On Sunday 3 May, Kimi Antonelli won the Miami Grand Prix from Lando Norris, three seconds clear, with Oscar Piastri third. It was Antonelli’s third consecutive victory of the 2026 season.

The same week, Ampere Analysis published the figure that should be on every CMO’s desk. According to Ampere, total global Formula 1 sponsorship spend will exceed $3 billion for the first time in 2026 — a year-on-year increase of around 15%. Tech sector spend on F1 alone has reached $565 million, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle accounting for roughly 24% of that vertical between them. And in the past six months, eight separate AI brands have signed F1 partnerships, including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Groq and Meta AI.

The data describes a market. The interpretation — what those numbers mean for a brand entering or renewing — is what this article is for. My read, after thirty years on the contract side, is that the fastest-growing F1 partnerships are no longer principally about logo placement. They are increasingly about cloud, AI, engineering support and data integration. Treat the rest of this piece as a structured argument for that read, not as documentary fact.

This article is for the CMO, CIO and CFO being asked to renew, or to enter, F1 in 2026.

An operational integration

For three decades, motorsport sponsorship was sold along a media curve. Eyeballs, broadcast minutes, trackside square metres, priced against a CPM benchmark. That curve still exists. In my view, it is no longer where the largest cheques are being decided.

The pattern I see in the deals driving the 2026 numbers is a partnership infrastructure of which the fairing is only one component. The team and the brand co-develop a product or a platform; the brand’s tools, where the partnership is technical, support real engineering or operational work; the team’s hospitality programme functions as a B2B environment, with first-party data attached. The on-screen logo is one of several flows of value, and not always the largest.

That is analysis: it is the read that follows from looking at who is signing the biggest deals, what those companies sell, and where they say in their own announcements their value sits.

The practical implication, if you accept the thesis, is that pricing a 2026 F1 title slot purely against impressions makes the headline figures look hard to defend. Pricing the same contracts as enterprise integration — co-development, B2B account access, consented data capture — makes them look more reasonable. Same partnership, two answers, depending on which department is at the table.

Four F1 deals that exemplify the pattern

Four 2026 partnerships, each with a distinct slice of operational integration.

Oracle and Red Bull Racing

Oracle and Red Bull Racing extended their title partnership in February 2026 in a multi-year, multi-product deal. Per Oracle’s announcement, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hosts the team’s data architecture, and Oracle has introduced an AI Strategy Agent for trackside use during race weekends — a generative-AI system combining a large language model with retrieval-augmented generation over the team’s regulations and historical data, designed to support race engineers in real time. Trade press reports the deal at around $100–110 million per year; Oracle’s own announcement does not confirm a dollar value.

Mastercard and McLaren — title partner from 2026

Mastercard’s title deal with McLaren is the largest payments-and-finance entry on the 2026 grid. Reported values vary widely between outlets — published estimates range from around $65 million to around $100 million per year. Even at the lower end of that range, the deal is structured around co-branded loyalty work, fan-commerce activations and priceless experiences tied to race weekends, rather than visibility alone. The argument I would make is that the contract should be read as transaction data and premium brand association first, on-car branding second.

Microsoft and Mercedes-AMG Petronas — partner from 2026

Announced on 22 January 2026, Microsoft’s deal with Mercedes is reported by trade press at around $60 million per season; Microsoft’s own announcement does not confirm a dollar value. What the announcement does confirm is the architecture: Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AI now run across the team’s factory, simulator and trackside operations, with Microsoft branding occupying the airbox slot previously held by Ineos. The partnership was negotiated and signed before Antonelli won the season’s first three races. In my read, the case for the deal was the team’s data and operational architecture, not its driver line-up.

Anthropic and Atlassian Williams — Official Thinking Partner

Announced on 2 February 2026, Anthropic’s multi-year deal makes Claude the team’s “Official Thinking Partner”. Williams says Claude is integrated across the organisation — race strategy, car development, operations — and Claude branding appears on the FW48, drivers and team kit. This is Anthropic’s first sports sponsorship globally. The strategic logic, on the read I would offer, is enterprise credibility: Williams gains an AI tool, Anthropic gains a customer reference that no enterprise sales deck can fabricate.

A fifth example sits in McLaren’s wider partner stack. In late 2025 McLaren extended its agreement with Google, with Gemini branding now featuring on McLaren’s engine cover in place of the previous Chrome emphasis — a shift in which Google product McLaren is positioning around, rather than a new partnership. Worth noting because it underlines how quickly the visible inventory is being repurposed for AI products specifically.

These deals do not share a price. They share an architecture: signed at the end of a longer integration conversation, not the start. The brand is buying the run, not the result.

The figures that are clearly supported

Sponsorship investment in Formula 1 continues to grow at pace. As mentioned, global spend is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2026. Technology has emerged as the dominant vertical, crossing $565 million and overtaking financial services for the first time. The AI wave is visible too: eight new partnerships between F1 teams and AI companies have been signed in just the last six months.

Beyond these, individual title-slot dollar values circulate across trade press but are rarely confirmed by either the team or the partner. By comparison, MotoGP’s commercial sponsorship base is materially smaller. Liberty Media completed its takeover of Dorna, MotoGP’s commercial rights holder, in 2025; the championship has since been through a Chief Commercial Officer transition and its full 2026 commercial roadmap is still being communicated. The same operational-integration playbook described above is structurally available to MotoGP, but the case for it has yet to be made publicly at F1 scale. (See every team’s title sponsor for the 2026 Formula 1 season for the wider F1 picture.)

Five sponsorship lessons to take away

Five big mistakes, in my opinion:

1. Letting the media team lead the renewal. If procurement is benchmarking against TV CPMs, the deal will look expensive. On the read above, the visibility line is one of several flows of value; it cannot carry the price on its own.
2. Treating tech and AI as a single category. Anthropic, Oracle, Google and Microsoft are not interchangeable F1 sponsors with different colours. Each bought a specific operational fit with one specific team. A brand following them in needs to identify its own fit before it picks a team.
3. Skipping the architectural-fit conversation. Microsoft and Mercedes works in part because Mercedes’ data stack is Azure-compatible. Most failed deals I have seen never tested the equivalent question.
4. Hiring activation only after signature. The activation strategy is the contract. Sign rights you can execute against; do not sign first and plan later.
5. Treating the title slot as a billboard. The team name carries the partner name in every commentary, every results sheet, every market the championship reaches. That is real value — but it is the smaller half of what a 2026 title slot delivers, on the read I would offer.

TL;DR – My recommendation

If you are involved in F1 sponsorship or MotoGP Sponsorship today, ask three questions. What share of the value sits in visibility versus operational, B2B and data integration? Are the operational and data clauses being executed against, or sitting unread? If you renewed today, would the renewal look like the contract you signed? If the answers surprise you, audit before you renew. The conversation is cheaper than the renewal.

Sponsorship is an iceberg. The logo is the tip. The 90% beneath the waterline is, in my view, where the platform brands have built their commercial machinery, and where the next decade of growth will be won. The sticker has become a software licence. Read your contract accordingly.