I have been thinking about Max Verstappen at the Nürburgring.

Not the result — his car retired with hours to go, a mechanical failure that ended what had been a genuinely competitive run. What I keep thinking about is everything around it. The 352,000 people who turned up across the weekend, for a race that does not have a prime-time broadcast slot or a Netflix series built around it. The tickets that cost £69. The formation lap with fans lining the circuit, close enough to touch the cars. The open paddock. The atmosphere that several people described to me, unprompted, as feeling like motorsport used to feel before it became an asset class.

And then I think about Verstappen himself, who spent that weekend visibly energised in a way that has been harder to find in his demeanour on a Formula 1 grid in 2026. A four-time world champion, the most recognisable active racing driver on the planet, choosing to spend his free weekend driving through the night on the Nordschleife because it reminded him of something important about why he started racing in the first place.

There is a tension in that image that I find useful.

Because the same week that Verstappen was rediscovering what motorsport can feel like when the commercial architecture is relatively light, the commercial architecture of the sport he races in professionally was doing something extraordinary. The list of companies that signed or confirmed major partnerships with Formula 1 and MotoGP in the last three weeks reads like a brief from a strategy consultant trying to illustrate the concept of category disruption. An insurance broker. A semiconductor manufacturer. An energy drink brand executing a mid-season title deal that had not existed at the start of the year. A Chinese electric vehicle company in serious conversation about building a team from scratch. A broadcaster committing $1.35 billion over five years, three years before its current contract expires.

None of these fit the profile of the motorsport sponsor as it existed even ten years ago. And that gap — between what sponsorship used to look like and what it looks like now — is where I want to spend a few minutes.

The old model had a logic to it. Car manufacturers came in because the technology narrative was credible and the audience bought cars. Energy drinks came in because the demographic was right and the image transferred cleanly. Financial services arrived because hospitality worked and the client entertainment value was real. These were rational decisions made within a relatively narrow frame: who is watching, do they look like our customer, and can we justify the number to the board.

What has changed is the frame itself.

When Marsh — a company that advises governments and corporations on risk, that most people outside the financial services industry have never heard of — signs what its CEO describes as the company’s first enterprise-wide global sports partnership, and chooses Formula 1 over every other platform available to a business of its size and reach, something has shifted. The CEO’s explanation was, in its own way, a more precise description of what modern motorsport sponsorship does than most of the presentations I have seen from rights holders. He spoke about data, about insights, about the parallel between managing risk in business and managing it at 300 kilometres per hour. He was not buying a logo. He was buying a language — a set of values and associations that his company wanted to inhabit in front of an audience of decision-makers.

That is a different conversation from the one this industry was having in 2010.

Intel’s return to F1 through McLaren — its first direct team involvement since BMW-Sauber ended in 2009 — follows a similar logic. The partnership is structured around computing power and data capabilities for race weekend operations. It is not primarily a consumer-facing play. It is a demonstration, to the companies that buy Intel’s products at enterprise scale, that the technology works under the most demanding conditions imaginable. McLaren’s cars are a proof of concept with a global broadcast audience.

Monster Energy’s move to Aprilia tells a different version of the same story. Here the logic is more traditional in some ways — an energy brand, a racing team, a demographic overlap. But the execution is anything but conventional. Signing a title sponsorship mid-season, when commercial budgets are closed and activation plans have already been set, requires a level of conviction that goes beyond opportunism. Monster looked at Aprilia — four wins from the first six races, Marco Bezzecchi leading the championship, Francesco Bagnaia arriving as his teammate in 2027, both men personal Monster riders — and decided that the asset was too good to wait for January. That is not a media buy. That is a strategic position being taken before someone else takes it.

And then there is BYD.

The prospect of a Chinese car manufacturer entering Formula 1 as a constructor — not as a sponsor, not as a technology partner, but as a team, building cars, hiring engineers, racing for wins — would have seemed implausible five years ago. It does not seem implausible now. The FIA president has said publicly that a Chinese manufacturer would be welcomed. The commercial logic is unambiguous: China is the largest automotive market in the world, and Formula 1 has spent the better part of a decade trying to establish itself there. A Chinese team would not just bring investment. It would bring an audience.

What all of these moves have in common — Marsh, Intel, Monster, BYD, Sky’s early renewal — is that none of them were made under pressure. They were made from a position of conviction about where this sport is going and what it is worth to be inside it. The brands signing now are not signing for a season. They are building positions in an ecosystem that, whatever its on-track turbulence in 2026, is structurally more valuable, more global, and more commercially sophisticated than it has ever been.

I said at the start of the year that the brands which move decisively in seasons of disruption tend to define the commercial landscape of the years that follow. I still believe that. But what May has added to that argument is a different kind of evidence. It is not just that the racing is open and the narratives are alive. It is that the serious money — the long-term, enterprise-level, category-defining money — is already moving.

Verstappen at the Nürburgring was a reminder of what motorsport feels like at its most elemental. The deals signed this month are a reminder of what it has become. Both things are true. And for a brand director sitting outside the paddock wondering whether the window is still open, the second one is probably more relevant.

Warm regards,

Riccardo Tafà Managing Director, RTR Sports Marketing