In Formula 1, the biggest cheque doesn't always win the weekend. That's true on track, and we believe it's true in the commercial garage too.
The economics of F1 sponsorship have never been steeper. Industry analysts at RTR Sports Marketing put the 2026 range at roughly $1.5 million a year at entry level to more than $110 million for title naming rights with a front-running team — with total investment across the championship passing $3 billion for the first time. At the very top, a handful of enterprise-technology and finance brands now pay $80–110 million a season, and those deals are as much operational integrations as they are logos on a car.
That's a remarkable market to be part of. But it also raises a question that matters to every brand weighing a move into the sport: where does the value actually sit? Our answer, and increasingly the industry's, is that value in modern F1 is created through activation, audience and ideas — not simply through spend. And that is precisely the ground on which we compete.
The accessibility advantage
Here's a truth the cost tables make plain. The same modest partnership fee buys very different things depending on where you spend it. At the sharp end of the grid, inventory is scarce and demand is fierce, so an entry-level budget disappears into a small logo and near-zero camera time. At a team like ours, that same investment can secure meaningful placement and, more importantly, an activation-rich package built around a brand's actual objectives.
Independent analysts describe this openly: a fee that buys almost nothing visible at the most expensive teams can buy genuine presence, and a team willing to build something creative around it, further down the grid. We see that not as a compromise but as our commercial identity. We are one of the most accessible entry points into Formula 1 for a brand that wants to be a true partner rather than a passenger — and one of the most rewarding, because of what we do once a partner is on board.
It's a lesson we learned the hard way. For too long, our commercial base leaned heavily on driver-associated funding, which meant money could walk out of the door whenever a driver did. Rebuilding around a diverse, durable portfolio of partners — across technology, finance, energy, consumer goods and Web3 — has been central to our transformation off track, just as fixing the foundations has been central to it on track.
Why activation is the real return
The single most important finding in the sponsorship data is also the most sobering: only around one in ten F1 deals historically delivers a positive media-value return without significant activation on top. The logo, in other words, is the starting point, not the finish line. Brands that treat their partnership as a marketing platform outperform those that treat it as a media buy — every time.
That reframes what a team is really offering. A sponsor isn't buying a position label or a place on a winning car; it's buying screen time, audience quality and, above all, the creative capacity to turn a placement into something people remember. Visibility drives value more than victory does: analysts named Monaco the most valuable race of 2025 purely because its slow, tight layout keeps liveries on screen longer, and one of the sport's most-photographed teams generated the most social value of any team in the first half of that season without winning a race.
The audience underneath those numbers is the real prize. Formula 1 reached 827 million fans globally in 2025, and 43 per cent of them are under 35 — a young, engaged, hard-to-reach demographic that conventional advertising struggles to capture. US race viewership has grown 135 per cent since 2018. For a brand, the opportunity isn't just to be seen by a lot of people; it's to be seen doing something interesting by exactly the people it wants to reach.
That's the game we've chosen to play, and to win.
Ideas that use the whole car — and reach beyond it
Consider Duracell, our partner since 2022. When our 2026 livery broke cover, the air intake above the driver's head had become an unmistakable giant battery — an idea so clean it felt obvious in hindsight. In a sport of intricate liveries and crowded sponsor lock-ups, it used the car's own architecture as media space: simple, distinctive and impossible to ignore. It's the kind of execution that earns attention far beyond the fee attached to it.
Consider Kraken, our Official Crypto and Web3 Partner since 2023 and now renewed into a fourth season. From the start, we built the partnership around fans rather than around logo placement — the Grid Pass digital collectible programme, Kraken's role as presenting partner of our global Fan Zones, and the annual Rear Wing Takeovers that literally handed the design of a branding position to our supporters. The 2025 "memecoin showdown" that put Pengu on the car in Singapore is exactly the sort of thing that turns a sponsorship into an event. For 2026, Kraken moves to pride of place on the leading edge of the FW48's front wing.
Consider Claude, from Anthropic, our Official Thinking Partner. Beyond the hundreds of projects Claude now supports across race strategy, car development and operations, the "Pattern of Thought" campaign launched around Monaco turned something invisible into something you could wear on a helmet: the focus, judgement and split-second decision-making of our drivers and engineers, captured under pressure and translated into a bold visual design that ran on special helmets, race suits and the garage, then travelled to Silverstone, Singapore and Las Vegas. It's a campaign that could only exist because of what the partner actually does — the ideal of activation done right.
And consider how far we've been willing to take our audience-broadening ambitions. Our Marvel collaboration — a first-of-its-kind comic putting our drivers and team principal into the Marvel Universe, with event-exclusive covers rolling out across the season and a US retail release to follow — was designed explicitly to introduce comic fans to F1 and F1 fans to comics. Our Dandadan collaboration, built with Tokyo brand UNDONE and expanded into a striking anime-liveried show car unveiled at Anime Expo as the opening move in a 30-plus-stop global campaign, reaches a young, culture-driven, global audience that most sponsors would struggle to touch. Pairing mainstream partners with youth-skewing cultural properties isn't a novelty for us; it's a deliberate strategy to broaden who we reach.
Heritage, reinvented
None of this means walking away from the iconic. Our reunion with Sparco, whose suits our champions wore in the 1990s, reconnects a championship-winning heritage to the demands of a new era. Gulf Oil International brought one of the most legendary colour schemes in motorsport history and a shared appetite for fan activation, while helping diversify our commercial base away from its old dependencies. BNY, Barclays, Stephens, and the wider partner group anchor that portfolio with heritage, stability and global reach.
What ties all of it together is a single conviction: that the right idea, executed with care, beats the biggest budget. It's the same belief that built nine Constructors' Championships on ingenuity rather than resources, and it's the belief that shapes how we build partnerships today.
The case, in one line
If you want the most expensive logo in Formula 1, you know where to find it. If you want a partner that will make your brand accessible to enter, unmistakable on the car, and genuinely creative in front of the youngest, fastest-growing audience in global sport — that's the value we offer.
In F1, the smartest teams find the milliseconds others miss. We think the smartest partnerships work the same way.