I/AM Aston Martin: How One Team is Rewriting the Rules of F1 Fandom

Pilates on the beach, murals in Wynwood, and a vision for what F1 can be.

On a Tuesday morning in Miami, on the sand at Lummus Park, a HIIT class was in full swing. Kendall Toole, a former Peloton instructor turned wellness entrepreneur with a following in the millions, was leading the charge, and the crowd behind her was overwhelmingly female. There was an Aston Martin Aramco show car parked nearby, a glossy green under the Florida sun, and the energy in the crowd was exactly what the team had come to the Sunshine State to create: fans fully inside the sport, on their own terms.

The team’s I/AM fan platform arrived in Miami with a full week of activities planned, all displaying what happens when a sport outgrows its old idea of itself. There was the Stilt House at the fan festival, a free hangout space for anyone who wandered in off the beach, with morning Pilates sessions courtesy of Puma, HIIT classes, luxury beauty treatments with ELEMIS, and curated cocktail experiences with Glenfiddich. There was the Celsius Run Club, a 5K through Downtown Miami and Bayfront that drew two thousand people. There was also an After Dark evening at the Aston Martin Residences, up on the Level 55 pool deck with skyline views, with a Glenfiddich in hand. It was quintessentially Aston Martin, both exclusive and inclusive. And when the racing was done, the Palm Tree Club opened its doors to an afterparty headlined by The Martinez Brothers, the bass rolling out over Biscayne Bay.

On paper, these were all wildly different events. In practice, Aston Martin sees them as part of the same conversation. “F1 is for everyone,” Rob Bloom, the team’s Chief Marketing Officer, shares with The Paddock Journal while sitting near the team’s hospitality in an attempt to escape the baking Miami sun. “It’s not about hierarchies. This is a sport, and sport is for all.”

Bloom joined the team in 2021, when Aston Martin returned to Formula 1 as a constructor for the first time in over six decades. The sport was changing, Drive to Survive had opened the door, and TikTok widened it considerably. The fans arriving were younger, more diverse, and less interested in the sport’s traditional rituals of exclusivity. “Since day one,” he says, “the initial strategy talked about being the most inclusive, exclusive brand in world sport.”

That phrase sits at the heart of I/AM, with the name carrying a double meaning the team has never tried to hide: I am an individual, and I am part of Aston Martin. In practice, I/AM is a free membership platform that gives fans access to exclusive content, event experiences, collaborations, and drops.

It would be easy to be cynical about this. Afterall, fan platforms are not a new concept and teams have been unleashing activations around Miami since the race first arrived on the calendar. What makes Aston Martin’s approach worth examining, however, is the consistency with which they have followed their convictions through, and the specificity with which they have listened.

Helen Crossley has been the team’s Head of Social Media since December 2022, arriving following a five year stint at McLaren Racing, a spell at Chelsea Football Club, and a brief role at Alpine. “I wanted to move from being a team that simply reported what happened, to a team that told people why it mattered,” she says. “I wanted to bring more humanity into the storytelling. Formula 1 is incredibly technical and performance-driven, but it is also full of people giving everything behind the scenes. Mechanics, engineers, strategists, creators, partners, and fans. I wanted our channels to reflect that wider ecosystem.”

That ecosystem now includes creator partnerships, brand collaborations, and a growing TikTok presence rooted in listening just as much as posting. Last year, ahead of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, they looked at what was happening on the platform. The results influenced a Fanmade activation in Covent Garden bringing the two together in a way that felt nothing like what teams usually do for their home race. There were no Union Jacks, no heritage retrospectives. Instead, there was gel nail polish and matcha.

“We went back onto the platform and watched the TikTok response,” Bloom recalls, “particularly younger girls saying how refreshing it was. ‘Finally an F1 team sees us.’”

The TikTok partnership, which began in 2021, underpins much of this. “Nobody expected Aston Martin and TikTok to come together,” Bloom says, “but when you break both of those brands down, we believe ultimately in creators co-creating our story. And TikTok is all about creators.” Crossley frames it in similar terms. “It is a discovery platform, a community platform and, in many ways, a culture platform.”

