It vanished almost as quickly as it arrived.
When Formula One touched down at Suzuka Circuit in Mie Prefecture late last month, it brought with it the obvious things that make some of the world’s most technologically advanced vehicles run and compete — engines, front and rear wings, racing fuel and hundreds of tires — and much more besides, like the tech needed to bring the event to the masses and various signboards for the series and its sponsors.
Mere hours after the Sept. 24 race, most of it was gone.
As the F1 circus packed up and left after the Japanese Grand Prix, one couldn’t help but wonder about the sustainability of a racing series that will have visited 20 countries across five continents by the time the final checkered flag of 2023 is waved on Nov. 26 in Abu Dhabi.
And yet, if you attend a race or tune in from home, you’re likely to come across F1 branding advertising its pledge to reach net-zero by 2030, a goal it announced in 2019 and one that has only gained in importance in the years since as the full scope of the climate crisis comes into focus.
F1’s pledge also comes at a time when, as the planet stares down the prospect of worsening storms, drought and flooding due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, momentum is building against many of the sport’s top corporate sponsors, raising key questions about the long-term viability of those ties.
The issue
F1 is not alone in a sports world that, like many other industries, was slow to heed warnings about global warming and is now racing at full throttle to catch up. It’s also far from being the worst offender in the industry — even a scaled-down Tokyo Olympics still directly generated seven times the emissions of an entire F1 season.
But F1 does stand out given its position as one of the few truly global sports and as one whose product has been inescapably tied to fossil fuels from the very beginning.
That’s perhaps given it a dirty image in the minds of increasingly climate-conscious consumers: Indeed, driving high-powered cars around a track for 300 kilometers on a Sunday afternoon is, at least in its current form, tough to reconcile with climate goals. But that’s only the most visible way in which F1 pollutes and, according to the series’ sustainability strategy, accounted for just 0.7% of its total emissions during the 2019 season.
Instead, the bulk of F1’s emissions that season came from logistics — namely, road, air and sea freight — at 45% and business travel at 27.7%. Emissions from F1 and team facilities and factories accounted for 19.3%, while event operations generated 7.3%. Altogether, the series generated 256,551 metric tons of carbon emissions, more than the annual emissions by climate-threatened countries such as Tonga and Palau.
F1’s push toward climate neutrality comes as it enjoys a massive surge in popularity in many parts of the world, but particularly in North America, following the creation of the smash-hit Netflix series “Drive to Survive,” which chronicles the drivers and teams and the drama involved in each season. That’s brought higher demand for new races in new markets, and the calendar has expanded as a result: 24 races are scheduled for 2024, up from 19 a decade earlier.
The sport has also gone increasingly global in recent decades, leading to a large increase in air travel compared with when most races took place in F1’s European base. In 1994, just five of the 16 races were held outside of Europe, compared with 15 of the 24 races scheduled for next year.
“Being a sport in growth is an absolute privilege, but it is also a huge challenge when it comes to delivery because we are looking to, one, reduce our emissions by an absolute from our base but two, do that while growing,” says Ellen Jones, F1’s sustainability chief.
“That just means that the challenge is that much more ambitious and that we need to continue to think not just how can we make small gains but how do we really reconsider the delivery of the world championship.”
Greenhouse gases generated by F1 are not only an issue for a planet that just experienced its hottest summer on record. They’re also a problem for the sport’s image and could affect where and when it can hold races in the future, with knock-on financial implications.
“The economic impact is a harder one for people to wrap their heads around,” says Madeleine Orr, a professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in sports management and environmental policy.
“I would say that it's being felt a little faster on operations and health and performance,” she adds, noting sporting events were canceled in North America this summer due to wildfire smoke. (F1’s race in Montreal in June went ahead as scheduled, though it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where it could have been affected as wildfires raged in eastern Canada.)
“I think ... the sports world is waking up to what the consequences could be if this (doesn’t) get curtailed,” Orr says.
The economic impact could also be felt at the gate and in television ratings if fans come to feel their favorite sport is not doing enough to reduce its impact on the environment.
“I think fans are kind of coming around to the idea that some of the things that we love in society may not be sustainable anymore,” she says.
Veteran German driver Nico Hulkenberg said in August that he thinks F1 has suffered in his home country amid the climate crisis because of the high-polluting image of the automotive industry. To be sure, interest in Germany might also be waning in the absence of homegrown stars like Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel, but there does appear to be recognition at the top levels of motorsport that reaching carbon neutrality is healthy for both the bottom line and the environment.
“If we continue working like we've done for the last many years, then we will be completely out of touch with what's happening in the world,” says Nikolas Tombazis, the director of single-seaters with the FIA, the top governing body for motorsports, including F1. “I think clearly the public want to see actions rather than words.”
The pledge
F1 is not shy about publicizing its climate targets. “Net-Zero 2030” branding was visible in and around Suzuka Circuit over the race weekend, greeting fans, media and VIP guests in the paddock and provided the backdrop for TV interviews with drivers.
