The motorsport brand graveyard

Every major rights holder eventually asks the same question: we have a brand people love, can we sell something else under it? It seems obvious - the audience and customers are there, the aspiration is real, and the brand is recognisable.

The problem is that "brand people love" and "brand people buy non-core products from" are two completely different things. Racing audiences love their teams the way people love a great restaurant — they'll wear the t-shirt, but they're not buying the chef's cookware line.

Unless you're Binging with Babish

Most teams see this gap and try to solve it with more brand investment, creative, premium positioning, and limited editions to manufacture scarcity - assuming fan loyalty will translate if they just package it correctly.

The ventures that actually made money went a different direction entirely. They identified a capability the team had built to win races - battery engineering, aerodynamics, carbon composites, control systems - and sold that capability to customers who had a real problem to solve. Williams Advanced Engineering is the clearest example: £164M acquisition by Fortescue in 2021, every pound from B2B customers who needed what Williams actually knew how to build.

Williams Advanced Engineering is the clearest example: £164M acquisition by Fortescue in 2021, every pound from B2B customers who needed what Williams actually knew how to build.

That pattern shows up in three distinct forms across motorsport.

Williams Advanced Engineering was founded in 2010 as a separate division of Williams Racing with a simple brief: take the engineering capability built around F1 and apply it somewhere else. What followed:

McLaren Applied Technologies tells a different story. Launched circa 2004, it produced the mandated Standard Electronic Control Unit for every F1 car — a captive revenue stream — and reached £62M in annual revenue with 250 employees. It also pursued a broader ambition: applying its data analytics methodology to healthcare, transport, and financial services. The partnerships were credible:

But they remained at the research and pilot stage rather than generating commercial revenue at scale. McLaren Group sold the division to Greybull Capital in August 2021 — the same year as the Williams exit — for an undisclosed sum that insiders described as distressed pricing.

The distinction is simple: WAE built and sold physical products to customers with documented operational problems. McLaren Applied's methodology work, however genuinely valuable, never translated into a repeatable revenue line outside motorsport. When the market got hard, WAE's customers still needed batteries.

Joe Gibbs Racing ran the same play at smaller scale. JGR built in-house composite fabrication for NASCAR stock cars, then pivoted the division into aerospace and defence composites when the 2022 Next Gen car mandated common components. Sold to Torque Capital Group in December 2025, now expanding with 60,000 square feet of new space in Huntersville, NC. Capability built for racing, monetised outside of it.

Ferrari is the most commercially sophisticated motorsport property on the planet - and the cautionary tale that licensing advocates don't quote enough.

Through the early 2000s, Ferrari licensed aggressively:

Revenue was flowing. And the brand equity that made Ferrari worth licensing - the scarcity, and aspiration - was quietly evaporating.

The reset came in 2019. Chief Brand Diversification Officer Nicola Boari and Chairman John Elkann started cutting — low-end licenses terminated, underperforming stores closed, Rocco Iannone hired as creative director with a background at Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana. Ferrari held its first fashion show in June 2021 at the Maranello factory, releasing six collections per year in drops, with top-selling categories shifting from caps and t-shirts to leather bags, signature bombers, and knitwear at dramatically higher price points.

The numbers now: The "Sponsorship, commercial and brand" segment generated €670M in FY2024, up 17.1% year-over-year, with Ferrari targeting lifestyle alone reaching 10% of total company profits within 7–10 years of the reset. Licensing partnerships generate royalty income with zero capital risk:

No other team is close. Mercedes F1 generated £636M in revenue and £120.3M in profit in 2024 and operates no meaningful lifestyle brand — its biggest move was an Adidas deal reportedly worth ~$30M per year, a sponsorship arrangement structured the same way its predecessors were. Porsche Design, founded in 1972 by the designer of the 911, generates an estimated ~$75M annually against a €300M target it set for 2018, with a store network contracting since a 2013 peak of 152 locations.

Ferrari succeeded because it had 70+ years of brand equity, a chairman willing to kill revenue to protect positioning, and a creative director who had built luxury brands before. It also failed first and spent a decade digging out. Every licensing decision sets a price point in the market's mind — licensing without a ceiling commoditises the brand, the licensing revenue was supposed to be built on.

Gene Haas entered F1 in 2016 with a structure nobody had tried before: a manufacturer-adjacent team using Ferrari's power unit, gearbox, and suspension - built in the United States, explicitly designed to market Haas Automation's CNC machine tools to a global manufacturing audience.

Haas Automation had already exceeded $1B in worldwide revenue by 2014. The question was whether F1 visibility could accelerate international expansion, particularly in Europe. During the team's second F1 season, unit sales grew 30%, and European revenue grew 41%.

Gene Haas was direct: "Connecting Haas Automation with F1 in name and in practice is the best way to grow our business." The paddock became a hospitality venue for manufacturing customers. Every race weekend was a global trade show.

Stewart-Haas Racing - Haas's NASCAR operation - closed in May 2024 after sponsors departed and performance declined, with Haas stating the "return on investment just isn't there anymore."

F1's global platform, premium demographic, and European manufacturing customer concentration made the B2B ROI case in a way NASCAR's domestic, consumer-facing audience never could.

Use racing access to sell to the buyers your core business already needs to reach.

McLaren Golf launched March 2, 2026, with products hitting April 29, structured as a standalone company with a leadership team built entirely from golf industry lifers:

The financial backing is CYVN Holdings, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth entity that acquired McLaren Automotive in April 2025, which means the capital runway to survive a multi-year valley of death is real.

The historical record is unambiguous - every automotive brand that entered golf equipment failed:

The only ongoing success is TaylorMade × Red Bull's annual cosmetic limited editions, which work precisely because they make no attempt to build a new equipment brand. McLaren Golf's approach is the most serious attempt any motorsport brand has made, and it still launches with no Tour validation, no announced retail partnerships, and a DTC-only distribution strategy into a market dominated by five incumbents with decades of fitting infrastructure and retail credibility.

If you have a genuine engineering capability that solves a problem outside motorsport — battery technology, composites, aerodynamics, control systems, or structure - structure it as a separate division from day one, with its own P&L and leadership. Identify B2B customers with a documented problem before thinking about branding or distribution. Expect 5–10 years before the asset is worth selling.

If you want to monetise the brand through consumer products, start with two or three licensing partners whose price point and distribution channel you'd be proud to be seen in. Measure sell-through. When those partnerships consistently sell at full price, you have evidence of an appetite. That's when an owned product becomes worth considering.

If your core business is B2B and you're trying to reach buyers in a new market, map your series against your target customer's geography and industry concentration before you commit. Haas worked because European manufacturing buyers attend F1 races and value the engineering credibility signal. If your buyers aren't in the paddock and don't care about the series, the model doesn't transfer.

Every successful venture started from a customer with a real problem — WAE's customer needed batteries, Haas Automation's customer needed a credibility signal in a new market, Ferrari's licensing partners needed access to an aspiration their own brands couldn't manufacture. McLaren Golf's customer is an affluent golfer who already has Callaway, TaylorMade, Titleist, Ping, and Cobra, which is why the distribution question is harder than the brand question.

Before you build anything, answer this: who is the specific person with the specific problem your capability or brand solves, and where are they today?

P.S. Neil Howie spent 26 years at Callaway and knows exactly how hard Tour validation and retail shelf space are to earn. He came out of retirement for this. Either he sees something in the CYVN capital structure that makes the timeline survivable, or this is the golf executive's version of a bucket list. Genuinely not sure which — and I think that uncertainty is what makes it worth watching.