Motorsport icon Susie Wolff on building a fandom for F1 Academy

Susie Wolff knows a thing or two about legacy.

Wolff, the managing director of F1 Academy, Formula 1’s women-only racing championship, had a long career behind the wheel of race cars herself. Like many F1 drivers, she started in karting, and eventually competed in motorsports including Formula 3, the Race of Champions, and F1, where she served as a development driver for Williams and became the first woman to participate on track during an F1 race weekend in more than two decades. That’s no small feat in racing.

“It’s always been perceived as a very male-dominated, macho world,” Wolff told Marketing Brew, referencing a topic she writes about in her memoir, Driven. “It takes a special kind of environment, or a special kind of little girl with huge passion, to then overcome the fact that she’s looking at something where she doesn’t see herself represented.”

F1 Academy presents an opportunity to change that for future generations. But with just three full seasons under their belts, Wolff and her team are still in relatively early days of building fandom for the series, and she’s deeply aware that F1—and some of the other sports they’re competing with for attention—have the advantage of sheer time.

As such, Wolff is pragmatic when it comes to her plan to grow the audience for F1 Academy. She does, however, have several reasons to be optimistic that this is the women’s championship that may stick.

On fandom…

F1 Academy isn’t the first attempt at a women’s racing series, and while Wolff said she “applauds those that tried before,” she added that “the business case of what they were trying to build didn’t make sense to me.” One difference here, she said, is that F1 Academy is owned by F1, meaning it operates as part of an F1 race weekend.

“I don’t have a stadium to fill,” Wolff said. “I don’t have a fanbase to build, because I’m tapping into one of the biggest sporting platforms in the world with F1…We turn up at a race track where all the tickets are already sold.”

In addition to the in-person reach, F1 Academy is broadcast almost everywhere that F1 is, Wolff said, including Apple TV in the US and the F1 YouTube channel, which has more than 14 million subscribers. F1 Academy also has the benefit of starting up in an era where women’s sports across the board are thriving, she said. That’s something of a double-edged sword, and calls for “a long-term game plan” to stand out in the crowded women’s sports ecosystem, she told us.

“We know it’s going to take time to shift the mindsets,” Wolff said. “It’s competitive, but I think in a very short space of time, with the key factors we’ve put in place, in how we’ve been set up, we’ve managed to break through.”

On content and legacy…

Social media content, creator collaborations, and long-form videos are part of Wolff and her team’s play to grow the sport. Last year’s Netflix docuseries, F1: The Academy, helped spread the story about the championship, but not to Drive to Survive-level fame, which has yet to be achieved since.

Drive to Survive is unique in many ways—its rise to prominence during the pandemic, for instance—and the sport itself has a 75-year legacy tied to some of the most iconic brands in the world, like Ferrari and Mercedes, that Wolff acknowledged is hard to live up to. But she’s not trying to compete.

“We’ll never be the main show, but we want people to feel like they can feel a part of our journey,” Wolff said.

On sponsors…

That’s not to say she’s not trying to build a business, and brand partnerships can help the sport get up to speed, Wolff said. Sponsors are one lever she’s pulling to recruit new audiences to F1 Academy, rather than solely relying on existing F1 fans to convert—although some are.

About one-quarter (23%) of self-identified F1 fans said they follow F1 Academy, more than double the share that said the same of the now-defunct W Series in 2021, according to a survey conducted by F1 and Motorsport Network among more than 100,000 respondents across 186 countries. That share is 42% among women fans.

Partnerships with brands like Sephora and Charlotte Tilbury help draw young women to the sport, Wolff said, which is something F1 teams have also been trying to do. F1 Academy has deals with Disney and Hello Kitty that likely appeal to younger fans, too. Other sponsors include American Express, Gatorade, and Puma. Some bought in early, but the difference is “night and day” between now and three years ago, Wolff said.

“I had nearly an empty roster of sponsors, but I think we were initially selling a vision,” she said. “It would have been easy just to go for the quickest deals, but we definitely wanted to be really specific in which partners we brought on board…We wanted to bring in feminine brands that had maybe not been in motorsport before, not just for the audience they could help us reach, but also as a statement: We are going to do things differently.”