A week ago I wrote that Formula 1 sponsorship spend will exceed $3 billion in 2026 for the first time, driven by tech and AI deals that buy operational integration rather than logo placement. The number is striking. The reaction in client conversations has been more striking. Roughly half ask, “Then how do we get into F1?”. The other half ask the more interesting question: “What does that make MotoGP worth?” This is the article for the second half. It is also, on the read I would offer, the more profitable question to be asking in 2026. The visible numbers tell a clean story. Liberty Media’s Formula 1 business generated $3.87 billion of revenue in 2025, up 14% from 2024, with Adjusted OIBDA of $946 million. Liberty’s MotoGP business, reported on a pro-forma basis after the Dorna acquisition closed on 3 July 2025, generated $573 million of revenue, also up 14% pro-forma, with Adjusted OIBDA of $201 million. On that basis, F1 generated about 6.75 times MotoGP’s revenue in 2025 The argument I want to make in this piece is that the price gap is real but the asset gap is smaller, and that the difference is the cleanest structural opportunity in motorsport sponsorship right now. Four sections: what the visible gap actually is; what it buys, line by line; the mistakes brands could make when reading it; and how RTR approaches the F1-or-MotoGP decision in 2026.

The Gap, Numerically

Three layers of data, each from sources I would defend. Rights-holder revenue (Liberty Media, primary). F1 2025 revenue $3.87B, MotoGP 2025 revenue $573M pro-forma. The ratio, 6.75x, is the most apples-to-apples comparison available because both segments now report under the same parent on the same basis. Title-slot pricing (RTR’s own published estimates, plus F1 trade-press reporting). A MotoGP title sponsorship in 2026 prices in a band of €5–15 million per year, depending on team prestige, performance and rights bundle (figures from RTR’s own 2026 MotoGP sponsorship cost guide). An F1 title slot in 2026 is reported by trade press at $60–110 million per year, with Oracle at Red Bull at the top end, Microsoft at Mercedes around $60 million as the smallest primary-partner deal, and HP, Mastercard, Petronas, Aramco and Revolut between. Converting the MotoGP band at current EUR-USD rates and taking midpoints, F1 title slots cost roughly 7–10 times their MotoGP equivalents. Fanbase (primary on both sides). Dorna reports MotoGP’s global fanbase at 632 million in 2025, up 12% year-on-year. Nielsen Sports’ F1 audience-measurement work, surveying 44,000 respondents across 37 international markets, places Formula 1’s global fanbase at around 826–827 million in 2024–2025. On this apples-to-apples comparison, people who identify as fans of the championship,  F1 is roughly 1.3 times the size of MotoGP. Note: fanbase is a stock measure (unique humans who follow the sport), distinct from cumulative TV audience (the sum of viewers across all broadcasts in a season, which double-counts the same viewer at multiple races). Cumulative TV audience and the EAV bridge. Sponsorship ROI is most commonly quantified using Equivalent Advertising Value or Nielsen Sports’ QI Media Value, methodologies, with Repucom heritage, that convert seconds of logo exposure into the cost of buying equivalent advertising in the same broadcast windows. The metric that matters in that calculation is cost-per-second-of-exposure. Two figures help here. F1’s cumulative annual TV audience for 2025 is reported by Nielsen at 1.83 billion, up 6.8% year-on-year. Dorna has not published a single equivalent 2025 figure for MotoGP, communicating instead that TV audiences grew on average +9% per Grand Prix and +26% on Sprint races versus 2024. What is published is the broadcast volume: 22 rounds, 9 months, 143 broadcast partner, 200+countries, 87,000 broadcasted hours of television. Even at the upper bound of how an analyst might extrapolate MotoGP’s cumulative reach from those parameters, F1’s TV reach is materially larger in absolute terms,  but, on every published title-slot price point, MotoGP’s cost per second of broadcast exposure is structurally lower than F1’s. That is the variable an EAV-based ROI calculation lands on, and it lands in MotoGP’s favour. On-circuit attendance. Separately, MotoGP closed 2025 with a record 3.6 million spectators across 22 race weekends, including an all-time record 311,797 at Le Mans. The price ratio is 7–10x. The fanbase ratio is roughly 1.3x. F1’s cumulative TV audience is materially larger than MotoGP’s in absolute terms, but the gap, on the figures the parties disclose, is meaningfully narrower than the price gap, and the cost-per-second-of-exposure metric that EAV produces is structurally more favourable to MotoGP. Whichever ROI metric a brand uses, the pricing of the underlying asset is not tracking the reach it delivers.

