There is a phrase that sports marketing professionals still hear, with some regularity, on early calls with potential clients: “Sport doesn’t interest us — our buyers are women.” It is a belief that has held for years, sustained by stubborn stereotypes. The data from 2024 and 2025, however, tell a completely different story — and those who continue to ignore it are leaving a concrete opportunity on the table.

The numbers that redefine the audience

In December 2024, Nielsen published results from a study conducted across 46,000 people in 37 international markets: 41% of Formula 1 fans are women. This is not an emerging trend — it is already a consolidated fact. Formula 1 has surpassed 750 million fans globally, and the female segment is one of the primary drivers of this growth.

The 2025 F1 Global Fan Survey, conducted with Motorsport Network, pushes the picture further: women now represent 42% of the F1 audience and are at the centre of a generational shift — three in four fans among those newly engaging with the series for the first time are women. This is not a niche. It is the direction in which the entire market is moving.

In two-wheel motorsport, the trend is analogous. The female audience for MotoGP accounts for approximately 20% of the global TV target — a share in continuous growth according to Motorsport Network data — with significant peaks in Asian markets and younger age groups. The MotoGP audience profile reveals a female penetration that many sponsor brands continue to systematically underestimate.

Women’s motorsport: from the stands to sponsorship properties

The evolution of the female audience does not emerge from nothing — it is fuelled by a content and competition offering that has changed shape significantly over the past two years.

The F1 Academy, the single-seater series exclusively for female drivers, is already the second-most-followed series among female F1 fans: 42% of female fans say they follow it. In May 2025, Netflix launched F1: The Academy, generating an estimated 89 million contacts in the debut week alone. This is a series that does not merely exist — it produces audience, conversation and brand value alignment for the brands involved.

In the two-wheel world, 2024 marked the launch of the WorldWCR — FIM Women’s Circuit Racing World Championship, the women’s world series organised within the WorldSBK calendar. The inaugural edition featured 25 riders from 18 nations and six continents, with Ana Carrasco — already a Supersport 300 World Champion — claiming the inaugural title. The 2025 edition has confirmed the formula, with 14 nationalities on an even more competitive grid.

These are not internal motorsport communications exercises. They are sponsorship properties — with measurable audience, international TV and digital coverage, and a values alignment with women’s talent in elite sport that an increasing number of brands are actively seeking.

The “purchasing decision-maker” misconception dismantled

The classic reasoning — “our target is female, therefore sport doesn’t concern us” — has two structural flaws. The first: it assumes women do not watch sport, a hypothesis that data refutes without ambiguity. The second, more subtle: it conflates the profile of the end consumer with that of the sports audience, as though the two were incompatible.

The women who follow F1, WorldSBK or MotoGP do not cease to be consumers, purchasing decision-makers, or professionals with buying power. Reaching a female audience through sport is not a paradox — it is exactly the same logic that applies to any other medium.

The data point that closes the argument comes from SponsorUnited: in 2024, sponsorship deals in women’s sport grew 22% year-on-year. In the period 2022-2024, women’s sport revenues grew 4.5 times faster than men’s sport. The market has already made its choice — based on data, not intuition.

The implications for brands

If the sports audience is 41-42% female in the case of F1 and growing across all other motorsport disciplines, the question for a marketing manager is no longer “does sport interest us?”. It is: “which property, with which activation angle, reaches our target with the greatest efficiency?”

The answer depends on the brand, the market and the budget. But the premise — that sport is an unsuitable medium for reaching women — is definitively overtaken by the facts. Anyone designing a sports sponsorship strategy in 2025 can no longer afford to ignore this data without compromising their competitive analysis.

The open question is no longer whether women watch sport. It is how many brands have already updated their reading of the market — and how many have not.

Frequently asked questions on women and sports sponsorship