Italy hadn’t produced a repeat Grand Prix winner in over 70 years, since Alberto Ascari, and Giancarlo Fisichella’s 2006 win in Malaysia was the last time an Italian stood on the top step at all. An entire generation of Italian motorsport fans grew up rooting their national pride through Ferrari’s marque because there was nobody else to carry it.

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Sunday changed that, and when Antonelli cleared the barriers in parc fermé to find his parents, even the drivers who’d just finished behind him sought him out. Verstappen, both Cadillac drivers, and Franco Colapinto were all walking over with hugs. The paddock was telling you something.

Pair that with Jannik Sinner holding the world’s top tennis ranking at the same moment, and Italy has a cultural sports story it hasn’t had in a long time, two generational talents in two different sports running concurrently, neither of them appearing particularly burdened by what they’re carrying. And with the men’s Italian national soccer team missing a third straight World Cup, the time is now for both Sinner and Antonelli.

Antonelli said Thursday that he was aware of the historical pressure but wasn’t trying to focus on it. Watch the press conference footage, and you believe him.

The race earned him something that the first three couldn’t

McLaren brought a meaningful upgrade to Miami, enough for Norris to beat Antonelli in Saturday’s sprint and spend the second half of Sunday with a legitimate shot at the lead. Antonelli dropped two positions at the start due to a grip problem; Toto Wolff later called it a team mistake. He fought his way back through Charles Leclerc, passed Norris on Lap 28, and then spent the closing stages defending, with a gearbox issue developing around Lap 33 and rear tire temperatures spiking four laps later. Peter Bonnington, who spent years talking Lewis Hamilton through equivalent moments from the same radio seat, brought him back lap by lap, and by Lap 40, Antonelli’s voice had settled.

The first three wins came with a car that made the driver’s job manageable. Miami had the advantage compressed, meaning the question of whether Antonelli is a product of Mercedes or a genuine championship-level driver is effectively answered.

Inside the garage, Russell is navigating something uncomfortable

He finished fourth, admitting to Sky Sports F1 that he spent the final ten laps running Antonelli’s differential and brake bias settings after struggling all weekend with a setup that didn’t suit his style, and called the impact bigger than he expected. Russell is 20 points back, won in Canada last year, and has flagged Montreal as a circuit where he expects to recover ground. Antonelli, unprompted in the post-race press conference, said the same thing about his teammate.

Wolff is threading a needle that tightens with every Antonelli win, praising the younger driver publicly while immediately noting Russell’s competitive threat and framing the starts as a team-level problem rather than an individual one. Mercedes leads the constructors’ championship by 68 points, and the starts genuinely need fixing. Wolff called them unacceptable for a team with title ambitions, and he’s right about that.

The viewing data is where the commercial stakes become real

The 2026 regulations have created a problem Liberty Media did not budget for. Spain’s DAZN recorded a 49% year-over-year audience drop after the Japanese Grand Prix, France’s Canal+ fell 43%, Germany lost 21%, and Austria shed 36%. These are not rounding errors in peripheral markets. France and Spain are two of the sport’s historically central territories, and the combined viewership collapse across those four countries represents a direct threat to the broadcast rights valuations that underpin F1’s revenue model.

To understand why that matters financially, start with the top line. F1 generated $3.87 billion in revenue in 2025, with media rights fees accounting for 31.3% of that total and live viewership up 21% compared to 2024. Sponsorship alone contributed $840.4 million, up sharply from $634.5 million in 2024. The sport’s commercial model is built on audience scale, which justifies rights fees, which in turn justify sponsor pricing, reinforcing the cycle. A sustained viewership decline in Europe puts pressure on every layer of that stack when broadcast contracts come up for renewal.

Italy is the single exception. Sky Sports Italia drew 824,000 viewers for the Japanese Grand Prix, up 36% over the same race in 2025, with Antonelli entering that weekend as the first Italian driver with a genuine shot at the championship since Michele Alboreto in 1985. That number didn’t happen because the 2026 regulations suddenly became popular in Bologna. It happened because Italy finally has a driver, and the market responded immediately and measurably.

