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The most recognisable driver in the world, with every platform on earth available to him, chose the one most marketers still treat as a place to update a job title. He did it because that is where the conversation about his sport - and increasingly about every sport's commercial side - now happens.

For the brands in motorsports, the implication is the same.

You have spent a great deal of money to be in Formula 1, and the show car, the garage tour, and the Paddock Club suite are all tracked and reported.

The channel that costs nothing, reaches the exact people you are trying to influence, and very few activate with, is the one your buyers already scroll between meetings. People buy from people, and in this sport, the people are already there. What follows is the practical playbook for using it.

A personal profile earns many times the engagement of a company page, so the first decision is which person.

3 groups are worth weighing:

The non-negotiable is that the person has to want to do it, because anyone posting under duress stops within a month. If you can only begin with one, begin with the one whose expertise is most relevant to the audience you want to reach, which in most organisations is the founder or a senior leader.

The Elemis partnership is the clearest example in our world of what that looks like.

When the brand became the first beauty partner in Formula 1 alongside Aston Martin Aramco, the asset that did the heavy lifting was not only the co-branded products or the wellness suites at the track.

It was Amy Mansell, the partnership's architect, becoming personally visible - speaking on panels, championing women in the sport, and explaining in her own words why a skincare brand belonged on the grid.

The numbers followed the person: brand awareness among F1 fans rose 23 per cent, and fans of the team became three times more likely to buy. The partnership was the investment, and the public leader was the multiplier.

Almost any format can work. A three-line observation can travel as far as an eleven-minute video, so the constraint is rarely how you post but whether you have a steady supply of things to say. That is where most efforts quietly run aground.

Two habits solve it. The first is to pay attention to what makes YOU stop scrolling: every time a post earns your click, comment or save, note what it was and why - the angle, the tone, whether it was a story, a lesson or a strong opinion.

Over a month, you build a reference library of what works on the very people you are trying to reach. The second is a system for capturing ideas before they evaporate, because the good ones rarely arrive when you sit down to write.

A shared channel where colleagues drop the things clients say, a running list on your phone, the habit of feeding recorded client calls into an AI tool to surface the points your senior people make again and again — any of these turns a blank page into a backlog.

When an executive repeats the same story to three different clients, that repetition is the signal it is worth writing down. So are your own best comments on other people's posts, where a sharp three-line reply this week becomes next week's longer piece.

Above all, lead with expertise. The content that wins in B2B is seldom the product pitch; it is the person helping their customers get smarter about the sport, the market and their own job.

A founder or senior leader is usually the right voice because they did not arrive at this work by accident - they carry decades of context a company page cannot fake. Write about where the sport and its commercial model are heading, not only about your own activation, and you become a source people return to.

Don’t let the tight upper lip stop you from sharing the work you do; you don’t need to post about what you ate.

One caution on balance: you cannot be promotional all of the time. Post about your own programme three days running, and engagement falls away.

The subtlety worth holding onto is that engagement and results are not the same thing. A bottom-of-funnel post aimed squarely at a buyer who is ready might draw a dozen likes and still generate the handful of enquiries that actually matter. Judge a post by what it was for, not by the applause.

The platform that carries this newsletter is a useful model for the next step. Tyler Denk, who co-founded Beehiiv, has built much of the company by documenting the journey in public - his own newsletter now reaches well over a hundred thousand readers, and a good share of Beehiiv's growth has come from a founder writing honestly about building it.

That habit feeds directly into the platform's most effective paid format. A thought-leader ad takes a post from a real person's profile and promotes it into the feed, where it reads as content rather than advertising.

It works for two reasons. It does not look like an ad, so people stop for it; and you are no longer guessing, because you have already watched the post perform organically before putting budget behind it.

For some teams, the gap is stark - one B2B marketing lead recently reported that thought-leader ads returned three times what the rest of their LinkedIn advertising managed combined.

💡 The sequence is the whole point. Most brands commission the expensive campaign first and hope. The ones getting the compounding value test the message for free, in public, and spend only on what has already earned attention.

The honest difficulty is rarely whether LinkedIn works; it is that the return is slow and compounding, and resists a clean line on a dashboard. Nico Hülkenberg waited 239 starts - more than 5,500 days, the longest wait in the sport's history, before he stood on a podium at Silverstone last summer, and every race before it was a rep that looked like nothing until the one that was.

The channel rewards the same patience: reputation and relationships accrue quietly, in the way good PR always has, long before any of it shows up as a lead. The job is to keep a sceptical CFO comfortable while that compounding does its work, and a few things help.

Stack the deck early. The argument is won the moment your executive posts something and a prospect they have been chasing for months finally replies, or an investor surfaces from nowhere. Engineer that first hit, because once a leader has felt it, they stop asking for proof.

Frame it as an experiment. Nobody wants to commit to posting forever, but a single quarter with a clear definition of success is far easier to approve than an open-ended promise.

Then capture what evidence you can. A "how did you hear about us?" line on your enquiry forms will surface LinkedIn more often than people expect. Tools that trace the platform's influence on the pipeline, such as Fibbler, give you directional data even where attribution is imperfect, and the engagement signals they collect can be pushed into a system like Clay to prioritise who your team reaches out to next. None of it is courtroom-grade, but together it is more than enough.

The brands that treat their F1 partnership as the start of a story - told in public, by the people closest to it - earn a second return on the same spend. The ones who leave the channel switched off are paying for the access and giving away the amplification.