re: 2023 Formula 1 season Thread

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WTF1 is the only F1 podcast I listen to.

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While the livery is largely similar to last year’s design – the major difference being a matte finish – Gulf Oil International CEO Mike Jones says it was important Gulf protected its iconic color scheme having run it as a one-off with McLaren in Monaco in 2021, but did not rule out a return at some stage.

“Of course anything we do in the future has got to be bigger and better than before,” Jones said. “We have a lot of Gulf fans around the world, we have a lot of requests for our livery. We want our livery to be special.

“We’re launching a number of fan-centric activation plans. We always feel that Gulf is the fans’ favorite and we really want our fans to be a part of that, so of course we’re looking at different solutions for that right across the Formula 1 spectrum, and we’ll be launching activation plans in the new future.”

Jones also elaborated on why Gulf had left McLaren for Williams over the winter, having had a deep history with Zak Brown’s team.

“We had a great partnership with McLaren, some real highlights – the Monaco livery I guess being at the pinnacle of that – but our relationship with McLaren kind of came to a natural end, we’d achieved everything that we probably could with the McLaren Formula 1 team and so we started looking at what was next for us within Gulf and Formula 1.

“We talked a lot to Williams around their plans not just for 2023 but the future, and we really believed that Williams are going in the right direction, there’s a lot of good things happening here. It was very attractive for us as well to have sponsorship across the academy and esports.

“Gulf is known as the iconic brand, iconic is sometimes misinterpreted as ‘old’, and esports was very attractive to us because it brings Gulf to the younger generation.

“And then the culture here is very much one of passion, very much one of teamwork, we really liked what we saw and we felt it was a really good fit.”

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