In a sport where heavyweights like Ferrari, Mercedes, and Red Bull reign, McLaren, surprisingly came out as the most attractive team for sponsors. They are not the richest or even the fastest team on the grid. Despite this, they managed to grab a $30,000,000 sponsorship deal as revealed by Zak Brown in a report published by Business F1.
McLaren is primarily a British automobile company but has huge acclaim in the world of racing. Founded by the great Bruce McLaren back in 1963, the brand is huge and has always been a commercially viable option for several potential investors.
Other than F1, McLaren also worked on increasing their presence in the US, by launching an IndyCar team. Thus, their growth within the North American market has made them a favorite for companies from US and Canada.
How did McLaren do the unthinkable?
The majority of the money that McLaren gets is from BAT (British American Tobacco). There were several other teams who wanted to sign ad deal with BAT including Mercedes, Williams and Aston Martin. However, in the end, they signed with the team from Woking, for which the team from Surrey gets $30,000,000 annually.
Talking about this, Brown, the CEO of McLaren Racing stated as per Business F1: “A huge market for BAT is in North America. That was a competitive pitch. And when we won that five years ago, one of the deciding factors was that we have an IndyCar team. Because five years ago Formula 1 wasn’t what it is today in North America.”
McLaren has announced a multi-year partnership with Workday, which means the team now has a total of 47 sponsors 🤝
Here’s how many sponsors all the F1 teams have right now 👇 pic.twitter.com/uy5h44DZ1Q
— Motorsport.com (@Motorsport) March 28, 2023
Admittedly, McLaren have worked hard to ensure their visibility in racing ventures from around the world. Apart from F1 and IndyCar, McLaren also has teams in Formula E and Extreme E.
McLaren’s turnaround orchestrated by Zak Brown
Zak Brown, an American businessman and entrepreneur joined McLaren back in 2016 as the Executive Director. From there, he climbed the ranks to become CEO of the British team. From there on, he took a financially struggling team and turned it into the F1 outfit with the most number of sponsors.
When he joined, the papaya outfit barely had any sponsorship branding on their car. Now, as of March 2023, the Woking-based team had a total of 47 sponsors named in their car. The surge has been so huge that it took the team to devise a special way to show every sponsor in their car.
Sponsorship aside, their huge racing presence in other ventures around the world allows them to choose from a huge talent pool when it comes to drivers. All in all, even if McLaren isn’t the best F1 team right now, their commerciality is on a whole different level.
