In 2015, SIFI was not an obvious candidate for MotoGP Sponsorship.

Founded in Catania in 1935, SIFI is one of Europe’s most established independent ophthalmic companies — a developer and manufacturer of eye-care pharmaceuticals, intraocular lenses, surgical solutions and nutraceuticals, operating under the philosophy of “EyeCare Together.” Its customers are surgeons, clinicians and patients. Its world is the operating theatre and the medical congress, not the racing grid.

On paper, the brand had none of the usual reasons to enter motorcycle racing. No consumer-impulse product to push through trackside sampling. No mass-market positioning that needed the reach of a global championship. No history in motorsport. A conventional read of the brief would have concluded that MotoGP was the wrong platform for a B2B medical company — and most agencies would have stopped there.

The real question was never “should SIFI buy visibility in MotoGP?” It was: is there a reason for an pharma company to be in this sport that no one else has thought of yet?

The RTR recommendation

RTR’s recommendation rested on a single insight that turned the apparent mismatch into the entire point of the partnership.

MotoGP is, among other things, the most extreme test of human vision in professional sport. A rider at racing speed processes the track at over 350 km/h — covering roughly one hundred metres every second — under physical, thermal and cognitive stress that has no equivalent in ordinary life. If you are an ophthalmic company whose mission is to understand and protect human sight, MotoGP is not an awkward fit for your brand. It is the most compelling laboratory you could possibly find.

That reframing did two things at once. It gave SIFI a reason-why that was authentic to its identity rather than borrowed from someone else’s marketing — visibility became a by-product of genuine scientific purpose, not the goal. And it pointed to the right partner. RTR recommended LCR Honda MotoGP Team, led by Lucio Cecchinello — a top-tier, factory-supported independent team with the access, the riders and, crucially, the willingness to collaborate on something more demanding than a sticker on a fairing.

The thesis RTR put to SIFI was therefore not “sponsor a team.” It was: build a long-term scientific and communications platform inside MotoGP, with the sponsorship as its commercial backbone. Everything that followed was the execution of that idea.

What we built — across the full lifecycle

A decade-long partnership is not a single decision. It is a structure that has to be designed, populated, defended and renewed year after year. RTR’s role ran the entire length of that lifecycle, and across every level of the championship’s ecosystem.

1. Team level — the commercial foundation

The SIFI badge has appeared continuously on the front fairing of the LCR Honda RC213V and on the riders’ leathers — from Cal Crutchlow in the early years through Takaaki Nakagami, Álex Márquez and Johann Zarco — as well as on the team’s trucks, garage, staff apparel, communication materials and digital properties. This is the visible, contractual core of the deal: consistent, championship-long exposure on one of the most photographed objects in world motorsport.

But visibility was always treated as the foundation, never the building.

2. Activation level — turning rights into outcomes

A logo that is never activated is, in RTR’s language, a blank sticker. Over ten years, the partnership was leveraged through a deliberate activation programme: hospitality weekends for SIFI’s partners; international corporate and convention events built around LCR’s riders and the showbike; brand presence at circuits; branded merchandise; rider appearances; and structured B2B opportunities connecting SIFI to the wider commercial and stakeholder network of the paddock.

The sampling programme is worth describing in concrete terms. At the San Marino Grand Prix in Misano, sample units of Videorelax — SIFI’s OTC ocular self-medication product portfolio— were distributed across the circuit over three days of racing. The stand was anchored by the face of Cal Crutchlow, LCR’s lead rider at the time, and drew personal visits from Lucio Cecchinello, who signed autographs and posed for photographs with the public in the grandstands and on the grass banks. The operation ran across multiple consecutive seasons, embedding the Videorelax brand into one of the most attended European rounds on the calendar.

The activation footprint extended well beyond the track. For two consecutive years (2017 and 2018), SIFI was Official Sponsor of Lucca Comics and Games, Italy’s international festival of comics, animation and gaming — an event that drew over 250,000 ticketed visitors across five days. SIFI’s field team, uniformed in Videorelax livery, distributed product samples throughout the exhibition location around the city, supported by large-format branded banners at the festival’s key locations and a targeted survey on ocular health culture and product awareness. Lucca was a deliberate strategic choice: a young, screen-intensive audience that spends hours in front of monitors is precisely the population most likely to experience tired, red and fatigued eyes — in line with the product core brand strategy and consumer experience for Videorelax. The MotoGP platform was being used as the engine for a broader consumer marketing programme, entirely off-circuit.

The sponsorship became a working tool inside SIFI’s own marketing and customer-relationship calendar — not a line item, but an engine.

3. Scientific level — the platform that made it unique

The element that lifted this partnership out of the ordinary was the Driving Vision Science (DVS) project, launched in 2015 and later broadened into Performance Vision Science (PVS).

Working with LCR’s riders as research subjects, SIFI set out to study how the human visual system behaves under the most extreme conditions sport can produce. The investigation measured ocular-surface symptoms, visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, blink rate, anterior-segment imaging and tear-film osmolarity — later expanding to the retina, intraocular pressure and other parameters — both on and off the track.

The headline finding became one of the most widely reported sports-science stories of its kind: MotoGP riders blink dramatically less than ordinary people. Where a typical person blinks roughly every four to six seconds, the riders studied blinked as rarely as once every three minutes — with at least one rider recorded going some nine minutes without blinking. At Mugello, where a lap takes around one minute fifty, that means completing a lap and a half without batting an eye. The data also showed that, despite relentless exposure to wind, UV and stress, the riders were not developing the dry-eye damage one would expect — opening genuine clinical questions about concentration, blink rate and visual fatigue, and pointing toward eye-training protocols.

