store. The team’s TikTok following teetered on 999,999. The face behind the account glanced from one party horn to another.
As the number ticked to one digit, Horne began filming.
“I still love the video,” he says, grinning as he remembers the TikTok. “It was literally very mundane… and then everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, that's who it is.’”
The 12-second video was simple: Horne engulfed in white bedding in a dimly-lit New York apartment, fully clad in his emerald green uniform and blowing a party horn in celebration of reaching one million followers. Half a million viewers tuned in to watch the team’s senior content creator lift his figurative mask.
A true first-look behind the scenes of F1
When Netflix released “Drive to Survive” in 2019, a new era unfolded for the upper echelon of motorsport: fans had a front-row seat to watch their favorite athletes. Cameras barged into driver rooms, childhood bedrooms and daily commutes to team factories. The subsequent swell of social media activity allowed spectators to do what they do best: spectate. But this time, with more access than the sport previously allowed at the circuit.
Horne quickly caught on to the high demand for engagement, initially met with a low content supply. As the sport’s social media star power grew, so too did its fleet of chronically online staff members. In 2020, he was contracted to work as a social media admin for the Aston Martin team. Four years later, he officially joined the payroll at Aston Martin as their art director.
But Horne wasn’t expecting that the content fans desperately craved was getting to know the intermediary, the voice behind the lens and social media handle. Breaking the fourth wall quickly became not just good for the business of content creation, but making fans feel a personal connection.
In F1 circles, Horne, affectionately known just as “Jimmy” to fans, is a household name. His face graces spectators’ ‘For You’ pages and his personal Instagram account has amassed 40,000 followers—all eager to peek behind the curtain of a career on track.
From videos titled “Admin Tries Paddock Tacos” at the Mexican Grand Prix to a step-by-step guide on how Horne shoots, edits and publishes content, Aston Martin was the first team to lean into fan curiosity about what happens behind the scenes. Now, IndyCar, Formula E and other Formula 1 teams have followed the content model that is quickly becoming its own trend as motorsport fans call out from the comments for admin reveals.
Red Bull, though, takes a different approach. You might hear Lucy Gray, Red Bull Racing’s senior social manager, ask a question from a distance, safely tucked behind the screen, yet you won’t see her face on the team’s accounts.
The reason lies in keeping things authentic and original, never wanting to look like they are copying another team. That doesn’t dampen fans’ intrigue, though.
“Part of our thing is being Red Bull,” Gray says. “It's rebelling a little bit, being a bit cheeky, a bit playful, doing things that nobody else would do. So, that’s quite fun to play with.”
Gray encourages the team she oversees to exude personality and “be unhinged.”
Fans praise Red Bull’s Threads account manager, Instagram’s version of X (formerly Twitter), for playfully teasing other teams and using Gen Z slang to connect with the sport’s ever-growing young audience. When a fan posted a picture of Esteban Ocon, Oscar Piastri and Fernando Alonso in June asking followers to name the club of former Alpine drivers, Red Bull’s Threads account manager chimed in with “The Exes?” The reply gained traction and fans were swift to tout the admin as their favorite, even calling out corporate to give the person behind the screen a raise.
Breaking into F1’s social society
It’s unsurprising that most social media administrators in the sport are 20-somethings who know how to cater to the surging spectatorship of young, online fans.
Spectators, male and female, are younger than ever. The number of female fans watching the sport increased over eight percent in 2022, making up 40 percent of the total audience. In the last two years, that number has only inflated. Forty-eight percent of women in attendance at the 2024 Australian Grand Prix were between the ages of 16 and 34, according to the Herald Sun. In a 2021 survey commissioned by Formula 1, Nielsen Sports and Motorsport Network, the sport’s average fan base age was 32, falling from 36 years old just five years earlier. Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League all have older audiences. Most IndyCar and MotoGP spectators are above 45 years old. And those fans are also curious about getting into the world of Formula 1. Whole social media accounts are dedicated to promoting motorsport job openings and promise to share the secret to becoming a part of the traveling circus, like Formula Careers’ LinkedIn with 55,000 followers. Jordan Agajanian, a motorsport marketing content creator and owner of A/Agency, amassed 157,000 followers on Instagram by sharing “tips for getting your dream job in racing.” But like most jobs in the industry, a career in social media is all about who you know.
