At the weekend, the traveling carnival that is Formula 1 arrived at the Lusail International Circuit in Qatar for the second Grand Prix in the country. A newly resurfaced track, tyre troubles, and a minimum of three mandatory pitstops created a lot of drama in an already busy weekend schedule.
However, those who’ve been watching the races throughout the 2023 season may have noticed a number of differences between the liveries on display as Formula 1 hops from country to country.
Of note is the change seen at the weekend on Alfa Romeo which usually sports the Stake.com branding. For those who may not have encountered this name before, Stake is an online crypto-gambling and sports betting website founded in 2017 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani.
In 2023, it was announced that the website would become the title sponsor for the Alfa Romeo F1 team which is actually owned by Sauber Motorsport. This means that the Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake would be zipping around the 23 tracks on the calendar for this year.
Well, except for a few.
Formula 1 travels to a number of countries including Australia, Japan, the US and – more recently – the Middle East. This year has seen races in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and of course, the season finale in Abu Dhabi. Unfortunately for Stake, these countries and others, don’t permit advertising for gambling and so, Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake becomes, erm, Team Kick during the races in countries where Stake’s name can’t be displayed.
This creates the impression that Stake and Kick are linked but their relation comes down to one man.
Kick’s founders are none other than the aforementioned Craven and Tehrani with Craven being an investor independent from Stake. Given the fact that the pair founded both, many assumed that the two sites are linked, which both websites have denied on a number of occasions. However, Kick’s biggest category is Slots & Casino which features streamers such as xQc gambling on Stake as seen below so on the surface, to the average viewer one would be forgiven for wrongly assuming Stake and Kick are linked.
Alfa Romeo isn’t the only team that has to adapt its livery depending on where the race weekend is.
McLaren, which has really come into form since the mid-season break, has the controversial principal sponsor, British American Tobacco through its A Better Tomorrow initiative. Here, vape brands such as Vuse and Velo are featured on the side pods of the four-wheeled rocket ship. However, McLaren needs to change these liveries in countries where tobacco advertising isn’t permitted or where it doesn’t sell those products.
When the Formula 1 carnival arrived in Singapore and Japan however, A Better Tomorrow and BAT advertising was nowhere to be seen, instead, the livery featured crypto exchange OKX. In 2022 however, McLaren showed off a LOVE-branded vehicle (which returned at the Dutch Grand Prix in 2023) which was a sneaky way to get the VELO brand on track at Zandvoort, where tobacco advertising isn’t permitted.
This year also saw Williams running a Gulf-themed livery during the Singapore, Japan, and Qatar Grand Prix races. Similarly, McLaren raced with a tri-colour scheme to celebrate the fact it’s one of two teams that has won the Indy 500, Le Man 24 Hour, the Monaco Grand Prix or a Formula 1 World Championship (known as the Triple Crown). The only other Formula 1 team to have won the Triple Crown is Mercedes.
In recent years the International Automobile Federation (FIA) introduced a cost cap in a bid to make races more competitive and one easy and rather cheap way to reduce the cost of your vehicle is to reduce the amount of paint used. This cost-saving also extends to not having to pay a designer for a new concept when you can just run with the carbon fiber body that encases the more important features teams would rather pay for.
The short answer to why so many liveries have changed in 2023 comes down to advertising regulations in the countries where races are hosted and teams trying to save weight and costs.
