Three-quarters of Ferrari's new fans are women. That's not from a press release—it's what Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM's vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships, told TechCrunch: "75% of new F1 fans are women." The Netflix documentary Drive to Survive has reshaped F1's audience over the past few years, bringing in a crowd Ferrari isn't used to.
An old team's new challenge
Ferrari's place in F1 is undisputed: it has competed every year since 1950 and is, as Stanhouse put it, "the winningest team in history." But for decades, its fan profile was male, European, and deeply loyal—the kind who watch every broadcast and track stats for years. The new fans are different. They may not know what Tifosi means, but they followed Lewis Hamilton's move to Ferrari more closely than anyone. The old app couldn't retain them or feed them technical content.
So IBM stepped in.
Race-day engagement up 62%
IBM didn't rebuild the app from scratch. Instead, it inserted AI as a middleware layer:
- AI race recaps: After a race, the app generates a summary instantly, no waiting for editors.
- Prediction games: Users predict lap times, overtakes, safety car deployments, and the AI scores them.
- AI Q&A assistant: New fans can ask about F1's notoriously complex rules—tire grip, DRS zones, fuel mix, pit strategy—and get instant explanations.
- Italian language support: The app previously lacked an Italian version; now it has Ferrari's home language.
- Behavior-driven personalization: The AI tailors the home feed based on which drivers and content types a user engages with most.
Stanhouse reported a 62% increase in race-day app engagement after IBM's intervention. That's not daily active users but engagement on race days—the hardest metric for sports apps.
Stefano Pallard, Ferrari's head of fan development, put it more directly: "With IBM, the vision for the next five years is to make every fan feel like the experience was built for them."
'24 people, 2 seconds, one tire change'
The hardest part of using AI for sports content isn't the technology—it's translating expert knowledge for novices without losing the insider appeal. Stanhouse gave an example from the app: "There are two drivers, but did you know it takes 24 people working simultaneously in two seconds to change a tire?"
For veteran fans, that detail is old news; for new fans, it's a hook. The AI recommendation system's job is to determine whether a user knows pit-stop complexity or finds it mind-blowing, then serve different content. Previously, editors segmented audiences manually; now the model does it.
AI in sports goes beyond the track
Ferrari isn't the only F1 team working with tech companies: AWS handles race data streams, Oracle provides real-time analytics for Red Bull, and Anthropic has also entered the space, as Stanhouse noted. But most of those partnerships serve the team—helping strategists decide when to pit or analysts review race data. IBM's work is for the fans, a different proposition.
Millions of data points are generated every second on the track. IBM's goal is to move that data from engineers' screens to users' phones, in a form they can understand.
A note from the sidelines
Sports organizations partnering with tech companies for AI tools has become common in recent years. But most cases involve a company, a feature, and a press release—few deliver 60%+ engagement growth. What's more telling is Ferrari's choice: it didn't go to a Silicon Valley giant or a personalization startup. It chose IBM, a company with a long history in enterprise systems integration that can handle long-term project delivery. The logic is pragmatic—fan engagement is a long-tail effort; flashy demos won't cut it. You need a partner willing to stay for five years.
For other sports IPs—NBA, Premier League, tennis Grand Slams—this is a template worth copying. They all face the same problem: new audiences coming in, old apps falling short.
Sources: CocoLoop, Ferrari is using IBM's AI to create F1 superfans (TechCrunch)