Aston Martin F1 MD Jeff Slack on the twists and turns required to reach the top

0:03Hello and welcome to another episode of Leaders Worth Knowing, the sports business podcast from us here at Leaders in Sport. My name is David Cushnan. I'm the content director round here at Leaders and bringing you today a conversation with Jeff Slack, the MD of commercial and marketing at the Aston Martin F1 team. We're just a few weeks away from the start of another F1 season in Melbourne, a season which brings with it a blanket set of new rules, the biggest rule change in Formula One history, according to some, which has the potential to reset the order and shuffle the pack for a new era of the sport.

0:48And Jeff is part of one of the most talked about teams over this winter, Aston Martin, who are coming in strong for 2026. They've been building up towards this, as have many of the teams. But there's been a huge investment in the team by Lawrence Stroll, the owner of the Aston Martin car company and the F1 team. And that has resulted in a incredible new campus facility up at Silverstone. There's a new partnership on the engine front with Honda this year. And there has been the signing of Adrian Newey, the technical genius behind so many F1 World Championship car designs, who has come into the team and has put his mark on the 2026 Aston Martin car as the team principal of the organisation.

1:44Jeff looks after the commercial and marketing functions at the team, which itself has undergone a huge departmental growth over the past few years. Jeff came into the role around about five or six years ago. He is a man who has been around the sports industry for quite a while. He was EVP at Wasserman for a time. He was an SVP of football at IMG. He was the CEO of Inter Milan. But he came into a new sport with Aston Martin, working closely with Lawrence Stroll and seems, as you will hear, to be really enjoying it and looking forward to all that's ahead over the coming years as the project, this long project to bring Aston Martin right up to the top of Formula One, hopefully from their point of view, comes to fruition.

2:33Lots in this conversation, we touch on the team, how it's structured, how it's grown, and of course, more widely, F1's continued growth and the hype around the sport at the moment and what that impact is on corporate sponsors, on hospitality, and the way that people like Jeff do business working for the teams. So do enjoy. Here's Jeff Slack, the Managing Director of Commercial and Marketing at the Aston Martin F1 team. This is David Cushnan in the Leaders studio and I'm delighted to be joined by Jeff Slack, MD of commercial and marketing. Is that right, Jeff, at the Aston Martin F1 team? It is, David.

3:15Very good to be with you. Thank you for joining us, particularly this incredibly busy time of the season, particularly this season, new rules, host of changes to the technical regulations in F1. Feels like the start of a big new era for the sport. And as we talk, testing about to get underway in earnest ahead of that new season starting at the beginning of March. Give us a taste, Jeff, of how the mood is within the camp. We're an interesting team in that we're on a journey going from a very small team when Lawrence bought Force India to try and to compete against the bigger teams. It's about a 10-year project and we're in about year seven we've hired some great people we built a fantastic facility we brought in honda for the first time to be a works team this year so all of those pieces have taken a while put into place and then you got to execute on them which you know we're building a suspension for the first time we're developing our own fuels and lubes with our partners in that sector, Ramco and Valvoline, Honda.

4:27So there's a lot to do. We got a particular car designer named Adrian Newey, who was of the GOAT or Steve Jobs of that world, and obviously the most successful guy. So you wake up and you feel very motivated about going to work. By the same token, we're going to stumble and we're going to have some setbacks and we won't get there as quickly as we would like. But it's certainly a very motivating place to be. And tell us, as you suggested there, the team has been on this journey for a number of years now as Aston Martin with Lawrence Stroll in charge of the team. Tell us a little bit what that has looked like in terms of number of people and the size and scale of the organization that you are a key part of leading now.

5:13Well, I started with, so Lawrence bought the team in 2018 out of bankruptcy. And for a couple of years, it was known as Racing Point, which was just a placeholder. Lawrence has made his money as a brand guy in fashion. He understood that the most iconic luxury British motorsports brand was Aston Martin. As only Lawrence can do, he set out and he eventually bought Aston Martin road cars and created a partnership between the two entities, privately held racing team and the publicly listed AML. And we became Aston Martin in 2021. I joined at the beginning of 2020. At the time, I think our team was about 300 people, the whole organization.