“I was doing photography as a hobby and went to a car event,” Horne remembers. “Then someone reached out and said, ‘Hey, your photos are great. We'd love you to take more photos.’ And then literally, it was just this snowball effect of networking and meeting people.”
While shooting photos for Mercedes and Lamborghini in Horne’s home country, the Australian met a Formula 1 agency owner looking for Paddock Club content across the 2019 season. “They were like, ‘Can you move to the other side of the world?’ And I was like, ‘I guess,’” Horne recalls.
“I quit my job the next day,” Horne says. “I lived on the road for three weeks, my full life in a suitcase, between Montreal and France and then, finally, to the UK.”
After living in the UK for a year, Horne signed onto Racing Point just before the team rebranded to Aston Martin ahead of the 2021 season. “I've been with them since the start of the journey,” Horne says. “It's a really unique position to have been a part of that journey because it was literally starting from zero, and then here we are.”
Expectations vs. Reality
Sidling up to the “rock stars” of racing seems glamorous, but the reality is late nights and, for some teams, strict oversight.
“I think people just underestimate the amount of planning and coordination that is involved,” Lizzy Brown, a motorsport content creator known as @pitlanelizzy, says. “Sometimes it's spontaneous, but, I think even myself, I underestimated just how much goes into getting a singular post up… how many hours and back and forth conversations went into making that happen.”
Brown previously worked as a social media specialist at Pace Six Four, a motorsport marketing agency, on George Russell’s GR63 brand and Alfa Romeo’s social media accounts. There, several rounds of approval for a hashtag are necessary, so often, the spontaneity and reaction time necessary in social media is lost.
“Every time I’m in the paddock, I'll get a glimpse of social content being created and I’m not talking about interviews here,” F1 tech and politics commentator Toni Cowan-Brown said in a recent TikTok. “It breaks the magic just a little for me. I realize just how much of it is not organic and very much fabricated. And it’s no one’s fault, but it’s a reminder of just how much content needs to be created during an F1 race weekend to keep the fans, the partners and the sponsors happy. Authentic and organic moments are few and far between, hence why most of it is fabricated entertainment.”
It makes the authentic content even more prized — posts that Gray says do better than planned-out, cinematic shots. Red Bull claims it’s against strict, corporate content. Gray is “empowered to act on our behalf,” Paul Smith, Red Bull’s head of communications, says. “So if Lucy has a good idea, she can just go out and do it.”
Although Red Bull’s social media team operates on the foundation of “if you can think it, we can make it happen” — from parachutes at the ready in Abu Dhabi to fighter jets flying over F1 cars — a race week-in-the-life looks a little less “Top Gun” and more like scrolling for inspiration, content meetings and quick turnarounds. All are necessary to produce the sheer amount of social content needed.
“[My] screen time is something I'd rather not look at,” Horne jokes. “A lot of times post-race weekend is just using my low days to my advantage and sleeping until midday and scrolling on my phone. It's one of those things [needed] to be creative.”
By the time race day rolls around, “then it is just executing basically: Shoot, edit, post. Just bang, bang, bang,” according to Horne.
Last season’s sticker war between teams, starting with Red Bull and Ferrari, came about naturally and offered a fleeting look into the off-track interactions between drivers. The video series finale amassed 8.1 million views on TikTok.
“[Fans] want to feel like they are getting an insider insight into our drivers, like what it's like to be part of a team,” Gray says. Being part of the team means getting to know the brains behind fans’ favorite 15-second videos, the people who understand that a Taylor Swift reference will nearly always reel in views. And understanding that although Formula 1’s social media admins are becoming overnight stars, they’re still mere mortals who grew up in the era of the internet.
