The Fangirl Revolution

For a long time motorsport’s standard operating manual has assumed a single audience profile: older, male, mechanically literate and tolerant of testosterone-fuelled gatekeeping. The last decade has exposed how wrong that assumption was. A demographic shift driven in large part by new, younger female fans, often dismissed as “fangirls”, has altered F1’s revenue mix, commercial strategy and even the technical storytelling around aero-packages, ERS deployment and tyre strategy. What looked like a culture war is better described as a reallocation of audience equity into new income streams and talent pipelines that materially increased the sport’s valuation.

By the numbers: F1 now estimates a vastly larger, more female audience than in the pre-streaming era. Recent global fan research published by F1 and Motorsport Network shows that women account for three out of every four new fans in the latest survey waves, and that female engagement is shifting the sport to younger audience (Formula1.com, 2025). That trend is reflected in industry tallies that place F1’s global fanbase in the mid-hundreds of millions; outlets citing roughly 750 million global fans attribute a substantial part of that growth to the new female and Gen-Z audiences (Brown, 2024).

So why does this even matter to valuation? Because sport businesses are priced off future revenue streams: media rights, sponsorship fees and race-promoter payments. Liberty Media’s reporting and market analysis show that primary F1 revenue streams grew materially in recent years; media rights in particular jumped from around £610.6m in 2017 to about £1.38bn by 2024, and sponsorship revenue has been one of the fastest growing components Liberty identified as being undervalued when they acquired the sport (Liberty Media, 2025; S&P Global, 2025). Those revenue uplifts, not just one-off race fees, feed discounted cash flow models and multiples applied (relative valuation) to rights portfolios and team assets. The consequence is palpable: independent valuations aggregated by Sportico (and others) put the combined value of the ten F1 teams north of £42bn, with an average team valuation rising into the low-single-digit billions by EOQ4 2025 (Sportico/Sport finance reporting, 2025).

How did women in motorsport produce this value uplift? The mechanism is both straightforward and multi-faceted. First, the demographic changed the mix of sponsors willing to spend in motor racing. Where historic sponsorship skewed to automotive suppliers, spirits and men’s grooming brands, the female audience unlocked lifestyle verticals: beauty, premium skincare, fashion and wellness, that had previously viewed motorsport as an indifferent fit. High-profile commercial partnerships that would once have been unthinkable, such as ELEMIS becoming an official skincare partner to Aston Martin Aramco, provide an exemplar: these are brands that can and do pay premium rates for global, lifestyle-centric inventory because the audience profile justifies a higher customer-LTV assumption (Aston Martin / ELEMIS press material, 2025). These sponsors drive higher per-fan revenue and broaden the buyers’ pool for hospitality, experiential and e-commerce activations around race weekends.

Secondly, female engagement amplified the sport’s social-first economics. The Netflix docuseries, Drive to Survive, opened the paddock to a mainstream, narrative-driven audience; women and Gen-Z viewers disproportionately fuelled the social engagement that followed. That organic creator economy of fan-made breakdowns, short-form clips, and driver lifestyle content, multiplied impressions for sponsors at negligible marginal cost to teams, improving ROI on sponsorship deals and making F1’s media inventory demonstrably more valuable to consumer brands. Academic and industry work on the series’ effect shows it helped convert casual viewers into engaged fans capable of elevating drivers into cross-over celebrities, which is precisely the type of attention that raises brand CPMs and long-term rights premiums (Scholarly and industry analyses of Drive to Survive, 2023–2025).

Crucially for the sport’s operational and technical fabric, women have professionalised fan discourse in ways that improved the communication of complex engineering narratives. Female-led content channels routinely parse tyre degradation curves, talk about compound windows, MGU-H/-K energy deployment, floor and diffuser upgrades, and use telemetry screenshots and sector delta analysis to argue about strategy lines and pit stop timing. That sophistication forced rights holders, broadcasters and teams to invest in clearer technical storytelling, with better on-screen graphics, comprehensive data overlays, segmented content for casual and hardcore viewers; all of which increased watch time and monetisable inventory on digital platforms. Higher watch time and more granular audience segment data make a media rights package more valuable in renewal negotiations; the upward pressure on media fees between 2017 and 2024 is consistent with this effect.