5:57We were in these very small warehouse facilities. Hard to believe you got a Formula One car out of there at Silverstone Regional Jordan facilities. it's kind of romantic now based on what we ended up building so we were 300 people i'm not mistaken now we're about 1100 people in addition of course honda has all of its people that work on the engine so it's a very large organization and that's all transpired in four or five years the honda relationship as you mentioned uh is going to be an absolutely critical one into this season and for many years to come. And this is being widely talked about as the most significant technical changes to Formula One in a generation and more, perhaps ever.

6:47And at the heart of it are the engines, the power units, and Honda, with all its history in F1, with all its history in motorsport, coming back into the sport in this capacity. and tell us a little bit about how you're working as a team to build the relationship to make sure there's a cultural fit between the two organizations because to be successful you're going to have to be an absolute lockstep that's true true what you say i think honda's got enormous experience in the sport so it's not a new build new engine won four of the last five world championships some level uh with with red bull we have a very good culture and organization we have a leader very clear who he is and he's very deeply involved and then we have very good someone like Andy Cowell is one of the best engine people on the planet so but it is a relatively new relationship well it's been a couple years in the making since we did our deal with them so I think that's just fine you've got some challenges a bit of distance across different cultures but again they know what they're doing and I think it's been very smooth we have we're completely aligned on interests Adrian's been able to design the car knowing what the engine's going to look like as opposed to being a non-works team, a customer team.

8:00So from what I can see, it's working very well. It doesn't mean that we're where we want to be with the engine. Obviously, you've been reading about some different controversies about compression ratios, things like that, kind of classic F1 stuff, trying to figure out great areas and rules. And I'm no expert. I'm not here to pass judgment on it, but there's some things like that. So it'll be an interesting development. But so far, it's been an excellent working relationship. You talked about the number of people you have in the team versus a few years ago. And just from an organizational, from a structural standpoint, and you've been right at the heart of it, what is that process like to expand at that sort of velocity?

8:39And what are some of the inevitable growing pains, challenges that you've had to overcome as you try and do that at the same time as there's obviously this mission to be successful on the track and to be performing at the highest level? I'd probably divide the answer up into kind of two sections. The section I'm most involved with, kind of the commercial side of the business, we were five people at the beginning of 2020. We're now over 100. Our revenues are up more than 15 times. And because of the smallness of the organization, it was the smallest team in terms of social followers in 2020. We didn't have a culture that we had to fix.

9:17We were able to develop a culture. So it's a whole conversation, but that was one challenge. The racing team challenge was a couple of challenges. First, of course, the best talent in Formula One is generally British, all in the area. Most of the teams are based here in the UK. It's, you know, how can you identify and get the talent, often on these no-notice contracts in Formula One and other things. So it's a very difficult business to actually bring in talented people from other teams, which is where you need to get senior experienced people. So you've got that time challenge and identification challenge.

9:49I think you have a challenge culturally of going from a team that has 4C India and even and his racing point was very successful for its budget. This was a mid-table team, if you want to think about the premiership team, mid to lower, but finishing fourth and fifth in place. So doing very, very well. Brentford or somebody like that, if it was a football analogy. You want to keep that, but you also want to say, wait a minute, guys, it's not enough to finish fourth. You want to win a world championship, which is a very, very different mindset, very different approach. So that's been a challenge culturally to make sure that while we kept this core of great racers, super efficient people, I mean, the budgets they had were minuscule, keep that culture, but add to it the ambition to be a world champion and all that that entails, the devotion that that takes with the right people.

10:40So it's certainly been challenging that we've hired people that have worked and hired people that haven't worked. But as I said at the beginning, you feel really motivated in the morning to wake up and go do it, but it is absolutely challenging and then look at our competitors of the bigger teams. They're where they were. In fact, with the budget kept coming in, in many cases, they had to cut back a bit. And they're really good. They're world class. So theirs has been doing stuff more at the margins, whereas ours has been their construction from a very small team to a much bigger team. Quick break from the conversation, but if you're a senior leader in sport, this is one you'll want to hear.

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11:58Let's talk a little bit about your role specifically, Jeff, overseeing the, as you say, expanding marketing and commercial functions. And we have seen across the board over the last few years, a huge rise in corporate interest in Formula One. And you look at any of the team's sponsor portfolios and they're in much better shape than they were five or six years ago. Aston Martin, very much at the forefront of that. You mentioned Aramco as your title partner. I think over this winter, new deals with Celsius, with Breitling just announced as well. Size and scope of your role and where you see you can make the most difference within the organization.

