Nick Stocker believes Oracle Red Bull Racing is becoming the favorite F1 team in the USred bull racing
Oracle Red Bull Racing will reveal its 2023 car next week in NY, a rare move that Commercial Director Nick Stocker said is a nod to how it is becoming what he believes is america’s favorite f1 team. The UK-based organization is now the two-time reigning champions of F1, and is owned — and heavily promoted — by its Austria-based Red Bull energy drink parent company. Most F1 teams typically reveal their cars for an upcoming season in Europe (even the American-owned Haas F1 Team’s main factory is in the UK), but Stocker told SBJ on Friday that Red Bull Racing saw a 69% growth in its social media followers who are based in the US just last year alone.
Their two drivers are Max Verstappen of Holland and Sergio Perez of Mexico; Perez is represented for commercial efforts by Endeavor. He said the US is the region where the team is seeing its largest growth globally in relevant key performance indicators, thus revealing the car here “is part recognition and reward to the fans in the US to reflect the presence we have and the growth of F1 .” That means three teams in F1 are now vying, to one degree or another, to lay claim to the title of America’s favorite team — with Red Bull joining Haas and McLaren as ones putting the US at the center of their marketing efforts. Red Bull Racing’s sister F1 team, Alpha Tauri, will also launch their car in NY the following week, which in that case is being timed to NY Fashion Week; that’s because Alpha Tauri is also the name of the energy drink’s apparel brand.
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Meanwhile, Red Bull Racing currently has 34 sponsors including the SF-based cloud computing giant serving as title sponsor, along with other American companies like Walmart, CashApp, New Era, Hewlett Packard, AT&T and Hard Rock. Stocker said that the team has gone from about 15 licensing partners to around 40 in the last couple of years, with some new announcements on the way, another example of its commercial growth, which has been spurred by CAA Sports who serves as its exclusive sponsorship sales agency.
Last year was the first year of Oracle’s title sponsorship that reportedly sees Oracle pay the team $100M a year over five years. It’s thus no surprise that Stocker revealed to SBJ that the team is having its best ever commercial performance, dating back to its founding in 2004, in categories like sponsor revenue and licensing royalties, saying that it’s broken its own records multiple times in recent years. Stocker said that the goal of the team principal Christian Horner has been to become the first F1 team to be able to sustain itself solely off sponsorship revenue if it had to, “and we’re almost there.” The launch next week is on Friday.