For Liberty Media’s commercial team, Italy’s counter-trend is both a proof of concept and a product brief. Driver-market correlation is the mechanism they’ve used to grow audiences since Drive to Survive: Verstappen built the Netherlands, Norris accelerated the UK’s younger demographic, and Colapinto lit up Latin America overnight. What’s being called the “Antonelli effect” has reignited national Italian attention around a new protagonist in ways no marketing campaign could replicate, even as Italy was already engaged through Ferrari. The additive effect of a national title contender at a rival team is commercially distinct from Ferrari loyalty. It creates new entry points.

Mercedes, the direct beneficiary, is already the sport’s most commercially valuable constructor. SponsorUnited’s latest data puts Mercedes-AMG Petronas at an estimated $558 million in sponsorship revenue in 2025, leading all ten teams, with the average F1 sponsorship deal worth roughly $6 million, approximately eight times the average NFL team deal. Their Advertising Value Equivalent, which measures the media exposure delivered to commercial partners, reached $5.7 billion in 2024, up 8% year over year. Three wins into a dominant 2026 campaign, with a 19-year-old Italian leading the drivers’ championship, those AVE numbers are compounding in real time.

The contract structure underneath all of this is worth understanding. Antonelli is currently earning a reported $2 million base salary in 2026, and he is contracted through 2029, which means the renegotiation conversation isn’t imminent, but the market comparison already exists.

When Charles Leclerc won back-to-back in Belgium and Italy in 2019, his base salary reportedly moved from around $12 million to $30 million within two years. Antonelli is two years younger than Leclerc was at that moment, already has more wins, and is at the sport’s most commercially active team. The salary structure is management’s problem to solve in 2027. The endorsement value is a problem for every brand that didn’t sign him in 2025. [Note: salary figures above are estimates from third-party sources; neither Mercedes nor Antonelli’s camp has confirmed specific contract terms publicly.]

Across the sport, F1 team sponsorship reached $2.54 billion in 2025, a 22.1% increase that has closed the gap to the NFL, which leads at $2.66 billion, to just $120 million. F1 surpassed the English Premier League. That trajectory runs directly through narratives like this one: a young driver from a historically passionate market, winning in his second season, carrying a national story that every broadcaster on the continent can sell. The 2026 regulatory headwinds are real, and Liberty Media is under genuine pressure to fix the on-track product in several European markets. Antonelli gives them cover they didn’t plan for and leverage they’ll use, whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not.

Eighteen races remain. Russell will be competitive in Canada, McLaren will keep pushing, and the starts need fixing before a reliability or tactical error costs Antonelli points he shouldn’t be losing. None of that changes what the Italian audience data through four rounds already confirms, or what happens to Mercedes’ $558 million commercial portfolio if this championship run extends to July.

The sport needed a story that could hold European audiences while the regulations get sorted. One arrived on schedule, wearing number 12, and collecting the chequered flag in South Florida.

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Field Notes - Miami Grand Prix

Thanks to our clients at Hyton, we had the opportunity to experience The Concours Club both at the Miami GP track and back at the club itself, located at the Opa Locka Executive Airport. We’ll write more about it in the coming weeks, but for now, here are some of the photos from the weekend.

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Apple Continues Building a Content Stack Around Its F1 Rights

The race is almost secondary.

Before a wheel turns in Miami this weekend, Apple has built an entire layer of original programming around its Formula 1 broadcast rights, and the talent it selected reveals exactly what the company thinks it’s building.

Circuits in Focus debuts April 30, pairing 2016 F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg with racing driver and YouTuber Emelia Hartford. The two analyze the track strategy and braking points using EA Sports F1 25, which turns a video game into a legitimate broadcast analysis tool and quietly co-promotes EA’s latest racing title to every F1 fan watching, a three-way arrangement dressed up as a television show.

