The Dark Side of Formula 1

- Formula 1, or F1 as fans know it, was in the headlines recently for reasons that had nothing to do with the cars or Lewis Hamilton's stylish appearance. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Haas F1 cut ties with Russian driver Nikita Mazepin and title sponsor Uralkali, a Russian oil company run by Nikita's father, Dmitry Mazepin. It turns out that Dmitry Mazepin was literally in a meeting with Vladimir Putin on the first day of the Russian invasion. And Haas only hired Nikita in the first place to get Dmitry's money. The car also had a decoration with the Russian flag, which is not a good look at the moment, internationally.

So they definitely made the right decision here. But it's still a bit surprising that anyone has drawn the line con

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ring the status of some of F1's other current sponsors and commercial partners. Today at Wheelhouse, I'm going to rain on everyone's parade lap and tell you why almost all F1 sponsors are shady. Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring today's video. Listen, loving mothers. Mother's Day is almost here and I know flowers are a nice gift, but my mom is a rock star and rock stars deserve more than flowers. They deserve Raycon Everyday headphones. It doesn't matter if you are tech savvy or not.

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Raycon's everyday headphones have over 49,000 five-star reviews, making them the perfect gift for a five-star mom like mine. I love you Nolan. I have been using Raycons for a long time. They sound great. The battery lasts a long time. They are super durable. Definitely check them out. Give a gift better than flowers and click the link in the description or visit buyraycon.com/donut to get 15% off your Raycon purchase. Tell your mother I said happy mother's day. (Nolan laughs) (brilliant music) The fact that F1 has sponsors has long been a huge boost to the growth of the sport and, at the same time, a bummer.

We're all so used to seeing race cars covered in advertisements that we don't even question it, but until the 1960s, big precars generally raced without any badges at all. Using only national colors. Back then, the closest thing F1 teams had to sponsors were tire and oil companies that gave them free supplies in exchange for small logos on the drivers' overalls. Even the branding of each car was limited to a discreet badge on the nose until the mid-60s. When the Lotus team began printing its name on the

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of its cars. Honda and other competitors quickly followed suit.

However, commercial sponsorship remained banned in F1 until 1968. What changed? Long before that season, BP and Shell stopped supplying oil to F1 and Firestone simultaneously decided to start charging for tires. Faced with a slew of new expenses, the FIA ​​finally decided to allow team sponsors. It was either that or hire Jackie Stewart to drive for Uber. The Lotus team quickly took advantage of the new rules. Lotus founder Colin Chapman signed an £85,000-a-year deal with Imperial Tobacco to sponsor the Lotus 49. In the third race of the season, the 1968 Monaco Grand Prix, Lotus surprised fans by changing its Traditional British racing green livery with a red paint job. based on Imperial's Gold Leaf cigarette cartons.

F1 cars have been covered in advertisements, Post Malone tattoo style, ever since. Today, more than 300 brands are sponsors of F1. It represents more than a billion dollars. Reaching the coffers of F1 every year. Sponsorships typically account for at least a quarter of each team's revenue. Some teams rely on sponsors for up to 80% of their funding. That's a lot of money. Which means great pressure on team owners to take on more and more sponsors. They have historically been willing to accept sponsorships from virtually anyone who can clear a check. That illustrious history includes extremely confusing sponsors. Like condom manufacturer Durex, porn magazine Penthouse and James Humphrey's favorite band in the world, Abba.

My mom, here we go again. To be fair, this is not an F1-specific problem. Rivals such as IndyCar and NASCAR have driven cars sponsored by Dianetics and funded by the Church of Scientology. Speaking of things that aren't real, sponsored F1 cars, Rich Energy may be the most famous recent example of a fraudulent F1 sponsor. The little-known company reached a title sponsorship deal with Haas ahead of the 2019 season. Even though the company's energy drink was basically not sold in stores. The deal fell apart mid-season when Rich Energy's official Twitter account tweeted that they were terminating the contract due to poor performance.

