Are we at peak F1? Is the Super Bowl a gig with a sporting support act? Is the IOC's TOP model fit for purpose?

0:04James Emmett:Hello and welcome to Worth Knowing, the sports industry podcast from Leaders, where we talk about what's worth knowing in the business of sport this week. I'm James Emmett, the editorial director here at Leaders.

0:16David Cushnan:And I'm content director David Cushnan. On the show this week, we go inside the Aston Martin F1 team on the eve of a new season. We reflect on the Super Bowl and run the rule over some revealing numbers. And we take a quick skate around Milan Cortina and IOC world as the Winter Olympics get underway in Italy. This is Leaders Worth Knowing. Indeed it is. James, how are you? I'm all right, thanks, content director David Cushman. Well, you drifted off script by throwing your own job title into the intro.

0:47James Emmett:Imagine if that's how you've just introduced yourself in general day-to-day circs. Content director david cushman here well it has been known to be honest um i think you've got to get ahead of that do you know what you do sign yourself dc on emails on your sort of friendliest internal emails yeah intimate internal emails occasionally external but that is an accident you know what you could start throwing in if you went with the content director cddc exactly that's what's known in the literary game as chiasmus um how are you david it's nice to be back in person isn't it Have we seen each other?

1:24James Emmett:No, we haven't.

1:25David Cushnan:We haven't seen each other since you got back from Australia. That's right. Flight back okay? Jet lag okay?

1:31James Emmett:All fine. Great. I watched a lot of films.

1:33David Cushnan:And you were chilling out with Shetmates in Brisbane, the content creators, influencers.

1:39James Emmett:Archie and Miles. Lip Sync Kings. Yeah. What a smart pair of lads. 23, 24 years old. and they spoke at our performance event out there in Brisbane and I was sort of chatting with them on stage and off and the coherence with which they were able to talk about and eloquence with which they were able to talk about. Put you to shame. Completely. I was a stuttering, inarticulate mess compared with these relative children but very impressive people and nice to meet them. Very good. Very good. You, David, you've been hanging out with the great and the good in the paddock, it seems. You've been putting content out on this stream, Jeff Slack.

2:24David Cushnan:Yeah. Don't make it sound like I've been putting content out without your permission.

2:27James Emmett:Yeah.

2:27David Cushnan:You didn't ask. I sort of didn't ask. You're in the air. No, Jeff Slack rang up and wanted a chat. So,

2:33James Emmett:I'm always up for a chat with Jeff, who is Managing Director of Commercial and Marketing

2:39David Cushnan:at the Aston Martin F1 team. But -

2:41James Emmett:Jefferson Slack is actually its full name. Correct. There aren't many Jeffersons out there.

2:45David Cushnan:There aren't. Also, I think well known to lots of people in the sports industry through a long career, stint at IMG, ran into Milan for a long time. So he's been around the industry for some time, but for the last five or six years has been working in Formula One as part of this intriguing Aston Martin project as it builds up.

3:06James Emmett:Yes, really interesting interview and really good to get some commercial insight from within the paddock on the eve, pretty much the eve of a new Formula One season. They're testing at the moment, aren't they? A couple of things struck me about this, David. First of all, I do love the way that business and performance in Formula One sort of blend and clearly the sort of outsized importance given by both you, a Formula One fan and commentator, and Jefferson Slack, an insider and employee. and also all the people online who are watching the video of this particular clip, the outsized importance of Adrian Newey to the success of any given Formula One team.

3:46James Emmett:So he is, Adrian Newey, is he now a team principal? Is that right? But he's an aerodynamicist. He's an engineer.

3:52David Cushnan:He is. He's responsible for the design and the concept of the car.

3:58James Emmett:And he's the winningest designer in Formula One, is that right?

4:01David Cushnan:He has, more than any other designer, technical person in F1 history, the most championships, the best track record. Left Red Bull just over a year ago, joined Aston Martin as an equity partner in the team alongside Lawrence Stroll. Initially as a sort of technical partner and has been tasked with designing the concept for the 2026 car, which is this new set of regulations and is a date that everybody in Formula One has marked in their calendars for some years as the moment when there may be an opportunity to reset, to reshuffle the order of the competitive pack.

4:39James Emmett:So having Adrian Neary design your car at the most pivotal point in Formula One's sort of rule-changing history for many years is potentially a game changer in terms of where Aston Martin, a mid-ranking slash lower order team could find themselves now?