The POV takes a completely different approach. Former Red Bull Racing technician Calum Nicholas and engineer Christina Roki run a post-race social series reacting to key moments and strategic decisions, two people who actually sat inside an F1 operation, describing what they saw in terms that make the sport legible to someone watching their third race ever.

The Tubi arrangement deserves attention. The Fast Lane: Miami runs on Fox’s free ad-supported platform, with YouTuber Michelle Khare, Jeremiah Burton, and F1 instructor Scott Mansell providing live commentary from a creator-centered perspective. Apple routes the premium experience behind its $12.99/month Apple TV+ paywall and pushes the influencer-adjacent content to a service that costs viewers nothing. That’s audience expansion by design, and coordinating it with Fox signals an unusual degree of alignment between two companies otherwise competing for the same living room.

Apple’s physical footprint around the race is just as deliberate. On May 1, the Aventura store becomes a full-day race venue, with oversized screens and stadium seating for Practice and Sprint Qualifying, a live performance by DJ Dímelo Flow, and an Apple Books conversation with Susie Wolff about Driven, her memoir on building a career inside a sport that spent years making clear she wasn’t welcome.

The Cadillac F1 special livery is on display, a well-placed reminder that the sport’s new American team exists, at an event specifically designed to grow F1’s American audience. Sergio Pérez, now driving for Cadillac, shares a personal playlist through Apple Music.

More than 50 IMAX locations nationwide are screening the Miami Grand Prix live, and Apple is running a public viewing of the race day in Times Square. Theatrical chains and streaming services have spent years in a low-grade war over the same eyeballs. Apple is routing a live F1 broadcast through IMAX infrastructure, which is a different kind of arrangement, and the Times Square screening makes the same point from street level: Apple wants race day to feel like something people show up for.

Talent architecture reveals Apple’s theory of long-term retention. Rosberg carries
championship credibility. Hartford brings accessibility and a female broadcast presence to a sport where the commentary booth has historically been narrow. Nicholas and Roki provide the technical granularity that converts a casual viewer into someone who actually understands what they just watched, which is the version of that viewer who clears their calendar the following Sunday.

Apple’s F1 deal spans a decade. Original programming is how a ten-year contract becomes a habit rather than a scheduled event, and getting someone to open Circuits in Focus on a Thursday afternoon builds a fundamentally different relationship with the sport than selling them a Sunday broadcast slot. The rights get you in the room. The programming, the store takeovers, IMAX partnerships, and public screenings are what keep people there.

Whether any of these specific formats survive long enough to compound is the real test. Creator talent moves. Production costs stack across ten seasons. Building a sustained audience for sports analysis content is genuinely hard. But the underlying logic of layering original content and physical presence around expensive rights is sound, and the mix of championship pedigree (Rosberg), technical credibility (Nicholas and Roki), and creator-economy reach (Khare, Hartford, Burton) suggests Apple is at least asking the right questions. Which of these formats gets renewed at the end of 2026 will tell you what Apple actually learned.

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Barilla Made a Pasta for Race Day

Angie Cotter, Barilla’s U.S. pasta category marketing director, launched Racing Wheels this week: a special-edition pasta cut shaped like an F1 wheel, ridged and circular, built for al dente texture and sauce pickup. Available on Walmart.com now, with broader retail through spring. Race weekend activation at the Miami Grand Prix includes two Lasagna Bars on-site and dishes in the Paddock Club.

Barilla holds the title of Formula 1’s official pasta partner, and Cotter’s team decided to build a product with it. Racing Wheels is a new SKU that exists because of the F1 relationship: it costs $1.17, it sits in a grocery aisle, and it puts the partnership in someone’s kitchen. That kind of move is rare in motorsport sponsorship, where the default is signage, hospitality access, and a logo on the broadcast.

The campaign wrapping it is called “Domenica Italiana,” built on the Italian tradition of Sunday meals shared while watching the race. It works because it describes what people already do on race Sundays.

