The Next 100 Years Of Motorsport: What Will Racing Look Like In 2125?
It always strikes me how quaint the past now looks. When Alfa Romeo won that first Grand Prix, the cars were front-engined, had no aerodynamics, rode on narrow tires, and their steering wheels were decades away from a single button, let alone screens, microchips, or multi-function displays.
If you could show those drivers a modern F1 car, they’d assume it was built by aliens.
Even beyond F1, imagine the participants of the first 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1923 trying to comprehend a Ferrari 499P, a Peugeot 9X8, or any prototype from today’s WEC and IMSA grids.
And so the question is obvious:
If the last 75 years turned simple race cars into machines that resemble spacecraft, what might the next 100 years bring?
The Vaucher Analytics State of Motorsport 2025: The WEC and IMSA
Endurance racing doesn’t dominate global motorsport conversation the way Formula 1 does, but in 2025 it delivered something arguably more impressive: sustained, organic growth across multiple continents and two major rulebooks; indeed, although WEC and IMSA now operate within a broadly shared prototype ecosystem, they’re still distinct products with different audiences, commercial structures, and internal priorities.
Nevertheless, their shared success comes from a phenomenal on-track product, showcasing multi-class action, manufacturer storytelling, and the kind of racing purists swear by. And crucially, unlike some other series, WEC and IMSA genuinely seem to understand what they are and how they appeal to people.
But beneath that success, three separate fault lines began to emerge in 2025. Each one matters not because endurance racing is struggling (it isn’t), but because the future depends on navigating these issues without breaking the momentum the sport has finally built.
Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 5: The Objections That Will Define (Or Crush) Motorsport’s Next Business Model
The sponsorship model has been in use in some form or another almost since Formula 1’s inception, and as imperfect as it is, it’s safe.
But is it really safer in the long-term?
Arguably not, because not doing anything is itself a choice, without the benefit of having a say in the potential consequences.
Ulimately, if anything derails Racing’s Second Revolution it won’t be technical factors, since everything we’ve talked about so far rests on well-known business fundamentals.
In this fifth and final installment of the Racing’s Second Revolution series, we’ll cover the aspect of any great change initiative that is never talked about directly until it’s too late, yet has the potential to derail new ideas from the start: resistance.
The main risk is nothing more complex than skepticism.
This article addresses that head-on, and while the feeling is always the same, there could be multiple reasons behind that doubt.
Here we’ll lay out nine likely objections that executives, series managers, and investors will raise when confronted with the idea of moving beyond sponsorship, and of course we’ll explain how each can be addressed with a reliance on facts rather than gut feel.
Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 1: Why Motorsport Racing Teams Must Move Beyond Sponsorship
If you don’t have OEM support, sponsorship is effectively your only oxygen, and if a sponsor cuts back or disappears, the cycle starts all over again.
This is the fundamental problem: how sponsorship looks or is activated is of course going to follow Ron Dennis’s playbook and be much more polished than it was in the 1960’s, but it’s still the same paradigm, and remember, even Ron Dennis’s playbook is now nearing 50 years old!