What 1/10 The Title Price Actually Buys

The thesis I am offering is that the integration value of a MotoGP title slot in 2026 sits at roughly 60–70% of the equivalent F1 title slot, while the price sits at roughly 10–15%. Neither figure is a hard fact, they are estimates anchored on the deal architecture I have seen,  audited and reviewed across almost thre decades. Treat them as the read of an experienced practitioner, not as documentary data. Five components. Near-parity on the calendar. F1 runs 23 rounds in 2026 (the Saudi Arabian GP was cancelled; the Bahrain GP moved to October, hosted at Sepang in Malaysia). MotoGP runs 22 rounds across five continents from March to November. Race-weekend volume, broadcast hours and brand exposure windows remain closely aligned — one round apart out of twenty-two. A title sponsor in either championship has roughly the same number of activation moments per year. Audience composition. Per Dorna’s most recent global fan survey, MotoGP’s audience is European and Asia-Pacific weighted, with strong heart-of-fan markets in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan, and accelerating growth in the Americas under Liberty’s stewardship. F1 has broader North American reach since 2018. For a brand whose growth markets weight toward Southern Europe, ASEAN or Latin America, MotoGP is often the closer fit. Operational integration capacity. This is the value flow my F1 $3bn piece argued is now the largest in modern sponsorship. MotoGP has almost the same capacity available. The Lenovo-Ducati partnership, in force as a technology partnership since 2018 and as Title sponsor since 2021, is the working template: hardware and engineering integration, B2B hospitality, co-developed content. The architecture exists. The price tag for a comparable deal is materially lower. B2B and hospitality density. MotoGP’s VIP Village programme is a paddock environment whose sponsor B2B density is, in commercial terms, very close to F1’s Paddock Club. Where MotoGP differs is geographic: a Lusail or a Mugello hospitality programme reaches a different decision-maker cohort than a Monaco or Abu Dhabi one, not lesser, different. For brands whose enterprise-customer base sits in continental Europe and ASEAN, that is a feature, not a bug. Inventory availability. This is the pricing-cycle point. F1’s top four teams between them carry, more than 200 sponsor and partner relationships. Category exclusivity is increasingly difficult to find. In MotoGP, factory-team title slots are moving fast: Castrol replaced Repsol at Honda, and on 29 May 2026 Aprilia — leading the 2026 championship — signed a multi-year deal with Monster Energy as main sponsor, becoming title sponsor from 2027, the team’s first in its factory history. Premium sponsor inventory at the major factory teams is already being allocated and is no longer as freely accessible as it was a year ago. That window does not stay open through a Liberty-led commercial cycle.

Five mistakes easy to make when running the F1-vs-MotoGP comparison

1. Reading the price gap as a quality gap. It is not. F1’s pricing has crossed an efficiency threshold the operational-integration buyers reset higher; MotoGP’s has not. The gap is a cycle effect, not an asset-quality verdict.
2. Treating MotoGP as the F1 alternative for budget-constrained brands. That framing leaves the strategic case unbuilt. MotoGP is, on the right brief, a primary recommendation, not a fallback.
3. Pricing MotoGP against historic MotoGP deals rather than F1-equivalent integration value. Negotiating up from a 2018 baseline understates what the current asset delivers. Negotiate against the 2026 F1 architecture; the conversation moves.
4. Skipping the geographic-fit conversation. A US-only growth brand belongs in F1 today; an Italo-Spanish-ASEAN growth brand often belongs in MotoGP first. The default of “the bigger championship is the better answer” costs brands real money.
5. Treating the inventory window as permanent. “We will look at MotoGP next year” assumes today’s pricing equals renewal pricing. If Liberty executes its commercial integration playbook on MotoGP at half the speed it did on F1, that assumption fails inside 24 months.

How RTR Approaches the Decision

The method has three steps. We use it whenever a brand brings the F1-or-MotoGP question to the table. Step one –  same activation grid, two prices. We build the brand’s activation plan as if it had to be executable in either championship. Same B2B account list, same hospitality calendar, same data architecture, same content output. Then we cost it twice,  once at F1 title-sponsor pricing, once at MotoGP title-sponsor pricing. The output is rarely a 7–10x cost gap; it is more often 4–6x once the activation overhead is constant. That number is the actual decision figure. Step two – geographic and architectural fit. We weight the brand’s growth markets and its operational architecture against each championship’s footprint and integration capacity. If the brand’s three-year roadmap is North America heavy with enterprise tech buyers, F1 wins. If it is Southern Europe, ASEAN or Latin America heavy with B2B premium engagement, MotoGP wins. If the brand is multi-region with no clear weighting, the cost gap usually decides. Step three – net opinion, then sequencing. RTR’s role is to offer a recommendation, not a balanced list of pros and cons. Increasingly in 2026 our recommendation for a brand with a five-year horizon is to enter MotoGP now at the current pricing window, with an explicit upgrade option to F1 in years three to four if the brand’s footprint and architecture justify it. The reverse, F1 first, MotoGP later,  is a more expensive sequence by approximately the cost of one full F1 contract cycle. (See 2026: the right year to sponsor MotoGP for the structural case.)

What CMOs Should Do This Quarter

If you’re involved in F1 sponsorship or MotoGP sponsorship, this is the exercise to run before your next renewal. Pull out the line of your 2026–2028 sponsorship strategy that names the championship. If the line says “F1 because it is the biggest”, that is a 2018 answer. The 2026 question is which championship gives you the integration you actually buy at the price you actually pay. Run the exercise above,  same activation grid, two prices,  and let the comparison speak. Sponsorship is an iceberg. The visible logo is the tip. In 2026, the price of that tip in F1 has caught up with the value beneath the waterline; in MotoGP, on the read I would offer, it has not yet. The gap between price and value is exactly what brands are looking for when they say they want a strategic position in motorsport. F1 is priced like a finished asset. MotoGP, today, is priced like an asset under construction. Both are real. The construction site costs less and lets you change the floor plan. Sit down, relax, but do the comparison this quarter, not next.