Every food and beverage brand on the F1 grid should study what Cotter’s team built and ask the same question: what artifact of the partnership lives outside the circuit and inside someone’s daily life? Barilla’s answer is on Walmart.com right now and will be in Miami in three weeks.

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F1 had just announced revenue rising 14% to $3.87 billion in 2025. Shanghai was selling out tickets and hospitality as China’s expanding middle class and Gen Z caught the F1 bug.

Yet, as Thomas wrote, brand sponsorship from China has “slowed to a trickle,” with Lenovo standing “almost alone” as a major Chinese global F1 partner and no team on the grid currently carrying a major Chinese name. Thomas was at the first Chinese Grand Prix in 2004 and was part of the commercial gold rush that followed. His framing of “full grandstands, growing fanbase, empty sponsor pipeline” stuck with me, and I wanted to understand the structural reasons behind it.

Then the race happened, and everything he described played out in real time. 230,000 people attended the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. They packed Metro Line 11 in Ferrari red caps and McLaren papaya tees, carrying handmade banners, some with Labubu dolls dressed as their favorite drivers dangling from their backpacks. Lewis Hamilton, who has raced in Shanghai for two decades, said he had never seen crowds that large.

Tickets across every price tier, from ¥330 ($45) practice day passes to ¥42,800 ($5,860) premium packages, sold out, and gate revenue hit ¥190 million ($26 million), up 35% from last year. After the weekend, Thomas posted again, writing that sales records were smashed across sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, merchandise, and concessions, with “literally not a free seat in the house.”

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Where the Money Went Instead

China generates close to $20 trillion in annual GDP, and around 130 Chinese firms sit in the Fortune Global 500. Nielsen reports Chinese F1 fandom grew 39% year over year. Over half of fans in the country discovered the sport in the past four years, and the audience skews young with a 50/50 gender split, a demographic profile that should have every sponsorship broker in the paddock on a plane to Shanghai.

F1 generated $3.65 billion in total revenue in 2024, and its global partner roster has nearly tripled since 2020, from 12 to 31. LVMH signed a 10-year global deal. American Express, LEGO, Sony, and Santander all entered.

More than 110 U.S. brands now sponsor F1, more than double the figure from 2017, and forty-five percent of McLaren’s 57 sponsors are American. The world’s second-largest economy contributes one name to that roster, and the reason has far more to do with how F1 sells than with whether Chinese companies are buying.

Put the 2004 and 2026 numbers side by side, and the reversal becomes clear: two decades ago, the arrival of F1 in Shanghai triggered a wave of Chinese commercial interest that Thomas described as a gold rush with “some pretty hefty deals” getting signed across the paddock. The fanbase today dwarfs what existed then, the sport’s global revenue has multiplied several times over, and Chinese corporate presence in F1 has moved in the opposite direction.

Chinese Brands Are Choosing Different Global Sports

The idea that Chinese companies haven’t figured out international sports sponsorship is easy to believe if you only look at the F1 grid.

Look wider, and the picture changes fast.

Five Chinese companies, Ant Group, Hisense, AliExpress, Vivo, and BYD, served as official global sponsors of UEFA Euro 2024, accounting for a third of the tournament’s entire sponsor pool. Alibaba holds a top-tier Olympic partnership running through 2028. Hisense has been embedded in FIFA and UEFA cycles for the better part of a decade and reported a 274% year-over-year sales surge during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. BYD replaced Volkswagen as UEFA’s official vehicle supplier and, in February 2026, Stella Li traveled to Manchester to personally finalize a multi-year deal making BYD the official automotive partner of Manchester City, following an earlier partnership with Inter Milan.

These are substantial commitments. The money exists. The appetite for global platforms exists. What Chinese companies have repeatedly and deliberately chosen are properties with massive single-event reach, concentrated activation windows, and straightforward ROI measurement. A month-long football tournament with 5 billion cumulative viewers and a fixed host market is a different proposition than a 24-race global calendar that requires year-round activation across 180+ broadcast territories. Thomas, who has watched this dynamic play out from Shanghai for more than two decades, identified the core tension on LinkedIn: F1’s commercial model remains “too Western-centric” while Chinese brands continue to prioritize domestic digital platforms, short-form media, and performance-driven spend.

