A conversation with two motorsport experts, Senior Creative Producer Jake Smith and Creative Director Rob Statham, about why the best motorsport partnerships feel like they belong.

Rob Statham was walking past a Cognizant office in London when he noticed an Aston Martin F1 car on display in the window and paused to see how people reacted. Nobody stopped to take a photo or even seemed to look. Rob said that, as a child, he would have been glued to the glass.

Now, he suggested, people have seen so many show cars that the car alone can't be expected to hold their attention.

Rob and Jake Smith have spent years producing live brand experiences in F1. They're now building a motorsport agency that works with brands and their agencies across experiential strategy, creative, production and insight.

What Rob saw in that window is a small detail, but it gets at the question running through my conversation with them: what does a brand add to an experience that racing cannot provide on its own?

A car is exciting, and driving a simulator can be fun. Neither necessarily tells you why a particular company is involved.

A brand can enter a three-year F1 partnership and spend much of its first year working out what it wants the partnership to mean. Rob described that period as being "a bit lost at sea." By the time the brand has a clearer direction, the launch momentum may have passed.

That uncertainty eventually shows up in the work. If the purpose isn't clear, the brief can become a request for "the new thing": an idea that attracts attention, whether or not it explains why the brand is in motorsport.

A B2B technology partner might need to engage a small group of influential people and demonstrate its expertise, while a lifestyle brand might need something entirely different. The activation only makes sense once you understand that distinction.

Without that understanding, the work can become a collection of familiar motorsport ingredients: a show car in the space, a simulator, maybe a reaction test.

Each gives people something to see or do, but Jake questioned whether driving a virtual F1 car says much about the specific partner beside it. A reaction test relates to driver training; it doesn't automatically explain the sponsor's contribution to a team or the sport.

Rob raised a more personal concern about simulators. He can drive a car, he said, but he isn't particularly good on a sim and wouldn't want an audience watching him crash. A visitor might wait half an hour, struggle through a few laps and leave frustrated. That, too, becomes part of their experience of the brand.

Neither of them was arguing for a ban on sims or show cars. When I brought up a Williams and Claude experience where Claude analysed someone's driving after their simulator session, they saw how the asset could do more than offer a brief turn behind the wheel.

Rob made a similar point about show cars: place one at the centre of a larger story, and it can still be powerful. The problem is putting it on the ground and expecting it to do the heavy lifting.

Jake put the creative challenge neatly. If you removed the logos and colours from a brand experience, would a community still recognise whose it was?

The test goes beyond visual identity to whether the activity itself carries the brand's point of view.

If another sponsor could take over the installation tomorrow without changing anything but the signage, the experience may be drawing all its meaning from F1 and very little from the partnership.

It also matters who the experience is meant to reach. Jake described F1 as a place where racing, driver personalities, fashion, music, design and other interests overlap.

Fans aren't neatly divided into those categories; they move between them. Rob worried that, in the rush to reach newer culture-led audiences, brands could overlook the committed race fans who already care deeply about the sport.

Location also changes the brief. An on-track fan zone needs to engage people differently from a downtown installation. A B2B experience explaining a technical partnership has a different job from an activity designed for a broad race-day crowd. The same idea cannot be assumed to work equally well for all of them.

And the audience extends beyond anyone who can attend in person. Jake said an activation needs a way to reach fans away from the track, whether through digital interaction or strong content storytelling.

Rob talked about considering experiential, content and retail together from the start, using the elements that make sense for a particular project rather than bolting a digital story on afterwards.

Similar to my conversation with Alex about digital inventory last week.

Late in the call, our conversation moved from how to plan an experience to how it feels when the result misses.

We got onto music in F1, and Rob brought up a branded song he felt had missed the mark. His reaction was funny and a lot less measured than the strategy discussion that preceded it.

Jake and Rob then pointed to music-related work they felt had landed better: Aston Martin's collaboration with Defected, and the F1 movie soundtrack's presence at the 2025 Miami Grand Prix, where artists became part of the event.

Putting the two side by side made their earlier argument tangible. Associating a brand with a part of culture is easy to describe and much harder to make convincing when people encounter the actual work.

Rob saw fashion as the most visible crossover in F1, though not necessarily the one that resonates most with everyone.

Music, they suggested, is more dependent on taste and on where in the world an activation takes place. So the choice of cultural reference is a strategic decision in its own right.

People experience a partnership through the song they hear, the queue they stand in, the simulator they try and the car they walk past in the window. What they take away depends on whether any of it gives them a reason to understand why that brand is there.

A great motorsport activation borrows the excitement of racing and then makes the brand's place in that world feel earned.