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Do you watch Formula One? There is a good chance you do. Sometimes, I myself do as well. As straightforward this sport looks on the outside, it is a very lucrative sport when you actually follow it. Formula One has a worldwide TV coverage. Which itself explains how many people love to watch fast cars with naked tires blazing by. Formula One is arguably the sport with the most spending. Yes football is actual biggest game on earth. But money wise, it's Formula One. And big spending attracts big investments, more investments, more money, the whole sport is an over the moon money shifting game. Today I want to concentrate on the most mind boggling sponsorships in Formula one. And how the most lucrative sport is getting sponsors from all the wrong people.
Starting with tobacco companies. Tobacco companies and Formula One teams go hand in hand in history. A stark example is different tobacco companies spending a total of around 4.5 billion dollars in Formula One sponsorships over the past 50 years. Now that, is a lot of money, for tobacco. A bit detour here. You sure have known cigarette companies such as Lucky Strike, Gold Leaf and Marlboro right? Regardless of you smoke or not. I don't promote smoking. Now you might remember these companies existing around you even today. But did you ever thought how they got there in the first place?
It was motorsports. More precisely, Formula one. An old Formula One team, Lotus, changed their car colors to red and white to match the colors of their then sponsor, Gold Leaf. And Marlboro have went on to sponsor different Formula One teams over the years which even continue today. Now you might ask, why we don't see any visible Marlboro or Gold Leaf or any other tobacco or cigarette company logo on any car today? Because they have been banned in 2006. Promoting smoking using a worldwide glamorous sport with a huge coverage in place and time is a very usual violation of use. But this ban did not stop them. Enter dark logos or workaround logos. Which means teams would use these logos in their cars but leave out the text. Leaving the rest to the viewers' imagination. Which was very easy to imagine by the way. For example in 2021 Ferrari printed a barcode in the back of their car. It's a simple barcode, what could go wrong. But at high speed this barcode can easily resemble to the Marlboro logo. So the authorities banned this too. So Marlboro and Ferrari went on to make a merger logo which was also banned. Later the owners of Marlboro founded a shell company to fund Ferrari and reap the sponsorship rewards.
The Williams racing team has always had financial problems. For this they have almost ways one of the teams from the lower end. But Williams did one titles. And speaking about the first title they won, they won that title with financial help of three major sponsors from Saudi Arabia. One of them was Saudia airlines, and the other was the ALBILAD hotel chain. Now what's wrong with a hotel chain? It's because it was owned by Mohamed Bin Laden. Father or Osama Bin Laden. Now no, Mohamed Bin Laden wasn't a terrorist. There is also a scandal regarding HAAS F1 team partnering with Rich Energy which was a total scam.
Formula one has a glamorous outlook, lucrative market, worldwide coverage and competition. The slowest car is only 1.5 seconds slower than the fastest. This should tell you it's highly competitive. Most of the time it's down to the driver. But anyway. What I believe about Tobacco companies have been so successful in sponsoring Formula One teams is because both of these are risks to life. Drivers and smokers could die, yet they do it for the thrill or living or whatever you want to call it. This resemblance has been key to why people have actually complained about Formula One teams getting sponsors from odd places and mostly, tobacco.