Matthew Marsh, an F1 sponsorship broker covering Asia, told Autosport that Chinese company leadership approaches sponsorship like a commodity purchase, evaluating it the way they’d evaluate a shipment of steel, with a focus on measurable returns. The Apple model of building margin through brand association and long-term equity hasn’t taken hold in most Chinese boardrooms, and that framing clashes with how F1 partnerships actually function, which is largely through compounding brand presence over multiple seasons, hospitality relationships, and the soft power of being seen inside a global entertainment property week after week.

Jason Du, GM of global brand marketing at Join-Cheer Digital Group, which works directly with Chinese EV brands on overseas campaigns, told The Current that increased global marketing spend from Chinese companies is inevitable, given how saturated the domestic automotive market has become. The question was never whether the money would move outward. The question is which platforms capture it first, and F1 has been losing that race to football for years.

The Activation Gap in Shanghai

Look at the race week activation schedule in Shanghai during the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. F1 teams sent their drivers all over the city to front brand events. Max Verstappen appeared at an ExxonMobil event alongside actor Daniel Wu. Charles Leclerc visited a PUMA store. Fernando Alonso showed up at the BOSS flagship in Jing’an. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli hosted an IWC Schaffhausen event at Taikoo Hui. Jiemian News, one of China’s most prominent business outlets, covered the full circuit of appearances, and every brand the drivers were activating for was Western.

The commercial infrastructure of F1 in China is designed to serve sponsors who already exist, all of whom are based outside the country. Nobody from the teams is building relationships with Chinese corporate leadership on Chinese terms, using Chinese commercial logic, through Chinese digital platforms.

F1 poured enormous energy into its American expansion, and Liberty Media invested years of strategic effort into understanding how American brands think, what American audiences consume, and how to build a commercial bridge between the two. That pipeline brought in more than 110 U.S. sponsors. No one has attempted anything comparable in China, and the difference shows in every race week activation schedule Shanghai produces.

F1’s Growth Engine Doesn’t Reach This Market

Drive to Survive is the single most effective fan-acquisition tool F1 has ever deployed, and Netflix penetration in China is zero. The show simply doesn’t exist in the market. The F1 movie starring Brad Pitt pulled ¥328 million ($44.9 million) at the Chinese box office, a solid number that still accounts for only a fraction of its global $633 million haul. Tencent signed a multi-year broadcast renewal through 2027 to carry every race, and CCTV has expanded coverage, but the storytelling pipeline that converted casual viewers into obsessive fans across the U.S. and Europe hasn’t been replicated on Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, or any other Chinese platform.

Without a Chinese-language content ecosystem that builds emotional connection to drivers, teams, and paddock culture, fandom stays broad and shallow.

There is also no emotional anchor on the grid. Zhou Guanyu, the first full-time Chinese driver in F1, raced for Alfa Romeo and Sauber between 2022 and 2024, and when Frederic Vasseur signed him, he publicly dismissed the idea that the move was commercially motivated. He also later admitted to Autosport that tapping into the Chinese market had been “difficult” even with Zhou in the car. SenseTime and Yili both came on board during Zhou’s tenure, and both are gone now that he’s been reduced to a reserve role at the Cadillac F1 Team.

The Ground Is Moving Faster Than the Paddock

The most interesting commercial signal from the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix came entirely from outside the paddock. Taobao Instant Commerce, Alibaba’s on-demand delivery platform, became an official race partner through a sequence that F1’s commercial team should study. Last August, the company redesigned its delivery rider uniforms in orange and black, and Chinese internet users immediately spotted the resemblance to McLaren’s livery. The comparison went viral, the company leaned into the moment, and a partnership with the Chinese Grand Prix followed.