What was really happening was a struggle within Rich Energy. That he was trying to oust CEO William Storey. Unfortunately for the company, Storey had control of his Twitter account and was also the face of the Haas deal. Storey compared Haas' car to a milk truck and tweeted a Photoshop of himself crashing the team's vehicles. Joe Weber from Donut bought me a box of Rich Energy online in 2020. And I have to say, it's actually pretty good. He helped me write many episodes of Past Gas. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the oil companies here. Who have been prominently involved in the sport since those days of free gas.

But I'm basically going to give F1 a pass for oil sponsorships and not really talk about them here because, first of all, they all do the same shady things, so it's not very fun to examine. And two, oil is integral to the sport itself. It's like getting mad if the NFL was sponsored by an MRI machine company. You just can't. On the other hand, I will definitely leave him for the all-time GOAT of F1's horrible sponsors, the tobacco companies. Team Lotus' initial partnership with Imperial Tobacco paved the way for decades of close collaborations between cigarette manufacturers and racing teams.

In 1972, Lotus launched a black and gold livery inspired by the John Player Special, another imperial brand. For many fans, this car proved that a branded livery can really look good and I must say they were not wrong. The damn rules of the John Player Special. Marlboro joined the influx of tobacco brands into F1 in 1973 by signing a deal with McLaren. He then became Ferrari's main partner in 1996, marking an era in F1 cars, thanks to the success of Michael Schumacher. But despite the iconic status of the Marlboro automobile, it was an endangered species. In the late 1990s, some countries began to adopt restrictions on tobacco advertising in the media.

At the same time, the expansion of cable and satellite television made F1 and other motor sports increasingly dependent on media money. But the tobacco companies did not go down without a fight. In response to the new rules, companies like British American Tobacco began designing logos for global

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markets. These logos used the color and design of key cigarette brands, but not their names. Therefore, they could still be placed in cars. Very smart. In 2005, a treaty led by the World Health Organization led to a ban on tobacco advertising in print, radio and online. Basically all over the world.

In 2006, the FIA ​​finally implemented the recommendation against tobacco advertising. Although it was not a total ban. This small loophole gave tobacco companies the ability to get around the new rules with creative twists on their old branding. Which led to super weird liveries like the Marlboro barcode car and the admittedly awesome Bitten and Hisses car that substituted a damn snake for the Benson & Hedges tobacco brand. I must say a big improvement. However, unable to advertise their cancer bars, tobacco companies eventually stopped sponsoring F1 teams altogether. Or did they? Question mark, question mark. Despite literal international laws against tobacco advertising, cigarette companies are still a big source of sponsorship money.

Today, tobacco companies simply disguise their sponsorship money. British American Tobacco is now McLaren's title sponsor. Only the car says "A Better Tomorrow" instead of the name of a cigarette. That phrase is apparently British American Tobacco's thought-leading program that hopes to provide "a portfolio of potentially reduced risk products that can deliver a better tomorrow for our consumers." Similarly, Marlboro still sponsors Ferrari, but their contributions are called Mission Winnow, which like A Better Tomorrow is stupid you've never heard of. This is funded by Philip Morris, Marlboro's parent company, and seeks to quote: "Create engagement around the role of science, technology and innovation as a powerful force for good." That?

The Mission Winnows website also says it is dedicated to finding non-smoking alternatives to tobacco and is experimenting with donated human tissue to see those possible alternatives before human trials. Basically, it's a bunch of guys sitting around figuring out how to make Juul Pods more addictive. Awesome. And the truth be told. I'm not sure what Philip Morris gains by announcing a bogus scientific initiative that no one will pay attention to. But hey, what do I know? I'm literally just a guy. F1's continued relationship with Big Tobacco is just one of the many controversial industries the sport is currently associated with.

