When the Formula 1 team McLaren won its first Constructors’ Championship in more than 25 years last season, it was the only team on the grid without a naming rights sponsor. Halfway through the 2025 season, McLaren is firmly in the lead for the constructors’ again, but its naming rights are now spoken for.
Say hello to the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 team—as of 2026, that is.
Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer, told Marketing Brew that while McLaren was the only team with naming rights available, he still had talks with a handful of other top teams before deciding on the partnership. The goal for the sponsorship, which is reportedly the largest F1 title sponsorship and the biggest commercial deal yet for McLaren, is to drive brand awareness and affinity through unique activations, he said.
“We are now predominantly an experiential marketing organization, not an advertising-led organization,” Rajamannar told Marketing Brew. “Our approach is not just about flashing our brand, but bringing our brand to life through experiences that money cannot buy.”
Pitch Paddock perfect
About a year and a half ago, the Mastercard marketing team ran an analysis of its sponsorships and found a hole the size of F1, Rajamannar said, although it did have some motorsports experience. Mastercard sponsors the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a motorsports festival in England, during which Rajamannar said he noticed “the impact and the passion” of car racing.
That, combined with the growth of F1 following the rise of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, got him studying the landscape, he said—which included binge-watching the docuseries.
F1 has become increasingly popular in the US in large part thanks to the show, and it’s growing specifically among women, who made up three-quarters of new fans as of a survey released this summer by F1 and Motorsport Network. Women also account for about 75%–80% of spending Mastercard cardmembers, according to Rajamannar.
Those stats helped inform Rajamannar’s early conversations with F1 teams about sponsorship opportunities, but he told us he wasn’t interested in just any team. While some CMOs are willing to bet on teams before they have winning records, Rajamannar said he wanted to go with one of the best.
“We wanted to be associated with a better team than just put our brand on some car or the other,” he said.
McLaren stood out for a few other reasons, including the fact that the team seemed fan-focused and marketing-oriented, he said. Rajamannar also said he got along well with McLaren CEO Zak Brown, who has a marketing background, and liked that McLaren’s drivers, 25-year-old Lando Norris and 24-year-old Oscar Piastri, are fairly young and are both “extremely good,” he said—they’re currently battling for the World Drivers’ Championship.
While McLaren hadn’t won the constructors’ when Rajamannar and Brown started talking, the team had enough momentum for Mastercard to get on board, debuting as a principal sponsor during the Las Vegas Grand Prix last year.
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“Since then, the experience has been brilliant for our customers,” Rajamannar said. “We said, ‘Wow, this has got actually a lot more potential than we originally even thought.’ We come up with one idea, McLaren comes up with two ideas.”
That potential is what led Rajamannar to ask Brown about the naming rights, he told us, and while McLaren hadn’t previously found a brand it wanted to include in its team name, Brown and the team agreed to bring Mastercard on.
The deal, which was announced in late August, is “very long-term,” Rajamannar said, though he declined to share the exact length of the arrangement. He also declined to comment on value, but said that given the team’s and drivers’ winning records this season, “it is not cheap.” Last week, The Athletic reported that the deal was worth somewhere “in the region of $100 million per season,” and that it would stretch through the 2030s.
Driver’s seat
In addition to naming rights, experiential opportunities for fans through an initiative called “Team Priceless” are a major part of the partnership, as well as Mastercard’s marketing in general. The majority of Rajamannar’s total marketing budget is allocated toward experiential activations, he said.
Earlier this summer, McLaren and Mastercard announced 15-year-old fan Olivia Lawson as the winner of their first “Junior Race Engineer” competition focused on inspiring next-generation motorsport fans and engineers; she spent a day at the McLaren Technology Centre ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. Mastercard also has plans to offer fans experiences like driver meet and greets, according to the company.
Between the naming rights and the fan experiences, Rajamannar said he’s aiming to achieve three different goals. First, he’s hoping the McLaren partnership will “make [Mastercard] more prominent, more relevant, and more lovable,” he said, which the Mastercard marketing team measures by tracking visibility of the brand on TV and elsewhere and through surveys. He’s also looking to drive revenue for the company, which he’ll measure by tracking card spend in markets where Mastercard activates the partnership, he said.
Lastly, Rajamannar said, the sponsorship is designed to give Mastercard a “sustainable competitive advantage” in the market, meaning “competition will find it very difficult to replicate.”
And while it’s not a key metric that Rajamannar said he plans to track, he is hoping that winning means added screentime for McLaren—and, subsequently, now Mastercard—on the next season of Drive to Survive.
“If the team that we have chosen keeps winning more and more, then obviously it will show up more than the other brands in the show,” he said. “The show, it’s fun. It will be great to be more visible and obvious.”
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