The Italian Motorsport industry - 3,4 billion euros annual turnover
Posted by Tim Angus and Riccardo Paterni on 09/10/2017

Statistics on the size of a country's motorsport industry are very hard to come by. Most of the research on the scale and scope of the global motorsport industry has been produced and summarised by one of this article's authors in the 2007 book, 'Motorsport Going Global’.

Motorsport was defined in the book as 'competitive racing by equivalent machines on a frequent basis, on designated tracks and circuits' (p1) and the motorsport industry was further defined as;

- 'motor' - meaning the provision (construction and preparation) of cars and bikes; and

- 'sport' - meaning the infrastructure including clubs, circuits, promotion, insurance and so on that is needed to participate in, spectate, or view the sport (Henry et al, 2007, p1)

In this book was estimated that the global turnover of the world's motorsport industry was £50 billion in 2005. The UK's share of this global turnover was estimated at £6 billion in 2005. Italy's share was estimated at £2.0 billion - a third of the size of the UK.

Since then the UK's turnover has been updated in research conducted for the UK's Motorsport Industry Association (MIA) by one of the authors of this article in 2012 (access to the research);

That research concluded that in 2012 the UK's motorsport industry turnover was £9 billion. If we apportion the same percentage of value to the Italian motorsport industry as did in for the 2005 figures from the book, this gives us an estimated turnover for Italy of £3.0 billion in 2012, or around 3.4 billion euros.

We also know from research conducted for the MIA in 2012 that the UK industry employed around 41,000 full time individuals. So could we estimate that in the same year Italy employed around a third of this? Around 14,000?

All of this is open to debate from any perspective.