Research in Progress: When sustainability challenges sport: How motorsport is adapting

By Virginia Harrison, Clemson University, and Rosalynn Vasquez, Boston University

Can a sport centered around fossil-fuel burning vehicles that promises to be carbon neutral put its money where its mouth is? Our study sets out to examine how communication practitioners in motorsport are wrestling with this question as they communicate more frequently about their sustainability initiatives.

On June 20, 2022, U.K.-based McLaren Racing became the first team in the three major motorsport series (IndyCar, Extreme E, and Formula 1) to release a sustainability report. The press release highlighted how the team was working on a “net-zero mindset” and creating a “sustainability-as-second-nature approach” to their team operations. In the United States, Firestone transported its tires to the Indianapolis 500, the most famous race in the IndyCar series, in an electric truck, touting its “zero emission tire transport” for the 2022 race.

Motorsport, with its global appeal and inherent contributions to climate change (e.g., gasoline-powered engines), is naturally situated to advance the conversation about sustainability. In recent years, motorsport series, teams, and racetracks have increased their sustainability-focused initiatives and reporting. Yet, fossil-fuel burning engines are the number-one leading contributor to climate change, according to the EPA. How committed are these organizations to sustainability or are they engaging in greenwashing?

Greenwashing is a process of deliberately providing false or misleading information about a company’s sustainability-focused products or practices. Some corporations engage in greenwashing to appear more environmentally conscious, but consumers today are particularly savvy about noticing these deceptive efforts. When a company is believed to be greenwashing, consumers develop a negative perception of the brand and are less willing to engage and buy its products or services.

However, we don’t know much about greenwashing in the sports industry. According to the United Nations, sport has a particularly powerful role in helping to spread prosocial messages across the globe. Because sport is a universal language, it can help encourage healthy behaviors, social equity, and economic development. In theory, sport can provide visible support for sustainable behaviors and educate fans on the importance of living sustainably. However, research has found that most sustainability communications from sport organizations are vague and show little actual commitment to sustainable practices.

With our research, we hope to address this gap in sustainability communication and understand why and how motorsport organizations are communicating about the sustainability practices and initiatives at their teams, series, or events. If these organizations are engaging in greenwashing (or “sportswashing”), they could risk alienating fans and other stakeholders who may feel that motorsport is not doing its fair share to combat climate change.

We are consulting with a variety of theoretical perspectives (relationship management theory, stewardship theory, CSR in sport, the halo effect, and psychology of greenwashing) to build a strong theoretical framework and contribution to the literature. In this study, we will interview communication professionals in motorsport about their perceptions of sustainability’s place in motorsport and how this affects their communication to the sport’s stakeholders.

Our study contributes to the mission of the Page Center by demonstrating the importance of ethics in communicating sustainability in sport. By combining a public relations and sustainability lens, we focus specifically on motorsport to examine how fans and stakeholders are responding to sustainability communication and explore the dynamic between sports entities and corporate sponsorship.

We hope our findings will help illuminate how — and if — motorsport is living up to its communicative promise to be a motivator for prosocial behavior around the world.

For further information on this study, please email Virginia Harrison at vsharri@clemson.edu or Rosalynn Vasquez at rosalynn@bu.edu. Results from the study will be available next year. This project is supported by a 2022 Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant from the Arthur W. Page Center.