That deal was born of organic cultural momentum on Chinese social media, and it reveals how commercial energy actually moves in this market. Chinese consumers are ready to connect brands with the sport when the connection operates on their terms, through shareable identity, cultural resonance, and a logic that ties back to something measurable rather than abstract brand equity.

China Daily reported on a broader consumer shift that accelerated during COVID, away from conspicuous luxury consumption and toward health, lifestyle, and premium experiences. Their reporter described fans on Metro Line 11 wearing full team kits, carrying homemade signs, treating the race weekend as a destination event in a way that looks more like what F1 has cultivated in Austin and Miami than the corporate-hospitality model of a decade ago. F1 as a live experience fits that shift, and the commercial opportunity attached to it remains almost entirely untapped.

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BYD Is Coming

Stella Li attended the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last December and was in the Shanghai paddock last week. In 2025, she became the first woman and first representative of a Chinese brand to be named World Car Person of the Year. She is the person most directly responsible for BYD’s international expansion, and she is spending time in F1 paddocks.

BYD is already the largest electric vehicle seller in Europe by unit volume, operates in more than 110 countries, and has built a production facility in Hungary. Its sports sponsorship portfolio now spans UEFA Euro 2024, Manchester City, and Inter Milan. Huu-Hoi Tran, managing director and global VP at Capgemini Invent China, told The Current that Chinese EV brands like BYD have the superior product but need to integrate themselves into consumer consciousness in new regions, and Prof. Holger Görg of the Kiel Centre for Globalization told the South China Morning Post that sports sponsorship helps Chinese brands appear “less threatening” in European markets where they face persistent perception barriers around quality and market competition.

So far, BYD has deployed that strategy through football. Motorsport.com reported this month that the company is now actively assessing F1 entry options, from team acquisition to a 12th entry application to a title sponsorship modeled on what Alfa Romeo did with Sauber for six seasons. The Geely Group, which controls Lotus, Volvo, and Polestar, attempted to acquire a team two years ago and was priced out by the surge in F1 valuations, though a title sponsorship remains on their table.

What makes BYD’s entry feel inevitable rather than speculative is the convergence of several forces. The 2026 regulations shift F1 toward a 50/50 split between electric and combustion power, making the sport far more relevant to an EV manufacturer’s narrative.

The Chinese consumer base is already engaged. BYD has entered the growth phase where purely domestic brand investment hits diminishing returns. And behind BYD sit 10 to 20 more Chinese EV brands preparing to compete internationally, all of which will eventually need to differentiate against each other on something other than price and will run out of UEFA and FIFA inventory before they get there.

Revolut’s deal with Audi showed what a modern F1 partnership looks like when the partner embeds itself into the team’s operational infrastructure rather than buying logo space, and Toyota’s embedded approach with Haas offers another template built on lower risk, high learning, and room to scale. BYD is sophisticated enough to study both models and build something that aligns with Chinese commercial priorities rather than imitating a Western playbook designed for companies with a different relationship to brand equity.

The Call

F1 is running a global commercial operation that has cracked the U.S., consolidated Europe, and aggressively expanded into the Middle East, but it has not built the muscle to compete in China. The partnership model assumes sponsors already think in terms of long-term brand equity, that they want global category exclusivity across 180+ broadcast territories, and that they’re comfortable spending $30 to $70 million per year for a position on a car they can activate at 24 race weekends across five continents.

That model works for LVMH, HP, and Oracle, but it does not work for Chinese companies that operate primarily in domestic markets, prioritize measurable return on investment, and view marketing as performance-driven spend. Thomas laid out what the alternative looks like on LinkedIn: China-first commercial strategies, modular sponsorship models, localized digital and social solutions, and deeper integration with Chinese tech and commerce platforms. That list should be pinned to the wall of every team’s commercial office. Teams need on-the-ground leads in Shanghai and Shenzhen year-round, not executives who fly in for race week and leave, and F1 itself needs content creation pipelines in Mandarin that do what Drive to Survive did in English.

