There’s a phrase that anyone who works at a sports sponsorship agency hears periodically — usually toward the end of a meeting that seemed to be going well. It comes from a marketing director, or a C-level executive who has just spoken up, and it sounds something like: “We like motorsport, but it’s too dangerous. It doesn’t align with our company policy.”

It’s a position that deserves respect. Those who express it aren’t looking for a way to close the conversation: they’re raising a genuine concern about brand reputation, consistency with corporate positioning, and the risk that an on-screen incident could turn a sponsorship into a communications crisis. These are legitimate questions. But, as is often the case, the expected answer doesn’t match the available data.

Perception versus data

Let’s start with the numbers, which in this case are more useful than any qualitative argument. Over the last forty years of Formula 1 and MotoGP World Championships, the combined number of riders and drivers who have died in or as a direct result of a racing incident is approximately 25. That’s roughly one fatality every 21 months, across two championships that together have held thousands of rounds in front of a global television audience.

That figure alone should prompt reflection. Comparison with other sports clarifies the picture further: in Italy alone, sports-related deaths exceed 100 per year across all disciplines. Road cycling — a discipline many brands consider “safe” in image terms — claims one life every 35 hours in Italy. Mushroom picking in the countryside, an activity we would never associate with sporting risk, causes more annual deaths than Formula 1 and MotoGP combined.

This isn’t cynicism: it’s the correct way to calibrate a perception distorted by media exposure.

What has changed since 2015

Data from the past decade tells an even clearer story. In Formula 1, the last driver to lose his life as a result of a racing incident was Jules Bianchi in 2015 — following a trauma sustained at Suzuka the year before. Since then, across more than ten consecutive seasons, the category has recorded zero fatalities. A 2024 analysis estimated that the frequency of fatal incidents per race in F1 dropped by 98% between 1960 and 2020. The probability of surviving a 200+ km/h impact has risen from approximately 60% in the 1980s to 99.8% today.

In MotoGP, the situation at premier class level is comparable. The last fatality during a premier-class MotoGP race was Marco Simoncelli in 2011. In the last decade, the only fatalities in the World Motorcycle Championship have been Luis Salom in Moto2 in 2016 and Jason Dupasquier in Moto3 in 2021 — junior categories, not the top class. Fourteen years without a fatality in the premier class of a two-wheel motorsport series that races at over 340 km/h. A record many traditional sports disciplines cannot match.

The safety engineering the public doesn’t see

Behind these figures lies a systematic technical and regulatory investment that has been running for decades and has, in recent years, produced concrete and measurable innovations. The Halo — the titanium structure protecting the F1 cockpit — became mandatory in 2018 after years of development. Since then, at least two incidents that could have been fatal ended without injury to the drivers: Romain Grosjean in Bahrain in 2020, when his car split in two and caught fire, and Zhou Guanyu at Silverstone in 2022, when the car flipped and slid upside down along the asphalt for dozens of metres. In both cases, the Halo made the difference between a serious incident and a tragedy.

In MotoGP, integrated airbag suits have been mandatory since 2019: they deploy in milliseconds during a crash, protecting the rider’s shoulders, chest and spine before they even hit the ground. Chassis design, circuit layouts, energy-absorbing barriers and medical protocols have all advanced enormously compared to the motorsport of twenty or thirty years ago.

There is one further aspect worth highlighting, directly relevant to the narrative a brand can build around its sponsorship: the technology developed to protect drivers and riders on track transfers systematically to everyday mobility. Modern helmets, protective jackets, and active safety systems in production cars owe a great deal to decades of research driven by the urgency of protecting racing professionals. Associating with motorsport doesn’t mean associating with danger: it means associating with the technical excellence that has made transport safer for everyone.

The real issue is not risk — it’s risk visibility

There is a distinction worth naming precisely, because it is the key to reading the objection correctly. Motorsport is not statistically more dangerous than many other physically intense activities. It is, however, extraordinarily visible when something goes wrong: incidents happen live in front of hundreds of millions of viewers, captured in high definition from dozens of angles simultaneously. A MotoGP crash enters talk shows and social media feeds within minutes; the 100-plus sports deaths per year in Italy generate almost no news coverage at all.

This media asymmetry creates a cognitive distortion that is difficult to correct without data. It leads many brands to systematically overestimate actual risk and to forgo one of the most efficient communications platforms in the world — the combined global audience of F1 and MotoGP exceeds two billion contacts per season — based on a perception the numbers do not support.

What genuinely deserves careful evaluation — and this is where working with a specialist agency becomes essential — are crisis management clauses, pre-defined communication plans for adverse scenarios, and the coherence between a brand’s positioning and the chosen sports property. These are the real risk factors to manage: not the statistical danger level of a sport that has not lost a premier-class competitor in over a decade.

To explore motorsport sponsorship opportunities and understand how to manage the safety narrative with your internal stakeholders, read our guide to MotoGP sponsorships or contact us for a personalised assessment.