Stephen Ross Is Shopping a Fifth of the Miami Grand Prix

The owner of the Miami Dolphins is getting ready to sell a piece of a car race. Stephen Ross is in advanced talks to sell a 20% stake in Formula One's Miami Grand Prix to the private equity firm Otro Capital, Front Office Sports reported. No deal is final, the talks cover only the race, and Ross has no plans to sell all of it.

It wasn't clear what a deal would value the race at. The Grand Prix sits inside Ross Sports and Entertainment, a company formed in August to hold the Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium, Ross's roughly 45% of the Miami Open and a private driving club. Ross has owned the race since 2021, and it has sold out five years running.

It is a proven event, not a speculative one. The prospective buyer is no stranger to the sport. Otro already holds a stake in the Alpine F1 team, and this year it closed an investment in the University of Utah's new athletics company.

A deal would bring in a partner that already knows Formula One from the inside. The race has been priced before, but never on its own. In late 2024, Ross sold 13% of the Dolphins, the stadium and the race together to Ares and Joe Tsai at a valuation of about $8.1 billion.

In that deal, the Grand Prix was one ingredient in a bundle. A sale of a fifth of the race by itself would do something the earlier transaction did not: put a standalone price on the Grand Prix. What Ross is really doing is taking one piece of a bundled sports empire and pricing it on its own.

That fits a pattern running through the business. Sports properties are increasingly being taken apart and priced one piece at a time. The NHL did it with local television, selling four teams' rights centrally after the regional network that used to hold them fell apart.

Benfica sold the name on its academy separately from the name on its shirt. Nix Biosensors is splitting its data business away from the hardware that created it. Even the Premier League's shirt sponsors are a version of the trend: the front of the shirt was repriced overnight when gambling left, and the new buyers say it was worth it.

For Ross, the Miami race is the obvious next candidate. It used to be bundled into a football team's valuation; now it may have a price, and a partner, all its own. And because the talks cover only a minority of the race, the move fits a seller who wants to put a price on his assets without giving up control.

The asset isn't the team anymore. It's the race, the channel, the building, the algorithm, and increasingly, each one has its own buyer. The asset isn't the team anymore.

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the Miami Grand Prix Deal An operator-led firm that may be cashing out of an F1 team, a race locked in through 2041, and an 86-year-old owner splitting his empire into pieces that can each be priced. tart with the buyer. Otro Capital was founded in 2018 by Alec Scheiner, a former president of the Cleveland Browns who, before that, was a Dallas Cowboys executive and a point man on building the Cowboys' stadium, alongside a group of partners from RedBird Capital. Otro calls itself an operator-led private equity firm, and its best-known deal is Alpine.

In 2023, an Otro-led group that included Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Rory McIlroy and Ryan Reynolds' Maximum Effort bought 24% of the Alpine F1 team for €200 million, an implied valuation of roughly $900 million. The timing now matters. According to PlanetF1, a restriction on Otro selling that Alpine stake without Renault's consent expired on Sept. 8.

Flavio Briatore put Alpine's value at about $3.2 billion in August, which would be roughly four times what Otro's group paid, and Mercedes and a consortium led by Christian Horner have both been linked to the stake. So the same firm that may be about to cash out of an F1 team is reportedly lining up to buy into an F1 race. Now the asset.

The Miami Grand Prix isn't a one-off event; it's a long contract. Formula One announced in May 2025 that it had extended the race by ten years, through 2041. Organizers said the race drew 275,000 people over race weekend in 2024 and contributed more than $1 billion to the local economy in its first three years.

This year's race, won by Kimi Antonelli, drew a three-day crowd that organizers described as similar to the year before, even after a storm threat pushed Sunday's start three hours earlier and thinned out the Sunday crowd. A promoter with a contract that runs another 15 years and a sellout streak is a predictable cash flow, and predictable cash flow is exactly what private equity likes to buy. And the seller.

Ross is 86, and he has spent the last two years splitting a single sports empire into pieces that can each be priced. In 2024, he reportedly turned down $10 billion for everything. Late that year, he sold 13% of the combined Dolphins, stadium and race to Ares and Joe Tsai at about $8.1 billion.

In March, Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin bought 1% of the Dolphins at a record $12.5 billion valuation. In August, Ross put all of it inside Ross Sports and Entertainment. Selling a fifth of just the race is the next step in that sequence.

It puts a standalone price on the Grand Prix. It brings in a partner that already knows Formula One from the inside. And it does both without Ross giving up control of anything.

Seen together, the three pieces explain why the deal makes sense for each side. Otro, a firm that already knows Formula One from the inside, may be moving from an F1 team to an F1 race just as its Alpine restriction lifts. The race offers the long-dated, sold-out cash flow that suits a private equity owner.

And Ross gets a price tag on one more piece of the empire he has spent two years taking apart.

Sports properties are being taken apart and priced one piece at a time. The asset isn't the team anymore; it's the race, the channel, the building, the algorithm, and each increasingly has its own buyer.

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