4:57David Cushnan:Definitely. And this has been part of the Lawrence Stroll plan. And this has been coming for a number of years, both the rule changes, but this sense that Aston Martin under Lawrence Stroll, billionaire owner, is the building of a super team, essentially. So various component parts in play there. Certainly one, a better, stronger technical team helmed by somebody like Adrian Newey, who is somewhat old school in that He still hand draws a lot of what he designs, but corralling, energising, challenging the technical team, the big technical team that are working at Aston Martin. And Adrian Newey was somewhat surprisingly promoted to team principal role towards the end of last season, I suppose in recognition of the importance of having a technical person at the top of the organisation.

5:46David Cushnan:Although it must be said that he's probably not doing all the jobs that team principals are doing in other teams because they very much want him and need him to concentrate on doing what he's best at, which is design the car, get the performance out of the vehicle. But yes, this has been a project that has also included the construction of this amazing new, enormous facility at Silverstone that now houses the team, having a driver of Fernando Alonso's capability on board and still going and past the team. And Alonso is, what, 44 years old, I think now. He is hanging on and continuing, driven by the prospect of this 2026 rule change and the opportunity that it perhaps opens up.

6:34David Cushnan:Big new technical partnership with Honda, which moves the team from a customer supplier of Mercedes engines to effectively running a works team with Honda, where Honda's sole focus is on Aston Martin. Now, pros and cons to that, because the suspicion is that the Mercedes engine this year will be the one to have. But over the next few years, with that sole focus, the idea at least is for Honda and Aston Martin to build up together as one absolutely aligned unit. So this is all part of the vision, all part of the master plan to try and make the jump between, as you say, finished seventh last year, a midfield team to a team that is competing alongside the teams who will be disappointed if they're not challenging for the championship this year.

7:23David Cushnan:And that's McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, and that's through history, status, resources, expectation, recent performance. It's a big leap to get to that. I think there's two teams in Formula One who have the current potential to do that. One is absolutely Aston Martin. The other is in the longer term, potentially Audi, who are now in the sport for the first time, have taken over the Sauber team and have the resources and ambition to probably attempt to make that significant jump into title challengers soon but for aston martin they're a bit further along the journey so this may not be the year he was very clear when i asked him at the end can you win the world championship no we can't but uh they will be looking for a significant uptick in performance and adrian newey has designed the most innovative and very different looking car yeah that we'll see on the grid this does it look fast looks quick so far does look quick testing's underway great um another thing

8:18James Emmett:that struck me um sort of taking a step back and not getting involved in the adrian newy will they won't they win sort of minutiae of it the rising tide of formula one and we've discussed many times on this podcast how well liberty and the team at formula one central formula one office are doing at commercializing and growing the popularity of the sport and the series that rising tide is floating all boats if the boats are the teams. Just a few years ago, there was a sort of fragility about having a Formula One racing license. You know, the teams at the back of the pack would be hanging on, or it seemed like they'd be hanging on from season to season.

9:03James Emmett:Team sponsorship income was hard to come by. Now it seems that they're, I'm sure it's not, you know, a cakewalk to sort of get sponsorship for a Formula One team. And people like Jeff Slack absolutely are worth the money that I'm sure they get paid. But there does seem to be a healthy bounty of team sponsorship available at the moment in Formula One. And likewise, the uptick in the size and scale of these teams as kind of organizations has really gone alongside that.

9:35David Cushnan:Definitely. I mean, Jeff was talking about the ramp up in terms of number of employees over last few years at Aston Martin. I think they're up to around about 1 ,100. And that is now getting onto a par with some of the biggest teams, the Mercedes, the Ferraris. Some of these teams, it's quite hard to understand exactly how many employees are working on the F1 project because all the teams are structured slightly differently. But that's pretty comparable to if you think about a Manchester United, who have obviously been through a process of change within their organization over the last couple of years, but they were up at around about the same number and probably, you know, maybe dipping under a thousand people at this point.

10:17David Cushnan:There's also been this interesting guideline put in, well, regulation put in around the salary cap, the budget cap in Formula One, which has created a situation where teams like Mercedes have actually had to slightly downsize a little bit. And you saw a period where there was some diversification happening over the last few years, Mercedes and Red Bull Racing, deploying resources essentially into other projects and other sports like the America's Cup. Those things not happening so much now as they've sort of righted the ship, no pun intended, to get their employee numbers to a level that works.

10:52David Cushnan:At the same time, and Aston Martin has been in a position where it's been able to increase headcount to get to a point where they're just about on a par. There are smaller teams who have fewer employees, of course, further down the grid. But I think Jeff was also really interesting in terms of how his commercial team has grown at the same time. And you're right, there's huge corporate interests in Formula One at the moment, both at a central level. And we've seen over the last few weeks, Standard Chartered, the latest sponsor of F1 centrally coming in. And there've been some really big deals over the winter across nearly all of the F1 teams.

