Sports sponsorship, and motorsport sponsorship in particular, is a flexible, three-dimensional marketing tool whose role has changed profoundly over the years as markets, consumers and regulation have evolved. From the early years built on pure visibility to today’s expansion of decentralised finance, sponsorship and partnerships have gone through an extraordinary evolution. Telling that story means telling the story of sports marketing as a whole, but above all it means anticipating where it is heading next and the future that awaits us.

Article published in October 2022. At the end you will find an update written in September 2026.

One of the first sponsorships in the history of Formula 1 very probably dates back to 1968 when, at the South African Grand Prix, a car from the private Brabham team driven by John Love took to the track in the colours of the Gunston cigarette brand. It was a particularly sensible combination, yet at the same time a remarkably far-sighted one. John Love, driver and team owner, came from neighbouring Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), while Gunston made and sold its tobacco in South Africa itself. Around the circuit, posters showed the roaring car against the backdrop of a giant cigarette packet. The rhyming slogan read Men rate Gunston great, a play on words that needed no explanation.

A great deal has changed since that day in South Africa. And yet, well over half a century later, Formula 1 cars still race around circuits all over the world in liveries painted in their sponsors’ colours and decorated with brands and logos of every kind. It is an obvious observation, but an important one, because it leads us to a twofold conclusion. The first is that sports sponsorship works, and it is a powerful, recognised and reliable marketing tool. The second follows as a syllogism: if sports sponsorship has stood the test of time but the world has changed, then the way sponsorship is done must necessarily have changed too.

The 4 eras of sports sponsorship

To clear the ground straight away, it needs to be said that all companies, from Gunston to the present day, sponsor in order to sell more. To simplify even further, every profit-making business of any kind anywhere in the world has one ultimate aim: to impact the bottom line and sell more product than it sold yesterday, or sell it at a higher price.

Yet the concept of selling, despite the fairly universal understanding of the basic idea, is highly nuanced and in constant, frantic evolution. Today’s companies face more saturated markets, all-pervasive globalisation, more aware consumers, working conditions that are thankfully better regulated, and an overcrowded media arena in which the good old Gunston poster can no longer achieve anything on its own. If selling changes, marketing changes. If marketing changes, sports marketing changes too. In short, how do you get from a cigarette packet to Web3.0? How do you go from an orange livery to an NFT?

In this long-term view, we like to identify 4 historical moments of sports sponsorship in motorsport. Four eras of sponsorship that differ in method but not in objective, and whose boundaries are necessarily far more blurred and less clear-cut than the lines that follow can convey. The 4 eras we identify are these:

1. The era of Exposure
2. The era of Proof of Concept
3. The era of Engagement
4. The era of Digital Monetization

Before going into detail, a clarification is in order. Two, in fact.

The first is that we are not academics. This is our own view of the world of sponsorship, drawn from experience in the field and from our knowledge of the subject. There is certainly someone, at some university, who could offer a more rigorous, better argued observation backed by an extensive bibliography. Our aim is not to replace academia but, on the contrary, to offer the practitioner’s point of view. In that sense, any comment, correction or addition to these pages is not only welcome but encouraged.

The second is that knowing the past and reflecting on the present is, in any field, a way of trying to understand the future, and this is not merely a theoretical puzzle. Professionals in sports marketing and sponsorship have a duty not only to master the discipline but also to steer it and, above all, to present it to clients and sports properties in a way that creates value tomorrow as much as today.

The era of Exposure

The first age of sports sponsorship, and of motorsport sponsorship, coincides with companies’ need for awareness. We can define awareness as the degree to which a brand, a product or an advertising campaign is known and recognised by the public.

A brand’s first need is often to make its name known to as many people as possible, in the hope that they will become customers or increase their purchasing rate (how often they buy). As a customer, I cannot buy, or try to buy, a particular product if I do not know that the product exists.

Over time, however, this need changes as competition grows within the same product category and more products appear with the same purpose or the same promise. The question shifts from “how do I make my product known” to “how do I make sure my customer thinks of my brand when faced with a multitude of equivalent products”. This is where the concept of top of mind comes into play, which is, to put it simply, the most desirable evolution of awareness.

To both of these questions, the early companies responded with exposure, a series of actions aimed at putting their brand and product in full view. Here, sports sponsorship proves to be an extremely powerful tool. Sport, with its vast and passionate following, is the perfect canvas on which to display a logo and a name, and to paint in the colours of one’s brand.

This was the great insight of Gunston cigarettes and, before long, of the entire tobacco industry, which, blocked by restrictions on traditional advertising, was looking for a way to reach the mass of consumers. Motorsport was, not by chance, the perfect medium, and cars and motorcycles roaring at high speed, ridden by daredevils who scorned danger, were the ideal vehicle. Speed was masculine, brave, glamorous and rebellious, exactly like the world that cigarettes and rolling tobacco drew on.

