If you take a few laps, learn the course and get a good look at your field of competitors, you’ll eventually determine what it takes to win the race—and if you have enough under the hood to get there.
This advice applies equally well to Formula 1 racing teams and their sponsors.
Since 2012, F1 has held its United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas. Just as the organization’s revenue engine heated up, F1 was purchased by U.S.-based Liberty Media for $4.4 billion in 2016. That was followed by an F1 broadcast deal with ESPN in 2018, then Netflix’s extremely popular Drive to Survive behind-the-scenes series.
According to Omnicom Group’s Dallas-based creative and marketing agency The Marketing Arm—which has spent more than a decade working with F1 for clients including Citrix, AT&T and Monster—F1 event viewership in the U.S. increased 58% in 2021.
That season, the U.S. Grand Prix hosted more that 400,000 fans over its three-day weekend, making it the most-attended event in F1 history at the time. The 2022 U.S. Grand Prix broke that record with 440,000 fans.
The 1.6 million U.S. viewers who watched the 2021 U.S. Grand Prix live on ESPN was the network’s largest F1 audience to that point; it represented a 42% increase in viewership compared to the same event in pre-pandemic 2019. Just before this year’s U.S. Grand Prix, ESPN announced the extension of its F1 broadcast deal through 2025.
This year, according to COTA, the event sold out all general admission and reserved seating by March. It also has a new lead-in event: the Miami Grand Prix. It debuted in May with 240,000 attendees and an average ESPN audience of 2.6 million. In November 2023, F1 will add a third U.S. race with the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Brandon Snow joined F1 as managing director of commercial in March. After spending much of the last decade at the National Basketball Association and Activision Blizzard, he’s aware that embracing both a brand’s legacy and its growth can be a tough balance.
“We have this influx of new fans that tend to be younger, much more diverse, much more female than we’ve had in the past—and there’s a lot of connectivity there to markets like Miami and Las Vegas,” Snow said. “But there is a tremendous amount of hardcore Formula 1 fans here (in Austin), and COTA is the granddaddy of them all for us.”
The U.S. Grand Prix did more than just pave the way for those other races. The race showed F1, its new venues and brand partners how to distinguish themselves amid a crowded U.S. sports field. With F1 extending the U.S. Grand Prix contract through 2026 earlier this year, the event continues to perfect its blueprint for attracting an engaged, diverse and aspirational audience.
Catherine Hall, a marketing and sponsorship consultant at The Marketing Arm, has worked on Formula 1 accounts for more than 10 years. She attended the U.S. Grand Prix from its inaugural race in 2012 to 2018.
“What I love about it is that it has that American flair that a lot of the other F1 races don’t have,” she said. “I remember in 2012, you had the University of Texas at Austin come out with their band and you had the cheerleaders—it was an amazing, different feel.”
Long road from Austin
The U.S. Grand Prix only recently began selling out its weekend slate. It first fully depleted its ticket supply in 2019 before losing a year to a Covid-19 shutdown. When the event returned in 2021, COTA discovered that 56% of those in attendance came in from out of state. Most attendees hailed from California, New York, Florida and Colorado, indicating a fairly wide geographic profile for F1 and its sponsors to tap.
When general admission and reserved seats sold out for 2022, COTA teamed with Elevate Sports Ventures to offer travel packages aimed at long-distance visitors.
On average, fans bundled three tickets and two hotel rooms for four nights.
While roughly 52% sprung for grandstand seats, another 48% took “shared hospitality” tickets. That latter option allowed access to a 251-foot observation tower; four club spaces with climate control, free food, commemorative gifts; and on-site Ed Sheeran and Green Day shows. A full 85% of travel package buyers ended up at four-star hotels in downtown Austin.
“Austin is a great destination city, but everyone knows that the crown jewel of Formula 1 racing is Monaco,” Hall said. “You have people that go to Monaco that aren’t Formula 1 fans. … They’re going there because they want to be seen and have a nice weekend on the Riviera.”
It’s a reflection of who’s buying into F1’s U.S. growth. According to Nielsen, Netflix’s Drive to Survive has inspired 2.3% more U.S. viewers to watch F1 in 2022 than they did a year ago. Among those streaming the series, 69% are in households that make $100,000 a year or more.
“Formula 1, traditionally, has been a bit of a stodgy European sport, at least in U.S. people’s minds,” Snow said. “We have a lot of young drivers who are very active in social media and digital media… so you’re layering on their personalities and their accessibility, which really haven’t been what Formula 1’s been about.”
F1’s affluent audience gravitated to the sport through streaming and drew tech-savvy sponsors including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Oracle. When digital payments company Moneygram wanted to announce its multiyear title sponsorship of the U.S.-based Haas F1 team, it waited until the U.S. Grand Prix to do so.
Mixed in with luxury and lifestyle brands including Rolex, Tag Heuer and Marriott Bonvoy, tech sponsors pair their business-to-business goals with F1’s aspirational sports culture.
“I was looking at [F1 team] McLaren the other day, and they have 45 sponsors for one team,” Hall said. “It’s important for brands that think about getting into sport to have really strong business objectives, know the market and know exactly what the story is they want to tell.”
A place in the race
The U.S. audience for Drive to Survive is also incredibly layered. Roughly 46% are 34 or younger, and nearly a quarter (23%) are Hispanic or Latino. While COTA doesn’t have demographic data on U.S. Grand Prix attendees, The Marketing Arm’s Hall noted that there was a strong Mexican and Mexican-American presence during her years attending the race.
Since then, however, Mexican driver Sergio Pérez (known as “Checo” to fans) has won four Grands Prix within the last three years. Earlier this year, he became the first racer from his country to win at Monaco. The Mexican Grand Prix, the next F1 race after Austin, averaged 968,000 U.S. viewers on ESPN last year. Peak viewership topped 1.2 million, making it the most-watched Mexican Grand Prix here since the event was revived in 2015. Yet even F1 itself admits it isn’t doing enough to reach Mexican and Mexican-American audiences or Hispanic and Latino viewers in the U.S.
“Honestly, we’ve got to do a better job. … [Pérez] and his team do a better job than we do,” F1’s Snow said. “Where we have been spending our time is very broad and global in scope, and we haven’t done a good enough job getting more local. … We need to lean into it more, particularly with Checo.”
While Snow noted that ESPN offers a Spanish-language feed for races and promotes them in Spanish, he said race teams, promoters and partners have done much of the work in bringing F1 to underserved communities.
Project management platform Smartsheet, which sponsors the McLaren F1 team, took matters into its own hands with a campaign it calls Sponsor X, which offers logo space to groups supporting access to STEM education to help generate awareness and donations.
At the U.S. Grand Prix, Smartsheet ceded its logo to the Hidden Genius Project: an Oakland, Calif.-based group founded by Black tech entrepreneurs to mentor Black male students in technology, entrepreneurship and leadership.
Smartsheet and The Hidden Genius Project hosted local high school students during the U.S. Grand Prix and had them participate in robotic coding, sports analytics workshops, and talks with a McLaren race engineer and driver Lando Norris. Google, Salesforce, Splunk, Cisco and the city of Austin also pitched in to help The Hidden Genius Project make the most of F1’s spot on the global stage.
“More and more U.S. brands are global in scope—almost everyone has got business outside of the U.S.—and we’re a platform that can really help them with that,” Snow said. “When you start to have Miami, Austin and Vegas as these tentpole moments, these are Super Bowl moments in the calendar, and we’re doing three of them a year, not just one.”
