Cable and terrestrial television viewers are dropping like flies, and many don’t want to pay the exorbitant $84.99 per year fee that F1 TV charges for live streaming of Grands Prix. I, myself, was an F1 TV subscriber until the rates went up significantly for the 2024 season. If you wanted to keep up with F1 but didn’t want to pay for the privilege, you were forced to fly around the world to races, attend local F1 watch parties hosted by sports bars and suffer Max Verstappen fans at 7 a.m., or tune in to some “private” F1 streams online. For many who chose the latter, Lord Latifi Streams was the place to be.
I first found LLS a few years ago when it was linked on a Reddit thread. The moderators of LLS posted reliable and usually lag-free streams in high definition that allowed casting to my television. I mean, uh, my friend found the stream, and cast it to their TV. Yeah, they did it, not me. Anyway, I heard it was really good, and that the pirate streams were reliably of a pretty high quality.
Named after Nicholas Latifi, the Canadian F1 driver who raced for Williams between 2020 and 2022—or GOATifi as he was known among fans—Lord Latifi Streams likewise rose to prominence during the F1 boom of 2020. For thousands of F1 fans, the Lord Latifi Streams channel was the place to view F1, participate in (admittedly usually pretty shitty) live text chat, and ask questions about F1.
Most users of LLS didn’t really talk about it in wide conversation for fear of it getting shut down, but it was a pretty active F1 source, considering the elicit nature of the stream. After several years of streaming, the site is shutting down. Fans of the stream can find solace in each other by joining the LLS discord server, but F1 (and soccer) live streams from LLS are a thing of the past.
Oh captain, my captain, where will I go without you? Rest well, sweet prince.