Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 1: Why Motorsport Racing Teams Must Move Beyond Sponsorship
If you don’t have OEM support, sponsorship is effectively your only oxygen, and if a sponsor cuts back or disappears, the cycle starts all over again.
This is the fundamental problem: how sponsorship looks or is activated is of course going to follow Ron Dennis’s playbook and be much more polished than it was in the 1960’s, but it’s still the same paradigm, and remember, even Ron Dennis’s playbook is now nearing 50 years old!
Racing, Politics and Power: Why Porsche’s WEC Threat Isn’t Really About Money
Porsche’s hints at quitting the WEC aren’t really about money, but about influence over the rules that shape the sport. Rivals like Ferrari and McLaren are showing that creative funding models exist, making withdrawal a short-sighted option. In endurance racing’s Platinum Age, walking away would only hand rivals the spotlight; Porsche’s real play is leverage, not exit.
Motorsport Merch Is Lazy, And It's Costing Teams Millions
Motorsport, from Formula 1 on down, is unabashedly capitalist, in its operations, its scope, and its sheer spectacle.
At every race, the money is on display in every second of coverage. The scale may vary, but only from “kind of expensive” to “ludicrously expensive.”
Merchandise sits comfortably within that ecosystem. It’s not just a revenue stream, it’s capitalism in pure form: the sublimation of self through consumption.
For fans looking for connection, merch is the perfect outlet: an easy, visible way to say this is who I ride with.
So if the emotional buy-in is this strong, the question becomes obvious:
Why are teams still neglecting that loyalty with lazy, uninspired merch?
From Tobacco to Crypto: The Search for the Next Lucrative Vice Motorsport Sponsor
Tobacco use is widely recognized as a lethal habit and has for all intents and purposes disappeared from the visible marketing landscape.
You’d be hard pressed to remember the last time you saw a tobacco brand anywhere but behind a store counter, yet racing fans will know it wasn’t always this way.
As destructive as the tobacco industry was and continues to be, there is no denying just how mightily their involvement shaped motorsports. Obviously we can talk about liveries which have since become iconic, and it’s shocking just how many names from a certain era are actually tobacco-related.
Marlboro, Gitanes, John Player Special, Silk Cut.
All tobacco brands, and that’s only a handful of examples!
Why did tobacco companies invest so heavily in motorsports?
They did so because the return on investment they received allowed them to quite literally engineer several eras of motorsports.
Tobacco companies also defined the modern era of racing sponsorship, and they did so for reasons that still form the bedrock of why any brand enters the sport today.