BYD will enter F1. When it does, it will open the door for a wave of Chinese EV brands behind it, just as Liberty Media’s American expansion turned a trickle of U.S. sponsors into a flood. The question is whether F1 will be ready to receive them with something more than the same pitch deck it uses in London and New York, or whether 230,000 fans will keep filling the grandstands while the commercial model stays a decade behind the audience it already has.

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In case you missed it, Charles Leclerc won his home race in Monaco last week. It might be one of the most unanimously beloved home wins in recent memory. And while the race might be a bit of a procession these days, qualifying is always epic. An actual battle of man versus machine versus narrow street.

New sponsors are entering F1 and partnering with the teams, most recently and notably the HP x Ferrari title partnership. But McLaren continues to make moves through partnership extensions and impressive displays.

Let’s dive in.

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What OKX Actually Gets From Its McLaren Deal

As Formula One continues its tremendous rise, partners like OKX are strategically positioning themselves to capitalize on this momentum and improve their brand reputation.

Ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, OKX unveiled a special tribute to Ayrton Senna with the McLaren F1 Team, showcasing their strong partnership.

Ahead of the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix, OKX and McLaren rolled out a one-off livery honoring Ayrton Senna, painting the MCL38 in the yellow, green, and blue of his iconic helmet. Thirty years after his death, at the circuit where he won six times, the second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume turned a heritage play into a global brand-building exercise.

That livery got attention. The business logic underneath it deserves more.

The Monaco Calculation

OKX CMO Haider Rafique has been threading a specific needle since the partnership began: how does a crypto exchange borrow credibility from a sport that trades on engineering precision and generational legacy? Monaco is where that question gets answered most directly. For one weekend, the principality becomes the densest concentration of capital, media, and commercial decision-makers on any sports calendar. The paddock fills with fund managers, tech founders, and brand executives who would never attend a crypto conference but will happily take a hospitality pass at Sainte Devote.

Rafique has spoken openly about targeting the “crypto curious,” a segment that skews younger, is digitally native, and is reachable through sports culture in ways that programmatic ads and exchange banner campaigns cannot reach. OKX’s partnership with McLaren sits inside a broader portfolio that includes Manchester City (a reported $70 million sleeve deal), a LIV Golf team, and the Tribeca Film Festival. The exchange has declined to disclose the value of the McLaren deal. Given that F1 sponsorship pricing has climbed sharply in recent years, primary partner placements at a team of McLaren’s profile likely run well into eight figures annually.

Senna as Strategy

The livery choice was surgical. OKX launched its Brazilian exchange in the months before Monaco, and Senna remains the country’s most beloved sporting figure by a wide margin. A tribute campaign at Monaco lets OKX associate itself with that emotional register across every market F1 reaches, while landing hardest in the one where it just opened for business.

Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri wore custom Senna-inspired overalls for the weekend. Both drivers were born years after Senna’s death at Imola in 1994, and both cite him as an influence. That generational bridge is precisely what Rafique has described as OKX’s role in the partnership: connecting younger fans to McLaren’s deep history while embedding a crypto brand in that narrative.

Previous OKX livery activations followed the same playbook. The “Future Mode” redesign in 2022 and “Stealth Mode” at the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix each generated outsized social engagement relative to a standard weekend, and each gave OKX co-ownership of a visual moment that travels far beyond the broadcast window.

Why the F1 Media Model Works for Crypto

Rafique has been blunt about one thing: the McLaren sponsorship outperforms traditional media buys for OKX. The reasoning is structural.

F1 broadcasts across more than 180 countries over a calendar that spans roughly nine months. A single partnership delivers continuous global exposure without the regulatory patchwork that crypto companies face when buying media market by market. In jurisdictions where exchange advertising is restricted or outright banned, an F1 car still appears on screen. That regulatory arbitrage, available to any global series sponsor, carries particular value for an industry where advertising channels have narrowed since FTX collapsed in November 2022.

