How F1 learned to grow without growing

When LVMH signed its reported $150million-per-season deal with Formula 1, it did not buy trackside signage in the traditional sense. It bought exclusivity: the right to be the championship's only global luxury partner, elevating Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy and TAG Heuer across a decade of grands prix. That deal is the most prominent example of a strategy that has reshaped F1's commercial model under Liberty Media: decoupling revenue growth from physical growth.

Every few weeks F1 announces another official partner and on their own, they look like ordinary sponsorship announcements but together, they show how Liberty Media has changed the way F1 sells sponsorship. The championship now offers a growing range of specialised partnership categories and since 2020 it has more than doubled its partnership portfolio, from 12 to 27, the result of which has seen sponsorship revenue reach approximately $850m in 2025, 21.7% of F1's $3.87billion total. This is the highest share sponsorship has represented since Liberty Media acquired F1 in 2017.

There are 24 grands prix on the calendar, while the arrival of Cadillac delivered the first expansion of the F1 grid since Liberty’s official takeover. Sporting growth is constrained by geography, circuit contracts and geopolitics and sporting politics.

Liberty Media has spent nine years finding new ways for companies to buy into F1 while the championship's physical footprint has moved very slowly – admittedly the calendar has grown from 20/21 races to 24 rounds over the last decade.

The partnership categories tell the story. For example, Flexjet holds the title of Official Private Aviation Supplier, Marsh holds Official Risk and Insurance Brokering Partner and Fever holds Official Ticketing Supplier. That expansion is not a product of simply adding more names to the same sponsorship tiers. Instead, Liberty has built a four-tier structure – Global Partners, Official Partners, Regional Partners and Official Providers – each with increasingly specialised categories.

In its annual report to investors, Liberty Media states the strategy is to maximise impact, exclusivity and value for partners while creating new, tailored assets to meet growing demand. In many ways, Liberty behaves less like the owner of a sporting championship and more like the manager of a portfolio of commercial assets.

Each track only has a finite amount of space for sponsorship signage - but F1 has found a way to diversify its offering

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Traditional sponsorship inventory is finite. Trackside signage, title sponsorships and hospitality packages exist in limited supply, and additional inventory eventually dilutes the value of what is already there. Creating highly specialised partnership categories avoids that ceiling. F1's growing list of partners also reflects the championship's changing commercial appeal.

A company does not become F1's Official Private Aviation Supplier merely by wanting to advertise. It pays for exclusive access to that category, so the value would disappear if competitors could buy something similar. LVMH's 10-year partnership illustrates what exclusivity is now worth at the top of the market, while selling a luxury partnership to a rival would weaken the value of the deal.

Adding a grand prix requires years of negotiation, circuit infrastructure, promoter agreements and logistical complexity. Creating a new commercial partnership category can happen in a boardroom

Jonny Haworth, F1's director of commercial partnerships, made this clear in late 2025. He explained that on the global partner level, F1 is quite restrictive on the number of partners it takes on, specifically to make sure there is that value of exclusivity. The discipline extends to pricing. Williams, under commercial advisor Peter Kenyon, set a pricing floor for partnerships and deliberately capped sponsors at 24 to maintain scarcity, a strategy he refined during his tenure at Manchester United. Kenyon observed that scarcity is valuable, and that observation has become the operating principle for how F1 now structures its commercial offering.

One of the most innovative developments in the sponsorship strategy is the use of virtual signage. Because F1 controls its own broadcast, it can guarantee visibility for partners and, importantly, change on-screen branding during a race to target specific markets. This has unlocked regional partnerships. McDonald's in Latin America is one example. This was accomplished without adding a single square metre of physical trackside inventory.

The approach mirrors strategies used beyond F1. Airlines sell more classes on the same aircraft, hotels offer tiered room packages - the underlying product changes very little while commercial inventory expands considerably. Liberty has applied the same principle to sponsorship, asking how many distinct commercial assets can be created around the same championship rather than how to stage more races.

F1 has capped its calendar at 24 races meaning its physical growth will stop

Photo by: Las Vegas GP

Investors reward businesses that increase revenue without a proportional increase in costs. Adding a grand prix requires years of negotiation, circuit infrastructure, promoter agreements and logistical complexity. Creating a new commercial partnership category can happen in a boardroom. Liberty has, so far, solved one of F1's hardest business problems: how to keep growing once the product itself has largely stopped expanding.

That strategy has worked because F1 has largely created distinct partnership categories that do not compete with one another, because a private aviation company, an insurance broker and a ticketing platform occupy different commercial spaces. That separation has allowed Liberty to expand its partnership portfolio without weakening existing agreements.

However, the challenge becomes greater as the remaining opportunities grow narrower, because every additional category has to feel genuinely distinct if existing partners are to continue paying a premium for exclusivity. LVMH's reported $150m-per-season agreement also illustrates how valuable premium exclusivity has become at the top of F1's commercial market. Now the strategic challenge for Liberty will be to recognise when the next sponsorship contract is worth less than the scarcity required to maintain the value of the ones already signed.

$150m a year gets you primary positioning in F1's sponsorship portfolio

Photo by: Andrej Isakovic / AFP via Getty Images