Lego goes all in on Formula 1, adding F1 Academy team sponsorship

Lego is rebuilding how consumers engage with motorsport brick by brick.

In 2025, Lego kicked off a partnership with Formula 1 that brought officially licensed sets to global retail shelves and immersive experiences to races around the world. In the nearly year since launch, the collaboration has bolstered fan engagement for both brands, lead to promotional sales of Lego products and expanded the demographic reach for the toy company and the racing organization.

In August, Lego CEO Niels Christiansen touted the company’s Formula 1 sets as one of the innovations that fueled record first-half revenue and operating profit. The company, which is privately held, reported a 12% year-over-year revenue bump to 34.6 billion Danish kroner, or $5.4 billion, for the first six months of 2025.

“It is a massively growing fan base,” Julia Goldin, chief product and marketing officer at Lego, told CNBC. “It is the biggest motorsport now in terms of its fandom. … We felt that we could really tap into that and deliver something very unique.”

With Formula 1, Lego isn’t just leveraging an existing fandom, it’s expanding it, bringing underserved demographics into the world of racing and engaging new customers.

“Lego has a great reputation for picking out the right trends to become a part of, and motorsports in recent years has been on a real upswing,” said James Zahn, editor in chief of The Toy Book.

“F1, as we’ve seen, has just become a cultural juggernaut where it is attracting an audience that isn’t your typical motorsports fan,” he said. “It seems to transcend ages and interests.”

ESPN, which broadcast the 2025 F1 season in the U.S., reported record viewership numbers for the races. The Disney-owned sports network saw an average of 1.3 million viewers across its stations and platforms through the majority of the racing calendar. That was up from a previous record of 1.21 million viewers set in 2022 and up from just 554,000 in 2018, the first year of ESPN’s broadcasting deal with F1.

Next year, U.S. broadcasting rights move to Apple TV following the success of the Apple-distributed “F1: The Movie,” which hit cinemas in June.

In expanding its catalog of products — introducing meticulously designed F1 car brick sets, complete with team-accurate liveries — Lego has built gateways into the brand for newcomers.

“At the heart of it was understanding our audience’s passion points,” Goldin said. “When we choose to go into a partnership, could we see ourselves doing something unique that would offer real value … we felt like we had a real opportunity to deliver experiences that they would really love.”

The F1 portfolio included products for Lego’s Duplo line for preschool children, traditional sets for casual builders and Lego Technic sets for more advanced builders.

Lego was also present at F1 races during the season, hosting in-person activations that included functional, life-size Formula 1 cars and even crafting trophies out of bricks for podium finishers of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

At the Las Vegas Grand Prix in November, the top three drivers were chauffeured to a media availability area following the race in a life-size pink Lego Cadillac, a nod to the Cadillac F1 team that’s joining the grid in 2026.

With the 2025 season wrapped, Lego is already building into next year.

“Lego is one of our dream partners,” said Susie Wolff, managing director of F1 Academy, an all-female racing league under the broader F1 umbrella.

“When they joined Formula 1, I immediately reached out to Julia [Goldin], the [chief product and marketing officer], and said, ‘Listen, could we explore doing something together with F1 Academy?'” Wolff told CNBC. “There’s just so many synergies between what they’re trying to do and what our main mission is.”

F1 Academy held its inaugural season in 2023. The division was established to address the lack of female drives in the F1 series and aims to develop young female drivers and prepare them for higher levels of competition.

“We’re trying to break down the preconceptions of motorsport being a male-dominated environment,” Wolff said, noting Lego has similarly made strides to promote inclusivity with its brick sets.

As part of the ongoing relationship between the two brands, Lego has signed on as a team sponsor for an F1 Academy car starting in 2026. Behind the wheel is Esmee Kosterman, a 20-year-old Dutch driver.

Lego’s Goldin said while the F1 Academy partnership is an extension of the existing racing partnership, “they’re doing it in a unique way, because they are actually partnering up to support a life-size car and the driver.”

“That’s a very important element of bringing more attention and kind of underscoring the credibility and authenticity of women participating in motorsports and, importantly, for their parents to see the opportunity [and] potential for them to be engaged in the sport,” Goldin said.

Zahn of The Toy Book described the collaboration between Lego and Formula 1, particularly the F1 Academy, as a “perfect partnership.”

“[The] Female motorsports fan has always been there, but they haven’t necessarily been embraced on the consumer product side of things,” he said.

Wolff and Goldin both noted that one of the fastest-growing segments of the Formula 1 fan base is women.

“We are tapping exactly into the the trend of this fandom and we’re adding value to the partner, as well,” Goldin said. “We see from our data that not only are we engaging more F1 fans with the Lego brand, but vice versa. There are more Lego brand fans that are now becoming fans of Formula 1.”