The sport’s audience composition helps too. F1 skews younger and more international than most major sports properties. For a crypto exchange chasing user acquisition in its twenties-and-thirties demographic, a 24-race season embedded in culture and content delivers compound exposure that a Super Bowl spot, for all its raw reach, cannot replicate across geographies and across months.

McLaren’s Commercial Machine

Zak Brown and Louise McEwen have built McLaren’s commercial operation into one of the most aggressive in the paddock. The team has stacked financial, tech, and consumer brands across its car, race suits, garage branding, and digital assets with a layering strategy that lets multiple sponsors coexist in the same category. McLaren was also the first F1 team to embed digital display panels on its cars, partnering with Seamless Digital in 2022 to run e-ink screens alongside the cockpit that can rotate sponsor branding in real time during a session. That kind of inventory innovation directly increases the commercial surface area available to partners like OKX.

The team’s trajectory on track has amplified the commercial story. McLaren spent years fighting in the midfield. By early 2024, Norris and Piastri were regularly challenging for podiums, and the car’s development curve looked steep. Rafique acknowledged the appeal directly, calling McLaren’s climb from the back of the grid to consistent front-running performance “incredible” and describing the decision to stay alongside the team through that arc as a deliberate bet on momentum.

What Drive to Survive Actually Changed

Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” comes up in nearly every conversation about F1’s commercial growth, and for good reason. The series, launched in 2019, pulled an entirely new audience segment into the sport, one that cared about personality, rivalry, and narrative as much as lap times. U.S. television viewership climbed 67% after the show premiered. The downstream effect on sponsorship was immediate: brands that had never considered motorsport saw a younger, engaged, content-hungry fanbase and started writing checks.

For crypto companies specifically, the timing was ideal. Drive to Survive’s audience overlapped almost perfectly with the demographic profile exchanges wanted to reach. OKX, Crypto.com (which sponsors the Miami Grand Prix and previously held Aston Martin’s title sponsorship), and others entered the grid during this window. The FTX implosion in late 2022 spooked some brands and prompted F1 to tighten its diligence process, but the exchanges that survived, including OKX, found that the reputational cleanup actually made the sport a more valuable partner. Being associated with McLaren, a team founded in 1963 with three decades of championship history, provides a kind of institutional credibility that no amount of influencer marketing can manufacture.

The Trade Show Effect

Enterprise brands use F1 sponsorship differently. HP, which joined the grid as a team sponsor, deploys its F1 assets at trade shows and partner events where a McLaren car on the booth floor signals scale, ambition, and commercial prestige to prospects and competitors alike. It draws foot traffic. It starts conversations that a product demo alone cannot.

OKX operates in a parallel register. Its activations at race weekends, including the Singapore Grand Prix fan event that Rafique cited as a standout, serve both consumer marketing and B2B credibility purposes, signaling to institutional partners and regulators that the exchange operates at a tier above the crowded field of smaller platforms.

Where This Goes

The crypto industry’s relationship with F1 is maturing. The initial land grab, when exchanges flush with bull-market capital plastered logos on anything with wheels, has given way to something more deliberate. The companies still standing are those that built genuine operational partnerships with their teams, invested in activations that went beyond logo exposure, and treated the sponsorship as a multi-year brand architecture project.

OKX appears to understand this. The Senna campaign was expensive to produce, complex to coordinate across McLaren Racing, McLaren Automotive, and Senna Global, and designed to generate emotional resonance rather than direct conversion. That is the behavior of a company playing a long game with its F1 investment.

If McLaren’s on-track performance continues to improve through 2024, OKX’s bet gets cheaper in hindsight with every podium. The exchange locked in its deal when the team was still climbing. Sponsors who arrive after the championship fight starts pay a premium. The ones who backed the team during the rebuild collect the upside.

Expect OKX to stay. Expect the activations to get bigger. And expect other crypto companies watching from the sidelines to regret waiting.

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