Why Luxury Brands Are Spending Billions to Put Their Logo on a Race Car

The Audience Changed, and Brands Followed For most of F1’s history, the sport attracted a narrow audience: affluent, older, and predominantly male. That profile has changed sharply.

According to Formula 1’s own 2025 season review, 42% of the global fanbase is now female, up from 37% in 2018, with women accounting for three in four new fans added to the sport.

F1’s global fanbase has grown from around 450 million in the mid-2010s to 827 million by the end of 2025, making it the world’s most popular annual sporting series. Netflix did much of the heavy lifting.

The Drive to Survive docuseries, now in its eighth season, brought in younger, more diverse, and more globally distributed fans. With that demographic came entirely new sponsorship categories…