While the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship spends this weekend deciding its twelfth title in London, the series’ next era is already locked in on a very different kind of grid: the home screen of Disney+. On August 11, Disney, ESPN and Formula E confirmed a multi-year agreement that makes Disney+ and ESPN+ the home of every Formula E race in the United States, and Disney+ the home for most international markets, starting with the 2026/27 season.
The scale of it is real. The 2026/27 season spans 21 rounds across 13 events, opening December 18 in Jeddah and touching Austin, Miami, Monaco and Mexico City before wrapping up in Tokyo on July 25, 2027. Subscribers get every session, from practice through qualifying to the race itself, rather than the clipped highlight packages that smaller racing series often get stuck with. Neither company disclosed the financial terms, which is standard for rights deals like this but also tells you Disney isn’t in a hurry to let anyone benchmark the number against its NBA or NFL deals.
From Roku to the Big Leagues
For American fans, this closes out an odd chapter. Formula E’s U.S. deal since 2023 has run through Roku, which picked up the series as its first-ever live sports rights package and paired it with linear simulcasts on CBS. That arrangement got races on screens, but it also meant Formula E was competing for attention inside Roku’s ocean of ad-supported channels rather than sitting inside an app sports fans already open out of habit. Moving onto ESPN+ and Disney+, the same platforms carrying World Cup qualifiers, NBA games and UEFA Women’s Champions League matches, is a different kind of distribution. It’s less about chasing eyeballs in the abstract and more about killing the “wait, where do I even watch this” friction that has quietly sunk more streaming sports deals than bad production ever has.
It’s also part of a pattern. Racing series without Formula 1’s built-in audience have spent the last few years chasing exactly this kind of media-company backing. IndyCar’s own 2026 shake-up included Fox Corporation taking a stake in the series’ parent company for much the same reason. Alignment with a broadcaster that already has sports infrastructure and habitual viewers has become the preferred shortcut to relevance, because building an audience from scratch on your own platform takes years most mid-tier series don’t have.
The Car Getting All This New Airtime
The timing isn’t incidental. Formula E is using this new deal to launch its biggest technical shift since the championship debuted in 2014. The GEN4 car arriving with the 2026/27 season produces 600 kW, which Formula E describes as “more than 815-horsepower,” roughly double what the outgoing GEN3 Evo car makes. The series puts GEN4’s 0-60 mph time at around 1.8 seconds, about 30% quicker off the line than a current Formula 1 car. That’s not a knock on F1; it’s simply what a pair of electric motors driving all four wheels can do that a turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 can’t. Electric motors deliver peak torque the instant current flows, with no turbo lag and no need to build revs, so the advantage shows up hardest in the first couple of seconds of a launch. Formula E still won’t be quicker than F1 over a full lap, though. Its cars are heavier because of the battery pack, run treaded tires instead of slicks, and generate meaningfully less aerodynamic downforce, so none of this turns Formula E into a lap-time threat to grand prix machinery.
There’s an irony worth sitting with here. Formula 1 itself is leaning further into electrification for 2026, pushing its new hybrid power units toward a roughly 50/50 split between combustion and electric energy on fully sustainable fuel. Two very different rulebooks are converging on the same conclusion: the future of top-tier racing, even the loud kind, increasingly runs on batteries.
Landing a stop in Austin also drops GEN4 squarely inside the country’s fastest-growing motorsport market. American appetite for international racing has been climbing for years now, and putting GEN4 cars on a platform ESPN subscribers already pay for is a far more direct pitch to that audience than hoping curious fans stumble onto a Roku channel between other content.
What This Actually Means for Fans
None of this guarantees Formula E turns into appointment viewing. Distribution solves a discovery problem, not necessarily a demand one, and the series still has to convince casual sports fans the racing itself is worth carving out time for. But pairing a genuine product leap, a car with nearly double the power of its predecessor, with a genuine distribution leap is about as strong a setup as a mid-tier racing series can build for itself. For now, nothing changes for the rest of season 12; this weekend’s London finale still airs under the current arrangement. The switch to Disney+ and ESPN+ doesn’t happen until the GEN4 era opens in Jeddah this December, which leaves plenty of time to figure out which app you’ll actually need.
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