China and Korea have their eye on motorsports
Shift Happens #18 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.
⏳ Reading time: 8minutes
Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. And a quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport, you should be aware of, as they explain the cultural shifts we are seeing in this space.
When I attended the US Open last year with Rolex and IBM, J.P. Morgan pulled me into a small, carefully curated dinner to talk about investing in sport. It was one of those evenings where you look around the table and think: how is everyone in this room this smart and interesting?
Last Friday, Esses and J.P. Morgan hosted something in a similar spirit - an intimate drinks moment with some genuinely sharp women in motorsport. What I love about these gatherings is how rare they actually are: that perfect, slightly chaotic blend of business and culture, intellectualism and gossip, all in a setting casual enough that people actually say what they think. To everyone who came and showed up fully - thank you, and let’s do it again soon.
The lead lap
Alpine F1 is apparently up for sale. BYD is interested in F1. And Genesis is about to kick off its WEC debut in Imola next month. Three stories on my radar this week that, taken individually, feel like motorsport news. Taken together, they feel like a shift in motorsports.
First: BYD, according to Bloomberg, is examining options to enter competitive motorsport, including Formula One and endurance racing and their preferred route would be acquiring an existing team rather than building a team from scratch. Meanwhile, Genesis Magma Racing, led by Cyril Abiteboul, is weeks away from its Hypercar debut at Imola. Two Asian manufacturers, two very different entry strategies, one very clear ambition: use motorsport as a global stage.
And that ambition has a familiar shape. When Renault rebranded its F1 team as Alpine in 2021, then-CEO Luca de Meo was explicit: he believed in “the connection between racing on Sunday and selling on Monday.” The plan was to use the F1 team to help Alpine grow - track results would build brand power, and a stronger Alpine would help justify continued backing for the team. BYD and Genesis are playing the same game, just from a different starting grid: both are brands with serious product ambitions outside their home markets, and motorsport is their most powerful tool for building the kind of emotional credibility that no marketing budget alone can buy.
The irony, of course, is that Alpine is now apparently up for sale. The rebrand was always as much about giving Renault’s underperforming works team a clean slate as it was about selling sports cars, and finishing last in the 2025 Constructors’ Championship is not exactly the “racing on Sunday” story de Meo had in mind. The strategy was sound. The execution, less so, for now anyway. What it does tell you is that the platform itself - an F1 team, a WEC entry, a grid slot - has never been more valuable. The asset appreciates even when the car doesn’t. China and Korea aren’t just eyeing motorsport. It seems like they’ve done the math, and I for one, cannot wait to be in Imola next month and see the GMR-001 out on track.
The [number] of the week
80-90% of the car is developed over the year in F1. Just a reminder that the car that wins the championship in December won’t look much like the one we saw in Melbourne and Shanghai these past few weekends. In F1, the car never stops changing. See the car we just saw on teh grid in China, well, it’s already being replaced. F1 teams spend the winter building a car, go to testing and then go racing. And while that is true, it’s far from being that simple.
McLaren’s former COO once revealed that of the 16,000 parts on an F1 car, only 10% carry over from one year to the next. The other 90% gets Redesigned. Rebuilt. Replaced. As one F1 pundit and expert put it, teams will make changes to virtually every part on the car - most performance parts will change throughout a season.
To take this further, whilst bodywork, suspension arms etc, will be brand new drawings, there will still be a lot of smaller parts on the cars that are “carry-over” as they call it, from previous seasons. Mercedes once described their development process as “a continuous, cyclical process”.
However, as a former Red Bull mechanic explained to me, there is a distinction to be made. Because whilst the assemblies may be new, internally they will be constructed from many parts that the teams will be familiar with. Essentially, every team is racing two battles at once. The one in front of you, and the one happening in the wind tunnel and back at the factory right now. And this is yet another reason why I love this sport so much and dig for these stories - because there is so much more to it than meets the eye.
