F1 Academy and Brand Partners Open Lanes for Women Beyond Formula 1

F1 Academy and its partners used the bright lights of this year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix and its special events to introduce the sports and business worlds to the women driving its race series. 

In 2025, those F1 Academy drivers and their sponsors will have the Vegas street course and its Strip straightaway to themselves.

Wrapping up its second season under managing director Susie Wolff—a former Formula Renault, British Formula 3 and DTM driver, and Formula 1 development and test driver—F1 Academy just announced a seven-race 2025 schedule with three new stops. The series runs its first-ever races in both Shanghai and Montreal, but its biggest sports marketing opportunity may lie in new season-ending races in Las Vegas.

“’I’ve been in this sport a long time, and I’ve certainly been in very many situations where I had the feeling that I was there as a box-ticking exercise, covering diversity,” Wolff said. “But for the very first time in my career in motorsport, I’ve seen so much authenticity behind trying to create positive and impactful change in the sport.” 

In racing, getting across the finish line is a team effort, and this year, F1 Academy expanded that team with an influx of support from several influential sponsors, including The Female Quotient, Cisco, Amex, Charlotte Tilbury, and Tommy Hilfiger.

And with women now comprising 42% of Formula 1’s global fanbase, F1 Academy and its partners want to reach those fans by proving there’s not only space for women on the track but also in Formula 1’s operations, business, and networking spaces. 

“What I have been able to share is vision: This is where we are now, and this is what we want to get to, and we want you to come on the journey with us because we believe together, as a collective, we can create that positive change so much quicker,” Wolff said.

Finding the right formula

Among the partners, The Female Quotient, an experiential and media firm dedicated to equality in the workplace, signed a deal with F1 Academy earlier this year to host Equality Lounges, panels, and brunches for women in business and sports.

“Susie Wolff has been coming to our lounges for quite some time, and it was that heartbeat moment where she looked at us and said, ‘Well, you have the largest global community of women in business,’” said Shelley Zalis, founder and CEO of The Female Quotient, which covers 5.5 million women in 30 industries across 100 countries. “We say a woman alone is power, but collectively we have impact, and it was that perfect moment to say, ‘Where do we make the invisible visible, and how do we really showcase this next generation?’”

The Female Quotient has already hosted Equality Lounges at an F1 Academy event in Singapore and just hosted another at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, with other events slated for Formula 1 races in Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

In addition to the lounges, The Female Quotient also sponsored F1 Academy wild-card entrant Nina Gademan’s ride during races in the Netherlands earlier this year. Gademan used her time in The Female Quotient’s rose gold car to earn a fourth-place finish in her first of two races and earn 13 points on the weekend—making her the first F1 Academy wild card driver to score points behind the wheel.

Reflecting on the partnership, Zalis took a moment to savor Gademan’s wild card showing, watching her rose gold car reflect the sunlight as race-day rain gave way to clearer skies.

“We say when you help other women rise, we all shine,” Zalis said. “And the sun came out, and the car sparkled.”

In Wolff’s view, FQ’s rose-gold livery is just a fraction of its contribution to F1 Academy’s mission. She noted that events like the Equality Lounges and panels taking place away from the track have been vital to bringing like-minded individuals from various industries into F1 Academy, helping the series embrace the “movement, not a moment” ethos often repeated within women’s sports and creating valuable networking opportunities.

“What we are trying to do in the world of motorsport—create opportunity and create more diversity—very much parallels what other industries are also trying to do,” Wolff said. “The world of finance, the world of tech [ask] how are we getting more young women into those industries? How are we allowing them to excel up the ladder?”

That ladder gets a little easier to climb when contributions are more than monetary, as shown in Cisco’s F1 Academy partnership.

Going beyond the track

In October 2023, Cisco expanded its Formula 1 partnership to include sponsorship of McLaren’s F1 Academy program that placed its branding on Filipino driver Bianca Bustamante’s car, overalls, and team uniforms in 2024. In 2025, Cisco will extend the same sponsorship to McLaren’s newest F1 Academy addition, Welsh driver Ella Lloyd. A McLaren partner since 2021, Cisco rolled the new F1 Academy sponsorship into its 60 Scholars initiative with McLaren that creates paths to STEM careers for women.

“When McLaren came to us and said, ‘Hey, Susie Wolff is doing this driver academy thing, are you interested?’ We didn’t even hesitate,” said Carrie Palin, Cisco’s CMO. “In less than 24 hours, we’re like, ‘Not only are we interested, we want to be the title sponsor for McLaren’s driver.’”

During one of Palin’s first conversations with Wolff, she spoke about enrolling in a program for early-stage career executives while working at Dell in 2013.

Though Palin was “heavily pregnant” with her second child, she enrolled in a weeklong course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business that helped her interview for her first senior executive position shortly thereafter, learning things like body language and how to own her space when in the boardroom.

“I learned that things I was doing that I thought made me agreeable—like leaning into a conversation and nodding my head—actually were making me look deferential,” Palin said. “[It was] all these different things that I never knew.”

With that in mind, Palin has already spoken with Wolff about getting the same training for F1 Academy drivers to help them manage their contracts, social media presence, press acumen, and other business concerns.

She said that deal is currently being ironed out, but Cisco has found other ways to help drivers beyond the track—including offering them three-year sponsorship deals that can cover them either through their continued racing career, education, or other pursuits.

Driving opportunities

Sponsors are also finding new opportunities as their partnerships grow.

American Express debuted as a regional Formula 1 sponsor in October 2023 but came on board with F1 Academy at the end of April. Amex made its Academy debut with British driver Jess Edgar at the Miami Grand Prix but turned that single-season trial into a multiyear commitment in a new global Formula 1 sponsorship announced in October. As American Express chases the 300 million Formula 1 fans worldwide ages 18-34—the company’s fastest-growing customer base—it doesn’t want to speed past any portion of that group.

“As I told Susie when we met very early on, our support of women knows no bounds, and that was something that was really important,” said Shiz Suzuki, vp of global brand sponsorships and experiential marketing for American Express. “Even as we were negotiating the regional deal, we were talking to Formula One about our desire to support a women’s league or women in motorsports.”

Amex has also spread its support for driver Jess Edgar to women-owned small businesses whose logos they’ve attached to her car for every race weekend. When the company revealed Edgar’s car for the first time in Miami, it did so on a stage with Edgar, Wolff, singer and actress Camilla Cabello, and chef Monica “Mika” Leon—owner of South Florida kitchen Caja Caliente.

“When chef Mika saw the logo of her business come up on the livery of the car, she literally burst into tears,” Suzuki said. “She’s like, ‘I never imagined I’d be able to see this basically being shown worldwide,’ because of all the great work Susie’s done in terms of broadcast partnerships for F1 Academy, that logo is now being seen worldwide.”

While Edgar made an appearance in Las Vegas doing demonstration runs in American Express’ Small Business car and Bustamante showed up in Vegas with McLaren and gave Cisco a cameo on the Sphere, Wolff and her F1 Academy partners see much greater opportunity at the Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2025. 

For Wolff, the success of F1 Academy doesn’t hinge upon getting one of its drivers into the Formula One ranks—but challenging the perception that Formula One races are men’s spaces.

“This is about challenging their perception that it’s a man’s world: We want to show that this sport has opportunities for women, either on track or off track,” Wolff said. “It’s thanks to the brands that came on board with us, that believed in us, that wanted to stand by us and help us achieve our mission.”