Green light or black flag? Greenwashing environmental sustainability in Formula One and Formula E

Abstract

Historically, Formula One motor racing has had a deleterious environmental impact: burning fossil fuels, the wanton waste of resources while producing a complex global carbon footprint. However, as global concerns and expectations have escalated around environmental sustainability, Formula One has advanced what is largely superficial and deceitful ‘green' credentials via perfunctory hybrid technologies and promulgating piecemeal sustainability strategies. In doing so, Formula One harnessed the considerable symbolic power of its global brand to popularise a largely superficial approach to sustainability, while focusing on its own global expansion and growth. Formula E is similarly premised on purportedly more sustainable ‘green' technologies. Nonetheless, the sport’s environmental credentials are also contestable, due to its constitutive partnerships with high—tariff environmental polluters, as well as the efficiency of the electric and battery technologies that it promotes. Via greenwashing rhetoric and practices, this article explores the symbolic power both sports espouse through notions of sustainability.