So far, the series has enjoyed some modest successes as it bids to reduce emissions by at least 50% by 2030 compared with 2018 levels. The rest is due to be made up through carbon offsets, which F1 vows will be legitimate. Offsets have become a lightning rod for greenwashing accusations, particularly in recent months, with many offset claims found to have had little or no positive impact on the environment.
F1 has introduced remote broadcasting, allowing it to reduce the amount of people and equipment that are needed at each race. It has also redesigned freight containers to make them compatible with more efficient aircraft, leading to emissions reductions of 19.12% when those aircraft are used, according to its latest sustainability report, released in August.
For European races, biofuel trucks were used to transport freight, leading to at least a 60% reduction over standard fuels.
And one of the more visible changes can be seen in next season’s calendar, as some races have been moved to optimize travel for people and freight, including an April date for the Japanese Grand Prix rather than its traditional fall slot so that it can take place in between races in Melbourne and Shanghai.
Jones, who was hired in 2022 to lead F1’s sustainability department, now has four employees working under her.
She is quick to add, however, that sustainability has permeated all parts of F1’s operations, such as event staff who are tasked with conducting sustainability audits.
Still, in a highly competitive sport where tenths of a second can make the difference between a winning car and a backmarker, it remains to be seen when and how sustainability might factor into the action on the track.
In terms of the factory environment, sustainability does play a role, says Ayao Komatsu, the chief race engineer with Haas, but engineering decisions are purely made on cost and performance, with any waste reduction being incidental.
“We can’t pretend that we’re doing that for environmental reasons,” Komatsu says.
Still, an exemption for environmental initiatives from the FIA’s cap on teams’ annual spending allows them to avoid some trade-offs. That decision was made, Tombazis says, in order to prevent putting a team in a position where it has to choose between making the car faster and lowering emissions.
Orr was skeptical when F1 first announced its 2030 goal but says that she’s grown cautiously optimistic in the years since, particularly after the creation of Jones’ sustainability team.
“When you put your money where your mouth is, things change,” she says.
Where some of that money comes from, however, raises other questions about the legitimacy of the sport’s climate plan.
The ties to fossil fuels
Even as the planet warms due to the burning of fossil fuels, many of the biggest corporate polluters maintain a major presence in motorsports.
Indeed, up and down the F1 grid, major oil companies are everywhere.
British chemicals firm Ineos is a one-third shareholder of the Mercedes F1 team. The team of Lewis Hamilton is officially branded as Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team due to its long-running partnership with the state-owned Malaysian oil giant.
And fans would be hard-pressed to even picture a Ferrari F1 car without the Shell logo plastered on the nose, with the firm having been a major sponsor of the team going back to its origins in the 1920s.
But perhaps the most visible fossil fuel presence is that of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned petroleum and gas giant that a report in the Guardian in 2019 found to be the world’s biggest corporate polluter, accounting for nearly 60 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions since 1965. That’s more than the historical emissions of each of France, India and Canada, according to Our World in Data, and not far off Japan’s 64 billion metric tons through 2019.
Aramco’s position as a top sponsor for the series means its branding can be found all over F1 race tracks. It also served as the title sponsor for pre-season testing and the British Grand Prix.
That may eventually run into government opposition, facing the same fate as the tobacco ads that disappeared from sports not so long ago: France, which currently does not host any F1 races but is home to the headquarters of the FIA, enacted a ban on fossil fuel ads in 2022, becoming the first European country to do so.
“You can’t reconcile the two,” Orr says of climate goals and tie-ups with fossil fuel companies, adding that she is aware of internal discussions among teams concerning the future of fossil fuel giants in the sport. “But ... there is room to drop that kind of negative influence within the league, within the series, and to see positive change, because of the current investment portfolio and who's involved and who's calling the shots. That might not happen immediately. But I do see a version of this in a few years where it could.”
When asked about Aramco’s ties to F1, Jones pointed to the Saudi-owned company’s involvement in the development of a 100% sustainable racing fuel, which the series plans to roll out for the 2026 season and hopes will influence the broader automotive industry in the way a lot of tech introduced in F1 tends to do.
“From our side, it's important that to deliver on sustainable fuels, you have to work with those who can create fuels,” she says.
For the FIA’s Tombazis, he sees parallels between the sustainability challenges facing motorsports and the transition fossil fuel companies will need to undergo.
“They are also obliged to go through a very heavy transition,” he says. “They do play an important part in the sport and they are in a similar position to the sport in many ways. They realize they can’t just continue operating like they have for the last 100 years.”
Orr would like to see F1 set more ambitious targets, noting that the climate conversation has moved forward at a rapid pace since the sport made its original pledge in 2019. Still, she sees positive intentions and dismisses any notion that F1’s net-zero pledge amounts to outright greenwashing.
Still, that doesn’t mean that practice isn’t happening via one of the world’s most watched sports properties.
“And that's where I think it's much more egregious and where there needs to be a harsher look taken, like who are these brands and what are they trying to claim through their involvement in F1?” Orr says.