The Best F1 Audience Report Just Came from Pinterest
The Summer 2026 Trend Report shows what today's F1 fan actually does on a race weekend: searches, wears, eats, and posts the sport into their feed.
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The Pinterest search “Formula 1 aesthetic outfit” has increased by 483% over the past year. That’s the single most important data point in the business of motorsport right now.
Pinterest just published its Summer 2026 Trend Report, the first edition in its 16-year history dedicated entirely to sport. The team sifted through searches from roughly 600 million monthly users and found something that should rearrange how every F1 team, broadcaster, and sponsor thinks about their audience. The F1 fan has changed shape.
A few more numbers, before we go further:
“World Cup shirt”: +840%
“Baddie tracksuit outfit”: +276%
Dad trainers: +906%
And the one I had to re-read twice: searches for the American figure skater Alysa Liu, up +39,228%.
That last one is not a typo. Fan culture in 2026 has officially crossed into fashion. Sydney Stanback, Pinterest’s Global Trends Lead, put it cleanly: “Fandom is becoming a global lifestyle signal.” Translation: people are getting dressed in the sport they love.
For the last twenty years, the metric that mattered in the business of motorsport was viewership. How many millions tuned in for Monaco? What the Drive to Survive curve looked like. How long did the race retain its audience after the safety car? You could draw a single line on a chart and tell your sponsors how much attention you were giving them.
Pinterest just made that chart insufficient.
The report calls its headline trend Power Players, and the data is its own argument. “Eileen Gu” searches up 5,503%. “Georgina Rodriguez aesthetic” up 225%. “Caitlin Clark selfie” up 142%. “Angel Reese basketball” is up 96%. Female athletes are being mood-boarded the way Hollywood actresses used to be, with the additional perk that their wardrobes come pre-loaded with merch, sponsors, and trophy cases.
Pinterest names other trends, too. There’s Sports-Luxe Street Style. Off-Duty Varsity. Pep-Rally Glam, a makeup look with smoky eyes that smudge “like match-day intensity.” Hybrid Trainers. Fan Finishing Touches (tinsel hair: +622%, bandana scarves: +424%, halo hair color: +598%). Each trend tells the same story from a different angle. Sport is bleeding into the dressing table, the closet, the brunch table, the photo dump.
Here’s Stanback again, with the line every Business of Speed reader should ponder:
“It wasn’t contained to one category. It was showing up in fashion, beauty, food, and lifestyle all at once.”
That sentence describes a new species of fan.
Here is a Sunday in the life of an F1 fan, according to Pinterest. Watch the race. Search “Alexandra Saint Mleux Leclerc’s outfit.” Order denim jorts (up 330% in searches). Build a pre-race playlist. Lay out a Pantry Picnic (a Pinterest-named trend built around tinned fish and stone fruit; sardine searches up 1,815%). Take a photo. Post it. Become part of the broadcast.
Sponsorships sell to lifestyles now.
That is why Gucci just signed a roughly $50 million-a-year deal to put its name on an Alpine car. The team will race in 2027 as Gucci Racing Alpine, the first luxury fashion house ever to title-sponsor an F1 team.
Francesca Bellettini, Gucci’s president and CEO, called Formula 1 “a unique convergence of performance, culture, and global reach.” Read between the syllables. She means the only remaining audience on earth where the same screen pulls in Drive to Survive bingers, Pinterest mood-boarders, and traditional Italian tifosi at the same time, in the same hour, all of them with money to spend on a $2,400 belt.
Gucci just paid for an audience that Pinterest already mapped.
Here is the part the motorsport business has to internalize, and quickly.
For thirty years, fashion treated sport as a costume. Stella McCartney designs a one-off F1 race suit for charity. Louis Vuitton makes the trophy trunk for the World Cup. Everyone smiles politely and moves on. Branded courtesy.
That era is over.
Pinterest just turned that shift into a number. Search behavior is the most honest data we have, because people type what they actually want, anonymously, with no one to impress. What 600 million of them are typing is that watching sport, wearing sport, eating sport, and doing their eyeliner like sport have fused into one continuous activity. Sport is the operating aesthetic of regular life now. F1, with its native blend of glamour, geopolitics, and Swiss watch-grade engineering, happens to be the cleanest expression of all of those impulses at once.
The audience has evolved. Teams measuring viewership minutes are reading last year’s report. Pinterest published this year’s.
Fellow Substacker, Manvi Mittal dove in deep on this report. Check it out below 👇🏻
Thank you so much for including a link to my story! Truly so glad that you found it useful for your readers too ☺️
Interesting article. How do you envisage broadcasters changing or developing their coverage from this?