The visual power of motorsport is the ability of Formula 1, MotoGP and the other great series to strike the viewer before the race has even started: colours, lights, speed, scenery. It is not an aesthetic detail. It is one of the reasons these sports work so well with audiences and with brands, and why sponsors invest in them.

In 2024 MotoGP and Formula 1 opened their seasons from the night-time sands of the Middle East.

Bathed in floodlights and neon, and kissed by desert sand, the tracks of Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were the stage for two world championships that are changing their skin while trying to change their soul. Or rather, that changed their skin while they were changing their soul. The most attentive and loyal viewers cannot have missed this metamorphosis of the two competitions, a metamorphosis that is visual first of all.

Ever more cinematic and surprising, the circuits on which the fastest two- and four-wheeled machines in the world race are now a kaleidoscope of fluorescent colours, flickering lights, brightly painted run-off areas and breathtaking LED displays. Among palm trees, yachts, giant hotels and illuminated fountains, it is hard to say where cinema, video games and entertainment begin and end.

Helmets, liveries, race suits, parts and components have ever more saturated colours, bolder lines, more defined blocks of colour. Shading, inlays and fine detail give way to large splashes of colour at the edge of the visible spectrum, like the fluorescent green of the 2024 Sauber or the vibrant yellow of the Ducati VR46. At the same time, constructors and manufacturers play with materials and paints, between the total matte of Red Bull and the fluorescent yellow with which Lewis Hamilton went back to the helmet of his early days.

Interactive graphics, on-screen data, animations, motion graphics and more give viewers an experience and an amount of information unimaginable only a few years ago.

Motorsport: seeing is believing

The sensory side of motorsport, often overlooked, is a fundamental part of its success and popularity. Not everyone is lucky enough to watch races live, and so they partly lose the sound, on which the big TV producers, such as the former Dorna, now MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group, have long been working with cutting-edge, ultra-sensitive microphones. Even so, the great visual impact of the top series such as Formula 1, MotoGP, Formula E, NASCAR and WEC is a founding part of the charm, the appeal and the marketability of these series.

In essence, these sports are so effective with audiences and brands also because they are so beautiful to watch, because their imagery, their sculptural quality, is so powerful.

It is an interesting subject first of all for marketing, for which perception and emotion are among the strongest levers. How much, in short, do visual attraction, sensory weight and, in the end, beauty count in the choices we make, in the decisions we take and in the changes in behaviour that marketers so eagerly await?

To answer this question, let us take a step back. What is so fascinating, so magnetic, about the image of a supercar or a sports bike? And, more simply, why is there always a small crowd around every Lamborghini, Ferrari or Pagani parked on the street? The answer, simple but natural, is that these vehicles are beautiful, as well as rare. Now, as any child knows, “beautiful” is a word that means everything and nothing: beauty is hard to argue for, it has no edges and it certainly does not help analysis, any more than the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

A theory developed in 1980 by the essayist Roland Barthes, well known to scholars of visual languages all over the world, in his book “Camera Lucida” helps us more. Barthes says, among other things, that every time we look at something, in his essay a photograph, two aspects work together: the studium and the punctum.

The studium is the rational, lucid, physical side of the image, the one that tells us that this is a vehicle of a certain model and brand, with a certain colour and certain features. The punctum is what involves us in an image, a particular sign that acts on us and gives the impression of being wounded somewhere in the soul. Barthes cannot explain what the punctum is, except through a nuance of definition: it is something sudden, accidental and private.

Adapting Barthes’s theory to our field, it is not entirely reckless to say that motorsport, especially at the very top level, holds for its fans a punctum that is hard to explain but undeniable. As every fan knows, a Formula 1 car, even parked in a garage, has a cathartic magnetism. In the same way, a circuit, even empty and silent, carries within it the whirling power of racing.

Visual strength and success

Released on Netflix in March 2019 and taking off during the months of the pandemic, Drive to Survive has become one of the great success stories of sports television. Building on that result and confident they could repeat it, producers James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin made a series about tennis for Netflix, called Break Point. The idea behind Break Point is not unlike the successful one behind Drive to Survive: giving viewers exclusive, high-quality access to the behind the scenes, the matches and the many details of the spectacular world of the racket.

