How Motorsport Sponsorship Works

Fact: Over 60% of motorsport fans prefer to buy from a brand they see during the races. However, the most successful brands don’t use sports sponsorship in isolation, instead, they integrate it across all marketing and communications touchpoints in their business. In this article, we are going to explain how motorsport sponsorship works and how a brand should approach it.

If you compare sports sponsorship in different sports, you will find some common ground with concepts, frameworks and ideas that would work for all of them, but that's just the basics. Every sport offers sponsoring companies a different list of benefits and assets to deploy and the way you utilise the same asset can vary a lot from football to tennis and Formula 1.

That's why is never easy and rarely correct to compare sports sponsorship in different sports, also because the demographics of the fans are different. Motorsport fans are different from football fans in terms of how they are educated, their interests, their income, their age and also gender split. But more than that, motorsport embodies some unique values that are only marginal in other sports, like innovation and technology.

To give you a quick example, when signing a sports sponsorship with an F1 team the brand generally obtains a number of Paddock Passes that can be used in very different ways: they can be used to reward top executives, convert potential clients, nurture key business partners relationships but also a prize for an online consumers competitions.

The same can be said for the access to the drivers, senior team personnel and team HQ: it can be used to deliver a company-wide business meeting, deliver an experiential event, create case studies and shoot behind-the-scenes original content.

Structuring a strategic motorsport sponsorship requires expertise and deep knowledge of the sport and its main players.

This is original editorial content from Drive Sports Marketing, an agency specialising in Formula 1 sponsorship, Formula E sponsorship, MotoGP sponsorship, and WEC sponsorship.