That thinking shaped Aston Martin’s decision on which famous names to bring to Miami. Ashtin Earle, the 23-year-old creator and younger sister of mega-influencer Alix Earle, brought 1.3 million TikTok followers to the team’s race-week presence. Some longer-standing fans may have raised an eyebrow, but Bloom is unapologetic over the choice. “Ashtin’s audience is exactly the audience we want to communicate with,” he says. “She’s local to Miami. She’s creating amazing content on the platform. She’s been brilliant.”

The ‘Ashtin Martin’ campaign they ran was, by any measure, exactly the kind of outside-the-category activation Bloom is describing when he talks about meeting fans on their own terms. To those who felt it was not for them, Bloom’s answer is a simple one: there will be other activations, other moments, for other parts of the fanbase.

Crossley’s Creator Collective, built with TikTok, pushes further into that thinking. The first iteration selected five UK-based emerging creators working at the intersection of F1 and their other passions. From cooking to maths to reading, each one was carefully chosen to reach a different corner of the fanbase, and then given behind-the-scenes access to the team that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. The second year of the programme is now underway, again selecting five UK-based emerging creators and giving them the kind of behind-the-scenes access that used to be reserved for broadcasters and journalists. The idea is that a creator can bring in an audience who might never have found their way in through a more traditional route, and keep them there.

“The strongest communities are built when people feel they have a role in the story,” Crossley says. “Social media allows us to do that at scale.” Of course, reach, engagement, and views matter, but behind every metric is a person choosing to spend time with the team. “Our fans support us through every version of the journey. Not just the easy moments or the successful moments, but the difficult ones too. That loyalty deserves respect.”

The difficult moments have not been hard to find so far this season. While Aston Martin were building one of their most commercially ambitious race weeks in Miami, the car struggled on track, with neither driver finishing within the points. The contrast is impossible to ignore from the outside, but Bloom’s view of the team’s trajectory is one of growth over a period of time. Since 2021, they have witnessed genuine commercial growth, fresh technology, a brand new campus, the arrival of Adrian Newey, and a new power unit partnership with Honda. So, while the racing project is being rebuilt, the brand, as Bloom believes, is already where it needs to be.

The I/AM Drops franchise, a series of ultra-limited collaborations and fan experiences tied to the membership platform, will keep arriving through the rest of the 2026 season. The collaborations themselves have been deliberately wide in their reach, working with the likes of Toy Story, the Rolling Stones, Tems, and that matcha pop-up in Covent Garden. “Take Toy Story,” Bloom says, “a thirty-year-old, iconic franchise. It’s got stories of teamwork, which was fundamentally what the collab was all about. It’s all about teamwork, and Aston Martin is all about teamwork.”

Then there is I/AM Three Sixty, launched in April, representing perhaps the most candid statement of what the programme is actually trying to do. It is a feedback mechanism, a formal structure giving fans a genuine route to input into the team’s direction. “That is about genuine desire to hear the views, the expectations and the wants of fans,” Bloom says. In an era when fan engagement is more often a one-way performance than a conversation, the ambition to make it structural rather than cosmetic is notable. Whether it holds up under scrutiny will depend on what the team actually does with what they hear.

A further I/AM franchise is coming, built around fitness and wellness. The spirit of the Celsius Run Club, two thousand people moving together through Downtown Miami, united by a shared enthusiasm for the sport, is something Bloom wants to formalise into a recurring fixture rather than a single-race activation.

The playful green I/AM murals that appeared across Miami during race week hint at that broader ambition too. One simply read, “I am in a situationship with Miami.” The Miami neighbourhood of Wynwood has been built on street art; murals are the neighbourhood’s native tongue.

“Inclusion cannot just be a campaign line,” Crossley explains. “It has to show up in the everyday choices you make about who you feature, what you explain, what you celebrate, and how you respond.” Representation matters, and showing women throughout the team makes the environment feel more reflective of the audience that is actually there. Jessica Hawkins, the British racing driver who became Aston Martin’s driver ambassador, and one of the most visible female faces in the paddock, is part of that. So are the women in STEM, engineering, and operations whose work rarely makes it onto a social feed but that shapes the team’s identity. The Creator Collective continues into its second year, again bringing in emerging voices from outside the sport and giving them access that changes the story from the inside.

The afterparty matters. The run club matters. The matcha pop-up matters. What holds all of it together though is the steady accumulation of choices about who gets featured, who gets access, and who gets to feel like this team is for them. That is the version of I/AM that will outlast any single activation.