Beyond the pure commercial arithmetic, the cultural and human-capital effects are material and compounding. Visibility and representation attract talent (*cough* Lewis Hamilton *cough* ). Women increasingly enter CFD groups, telemetry and simulator engineering, composites workshops and race-strategy desks. That diversifies cognitive approaches to problem solving in environments where marginal gains, a few tenths shaved from a lap by an aero tweak or a tyre warm-up technique, are worth championship-defining points. Diverse teams show better performance in high-complexity settings because they expand the hypothesis space and reduce groupthink; in a sport where development directions must be decided quickly under a cost cap, improved decision-making efficiency is itself a value driver. It does not directly show up in a balance sheet line item, but it lowers the risk premium applied by investors and rights buyers assessing long-run competitiveness and commercial stability.

Just while I’m here, the term “fangirl” deserves a final mumble, because it’s central to the social dynamics that produced these changes. Linguistically, the label has been used to trivialise women’s technical literacy and emotional investment; it is often deployed to reduce a highly-engaged, knowledgeable consumer to a stereotype. That rhetorical belittling is both wrong and strategically blind: the same women who are dismissed by the term have altered consumption patterns, opened new sponsor categories and created new creator economies for the sport. Calling us “fangirls” as if that defines our contribution is a classic undermining tactic that masks real economic agency. Empirically, the data show they are professional consumers and content producers who meaningfully increased F1’s addressable market and commercial yields (Formula1.com fan survey; Forbes audience analysis). That being said , the unified reclaiming of the stereotype fills me with joy. I was a fangirl at 11 years old, and I’m still that same fangirl at 30.

And… If you want to be explicit about valuation mechanics: increase in female and Gen-Z engagement → broader sponsor categories + increased CPMs on social/digital inventory + higher media rights bids → higher projected free cash flows for rights holders and teams → higher multiples and asset valuations. That chain is already visible in the empirical record: media rights roughly doubled between 2017 and 2024, sponsorship grew as a percent of revenue, and team valuations moved into the billions as global fan numbers expanded and new cash flows from non-traditional sponsors arrived (Liberty Media; S&P Global; Sportico). The causal link is not purely monocausal: global expansion, calendar growth and platform deals also matter, but the female audience is a principal, measurable component of the current uplift.

In short, what began as a culture shift has become an economic realignment. The Fangirl label is a pathetic attempt of a dig at women who study onboards, interrogate tyre windows, buy hospitality packages… those same packages that all those stupidly rich men buy, and spend (arguably) more on licensed merch. The sport’s recent valuation trajectory suggests we women didn’t just cheer from behind a screen; we rewired the commercial circuitry of an entire industry, with purses in hand.

Sincerely,

Proud fangirl, and founding member of Cult44.

——

And yes  she can back it up:

1. Formula1.com, 2025. Formula 1 and Motorsport Network unveil 2025 Global Fan Survey: Gen-Z, women and US audiences leading new era of modern fandom. Formula1.com. 

2. Brown, M., 2024. Formula 1 Now Sees 750 Million Fans Due To Growth With Women And Middle-East Demo. Forbes, 3 December 2024. 

3. Liberty Media Corporation, 2025. Liberty Media Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter and Year Results (press release). Liberty Media. 

4. S&P Global, 2025. Formula One revenue up 5.9% in 2024 as focus shifts to US rights renewal (analysis). S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

5. Sportico / Sport finance reporting, 2025. Formula 1 team valuations and rankings 2025 (news analysis). (See aggregated coverage). 

6. Aston Martin / ELEMIS partnership press materials, 2025. ELEMIS and Aston Martin announce multi-year partnership (press release). Aston Martin Media. 

7. Drive to Survive impact studies and academic commentary, 2023–2025. (See industry analysis and peer-reviewed work on the series’ effect on F1 audiences).