This was the birth of the great sponsorships on two and four wheels that still colour the dreams of many fans. There was Ayrton Senna‘s McLaren Marlboro, Schumacher‘s Benetton Mild Seven, Valentino Rossi‘s Yamaha Gauloises and Max Biaggi‘s Honda Camel. The list could go on forever, from the Jordan Benson and Hedges to the daring two-tone BAR of a young Jacques Villeneuve, which even tried to make British American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike and 555 brands coexist: until the early 2000s, this was the dominant trend.

Big brands and big blocks of colour with a single purpose: to be seen by as many people as possible, in a way that nobody could fail to notice.

The era of Proof of Concept

While tobacco and consumer goods companies were starting to manage and understand the extraordinary potential of Formula 1, MotoGP (then still called 500cc) and other motor racing competitions, a small but growing group of highly specialised industries added another piece to the puzzle.

Makers of oils, fuels, suspension and carburettors realised that showing your brand is important, but linking it to the idea of performance is even better. After all, if something is good enough for a racing motorcycle or car, it will be excellent for everyday vehicles. This was the dawn of proof of concept sponsorship, in other words sponsorship as a guarantee of the quality of a product or service, which would inevitably give rise to technical sponsorship and to the concept of the official “supplier”.

From the mid-1970s onwards, the brands of Goodyear, Agip, Magneti Marelli and Champion began to appear with increasing frequency on racing liveries, promoting for the first time the technological side of racing’s value system. Because, of course, racing was virile, glamorous and synonymous with courage, but it was also, and the idea was beginning to catch on, a concentrate of cutting-edge technology and engineering. Being part of that world meant being able to promote your product as something excellent, transferred from the track to everyday roads.

Technical sponsorship, like the era of proof of concept sponsorship, has never ended: the underlying idea is so sound that even today major brands such as Pirelli, Petronas and other giants of global industry invest in it with enthusiasm and great energy. So strong is this bond between technical sponsor and racing that these brands often cross the boundaries of the circuit and become symbols of performance in their own right. Across the Atlantic, the phenomenon of sponsorship stickers began to spread: sets of decals with the main OEM or spare parts brands that young people stuck on their perfectly ordinary cars to give them a racier look.

Sponsorship had broken through its first barrier: from an advertising tool it had become an aspirational vehicle. This would open a new door onto the world of sports marketing.

The era of Engagement

At the start of the 2000s, the world facing advertisers and marketers everywhere had changed radically. Shelves were overflowing with equivalent products, radio and television broadcast advertising on repeat, and consumers faced a surplus of goods and information messages never seen before. On the horizon, the silhouette of a new communication tool was slowly emerging, the internet, which would soon upend the way things were done and seen.

Sports and motorsport sponsorship found itself at a crossroads with no easy way out. On the one hand, the awareness generated by television and the media was a double-edged coin, tightly bound to TV ratings that were beginning to suffer from the arrival of pay-per-view and a growing range of choice. On the other, technical sponsorship was limited to industries closely connected with the automotive world. Tobacco rightly met its end in the world of racing: the authorities, first in Europe and then worldwide, blocked the promotion of cigarettes and rolling tobacco, vetoing any form of sponsorship.

The answer, as always, would arrive more organically than anyone might have suspected. New brands were appearing on the consumer goods horizon, and they were destined to change the rules of the game. These were brands aimed at a young, nocturnal audience that read few magazines and spent little time in front of the television. It was an audience that took its cues from its own peers rather than from older generations, and made experience-centred rather than possession-centred choices. An audience that needed to try rather than see, to experience rather than be told. It was the perfect audience for energy drinks.

Red Bull, Monster Energy and Rockstar were the vanguard of a third era of sponsorship, the era of engagement, with which other industries would quickly fall into line.

The age of engagement did not simply want to show a brand or say how good a product was: its aim was to convey how a brand could make you feel. If the founding verb of the age of awareness was see, and that of the age of proof of concept learn, the age of engagement was built on feel. The gentlemen’s agreement, never signed but always implied, was: “I will make you feel cool, full of energy, welcomed into a community, and you will buy from me.” It was the golden age of large-scale sponsorship activation: events, concerts, themed parties, big skills contests, beautifully made merchandise, videos with stuntmen and often scantily clad girls that quickly went viral but were far removed from traditional communication.

Sponsorship became a tool for involvement, a starting point through which to try new experiences, a hand reaching out towards new experiential forms designed to nudge a change in consumer behaviour. There was a lot of psychology behind all this: brands focused on emotions and belonging, and associated the purchase with a feeling.

The smartest players, once again the energy drinks, even went back to grassroots sponsorship models, funding young and very young athletes who were not yet famous, accompanying them on their path to success and carefully selecting the most adrenaline-fuelled and “cool” sports. The brand broke free from the product once and for all and became experience, community, pure emotion: on nights lit up by coloured LEDs, as cars and motorcycles performed dizzying stunts and DJs played music at full volume, thousands of young people danced around a logo of two red bulls about to charge each other in a yellow circle. The miracle had finally happened: motorsport had been sublimated into its purest essence, and the energy distilled from it served to bring companies and consumers together.