12:41How do you approach what on paper looks like a pretty substantial remit? I've been fortunate enough, David. I've been in the business for a while, so I've got some experiences both in the U.S. but also European football mainly. So I came to the sport not as an F1 expert by any means, which has some challenges, but also I think some advantages. Over the years, I've been able to develop a very broad network of people, both from people that you could hire to people with whom you could do business. That's been very helpful. I guess I've been around them long enough to hope that I know how to put organization, a culture in place to be successful.

13:19And it's not easy when a lot of it's dependent on something that you don't control, which is your performance. Whether you're working in football or F1 or basketball or any sport, the commercial people are dependent on the success of the sporting people, the technical people. And it's really not something you have any control over. So I think we put an organization in place that has been able to bring out the best in the brand and the situation. I think it's been an advantage not to be a Formula One person. Again, I'm amazed at the sport. Never enjoyed working in a sport more in my career. But I also see a sport where people stay.

13:58It's a very alluring bubble. If you come in from the outside maybe with some different experiences and without the legacy, as I mentioned, having an extremely small marketing and commercial team six years ago, you actually have an advantage because you can think about things a little bit differently. And I think that's been helpful. So for me, the first thing was to put a culture into place to empower people, give them a chance to be successful. We've been fortunate that I didn't know, nobody knew, I think in 2020, right before a pandemic was going to hit us, that this would end up being probably the fastest growing sport, certainly one of the hottest sports in the world, the drive to survive effect, the importance of technology, the fact that the U.S.

14:39market now is a very substantial market, which without that, you're not going to get a lot of corporate sponsors. You've gone from teams that at that time, through the pandemic, that were on the verge of bankruptcy to revenue multiples as the franchises that are billions, as we're seeing transactions in the marketplace right now. And I had a very interesting conversation with Lawrence about, I guess, five years ago. Being an American, I'm well familiar with franchise model, liquidity in the marketplace, the fact that LPs trade in that it's not football with promotion and relegation, which of course is your biggest challenge to financially model a football team.

15:16And I remember having a conversation with Lawrence. I said, I did a slide where I showed the revenue multiples of the main US leagues and things like the MLS 20 times and the NBA 10 times. I said, Lawrence, come on, we're a franchise and we've got to be worth two or three times. And he used a word that wasn't, he didn't agree with me.

15:37But that's turned out to be the case. So all of these things have happened at the right moment in terms of sport and make it something that really is, I think, on fire. And it seems to me, I mean, certainly in the last few weeks, there's barely a day goes by without one of the teams signing a big new sponsor, without F1 itself announcing a new partner at the sort of central rights holder level. Huge element of competition within the sport now for brand partners. I was thinking about the team, Jeff, and I was thinking about if you put the allure of Aston Martin as a brand to one side for a moment, there's maybe three business development tools.

16:15And I would love to know whether you agree that they are business development tools and how they work for you. I'm going to give you them in order. Number one business development tool, Fernando Alonso, who is a probably, you know, he's very much not of the drive to survive generation, if you like, predates that. But actually, is that a bit of a point of distinction in terms of a driver, a driver profile? And he brings a different approach to working with partners and maybe different types of partners. Fernando is one of the most sophisticated athletes I've ever worked with, and I've worked with Michael Jordan and Ronaldo and lots of athletes.

16:55He is not only a world-class athlete by definition, but a super sophisticated guy who's obviously been around, but the type of guy who could be a CEO of a company type thing. I really enjoyed working with Fernando. Clearly, he's helpful, as you want to call it, a business development tool, but I think the first business development tool is the brand. We had a guy named Sebastian Vettel who actually was more accomplished than Fernando. And again, Sebastian Vettel couldn't be a more lovely guy, very different than Fernando as a human being, but a lovely human being. I don't think we attributed one deal we did to Sebastian.

