The twilight sky of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is unique to the Formula 1 calendar. The race begins just half an hour before the sun slowly vanishes below the horizon of the storied Yas Marina Circuit, and it ends with the track illuminated by floodlights at night. This special timing is reserved for the dramatic finish of the F1 season, and in December 2025, there was no shortage of drama.
Priyanka Ranchod had planned her trip to the United Arab Emirates long before the world knew the championship would be split by just a handful of points, taking the battle right to the end of the last race of the season. Call it luck or intuition, but she was there as McLaren’s early-season favorite, Oscar Piastri, slipped out of contention, leaving his teammate, Lando Norris, and Red Bull’s reigning champion, Max Verstappen, to battle for the 2025 title. Max did everything he could, even winning the race itself, but it wasn’t enough to steal the title away from the sport’s new world champion, Lando Norris.
Just a few months earlier, Glory Martinez and her boyfriend were walking through the Hungarian Grand Prix paddock, coexisting with F1 drivers and their teams. As the race neared its final lap, Piastri and Norris nearly collided, to a deafening Hungaroring crowd. But ultimately, the podium saw a McLaren 1-2, with Norris winning by an astonishing 698 thousandths of a second.
These races left an indelible impression on both Glory and Priyanka, who would soon take their passion for the sport home to Houston.
Formula 1’s rising stateside popularity is no accident. Liberty Media, which bought the company in 2017, has been staging an extensive marketing effort since the acquisition. The U.S. is currently home to three independent Grands Prix and a couple of F1 teams.
In Texas, Formula 1 returns to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin every October. The U.S. Grand Prix has been attracting an ever-increasing American fandom since 2012 and recently announced an eight-year contract extension, taking the Texas race through 2034. The multi-day event draws between 400,000 and 440,000 people each year and is projected to shatter 2025’s attendance of roughly 450,000 next week.
However, until recently, supporters of the sport in Houston have had few outlets for their racing enthusiasm.
Enter Priyanka Ranchod, Glory Martinez, Nick Cason, and Catherine Fernandez, founders of Space City Racing Club. Their idea for a wandering social club, centered around an equally wandering—although slightly more global—sport, has garnered the attention of many F1 fans in Houston.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Priyanka and Glory, the club’s conceivers, who take on most of its day-to-day responsibilities, to talk about the club’s origins and the growing popularity of Formula 1 in our city.
The club was officially founded in December 2025 and has made waves in Houston’s motorsport space ever since. But really, it was conceived earlier that year. Priyanka recalled the need for a dependable Formula 1 community in the city: “We had been going to different watch parties, but we noticed there was just a lack of community… everyone was watching independently, and there wasn’t a lot of conversing with the people or between groups…” she reflected.
That’s when Priyanka and Glory connected via social media, and plans for the club began to materialize. “…I think towards the end of the season, it got to the point where we realized, OK, this is something that we really want, and if this is something that we want in the city, we kind of need to take it upon ourselves to make the jump and commit to it…”
The duo uploaded their very first social media video gauging interest in the area. “We put out a TikTok video just kind of generally asking, ‘Houston, OK, this is what we’re doing,’” Priyanka described. “‘We want a community, we want to be able to watch races with other people [and] we want to make friends and share our love of this sport with others. Is that something that other people in this city also want?’ And we’re very thankful that a lot of people in the city expressed the same interest and they really wanted something like what we started in town, and honestly, the rest is history.”
A week before the 2026 Australian Grand Prix, Space City Racing Club hosted its launch party at Patterson Park Patio Bar. The turnout was bigger than the founders expected, especially for a standalone community event without a race attached. The group met once more at Patterson Park Patio Bar for the Australian race before finding its current home base, Social Beer Garden, where they’ve been gathering, with a couple of exceptions, for watch parties since the Chinese GP in March. The club has hosted events ranging from karting socials, dinners, mixer and trivia nights, fan zones, post-race meetups and pickleball socials—and of course, many, many watch parties.
Despite the sheer volume of events the group has hosted this year, a couple of moments stood out to the pair as exceptionally special. “We were going to partner with Circuit of the Americas to give away some race tickets, and that required a lot of behind-the-scenes work,” explained Priyanka. “So, to be able to work with one of my dream partners and then to be able to give back to the community in such a large capacity—tickets to the upcoming race—I got to see how excited the community was about that partnership, and I got to see how excited we were to announce it. It just meant so much on all fronts.” The two general admission three-day wristbands featured in the club’s early October giveaway were quite a gift, retailing for $900 if purchased directly from the venue.
For Glory, a rewarding moment for the group was when JD Sports, a multinational sports-fashion company with a vast social media presence, reached out in May to collaborate with the Racing Club on a fan zone experience in Houston for the Canadian Grand Prix. “JD Sports reached out and wanted to partner with us, and that’s how the Canadian Fan Zone came about. We had all kinds of vendors… we had games, we had a photo booth… Jack Daniel’s, Red Bull… all kinds of freebies, and towards the end, we were just like, ‘Oh my God, a lot of people showed up!’ It was such a success for being our first event at that scale.”
JD Sports was one of the first, but certainly not the last, major partnerships the club would secure. In the coming months, they would partner with Esses Magazine (a major publication in the motorsport space), IMAX, Red Bull, Jack Daniel’s, Girls Across the Grid, and Circuit of the Americas. The club even partnered with its first F1 team earlier this month. “We’ve done a one-off event with the Cadillac Formula 1 team, and are hoping to work with them in the future as well…” noted Priyanka. “So [we’ve] just been building every single day since then, and we’re really thankful for the community that we’ve built.”
When asked about a dream partnership, Glory responded, “I would love to get another Formula 1 team under our belt, at a bigger capacity, too. Like, getting some kind of Formula 1 car at our watch party—that would be the dream…”
Behind the scenes, running an organization like Space City Racing Club is no simple task. “It is a lot of work, actually,” Priyanka agreed. “Both Glory and I have full-time jobs that we work… We say Racing Club is our unofficial second full-time job.” The group’s goal is to cultivate and maintain this community without making it about profit, which Priyanka confirmed: “We don’t make any money off of it, and we don’t charge people for the events… Something that’s really important to us is keeping our watch parties, and keeping as many events free as possible. Every now and then, there will be one that has a cost associated with it… but our watch parties will always remain free.”
Space City Racing Club wants you to come as you are; they just ask one thing. “We don’t have a lot of rules for our watch parties, but the only one we have is you just have to come in with a welcoming spirit, and you can’t put others down,” Priyanka said. Glory elaborated, “We want to make this a space that’s safe for anyone that wants to learn about the sport…”
For a city as obsessed with sports as Houston, it is surprising that it took so long for a community like Space City Racing Club to form. Formula 1 is a sport with a famously high barrier to entry, especially if you don’t live in one of the 24 cities it travels to. But Houston’s F1 fandom, old and new, has a real home with Space City Racing Club. “We have a handful of people who come to our events because they’ve seen that we’re a new organization, we’re a community that’s building… They come in as people who have never watched a Formula 1 race before… So making sure we’re creating that welcoming environment, that is also an environment where you can ask each other questions [and] you can go to our social media and you can learn something new… That’s something that was very intentional with what we’re trying to do,” notes Priyanka.
The Racing Club has several upcoming events, including the Formula Flow Sunset Pilates USGP Launch Event on Sunday, October 18, the U.S. Grand Prix Watch Party on October 25, and the Mexico City Fan Zone on Sunday, November 1, all taking place at Social Beer Garden. If you’re interested in joining, be sure to check out the group’s social media pages at @spacecityracingclub.
