For the coming season, what was the AlphaTauri team will be officially known as Visa Cash App RB as the squad seeks to carve out its own identity rather than exist in the shadow of Red Bull Racing.
Elsewhere, having lost Alfa Romeo branding at the end of last year, Sauber appears set to alternate between two names depending on the market – and more specific online gambling laws – in which it’s racing.
Both of teams cross the invisible line as to what is acceptable in F1.
There is no shying away from the fact that sponsorship is essential in motorsport.
Branding first appeared in Formula 1 in 1968, before which cars ran (mostly) in the national racing colours of the country in which they were registered.
The issue with the commercial names chosen for 2024 is not that they include sponsorship, but how they include it.
Within the Formula 1 Sporting Regulations it details that the name of the team “must include the name of the chassis.”
According to the official entry list, updated by the FIA on January 24, the respective operations have named their chassis ‘RB’ and ‘Kick Sauber’ respectively.
In the cast of the team formerly known as AlphaTauri it meets those requirements, albeit in an ungainly way.
Sauber, meanwhile, appears to have deliberately obfuscated its name as, on social media, it has used the Stake F1 Team moniker.
According to the team, that is the best way to describe the operation.
But that raises two issues; the first has to do with its failure to comply with the Sporting Regulations, and the second has to do with online gambling restrictions in some markets.
In Australia, for instance, it will be unable to go by that name. Indeed, for simplicity’s sake, Speedcafe will refer to it as simply ‘Sauber’ throughout.
And therein lies the problem, or the two problems, F1 currently faces; defining what is and is not acceptable in terms of a team name.
That line in the sand is ambiguous but needs to be clearly defined – and quickly.
There is no issue with the use of commercial names in an official team name, it has been done for decades; even Ferrari is technically a commercial name.
So how is Kick F1 Team any different to Haas F1 Team, or Benetton, or BAR, for that matter?
In those examples, all but the former had equity in the sport.
The Benetton Group was a sponsor of Tyrrell in the early 1980s before purchasing Toleman and rebranding the team for 1986.
Ironically, BAR was the racing entity set up by a tobacco company and purchased Tyrrell’s F1 entry ahead of the 1999 F1 season.
But it didn’t bring with it any of the team and used it as a way to gain immediate access to F1’s prize money pool (which backfired spectacularly) and was therefore seen as a team in its own right.
For that 1999 season, it attempted to run different liveries on its two cars; one of its cigarette brands on the car of Jacques Villeneuve, and another on that of team-mate Ricardo Zonta.
The sport put a stop to that, as regulations state the two cars must be largely identical. In response the team sported a livery with one brand on one side of the car, and the other on the other side.
In that instance, 25 years ago, the sport put its foot down as a team attempted to effectively brand itself twice.
Now, the same thing is happening with Sauber, only not with the car design but with the team name.
It sounds a trivial issue to address but it has potentially significant ramifications as it creates a perception that is negative to the sport.
An inconsistent team name creates confusion for general fans – what team does Valtteri Bottas drive for…?
It also implies a degree of desperation for the team which, given F1 is booming commercially like it has never before, is simply not the case.
But it also breaks the narrative of the team. What happens when the title sponsor leaves? The team has to change its entire identity.
Here, we can learn from cycling, where teams invariably adopt commercial names as their identity.
A simple example is the team Lance Armstrong rode with on his comeback from cancer: US Postal Service.
That brand entered cycling in 1996 before exiting in 2004. However, the underlying team was founded in 1988 and continued until 2007.
It had five different title sponsors in that time but, aside from the die-hard fans, who would know that the Discovery Channel team was the same operation as the US Postal Service, or the Subaru-Montgomery operation?
By adopting an entirely commercial name the operation lost out on building any brand equity alongside the ability to draw on any of its history.
An example closer to home is Brawn, which won the 2009 world championship with Jenson Button.
It is an entity that existed for only a year but was, in reality, a slimmed-down continuation of the Honda F1 Team (which, ironically, took over from BAR).
In 2010, it was bought by Mercedes and remains under that name to this day (even if its ownership structure has changed somewhat in the intervening years).
Mercedes dominated F1 from 2014 to 2020 with seven successive constructors’ titles, but by rights that operation can claim eight.
And yet, because the name was notably different, it doesn’t and Brawn is regarded as a separate operation. Even though it wasn’t.
It highlights the importance of names in the sport, as well as the lineage and the power they can wield.
To clarify, there is no problem with a team having a naming rights sponsor, but the established convention is that the underlying team name is used and that – usually though not always – has equity in the operation.
But what about Visa Cash App RB? That meets the regulations and contains a naming rights partner. What’s the issue?
Firstly, there’s a contradiction in the name that jars.
Peter Bayer, CEO of the team, has stated that the intent this year is for the team to exist on its own and not simply exist to support the factory Red Bull Racing team.
However, the design office is set to move to Milton Keynes as that technical relationship appears to deepen, while the inclusion of RB can be construed as shorthand for Red Bull – or Racing Bulls, inline with the trademarks that were registered in mid-2023.
While somewhat jarring, there is no issue with RB as a team name in itself – it’s essentially no different to BAR, BRM, or AGS – the issue instead is the way the commercial partners are tacked on, with Visa Cash App RB especially unpalatable.
Interestingly, Visa RB is less offensive, so too Cash App RB, which suggests the issue is the tempo of the name.
A similar complaint can be made of Aston Martin last year, which was officially known as the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team – remove one or other of the commercial partners and it is immediately more amenable.
The solution is therefore simple; limit the number of commercial partners in a team name to one, in conjunction with a name directly associated with the underlying entity.
It’s a convention that is easily adopted, creates an anchor for the sport, media and fans for each team, while still affording the ability to sell naming rights.
The risk in not doing so is creating a grid full of mismatched team names with little to no consistency, effectively tossing out more than seven decades of history built by teams as the commercial focuses purely on the here and now.
