If you don’t know what happened, I wrote about the Norris can situation on LinkedIn.

Coke got a handful of buying-situations links out of one sentence.

Kimi Antonelli won the Spanish Grand Prix at the Madring on Sunday from Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, but Monday morning everyone had seen the short exchange in the cooldown room.

An off-camera official asked Norris to put away the can of Coca-Cola he was drinking. Norris politely said: “I just did a race, so I’m allowed to drink what I would like. Thank you so much.”

He said this while sitting in front of a Moët & Chandon backdrop, wearing a Richard Mille watch, next to a driver covered in Red Bull branding. Tom Potter made the same point on LinkedIn.

I went through the list on Monday, because it’s important to understand who’s playing in the drinks space in F1 and what the official thought they were protecting.

PepsiCo took sports drinks and energy drinks at the series level for 2026, with Gatorade and Sting. Heineken has beer, Moët Hennessy champagne, Belvedere vodka, Glenmorangie whisky, and French Bloom non-alcoholic sparkling wine.

The teams cover the rest: Red Bull owns two of them and brought Patrón; Monster sits with McLaren after moving across from Mercedes; Celsius arrived at Aston Martin this year; Ferrari has Peroni 0.0 and Chivas Regal; McLaren has Jack Daniel’s; and Jim Beam signed with Cadillac. I pulled apart how one of these drinks deals actually gets activated in Aston F1 let Glenfiddich run the funnel.

The drivers are spoken for, with Verstappen on Heineken 0.0, Hamilton on his own Almave and Leclerc on Chivas and Celsius.

Coca-Cola’s own position is two steps removed. It owns a minority stake in Monster Beverage, bought at 16.7% for $2.15B in 2014 and has since increased it. It holds pouring rights at Circuit of the Americas on a five-year deal from 2023.

Tom Potter at Rush Sport & Entertainment thinks so.

I spoke to Tom Potter and Jonny Odell at Rush Sport & Entertainment, who have spent 30+ years combined in motorsport sponsorship and advising brands.

“I don’t believe for a moment this wasn’t planned.”

Two things sit behind that, as I heard it. Coca-Cola is not a recovery drink, so the choice of can was deliberate rather than convenient, and Jonny came at it from the other direction: a driver reaching for something after a race reaches for an isotonic bottle, which is what every other cooldown-room clip shows.

Tom also suspects McLaren is in renewal discussions with Coca-Cola, possibly with a senior Coca-Cola exec in Madrid, which would make the moment a live demonstration of what the team can deliver.

“That’s blown up and got Coke tons of exposure,” was how he put it. On the official who asked: “an amateur mistake to ask him. Anyone with any experience would have guaranteed his response.”

Nobody has confirmed this, but Tom and Jonny advise on these deals for a living, so their opinions carry weight.

Whether they planned it or not, the commercial lesson is the same. If McLaren engineered this moment, they did it by understanding category entry points (CEPs).

A set of links between a buying situation and the brand, which determines the next thing a buyer reaches for.

A category entry point is the cue that sends someone into a category in the first place:

The cue is a need, thought or a situation, and the brain recalls a shortlist of brands already attached to that category, and the person buys from that list.

The whole thing is intuitive. Nobody stands at a petrol-station fridge running a comparison. They walk in with a situation already in their head and reach for what brand sticks in their head.

So the commercial question for any brand is how many situations it is attached to and associated with, and how firmly. It is the same argument I made about JCB’s F1 deal never winning an order.

SmilingCFO’s data across 30-plus categories puts numbers on that. Someone who cannot link a brand to a single entry point buys it at a rate under 1%.

In a recent US sports category study, more than 60% of buyers who could make six or more links to the leading brand said they had bought it. Six is roughly where the curve bends, and those links get built one situation at a time.

So back to the can. Jenni Romaniuk’s method for finding these cues asks seven questions about the situation: why, when, where, while, with whom, with what, and how feeling.

Here is how I scored the cooldown room moment.

Why: reward after effort.

When: immediately after the chequered flag

Where: backstage, out of sight of the crowd

While: recovering, waiting to be called to the podium

With whom: in front of your two rivals

With what: nothing

How feeling: overheated, drained, and visibly annoyed

How feeling is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the cue qualitative research routinely misses. Buyers describe their occasions in rational terms when you ask them directly.

Coca-Cola has spent decades building the “hard day, then a cold one” association through window-cleaner commercials and Christmas trucks, and Norris delivered it unprompted in one line, in the exact situation, from someone people believe.

A can in a driver’s hand at that moment attaches the brand to a situation a category buyer enters several times a week.

The job is to find the situations that send people into your category, then work out which of those your brand can realistically come to mind in.

Get the category boundary right first. A category drawn too narrowly flatters you, because you have excluded the brands you actually lose to, and one drawn too widely leaves a smaller brand failing to register links it has. Coca-Cola’s category in Madrid is soft drinks, even though they didn’t sponsor the race.

Find the cues qualitatively, and dig for the emotional ones. Run the seven W’s over the buying situation. Why, when, where, while, with whom, with what, and how feeling. The rational cues come up in the first ten minutes of any focus group. The emotional ones take work, because people put their own behaviour in rational terms when you ask them directly. “Hard day, want a reward” is the one that did the work in Madrid, and it is the one a survey about refreshment would never surface.

Rank the cues with no brands attached. Before you look at yourself, measure how many category buyers actually use each cue to enter the category. In the chocolate work SmilingCFO published, each of the top ten cues was used by more than 75% of buyers. A cue three-quarters of your category reaches for is worth more than one you happen to own already.

Then measure who owns what. Second round: brands in. Compare each brand’s links against what its size predicts. Five points above expected is a mental advantage. Past ten, you hit diminishing returns and the money is better spent elsewhere. Cues where no brands lead are white space, and they are cheaper to take than anything contested.

Pick six and brief against them for two or three years. Six links is where the purchase curve bends, so the target is six cues that are high-use, credible for your brand, and lightly defended. Then make every asset put the brand inside those situations, consistently enough that the association sticks. That runs on a timeline of years rather than campaigns, which is roughly what I found in Mercedes AMG F1: 10 sponsors in 5 years.

For a rights holder, the same method points at inventory and creative. Run the seven Ws over the weekend itself: the grid walk, the cooldown room, the media pen.

Write out what buying situation (giving attention or money) each one puts a viewer inside, and which categories credibly own it. That gives you a second inventory sheet, priced by situation rather than surface area.

If you’re the brand side within the sport, start by counting the links. If every asset in your motorsport programme attaches you to “motorsport”, you have one, and you’re sitting at the bottom of the curve.

Audit what your existing spend connects you to, in the words a buyer would use rather than the words on the rate card.