The era of Digital Monetization

Around the turn of the second decade of the 2000s, new technologies imposed new ways of relating to one another, new ways of shopping and new ways of doing business and creating value. Social media, by now so outdated that the big names are leaving the stage, paved the way for great granularity in consumption, experience, opinion and education. Even Thomas Merton, who in 1955 wrote that “no man is an island”, would be surprised to see how one-to-one the entire communication machine has become, and how the concept of community, so widely promoted only ten years earlier, is crumbling into an individualism that is first and foremost a mindset.

The pandemic wave that swept the planet from late 2019, forcing long lockdowns and periods of isolation, would radically change many people’s habits. Computers, mobile phones and TV screens became the most important, and often the only, window on the world, and the internet became the tool for interaction. Web3.0 changed perspectives on what, until yesterday, had been taken for granted: cryptocurrencies removed the relationship with banks and traditional currencies, NFTs altered the concept of ownership, and blockchains redrew the very idea of exchange.

What, in this redefined scenario, is motorsport sponsorship for? The answer is as simple as it is fascinating: to speak to a new audience of consumers who are embracing, with ever greater conviction, the idea of a digital economy designed around the individual. This is the age of “digital monetization”, and it is dominated by cryptocurrencies, NFTs and decentralised payment systems.

Formula 1 cars and MotoGP motorcycles became the place to put forward a modern business proposition: invest with me and in me, and together we will both become richer, and we will do it our way. But why do the big names, among them Crypto.com, Velas, Tezos, Lunar and Binance, choose the very best of motorsport for this meeting? The answer, once again, lies in the demographics of the viewership: very young, hyper-connected, truly global and fascinated by the technologies that permeate the best of two- and four-wheel racing.

It is a completely new way of doing sponsorship, and these companies, run by very young people with little interest in the ceremonies of traditional business, are not interested in the activations of the turn of the century, let alone in simple visibility. MotoGP, Formula 1 and Formula E became a gateway for strengthening a new and growing economy. Properties, too, have to adapt to new tools and methods: these young protagonists need little hospitality but a great deal of support in generating NFTs, they want few newsletters but ask for fan tokens. It is a new world, and those who are not afraid to dive headlong into it will see enormous deals land on the table.

The present and future of motorsport sponsorship

As we said at the start, these four segments of motorsport sponsorship are not categorical or definitive, and even less so neatly separated. What is more, we believe they should be understood as fluid models that permeate one another rather than replacing each other.

In essence: exposure and awareness, today as 70 years ago, remain important components of a good sponsorship plan. Today as then, any client would like its brand on this motorcycle or that car to be a little bigger than the sponsorship proposal showed. Engagement and alignment of value systems are as central today as they were then. But on their own they are no longer enough.

It is therefore also clear that these eras are not erasing the previous ones, but are neatly stacking on top of one another to create something of growing complexity, and growing potential. If good John Love’s sponsorship was a brilliant but also extremely simple idea (as all brilliant ideas are), motorsport sponsorship today is a multi-layered, multi-faceted tool that must be handled with enthusiasm but also with awareness. Going to a decentralised payments company today and offering a sticker on a rear wing would be a disservice to the industry, to the discipline and to the sport itself.

Understanding the trajectories of the market and of the world we move in is our job, if we want to give effective answers to the companies that ask us, today, how to build their success of tomorrow.

Four years on: the 2026 update

When we wrote these pages in October 2022, the era of digital monetization looked set to dominate the decade. A month later, on 11 November 2022, FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, filed for bankruptcy, and Mercedes, which had carried its brand on its cars since 2021, suspended the partnership within hours. It was not the end of cryptocurrencies in sport, but it was the end of a frenzy, and we traced its rise and fall in our analysis of crypto sponsorship in sport.

Looked at closely, that episode confirms the model more than it contradicts it. The eras do not replace one another, they build up in layers: the fourth has not disappeared, it has shrunk and normalised, and today it coexists with the three that came before it. Exposure still counts, so does technical proof, and engagement has become the foundation of any serious activation.

Meanwhile a fifth age is taking shape, which we like to call the era of the platform. The sponsor no longer buys only visibility, technical credibility, emotion or a digital community: it becomes part of how the team actually works. Oracle runs Red Bull’s simulations and race strategy in its cloud; according to Ampere Analysis, in 2026 the technology sector is investing 565 million dollars in Formula 1, and in just six months eight deals were signed with artificial intelligence companies, from Meta AI with Mercedes to Anthropic with Williams. If the verb of exposure was see, that of proof of concept learn and that of engagement feel, the verb of the platform is work: the brand is not looked at, it is used. Anyone who wants to know what these deals are worth today will find the numbers in our guide to the cost of Formula 1 sponsorship.

The conclusion we reached back then, however, still stands, with only the subject changed: going to an artificial intelligence company today and offering a sticker on a rear wing would, once again, be a disservice to the industry, to the discipline and to the sport itself.

Sources for the update: BlackBook Motorsport, Mercedes suspends FTX; SportsPro, Ampere Analysis on the 2026 market; Oracle, the renewal with Red Bull Racing.