Jack’s Rise to Formula 1
Jack Doohan was taken out of the Alpine team in 2025, but he is quietly winning outside the grid. Before I explain how, it’s worth covering his career first, since the experience he’s gained there is exactly what’s consolidating what he’s building now.
He’s has had a pretty interesting rise to Formula 1. Similar to most other drivers, he began with karting at about 8 years old. Fun fact, he received his first go-kart as a gift from Michael Schumacher, whose a friend of Jack’s father, Mick Doohan, a five-time MotoGP World Champion. He then quite quickly thrived winning multiple Australian titles including the Australian Kart Championship in Junior KA100 in 2015 and KA2 in 2016. He was also the 2nd runner-up in the 2017 CIK-FIA European Championship.
Image Source: Gamereactor
His successes didn’t stop there. He went on to single-seaters with the Red Bull Junior Team to which he competed in the British F4 and other F4 series. He has also raced in the F3 Asian Championship attaining runner-up in 2019 before debuting in FIA Formula 3. Although Jack was having a tough start, he had a strong breakthrough in FIA F3 with Trident to which he finished 2nd place in the championship with multiple wins and podiums.
He continued to thrive in FIA Formula 2 with Virtuosi Racing by winning at Budapest, Spa, and Abu Dhabi. His path to Formula 1 begun when he served as Alpine’s reserve driver, participating in FP1 sessions and testing. His debut F1 race was at the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix where he finished 15th. In 2025, he joined Alpine full-time. Unlike his past successes, his time at Alpine was, well cut short.
He was struggling in the beginning of the season. If you an avid viewer of F1 races, you would have noticed how many times he had crashed. Spoiler alert: Three times (Australian GP, Japanese GP and Miami GP). It didn’t end on the grid though. It followed him outside the grid as well whereby he struggled with team instability under advisor Flavio Briatore. He was then replaced by Franco Colapinto after the Miami GP.
He remained with the team as reserve driver for the rest of the year but described the experience as a “shock to the system” and feeling like he was racing “on borrowed time.” Fast forward to today, he’s a reserve driver at Haas and he competes in the European Le Mans Series (LMP2) with Nielsen Racing. I think he’s on the right track by being behind the wheels. His experience will compound and he could potentially be in F1 once again in the future or a different motorsport.
But the more interesting part of Jack’s story isn’t happening on a track at all, it’s the reason I’m actually writing this. Jack is the founder of Meuze AI, an intelligence layer built for F&B operations, something regular listeners of TBPN or ETN will already know. I’ve spent enough time in F&B to know exactly how scattered, inconsistent and outdated the data in that industry tends to be, with almost no real way to forecast inventory, sales or waste.
Here’s an excerpt taken from his appearance on ETN:
“Even when you’re a full-time Formula 1 driver, you’re an employee at the end of the day. I really wanted to have control and build out the team around me.”
“I really wanted to dive deeper into the proprietary data side of AI, not just data that’s being deployed with large LLMs.”
“You won’t have a good AI agent for something that hasn’t been gathered, aggregated, optimised and put together properly.”
You can tell Jack is proactive. He’s not reactive to circumstances beyond his control. He wants to shape his destiny beyond racing. He’s learning the industry. He has mentioned spending his spare time learning to code. You can tell he’s all in and that’s already a good start to winning.
Four ways Meuze is positioned for growth
I’ve laid out four aspects that make me confident he’s not just staying busy, he’s building something real.
He’s solving a core F&B problem
The F&B industry is operationally complex and low margin with a 2% to 6% range. Owners often juggle multiple disconnected software systems - POS, ERP, scheduling, inventory, and supply chain tools that produce massive amounts of data but rarely do they deliver actionable insights. This fragmentation leads owners to guesswork. For example, a restaurant manager might over-order perishable ingredients based on last week’s sales while understaffing a busy Friday shift, resulting in thousands of dollars in food waste one day and lost revenue the next — all while operating on razor-thin margins where even small inefficiencies can erase an entire month’s profit.
Meuze solves this. It aggregates, cleans and unifies data across all these systems into a single intelligent platform, turning overwhelming data noise into a self-learning brain that powers AI-driven forecasting, automation and optimisation, helping chains run leaner, reduce costs and improve profitability at scale.
The Metrics
To me, Meuze’s metrics add real conviction to the problem they are solving. So far, they have achieved $9M in ARR as of mid-2026, an impressive number for a very early-stage company that only started generating meaningful revenue a few months ago. With over 2,000 locations already live and plans to scale to 10,000+ locations by year-end, the early traction shows strong product-market fit and clear demand for a unified data platform in a fragmented industry. This quick rise not only validates the pain point but also demonstrates Meuze’s ability to deliver fast value and land enterprise deals in a traditionally slow-moving sector.
F1 Connections
One of Meuze’s biggest unfair advantages is Jack’s deep F1 network. The paddock is a unique ecosystem where Fortune 500 CEOs, CIOs, and high-level decision-makers gather race after race. Jack has leveraged these relationships to accelerate deal flow and build credibility from day one.
In his TBPN appearance, he explained the power of this network:
“The F1 network is unlike anything else in business. Fortune 500 CEOs, CIOs, and decision makers are all in one paddock, race after race and my access to these people that make things happen has compounded into serious deal flow for Meuze from day one.”
That access, trust and personal brand haven’t just helped Meuze land customers, they’re the same qualities that matter most when it comes to raising future rounds and recruiting advisors or board members. The paddock runs on performance and trust, and those translate directly into credibility when Jack is pitching investors rather than sponsors. Only a few early-stage founders get to walk into a room with that kind of built-in trust already established.
F1’s Intelligence Layer
Jack’s edge here isn’t just business instinct, it’s firsthand exposure to high-performance data systems. Formula 1 generates thousands of data points a lap, and reading them well and fast is often the difference between winning and finishing mid-pack. His time in the European Le Mans Series with Nielsen Racing adds another layer, prototype cars that demand even more complex interpretation across much longer stints. Meuze is built on that same instinct, turning fragmented, chaotic F&B data into something a restaurant chain can actually act on in time for it to matter.
It’s not just software.
It’s applying elite motorsport thinking to one of the world’s most chaotic industries.
Final Thoughts
Despite the setbacks Jack faced during his short stint in F1, I believe he is already proving that his story is far from over. In fact, he may be winning more meaningfully off the grid than many drivers do on it. At just 23 years old, he’s not only staying race-sharp as a Haas reserve driver while competing in endurance racing — he’s also building an AI business that’s already hitting impressive traction.
Losing his seat didn’t end Jack Doohan’s story, it just redirected it. Whether he returns to a full-time F1 seat or not, he’s already building something that matters well beyond the paddock. The grid gave him the tools. Now, he’s using them to race in an entirely new arena, and he’s doing it fast.