By Andy Marston, Sports Pundit
Scuderia Ferrari has announced WHOOP as its Official Health and Fitness Wearable Partner from the 2026 Formula 1 season with an ambition to extend “data-driven approach beyond the car.”
WHOOP devices will be rolled out across the Ferrari team to monitor sleep, stress, recovery and overall wellness, extending Ferrari’s long-standing data culture from the car to the human performance layer.
WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed has been clear that this is not a logo-led deal, but a fully embedded collaboration where product usage, science and outcomes matter as much as visibility.
Ferrari’s medical staff will work directly with WHOOP’s Performance Science team, led by Dr Kristen Holmes PhD, to analyse physical readiness and recovery in one of the most demanding environments in global sport, with insights feeding back into training and workload decisions.
The partnership is positioned as a shared R&D effort, combining Ferrari’s high-performance engineering mindset with WHOOP’s human performance data to improve consistency, resilience and efficiency across a long F1 season.
Why It Matters:
Elite sport is one of the best testing environments in the world, yet most sponsorship deals barely make use of it.
Too often, partnerships stop at branding and hospitality rather than tapping into the performance infrastructure sitting right in front of them. This deal does the opposite, anchoring the relationship around measurable inputs and outcomes rather than vague wellness messaging.
As Ferrari’s Chief Racing Revenue Officer, Lorenzo Giorgetti put it:
“The partnership with WHOOP allows us to extend our data-driven approach beyond the car, to aspects more related to the human factor, by combining our expertise in high-performance engineering with WHOOP insights into human health.”
WHOOP has seen this playbook work before. In its large-scale partnership with Major League Baseball, thousands of Minor League players wore WHOOP devices, generating insights that influenced training loads, roster decisions and injury prevention across clubs like the Baltimore Orioles.
A decade on, Ferrari now becomes the Formula 1 version of that laboratory.
There is, of course, a bigger takeaway here. Many sports organisations already have elite facilities, medical teams and performance staff, yet still sell partnerships mainly through hospitality and logo placement. That’s increasingly out of step with what sponsors want.
Brands are shifting toward health, prevention and performance, not just exposure. Teams that can translate their elite environments into credible wellbeing platforms stand to unlock a very different tier of partnership value.
Just this week, UAE Team Emirates announced a partnership with Eight Sleep, embedding sleep technology directly into recovery and performance programmes. It is a different sport (and budget), but the same underlying idea is present of elite teams as living laboratories where human performance products are tested, refined and validated under extreme conditions.
Taken together, the Ferrari and UAE Team Emirates deals show how sport can move from being a marketing channel to becoming part of the product itself. I would love to see how this trend advances in future, potentially with the launch of co-created products between sports organisations and brands as a result of the insights gleaned.
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