17:31And I'm not sure we attribute a particular deal. I don't think we have one Spanish partner, per se, yet. He's fantastic. He's a great flag bearer for us. But I think the bigger business development tool is the brand, our organization, and the sport. Let me give you, despite that answer, Jeff, I'm going to give you two others. One is Adrian Newey himself, who you talked about, who came into the team and has been given technical control of the team. He seems to produce a very innovative looking vehicle, which we will see more of over the coming weeks, I'm sure, has taken the role of team principal.

18:09But his status within the sport, his almost sort of mythical, legendary status within the sport, his track record. Again, if nothing else, must add a slide to your deck in terms of what you're able to take to partners and talk to partners about. Sure. Adrian Newey is emblematic of the ambition of the team to become world championship and with his track record, he certainly adds huge credibility to that. Again, where Adrian has been very helpful in addition to that vision and the belief in accomplishing that vision and him doing that is, yes, for certain technology-based companies that think out of the box and that are different, Adrian is an excellent example of the human part famous for, and you can see it in his office, his big drawing board, which he draws by hand in today's modern world with AI and CFD and all that stuff.

18:58And I think a lot of the tech companies actually want to figure out a way to think about AI today. It isn't about just AI replaces human beings. It's about AI enhancing in human beings. And Adrian is a good example of that. But again, I couldn't point to one partner that we signed that has said, I'm doing this because you guys have Adrian Newey. We have a guy named Lawrence Stroll, who's pretty driven. Without Lawrence, we wouldn't do any of this. And as I mentioned, you and I could have different points here, but I'd go back to the brand. It's been our fundamental business development. Not to take away from points one, two, and three.

19:32Well, number three is coming, Jeff. I'm going to give you number three anyway. You mentioned it earlier, actually, but they used to call F1 HQ's factories, but factories undersells what you have now at Silverstone, much more in common with almost a university campus than a mere factory. But that is a physical monument to the team. And again, must at the very least help with the storytelling that you're trying to do. It does. It helps with storytelling. telling. I think most importantly, it helps with your ability to build a race car quicker because when we had our little quarter cabins or whatever it was, Eddie Jordan's place, you'd have to get a lot of stuff done by third-party suppliers.

20:16It would take weeks, not days, and not all in-house. We have the best of everything right now. It helps with recruiting people because who doesn't want to work in an environment like that? It certainly helped in the case of recruiting Adrian. So it's part of the story of the journey of the team. But again, I wouldn't point to a singular deal per se that's linked directly to that. But it is a big part of our story of our journey. I want to touch on, as we have earlier, the wider growth of F1. And you pointed to the US market. You pointed to Drive to Survive. There was obviously the movie last year as well.

20:53And we have just had a number of conversations in recent weeks on the podcast from the Australian Open, where there's been a real sort of focus on fan experience and sponsor activation for an ever-increasing number of partners. And some of the feedback from the event is that it has almost started to burst at the seams. And there's a real onus being put on how to deliver VVIP exclusive hospitality offerings. Now, F1 has obviously for many years had a reputation as some of the most top-end hospitality anywhere in sport, anywhere in entertainment. And I just wonder, as frankly, the number of sponsors across the board that need to be looked after and service has risen, how that changes your approach as a team in terms of providing genuinely different VVIP once-in-a-lifetime offerings to deliver for a growing number of partners at a time when maybe the paddock club, the paddock itself, is potentially getting a little bit less exclusive as, for very good reasons, Liberty is looking to make the sport as accessible as possible.

22:06I haven't had a lot of experience in sports. I've never seen a hospitality program that is so engaging and high level as you have in Formula One. Of course, it's part of their sport. It wasn't back in the days where I guess Bernie had to approve every paddock pass. So we have, in some ways, a great job when you have people come and we get emails all the time. It was the best Saturday of my seven-year-old's life. I've never been to a race before, but it is the nicest experience I've had. We haven't had a problem as we've expanded, and there's some economies of scale, you can do that as long as we continue to hire good people and service people really well.

22:45I would think, you know, if we have 4 ,000 people through Paddock Club in a year, that's 12 ,000 days. But it's not, you know, one basketball match. So, you know, we're not there yet. I think there'll be real constraints on number of Paddock Club tickets left and there are challenges as you grow your partnership. So I'm not saying it's not something to think about for the future, but I think it's addressable. that hasn't been in terms of a challenge of diluting that i think the opposite for us it's good because you know there has been a tradition in some cases where teams will sell paddock club tickets to third parties because who wants to sit on a ten thousand dollar ticket we don't do that we've really so far only seen the economies of scale and because of partners we have you know in our suite you can have drink a beautiful 19 year old scotch you can have your massage with an LMA spa.