This was not marketing dressed up as science. The results were presented to the international ophthalmic community at major congresses — including the ESCRS (European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons) meeting at Vienna’s Hofburg in 2018 — and the project was featured by MotoGP’s own official channels. For a brand whose currency is clinical credibility, this was reach of a kind that no amount of conventional advertising could buy.

4. Championship level — beyond a single team

The partnership eventually reached past LCR to the championship itself. Supported by Dorna, SIFI took on the eye examinations and ophthalmic screening of riders across all racing classes over a period of years — embedding the brand into the prevention and rider-welfare fabric of the entire paddock, and turning a single-team sponsorship into a championship-wide eye-care programme.

This is the level most sponsorships never touch, and it is the clearest proof of the depth of the relationships involved: a partnership that began as a badge on one team’s fairing grew into a standing role within the championship’s own operations.

5. The MotoE extension — a final statement of commitment

In the tenth and final season of the partnership, SIFI extended its presence beyond the MotoGP class to include the MotoE championship — the all-electric category that represents the sport’s next technological frontier. The move was consistent with the logic that had governed the partnership from the start: a company committed to research, innovation and the science of performance does not stop at a class boundary. It follows the sport where it is going.

The architect on the brand side — Dr. Carmelo Chines

No partnership of this complexity sustains itself by institutional inertia. It sustains itself because someone on the brand side understands, year after year, what it is for and what it is capable of.

That person, at SIFI, has been Dr. Carmelo Chines, at that time Executive Director Operations, whose vision and leadership have been the decisive variable in this partnership’s longevity and depth.

It was Dr. Chines who grasped, from the earliest stages, the singular strategic logic of a medical company operating inside the world’s fastest sport: that the authority MotoGP lends to a brand is not the authority of mass visibility but the authority of extreme relevance. That credibility built on a racing grid is credibility earned in the most rigorous possible conditions, and that a company whose mission is to improve the quality of human vision has no more powerful demonstration than the men and women who see the world more clearly than anyone else alive.

Under his direction, SIFI did not merely occupy space inside the paddock. It used that space to generate original science, to build relationships with the international ophthalmic community, to activate at events ranging from the circuits of MotoGP to the streets of Lucca, and to embed its brand into the rider-welfare architecture of the championship itself. Each of these decisions required strategic conviction and the willingness to pursue a long horizon rather than a short return.

The result — ten uninterrupted seasons, a proprietary scientific programme cited at European ophthalmic congresses, a brand whose name is known and respected across the paddock, and an acquisition by a major European pharmaceutical group in 2025 — is in no small part the reflection of that conviction.

In Dr. Chines’s own words: “Our mission is to improve the quality of vision — and therefore the visual performance of athletes — while continuing to surround ourselves with successful partners who share our values.” It is a sentence that describes exactly the kind of sponsor RTR is built to serve: one who understands that a partnership is not a purchase, but a commitment.

The result

Ten consecutive seasons. From the 2015 Italian Grand Prix to the 2025 Italian Grand Prix, SIFI and LCR Honda renewed every single year — a continuity that is rare in any sport and almost unheard of in MotoGP, where most commercial relationships turn over within a few seasons.

What SIFI obtained was never just exposure, though the exposure was substantial and uninterrupted. It was:

• a proprietary scientific platform generating original data, peer engagement and earned media in both the sporting and medical worlds;
• a B2B and hospitality engine that put the brand in front of the right clinical and commercial audiences, year after year;
• a consumer activation programme — through trackside sampling and off-circuit events such as Lucca Comics and Games — that turned sponsorship rights into direct market presence;
• an authentic brand narrative — eye-care credibility demonstrated, not asserted — that reinforced exactly the positioning SIFI needed in its real market;
• and a partnership so settled that, in RTR’s own description, the two organisations came to operate less like sponsor and team than like family.

Over the same decade SIFI grew into an international ophthalmic group operating across several continents, ultimately attracting acquisition by a major European pharmaceutical company in 2025. The MotoGP platform was not the cause of that growth — but it was, throughout, one of the most distinctive assets in how the company presented itself to the world.

Why this engagement could only have been built by RTR Sports

A logo placement can be brokered by almost anyone with a contact at a team. This could not.

Designing a sponsorship around a scientific reason-why; matching the brand to the one team willing to collaborate on research; building the activation, hospitality and B2B programme that turned those rights into outcomes; constructing a consumer sampling operation that ran from the Misano pit lane to the medieval streets of Lucca; supporting the dissemination of the science to congresses and media; and ultimately helping the relationship extend from a single team up to a championship-wide role with Dorna — that requires an agency that operates on every side of the table at once: sponsor-side, team-side and championship-side.

That is the difference between an agency that sells inventory and an agency that architects a programme. RTR Sports introduced SIFI to MotoGP in 2015, then stayed for the entire decade as the independent partner structuring, activating and renewing the relationship at each stage. The breadth of what was built is a direct function of the depth of the relationships behind it — and depth measured in decades, across every level of the sport, is the one thing a competitor cannot manufacture.

This is what full-lifecycle, multi-level intervention in MotoGP looks like. It is the standard RTR Sports was built to deliver.