Three [stories] that need to be on your radar
Sephora x F1Academy should surprise absolutely no one. Back in October of 2024, I took a walk as I tried to make sense of the massive new LVMH investment into Formula 1, and shared a few thoughts. The main takeaway for me was that LVMH didn’t make a $1Billion investment into this space to not then use the sport as a platform for all its companies. I also mentioned that if I were a lifestyle, fashion or beauty brand not in the LVMH portfolio, I would be worried. Shortly thereafter, Moet & Chandon was announced as the Official Champagne of F1, TAG Heuer became the timekeepers of F1, and most recently Sephora has been announced as a partner for F1Academy. Out with Charlotte Tilbury and in with Sephora, although technically Charlotte Tilbury is sold in Sephora stores so that’s probably not the last of them in F1.
The wider consequences of a €1million Formula E influencer shunt. I’ve been a broken record on how Formula E missed the mark with their Evo Sessions - and boy did I want to love it. I championed the innovation and willingness to get creative from the series and the fearlessness of the participants. However, I also highlighted the flawed execution and, more specifically, the lack of proper training and preparation that went into this project. I was delighted when Formula E journalist Sam Smith wrote about the project and highlighted some of the same concerns I had. He didn’t hold back, nor should he. He writes, “What needs to be realised about the Evo Sessions initiative is that it was mostly unpopular with the teams even before the incidents in Jeddah last month. Lola-Yamaha Abt is a decent case study in that it has far better things to be doing with its car, its team and its image than allowing a Formula E novice with no prior experience of powerful single-seaters into a car.” Read the full piece here.
What do you mean the battery percentages shown during the F1 races are ‘guestimates’ and not actual data, in a data-driven sport? Similar to these guys, I thought the battery percentage levels shown during the race were quite interesting. I’ve found this both useful and fun in Formula E, and so very much enjoyed seeing this in F1 too. With that said, there has been some discussion since the Chinese GP about the accuracy of these percentages. A few people have claimed that it is guesswork by AWS vs. the actual data from the teams and cars. I actually don’t mind either way, and can understand why teams wouldn’t want the exact numbers (I think) out there, but I do think this needs to be made clear - is this data coming directly from the teams (and thus the cars), or does this data potentially contain a margin of error as it’s a deduction from AWS? I’ve put this question to AWS and will keep you posted.
One [video] worth your time
I will never skip a BTS video on how brilliant people do what they do - especially when they break down their creative process.
One [event] that caught my eye
SXSW was on my plans this year, and then, quietly, it wasn’t. Not because something went wrong, but because when I stacked it up against the furious excitement I feel planning for Web Summit Vancouver and Cannes Lions, the pull simply wasn’t there. So I didn’t force it. And honestly? I don’t regret it.
What did catch my attention, though, was the IBM crew arriving in force in Austin and building out their activation: the “IBM AI Sports Club” - a physical expression of their partnership with Scuderia Ferrari HP, and a pretty bold statement about where IBM sees itself going.
Here’s the thing about IBM: they’re not a consumer-facing brand, and that’s precisely why I love working with them. As my husband has taken to telling me: “Toni, you’ve just got to accept that you love a B2B2C corporate client.” And he’s not wrong. I love the complexity and challenge of helping tell the story about why some of these brands - their mission, their tech, their business - are so exciting. But over the past few years, IBM has made a genuine push to own the intersection of AI and sport - not just claim it, but make it feel cool and accessible to a wider audience. Their partnerships with Wimbledon, the US Open, the Masters, and Scuderia Ferrari aren’t decorative. They’re the vehicle.
Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s VP of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, put it well to me:
“Sports is having a real moment right now, and you could feel that energy all week at SXSW. From the core programming to conversations happening at ADWEEK, Brand Innovators, and The Female Quotient, sports and entertainment were some of the hottest topics in the room. At IBM, we sit right at the intersection of that momentum and the other big conversation right now, AI. Sport is one of the most powerful ways to make AI tangible for people.”
Final thought, I did a post on Instagram, at the start of the year, with all the culture, tech and motorsport events on my radar - many of which I’ll be attending - and it already feels out of date with the sheer number of new events on my radar. Please let me know what events I’m missing.
