Formula 1 announced Thursday that all ten constructor teams have signed multi-year partnership extensions with F1 Academy, the women-only racing series entering its third season, while Sephora and Lego joined as new title-tier sponsors. The commitments run through 2027 and formalize team obligations to field one car each in the five-round championship that feeds the F1 feeder ladder.
The Sephora deal marks the beauty retailer's first motorsport property globally. Financial terms were not disclosed, but two team sources familiar with category pricing estimate the combined Sephora-Lego packages at $15 million to $20 million annually. Separately, the ten-team commitment represents roughly $8 million in aggregate annual team fees, based on prior disclosures of the $800,000 per-car entry and operating baseline. McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari had initially signed two-year deals in 2023; those are now extended alongside Red Bull, Alpine, Aston Martin, Williams, Haas, Kick Sauber, and RB.
The coordinated announcement solves a quiet problem: sponsor renewals for women's properties typically lag men's equivalents by 18 to 24 months, creating planning friction. By locking team inventory through 2027, F1 Academy can now sell trackside hospitality and broadcast integrations with certainty that the grid size holds. The series expanded from fifteen races in 2024 to a projected twenty-one in 2025, adding stops in Miami, Montreal, and Shanghai alongside the F1 calendar. That density matters to sponsors paying for eyeballs: F1 Academy races stream free on F1TV and YouTube, where total 2024 views exceeded 42 million, per Formula 1 internal metrics shared with potential partners in December.
Sephora's entry reflects a calculated bet on the 18-to-34 female demo that represents 38% of F1's U.S. audience growth since 2019, according to Nielsen data F1 shared in a November sponsor deck. The brand will activate at paddock makeup stations, driver content partnerships, and in-store displays timed to race weekends. Lego's involvement extends its constructor partnerships—already active with McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes via licensed kits—into driver development. The toy maker will sponsor the championship trophy and create buildable sets featuring F1 Academy cars, targeting the 8-to-14 age bracket where female Lego Technic sales grew 22% year-over-year in 2024.
The renewal removes succession uncertainty for the fifteen drivers currently competing, eight of whom are eligible for FIA Formula 3 superlicense points if they finish top-five in standings. Alpine development driver Abbi Pulling, who won the 2024 championship, is expected to move to GB3 in 2025; her seat at Rodin Motorsport will open to the next cohort. Three drivers from the 2024 grid—Pulling, ART's Doriane Pin, and Prema's Maya Weug—are now signed to F1 team junior programs, a progression rate that justifies team investment in the category.
Watch for Sephora activation details at the Miami Grand Prix in May, where F1 Academy opens its 2025 calendar. Team junior academy announcements typically follow in March, when F3 and F2 grids finalize. Lego product launches are slated for Q3 2025, timed to the European swing. One team principal noted Thursday that sustained backing past 2027 will hinge on whether a driver graduates to F1 practice sessions by 2026—the metric Liberty Media uses internally to justify Academy economics.
The takeaway
F1 locks ten-team grid and two blue-chip sponsors through 2027, stabilizing the women's racing business case just as F3 promotion slots open.
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.