11:29David Cushnan:New brands coming in. We've seen Google and Mercedes. We've seen Revolut come in as title sponsor of the Audi team. Lots more at slightly lower levels as well. New brands, new categories. Corporate appetite, US corporate appetite for F1 has definitely never been higher. And that creates some competition. And that creates, we sort of touched on, and Jeff doesn't see it as an issue at the moment. But I think it's potentially one to look at on the horizon. There's a challenge in terms of how you service all those partners on site at races. and within your current team structures. So actually, as commercial teams grow, yes, the salespeople will, I'm sure, grow.

12:09David Cushnan:But I think we're going to see account management, client servicing, guest hospitality, guest relations as roles that all increase within these F1 teams.

12:19James Emmett:That was an enjoyable strand of the conversation that you had with him, where you were plugging away at the idea of the paddock club, the hospitality offering in and around Formula One, while it's now doing really well and there's a sort of global standard bearer, there's a risk that it loses its cachet, its exclusivity. And I wonder, and all the teams, it seems, get an allocation, which they, for the Paddock Club, for every race, no doubt Formula One Central also has its own allocation. It seems like tens of thousands of people go through this hospitality offering every race weekend. You're right, it probably is losing its sense of exclusivity.

13:00James Emmett:But what it gains, aside from revenue through the tiller, is probably more people being exposed to a positive offering who can feed back and support sponsorship propositions. So whereas in the past, you might have had your top two or three people from Rolex coming along to this, signed off by Bernie Eccleston, now Rolex, as well as, well, Rolex aren't a sponsor anymore, but, you know, all the sponsors will have much larger allocations for their hospitality offering. They can get all sorts of mid-rankers through who can then support internally on any kind of sponsorship decision and, you know, feeding it back up the chain.

13:44David Cushnan:Definitely. And I think it's a little bit sort of a build on what we were talking about last week in terms of what you're seeing, even at enormous Grand Prix venues, there is actually much more activity happening on the fringe in the cities where races are being held. And that's where a lot of teams are doing at least some of their activating and their guest relations as well. And that might be at hotels or other venues within cities. And it sort of feeds into F1's overall vision for having races that are more centrally located, essentially going where the people already are, i.e. cities. Now, you will always have races that are, particularly in Europe, at traditional circuits like a Silverstone, for example, that are in more rural parts of the country and those have their own characters.

14:34David Cushnan:But you see with the Madrid race coming, certainly Miami, obviously Las Vegas, races in cities do open up opportunities to provide a different kind experience for people over and above popping into the paddock, which is maybe part of the experience, but you're maybe not there for three full days as you might have been in the past. So there's just energy and momentum around Formula One that I've certainly not seen before. And I did ask him what he feels F1 as it goes through this sort of explosion in growth, but I think also transcends traditional F1 fans and becomes, you know, quote, cool, trendy, certainly more mainstream than it has been previously and hits that sort of North American audience.

15:20David Cushnan:What you have to be wary of or what the sport needs to be wary of. And he did talk, I think, quite well about never, ever losing sight for a moment of what fans want and what fans are looking for. And we will see, you know, hear reports about there's potentially a sequel to the movie coming. There's definitely sort of more accessibility in general, access to drivers whose time is very much at a premium, teams, I think, pushing the boundaries and challenging F1 a little bit in terms of what they can do creatively and how they can work within what need to be protected sort of, you know, areas and protected rights.

15:58David Cushnan:So it's an interesting, I had an interesting thought afterwards, which is where's the peak for F1? Are we at peak F1 or is there sort of a higher ceiling? And I'm not sure what the answer is to that.

16:09James Emmett:I think that's probably a higher ceiling where your most prestigious blue ribboned brands are at the top of your sport. And by that, I mean, the ceiling is only when Ferrari are winning again.

16:21David Cushnan:Yeah, perhaps. I mean, one of the challenges, you've got Audi coming in. You've got Cadillac who launched their - Oh, by the way, Cadillac paid for a Super Bowl out there. Correct. And they launched their car livery in a Super Bowl in the fourth quarter. So yeah, they're going at it big. Audi, Cadillac. You have Honda coming back in. You have Ford coming in with Red Bull as a technical partner this year. You have all the existing manufacturers like Ferrari and that's great. And manufacturer interest sort of drives F1 and long term, they've been attracted by the regulations, but obviously the popularity of F1.