SPONSORSHIP IN FORMULA 1

There have been some interesting moment in the sponsorship world in recent days with McLaren announcing a small deal with Coca-Cola. What is clear from this is that the signage is not the important thing and that the value of the deal is more to do with B2B activities than with the celebrated drinks company needing to tell the world about its name.

Finding money for Formula 1 these days is tough and many of the sponsor-hunters say that the best way to do it these days is to negotiate small deals and then work hard to please the sponsors and get them to expand the deals.

However, team owners such as Gene Haas have more radical ideas. They want to see a bigger share of the revenues being paid to the teams by the series promoter. And if they are not willing to do that, Haas says, then they should change the model for F1 sponsorships

“I think what we could really use in F1 would be to have more of a  NASCAR - Indy Car format, where you are allowed to have multiple sponsors,” he says. “If the cars can have different sponsors from one race to the next, it would be easier to raise more money. If we can sponsorships in the $ 1-5 million range and have multiple liveries from race to race that would probably be quite helpful.”

The argument against this is that the cars would stop being instantly recognisable, which many in F1 see as being of key importance to the sport because fans know which car is which and will simple be confused if the cars are constantly changing liveries and colours.

“I think that making the cars recognizable to the fans is not revenue-beneficial any longer,” Haas says. “It just doesn’t work. We need to have flexibility. An extra $5-10 million in sponsorship every year goes a long way.

It is a radical idea to have F1 teams with different revenues from one race to the next, and one which the F1 purists are not keen on. When you watch F1, you know instantly which car you are looking at, while in NASCAR if you don’t know the car number, it can be bewildering to know who is racing who because the liveries change all the time. There is also the practical point that NASCAR cars have roofs, on which numbers can be seen. F1 cars do not.


It is a sign of the times that in Britain the very sexy Bloodhound SSC project, which is trying to build a car to take the land speed record over 1,000 mph has been forced into administration because the money is not there to fund it.

Source: JSBL