Unfortunately for Gay-Rees and Martin, in March 2024 Break Point was cancelled after two seasons, according to The Times because of disappointing ratings and difficulties in getting access to the best players. While the failure is partly due to the absence of some superstars and a few glaring storytelling mistakes, many pointed to the fact that tennis, unlike Formula 1, is not visually engaging.

Several reviews said so clearly: the language that works so well with single-seaters suits tennis poorly. The result is a series that relies on close-ups of players hitting the ball, a gesture as majestic as it is repetitive.

The trick, on the other hand, works perfectly for Drive to Survive, which even when the script is uninspired or openly romanticised can rely on first-rate visual material. The glittering starting grid at the Monaco Grand Prix, the silhouette of a champion standing on his car in a night torn apart by camera flashes, the breathtaking curves of Spa plunging into the forest: these are communication assets that very few sports can count on. And of extraordinary power.

Directing the gaze, striking the heart

This is not the first time that the great sports properties have tried to understand, direct, manipulate, improve and ultimately exploit the innate visual power of sport.

As early as the beginning of the 1980s the NBA, the American professional basketball league, started working with Andrew Bernstein, a photographer trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and covering the league’s games since 1983, who would help make the game “cooler” for those watching live, on television or leafing through photos in magazines. Bernstein, one of the founders of NBA Photos in 1986, developed sports communication techniques and tools that are still applied today and refined, once and for all, the idea of all-access sports reportage.

Formula 1, MotoGP, WEC and the other great motorsport series are no different today. The extraordinary economic, creative and technological investment made to make the show more engaging, the image more exciting and the setting more attractive is there for everyone to see.

Without a doubt, the need for spectacle also comes from the competition that the whole world of sport faces from the entertainment industry, which is making giant strides towards engagement, sensory load, and the number and power of the stimuli to which users are exposed.

However, and perhaps even more importantly, the governing bodies of sport know very well that, to use another expression dear to marketing, “we buy with our eyes”, and they are doing everything they can to make every second, every frame, every piece of content ever more memorable. The stronger an emotion, the more the senses are stimulated and the more intense what we perceive from an experience, the stronger the impression it leaves in the mind and the bond with the brands and with the whole subtext. In this, and for structural reasons, motorsport is showing a potential unknown to almost every other discipline, with very few exceptions. It is the same principle that makes the experiential level so important in sponsorship: touching, seeing, feeling.

To infinity and beyond

Qiddiya City, the pharaonic development project under construction about 40 kilometres from Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, is set to host the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix from 2028, a race currently held in Jeddah. Renders and simulations show a spectacular strip of asphalt winding among fireworks, LED lights and, above all, “the Blade“, the elevated corner around 70 metres high, taller than a twenty-storey building. As someone was quick to point out, it looks more like a 1:1 scale version of Mario Kart than a racetrack.

If on the one hand sponsors benefit from this visual and sensory boom guaranteed by the top racing series, on the other their creative departments find fertile ground to contribute to the show with ever more spectacular innovations and activations. Just think of the role Red Bull has played in how Formula 1 presents itself today, with cars speeding through historic city centres or down ski slopes, like Verstappen on the Streif in Kitzbühel in 2016, or of Marc Márquez’s Honda crossing London’s Millennium Bridge in 2014, to understand how tightly intertwined and inseparable this mix is.

The question we need to ask at this point can only be one: up to what point does this visual feast, this invasion of the senses, prepare an excellent sporting show, and when does it become an exercise in style for its own sake, mannered and cumbersome? If it is true that great scenery enhances the show and gives lustre to the actors, it is also true that it cannot cover and obscure the plot of the play, or come before the performance of the lead. The same question applies to anyone choosing between two championships that sell different things, as our comparison of F1 and MotoGP, team oriented against star oriented, explains.

It is an issue that motorsport producers and organisers must start to address, as calendars fill up with video-game venues, breathtaking landscapes and gleaming vehicles. In the meantime, though, sponsors and partners can enjoy this thrilling feast for the eyes, knowing that every second of this lavish show works in favour of their brands and of the memory viewers keep of them.