Stop into Becketts this weekend as the landmark show rolls by and you could be forgiven for thinking the calendar has slipped.
The blue and gold of Rothmans Williams, the screaming yellow of Benson & Hedges Jordan, the Tyrrell in Elf colours, McLaren still wearing its day-glo Marlboro chevrons: for a generation these liveries are as exciting as they are engine markings. But look closely at those sidepods and you’re not looking at the paddock. You are looking at corporate graveyards.
The British Grand Prix around them couldn’t be more different. A record crowd of over half a million, the sprint format, the worldwide broadcast audience raised in Drive to Survive, and the game, as Business Matters reported this week, now returns £12bn a year to the UK economy. But in the 1980s and 1990s Formula One was a very different commercial proposition: a billboard held together by cigarette money, corporate vanity and the occasional cheater. The teams, Williams, McLaren, Jordan, Tyrrell, survived, appeared or were taken. Many companies whose brands have paid off debts have not. Their conclusions read like an arresting history of three decades of corporate upheaval.
Tobacco giants: controlled, swallowed
No industry defined the era like tobacco. In 1995, nine of the top ten drivers in the world championship carried the brand of tobacco on their overalls, and the sport’s aesthetic was successfully designed in the marketing departments of London and Winston-Salem.
Rothmans is a very instructive case. The brand arrived at Williams in 1994 and transformed the FW16 into what one Italian analyst called “a pack of cigarettes on four wheels”, white, blue and gold, and undoubtedly in all seasons that carried Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve to their world titles. However, less than two years after leaving the sports front line, Rothmans International plc ceased to exist as an independent business. In 1999 British American Tobacco was swallowed up in a merger brokered by the European Commission, and the Rothmans, Dunhill and Player brands disappeared from the BAT portfolio, where they remained. The company that once wrote the biggest checks in world sports is now part of someone else’s annual report.
Benson & Hedges followed a similar arc. Eddie Jordan’s masterstroke in 1996 was persuading Gallaher to paint his cars gold, then yellow, which revealed the working methods of the Buzzin’ Hornets and Bitten & Hissses when the national advertising ban began to bite. B&H stayed with Jordan until 2005, by which time the FIA had already announced that cigarettes would be phased out by the end of 2006. Gallaher, Britain’s last major independent tobacco house, did not survive long without a ban that ended its motor racing journey: in April 2007 it was acquired by Japan Tobacco for an estimated £7.5bn in Japan’s largest ever foreign company.
Camel, which had spread yellow throughout Lotus, Benetton and Williams, learned the ways of control before most of the time. When France banned tobacco advertising in motorsport in 1992, RJ Reynolds began to push back, and by the end of 1993 the desert drum had largely disappeared from the grid. The lesson for any business built on a single, legally defined revenue stream is timeless: the writing is on the wall long before the wall falls on you.
Only Marlboro defies gravity. Philip Morris outbid all competitors, quietly moved its money to Ferrari, and continued to pay long after its name could officially appear on cars, proof that in sponsorship, as in business, deep relationships survive even if the brand cannot.
Technical terms: interrupted at full speed
If tobacco was out of control, the technology sponsors of the time were just new, which is a paradox for companies connected to the world’s fastest growing game.
Consider the 1993 Williams FW15C, arguably the most sophisticated F1 car ever built, with active suspension and traction control. Next to it sits Sega, then champion of the console wars, who painted Sonic the Hedgehog’s feet on the bottom of the truck’s cockpit and gave away a Sonic-shaped winning cup, which was famously lifted not by the Williams driver but by Ayrton Senna at Donington, after which McLaren painted his squash car. Sega was at a commercial peak. Within eight years it was completely out of the hardware business: hurt by the missteps of the 32X and the Saturn and unable to support the Dreamcast against Sony and Nintendo, it exited the console in 2001 to become a software publisher. The company survives, indeed, with an interesting footnote, Sega returned to the grid last year as a gaming partner of McLaren, the same team that once mocked its Williams with a squashed-hedgehog sticker, but the colossus that sponsored the world champions does not.
Compaq tells a similar story on a business level. The Texan PC maker became the main sponsor of the BMW Williams team in 2000, its brand owned by Ralf Schumacher and the young Juan Pablo Montoya. In May 2002, mid-season, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in one of the most difficult mergers in the history of technology, and, in a beautiful piece of symbolism, the Williams car brand changed from Compaq to HP at that year’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone. The brand that was once one of the largest computer companies in the world was reduced to a mid-race product replacement, and eventually went out of business altogether.
The telecoms adventure: two crashes for the price of one
The dot-com era ushered in a new breed of sponsor, and no partnership captured its beauty better than Orange and Arrows. The mobile company’s papaya livery made the 2000 Arrows A21 one of the best-looking cars on the grid, but the relationship brought a double whammy. Arrows, owned by Tom Walkinshaw, ran out of money and folded in 2002, its cars notorious for not appearing in races while lawyers argued. Orange refused to renew and withdrew from the sport. The sponsor fared better than the team, but not as an independent company: it was already bought by France Télécom in 2000 at the height of the telecom bubble. The change is that the brand ended up eating its owner, France Télécom judged the name Orange to be more powerful than its own so that in 2013 it renamed the whole group Orange SA.
Warning: where money was never real
And then there were the patrons who were not what they seemed. Leyton House, the Japanese architecture and entertainment group whose March green cars almost won the 1990 French Grand Prix with Ivan Capelli, fell into disgrace when founder Akira Akagi was arrested in 1991 for fraud involving Fuji Bank. The team died with him, and F1 learned, not for the last time, as anyone who remembers the recent crypto logos will testify, that due diligence with the sponsor’s money is as important as the size of the check.
What survivors teach us
It would be a mistake to paint the entire era as a graveyard. Canon, which supported Williams with its Mansell-Piquet splendour, is still a force to be reckoned with around the world. Elf, the French fuel brand for every Tyrrell and Renault of the time, lives within TotalEnergies, and is still in the game today. And the teams themselves have shown remarkably long-lasting legacies: Tyrrell’s entry was sold to BAT and then to BAT, then to Honda, then to Brawn, and today to Mercedes-AMG F1; Jordan’s Silverstone factory is now home to Aston Martin’s title rivals. In Formula One, as a sponsorship strategist and author Jackie Fast, whose best-selling book PINPOINT tells about what really works in sponsorship, may note, the platform has been living longer than the types that have paid.
That, perhaps, is the real business story hidden in this weekend’s desire. The grid livery is the best indicator: it tells you which sectors have cash, confidence and something to prove. In 1986 that meant cigarettes; in 1993, video games; in 2000, PC and telecommunications makers; today crypto exchange, cloud computing and logistics giants, sectors whose survival for thirty years is not guaranteed. The move to the £12bn UK sport suggests that Formula One itself has never been healthier. History suggests the same cannot be imagined for the names painted on its cars.
So when the old Rothmans Williams tore into the pits this afternoon, spare a thought not just for the drivers who battled it, but for the marketing directors who signed the deals, men and women who believed, quite reasonably, that their brands were as permanent as the sport they graced. Formula One is still here. Rothmans, Gallaher, Compaq, Leyton House and the Sega console empire are gone. In business, as in Becketts, nothing stays open forever.