23:34I mean, it's great. You get out of the paddock and see the garage. So, so far, I certainly, I don't feel like it's been diluted, but it is going to run up against constraints and capacity as all the teams develop their hospitality and you add an all-app team. So, for sure, that's going to be a challenge going forward. We mentioned so many brands are looking at Formula One if they're not already active in it. You will have a list of brands, I'm sure, that you're talking to and looking at and thinking about and all sorts of different categories. What should brands be aware of as they sort of think about embarking on a partnership in F1 or with an F1 team in particular?

24:07What are some of the maybe some of the less obvious things that would be useful for brand side executives to know? Well, David, I know you guys are experts and your listeners are experts in sports business. We all know what's happening with the business. It's not enough to put a sticker on a car and say, OK, you got your ROI based on the Nielsen number. That helps in some cases. I mean, as the sport gets bigger, it's being manifested in a lot more B2C deals. Traditionally, the sport, of course, is much more B2B. The B2C guys are more concerned about that, but of course, they're super sophisticated in trying to sell more product.

24:41So I think what a brand should know is that it's a sport. First of all, in my experience, there's not a sport in the world. If you're a team like we are, the vast majority of your revenue is coming from partnerships. We do not have a stadium. In fact, as teams, we have to pay. I spend tens of millions of dollars a year on tickets, which cost me money. I don't get money, it costs money. I don't have any direct TV rights, that's all done by F01. Merchandise sales are relative, but it's not a football club. I don't have my own channel. So there's no sport in the world more dependent on partnerships.

25:15So as teams in the sport, if we don't do that well, we don't go racing. So I think actually compared to my many years of football experience, the sport is inherently better at activation and understanding the importance of partnerships. That doesn't mean we always do it right. We have a particular approach at Aston Martin. And when we talk to people, we say, you need to activate this. We're going to help you. I've got a lot of turnkey stuff I can do. So you don't need to spend any money. I'll handle a lot of this if you want, but you want to activate this. What are your KPIs? What are you're trying to accomplish?

25:48What is your marketing plan? If you're a B2B company, it's more about how do we convert and create that brand? It's a B2C. It's how do we sell more Celsius? Whatever that is, that's what we specifically look at partner by partner. And you've got to activate it. Otherwise, you're not going to get the best out of it. But the sport is inherently ready for that and built for that. You've been around a lot of sports, Jeff, and it will come as no surprise to anybody listening that F1 is ticking all the boxes at the moment. It's variously being described as cool, as mainstream, as the sport of the moment.

26:24It's on this sort of hot streak in all sorts of ways. Thinking about the sport in general with your experience, when sports are going through incredible growth spurts like F1 is, what does the sport need to be wary of? What can stop this continuing? That is a great question, David. You can never, ever take for granted your fans, ever. And it's natural. It's human nature. Things are going great. Pie's getting bigger. Money's getting bigger. Nobody could have imagined the value actions a few years ago. I think also inherently international sports aren't as well structured to do fan engagement and fan development, I think, longer term.

27:06I've been in New York for 30 years, so I don't say this is a kind of American thinks Americans know everything. But if you want to, the best sports are those that are either developing that have to do fan engagement great or somebody like an NBA. The structure of our sport is a little different. You have in Liberty an incredible operator that has transformed the sport and done incredible things, but still not the size, the structure, the scope of an NBA. If you want an NFL, whatever it is. You have teams that have a lot of their own rights and we compete directly with F1 once in a while, we run things like sponsorship, which is, again, a bit of a different model.

27:42It's a different structure that you have to recognize, but often within that, you sometimes have a vacuum to do things like long-term fan engagement, fan development, which costs money. It doesn't have a direct impact. So that's, and one, two is how do you stay at the forefront of using technology for fan engagement? One is just making sure that it's important. Two, you know, how are you using all the different tools that we have today? We know children, I mean, I'm an 18, 19 year old. I don't think a kid ever watches television. They watch things on YouTube. They watch what they want. They time shift.