So, let's play a quick game of bingo, shall we? Is that how it works. I'll look at the current grid and tell you which racing teams are associated with which shady industry. In the end, you choose the team to support and that repels you the least. Sounds fun, right? Yes, I don't think so. But here we go anyway. First of all, everyone gets a free space for environmental issues. This is because ahead of the 2020 season, F1 announced a long-term sponsorship deal with Saudi Aramco. The largest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. This single company is estimated to be responsible for over 4% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1965.

It's the closest real-world equivalent to partnering with Thanos. Great job F1. The new hotness in racing right now is crypto sponsorships. Not necessarily evil, but definitely an unregulated playground for scammers, spammers, and various other ne'er-do-wells. We talked a lot about this in our metaverse video. So go see it because I'm actually very proud of it. So let's see. Aston Martin is sponsored by crypto.com. Red Bull is sponsored by Tezos. McLaren is sponsored by bitsy.com. AlphaTauri is sponsored by Phantom and Alpha Romeo is associated with Socios.com. Alright, let's check out the Bingo card here and wow!

This could be a quick bingo. F1 accepted its first gambling sponsorship in 2020, when sportsbook 188 BET was installed as the official betting partner of F1 Asia. Ahead of the 2022 season, Redbull reached a brand agreement with PokerStars. So let's add a couple more stamps to the card here. Well. We'll see. We have a scam column up there. AlphaTauri is sponsored by myWorld, which is a multi-level marketing scheme banned in Norway. It used to be called Lyoness and before that it was called iTime, but they kept changing their name to avoid lawsuits. Similarly, Aston Martin received sponsorship from FuturoCoin, which was a rebrand of a Ponzi scheme called FutureNet.

The next step is health. First, we have to stamp Ferrari and McLaren for the tobacco think tanks. Thank you so much. Energy drinks are also known to cause heart and brain problems. Then the Redbull team receives a stamp. Monster Energy sponsors Mercedes. Haas gets a Nolan retroactive for its rich energy and Williams also gets one for a Hungarian sponsor called Hell Energy. Can we talk about thiswebsite for a second? What's in that flask? Why do you have a barcode scanner? Where do these people work? I want to know because I want to apply. This looks amazing. (Nolan sighs) Anyway, now we have the worst category on the board.

Human rights violations. Each of these teams has raced in China, Bahrain, Azerbaijan and, most recently, Saudi Arabia. All of these countries are governed by governments known for restricting civil liberties and abusing human rights. That hasn't stopped anyone in F1 from taking his money and legitimizing his leadership. The most problematic thing is that the largest shareholder of the McLaren group is Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company. In other words, McLaren is actually owned by the royal family. The literal government of Bahrain. Organizing these races and accepting the owners of these teams is in direct conflict with the We Race As One message that F1 has been using in recent years.

So, let's check the final Bingo score here. And it seems that we all lose. I told you this game is not fun. Well. So a lot of companies are shady. That's not a very good lesson. Where do we draw the line? It is easy to point out human rights violations in Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan. It's not that America is perfect. More to the point, are American oil tycoons really very different from Russian ones? Any company that is rich enough to sponsor an F1 team probably has a few skeletons in its closet. That's just the nature of the system we live in.

There is no easy answer to this problem and Formula 1 is not the only sport with this problem. So we are left with a situation in which the ongoing action is not inherently harmful, but we also cannot simply close our eyes to the money that makes it possible. - Hello, Car is officially back from the dead. So naturally, we have new Boost Creeps t-shirts to welcome you. Boost Creeps can be scary, I know, but they're perfectly harmless. I promise. So get your new Boost Creeps t-shirts today at donutmedia.com. (upbeat music) - Okay, then yeah. Thank you so much for watching Wheelhouse.

A bit of a mixed bag on this one this week. MMM I dont know. Tweet some, some racing teams. What about that? I think if you have a problem with how things are done, take it up on social media. Get in touch with these teams. Let them know you want to see something different. Be nice, see you next time.