Over the past decade, Formula One became a storefront window for many of the world’s major car manufacturers. BMW, Daimler, Ford, Honda, Renault, and Toyota bought teams to show off their brand name, cars and technology. After the economic crisis that started in 2009 hit auto sales worldwide, most of the companies pulled out of the sport, leaving only three last year: Mercedes, Fiat — via the Ferrari team it partly owns — and Renault, although the French manufacturer had sold much of its team.
Just when it looked as if the series would return to its traditional form as a playground for independent teams and private racers, a new car manufacturer trend has begun. And in this fast, high-octane, costly world at the pinnacle of auto racing, the new trend makes more sense than the previous one.
As the series prepares for the first race of the season at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on Sunday, half the 12 teams are again associated with or owned by car companies. But this time the accent is on luxury and high-performance sports cars.
“For us the push is on raising Infiniti awareness and using Formula One as a platform to do that,” said Simon Sproule, the head of marketing and communications at Nissan Motor, which owns the Infiniti luxury car brand. The company announced on March 1 that it had joined Red Bull, the reigning Formula One world champion team, as a sponsor and technological partner.
“We looked at the usual suspects — soccer, sailing and all those things,” Sproule added. “And very quickly we arrived at the conclusion that Formula One is still a very, very good place for a major global brand to have a presence. And it’s got the added benefit, of course, that it is related to the automotive business.”
Or as Andy Palmer, senior vice president of Infiniti, said, Formula One complements “Infiniti’s ethos of ‘inspired performance.”’
Infiniti is the biggest and the latest of the luxury car companies to enter the sport. But it will share the spotlight with some tough competition: Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, Lotus and Marussia, a Russian sports car company.
Since last autumn, Lotus, Mercedes and Marussia have bought into teams or increased their team-ownership shares. After years as a minority shareholder and engine supplier at McLaren, Daimler completed its buyout of the team that has run under the Mercedes name since last year.
The team that set the standard, of course, was founded on the principle that the others are now imitating: Ferrari, which has raced in the series since it began in 1950, was founded in 1946, and the racing division and the selling of the company’s road cars were always tied together. Success on the track leads to car sales and car sales lead to a budget to go racing.
There is also a close tie between the workers at the Ferrari road car and racing factory in Maranello, Italy, with the two sides working together to improve the models on either side of the divide.
McLaren has long tried to imitate the Ferrari model. After years of producing a sports car with Mercedes, it introduced its own MP4-12C sports car over the winter. The MP4-12C, the McLaren Web site says, is “equally at home on the track or on the road.”
Marussia entered Formula One last year as a sponsor to the Virgin team, but over the winter it, too, bought a large share in the company and intends to use Formula One to sell its cars and make the cars known around the world. Marussia was created in 2007 by Nikolay Fomenko, the company’s president, and Yefim Ostrovsky, and its B1 and B2 models were introduced at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 2009. Marussia’s philosophy for its cars is “innovation built on reliability.”
Formula One will race in Russia in 2014, and this worldwide exposure also attracts the companies.
“If you look at where we want to grow, and where the luxury market is growing now, it is no surprise: It is China, it is Southeast Asia, it is Russia, the emerging markets,” said Sproule, noting that these are the same countries and regions that hold many Formula One races. In Asia alone, their are Grand Prix races in China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea.
Ferrari was not the only traditional team that combined racing and sports car building. Its illustrious history was long matched by the Lotus team, which raced in Formula One from 1958 to 1994. Although the Lotus team, which was founded in 1952, returned to the sport last year with a team called Lotus Racing, the team was not tied to road-car development or sales. For this year, the Malaysian-owned Group Lotus decided to enter into a partnership with the Renault team, as part owner and sponsor. That new team is called Lotus Renault GP.
Behind this is a revival of the Lotus car company and the introduction of several new models of Lotus sports cars. The chief executive of Group Lotus, Dany Bahar, formerly worked at Ferrari. And he hired Donato Coco, a former Ferrari designer, as his chief designer.
“Lotus has been racing since the beginning,” Bahar said. “And I think if you build sports cars you need to be in racing. Because it shows the credibility, it shows that the technology comes from racing. It is the competitive spirit that you give into your sports car.”
But the connection with Formula One is not only about the image of racing and sports cars. It is about technological collaboration. And that, interestingly, has to do not only with making cars go faster, but making them more environmentally friendly.
This year, Formula One is reintroducing the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, or KERS, which stores energy while braking and releases it for power bursts. That is an area in which the needs of the two businesses come together, as the teams work with the manufacturers to develop the best systems and also grapple with the image problem of power in an environmentally conscious world.
“You need to walk and chew gum, as they say,” Sproule said. “You need to have cars that excite people. Because half the challenge about our business is getting people passionate about cars.”
