Formula One's new investors see virtual reality and gambling as potential growth areas for the sport.

Liberty Media is in the process of buying a controlling stake in Formula One and has made clear it intends to make changes once it has completed its purchase in early 2017. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investment conference in New York, Liberty Media's CEO Greg Maffei said there are a number of areas that his company is keen to explore.

"Less than one percent of revenues are from digital," he was quoted by Reuters. "They really have no organized digital effort. I think there's a lot of things that can be done around gaming, VR [virtual reality] and AR [augmented reality].

"There's an enormous amount of video feed and data about the races that we are already capturing that we are not in any way processing incrementally for the dedicated fan, or opportunities around things like gambling.

"Outside of the United States there is a huge gambling opportunity in the sport, none of which we capitalize on."

Maffei says F1 also needs to work harder to get big name sponsors aligned with the sport.

"I think we have 17 sponsors, and we have three people working in sponsorship in F1," said Maffei. "In contrast at Major League Baseball, a business we have some familiarity with through the [Atlanta] Braves, there are 75 sponsors just in the U.S."