Formula 1 has two new team names this season, following a trend in the sport of focusing on marketing: Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team and Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber.
Sauber motorsports It has been racing since 1993 under various names, most recently as Alfa Romeo. For this season and the next it will take the name Stake, taking over from Audi in 2026.
“Before the arrival of Audi, we felt it was important to present ourselves with this new identity and have a commercial partnership,” said Alessandro Alunni Bravi, representative of the Stake team. “The Sauber Group has been in Formula 1 for 32 years, but that does not mean that we have forgotten what Sauber is. It means that over the next two seasons we wanted to present ourselves as something new, fresh and different to help us attract a new audience.”
AlphaTauri, which entered Formula 1 in 2006 as Toro Rosso, will be named Visa Cash App.
“Visa sponsorship boss Andrea Fairchild said it’s a bit complicated,” said Peter Bayer, the team’s chief executive. “The reality is that we said from the beginning last year that we would get closer to the Red Bull family.”
RB stands for Racing Bulls, a reference to the collection of aircraft, known as Flying Bulls, that belonged to the team’s founder, Dietrich Mateschitz.
“It’s a good fit,” Bayer said. “But then we had a big problem because we had Visa, one of the biggest brands in the world, and Cash App, one of the most spectacular brands in the financial world, especially in the United States, who wanted to partner with us.
“We thought, ‘Well, we’ll be the Visa Cash App RB Formula One team.’ I don’t hear many people calling the Aston Martin Formula 1 team Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant, and I don’t hear people talking about the MoneyGram Haas Formula 1 team, so we just have to be realistic and focus on the content, and it’s a car. really nice and fast.”
Drake, a Canadian rap artist, did the voice-over in the social media video announcing Sauber’s name change.
For 20 of this year’s record-breaking 24 Grands Prix, it will be known as Stake F1 Team. For the other four, in Australia, Spain, Belgium and Qatar, it will once again be Kick Sauber.
The change is to comply with gambling advertising laws in those four countries because Stake is an online cryptocurrency casino. Its owners are also responsible for Kick, a live streaming platform.
“We will fully comply with all applicable local laws where Staking is permitted,” said Alunni Bravi. “So when gambling advertising is banned, we will use a different name.
“Our car launch was live streamed on Kick.com, our chassis name is Kick Sauber, so when we won’t be racing as Stake we will use the team’s middle name.”
The names of both teams have been criticized with some fans taking to social media. “Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber might be the worst name for a team in F1 history,” wrote one fan on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“When you try something new and when you have a team name that is different from other team names, it’s always easy to be critical,” Alunni Bravi said. “Of course, there was criticism from people close to the Sauber name, and perhaps they expected something different.
“Maybe we were too extreme, but we wanted to do something new and attractive for our fan base. When Drake announced our name, we had 22 million impressions, a number we have never achieved with a single post on our social media platforms. “It was huge.”
For Bayer, getting Visa was a big blow. “You see the growth rate of F1 in the United States, a country that is a huge market for sports marketing, and Visa is an incredible brand,” he said.
“They do the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup and now a Formula 1 team, which is an honor for us and a great opportunity. They will bring many new ideas.”
Kendrick Lamar, the American rapper, performed at the team’s presentation in Las Vegas earlier this month. “We are mixing sport with entertainment, bringing new fans, activating new groups of fans with a new way of communicating,” Bayer said. “It is an incredible opportunity for Formula 1.”
