Barring an unexpected twist, a bogus Formula 1 manufacturer will leave the grid again in 2024. Although he wanted to stay if he could.
The Sauber deal which started in 2018, was upgraded in 2019 and finally ended this year was clearly excellent value for Alfa Romeo and a really smart, efficient and valuable way to pursue F1 sponsorship.
Alfa Romeo put a new twist on a tried-and-true F1 approach: it repeated its title sponsorship in the form of a car company. This created the image that the manufacturer was involved in Formula 1 and he had an F1 team when it wasn’t and didn’t happen.
It was possible because Alfa Romeo closed this deal early and Sauber was the right team to target – a neutral, malleable identity that has been bought out in the past, and a rich owner but not one who uses his deep pockets en masse, so the money was useful too.
The deal was also rooted in a time when the value of F1 in general was much lower and Alfa Romeo was able to ride the wave through 2021 to 2022 and 2023, taking advantage when others would not have thought to seek exposure. through Sauber.
The initial sponsorship turned into huge value for money for Alfa Romeo, who were able to masquerade as an F1 team on the low end of €20 million a year (at least initially), getting a full team identity, lots of activation and – so we’re told repeatedly – some Sauber technical support for Alfa Romeo road cars.
Sauber believes the “commercial partnership” was successful, but it was also a source of tension when Audi decided to buy the team, and the deal was always going to end when the takeover gradually made Audi, another carmaker, a shareholder. .
“Alfa Romeo in recent years has not really been active in racing,” said Sauber team spokesman Alessandro Alunni Bravi.
“And I think Formula 1 has provided a platform that is second to none. We’ve seen since the very first year, all the activations we’ve done around the world with their agents.
“But then we also tried to bring everything we learned along the way together into the road cars. So we have developed, thanks to Sauber Technologies, important projects for them. We act as the R&D department for Alfa Romeo.
“Our partnership has been successful for me, both on and off the track. Mainly because we introduced a different business model for a car manufacturer to be in Formula 1.
“They have played a key role in the development of the team. Don’t forget 2017 when I joined the team with Fred Wasser [ex-Sauber CEO and team principal]there was no sponsor and having Alfa Romeo with us with a long-term project, extending the agreement with Ferrari in the long-term, all this helped us present Sauber as a reliable team for driver partners for people who join our team for to cooperate with us”.
With 2023 the end point for Sauber’s relationship, the same deal was not on the table to keep Alfa Romeo in Formula 1 elsewhere. Well, not until the end of 2023, anyway.
There were talks with Haas, so Alfa Romeo clearly wanted to find something that worked. It would be naïve to think he walked away because the deal itself wasn’t appealing, though – the suggestion is that that’s exactly what Alfa Romeo wanted.
The idea seemed to be to rebrand Haas and ideally not pay so much for it.
They certainly don’t pay the market price. The only thing missing compared to Sauber was the opportunity to help with the tech projects that Bravi mentioned, such as they were.
Haas was open to something, but the impressive Moneygram title sponsorship meant she wasn’t desperate. And it became clear that the two sides were very different in what they valued such an agreement.
Keep in mind that Haas is a team that not only sold their title sponsorship to Moneygram recently, they are a team that in recent years has been left to fend for themselves financially due to Gene Haas’s apathy and unwillingness to put money into the team that it really needs to be more competitive.
As Sauber was a few years ago, if there was any team on the grid that looked like a strong contender for Alfa Romeo to stay in Formula 1, it would be Haas. But Alfa Romeo wouldn’t put their money where their mouth was. And now he’s considering alternatives to other classes to create the impression that he’s in motorsport (when in fact he’s not), happily arguing that he got everything he needed from F1 and didn’t want to do the same thing again. .
Ultimately, Alfa Romeo created a new way for a manufacturer to ‘get into’ F1. She wants to rent a racing program and pass it off as her own. Now he’ll have to find something in the World Endurance Championship to scratch that itch. And it’s a good thing, really, that this will no longer be a concern for F1.
Although harmless enough on the surface, and convenient in terms of how good it looks for a brand like Alfa Romeo to be in F1, this kind of deal is not in the best interests of a profitable, successful F1.
It diminishes the serious commitments of the real projects and makes a little mockery of the team’s identity to the fans. It would be frankly stupid for F1 to be in a situation where an Alfa Romeo team was entered next year, but it was actually a different team to the one that has existed in recent years. And in hindsight, it’s unfortunate that ‘Alfa Romeo’ scored a number of race start and points stats, as it falsely inflates Alfa’s own legacy in F1 while diminishing Sauber’s.
Of course, there would be benefits to Alfa Romeo staying. There was certainly genuine enthusiasm from CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato, who was seen hugging senior Sauber executives at the partnership’s final race in Abu Dhabi. And Sauber certainly got something out of this deal.
“When the conditions are right, we’ll be back to thrill our fans once again,” Imparato said in November.
But if Alfa Romeo really wanted to stay in F1, they would have. There was a chance, even though it wouldn’t mean I’d get it right.