Drivers like Sir Lewis Hamilton, Lando Norris, Pierre Gasly and athletes alike are doing more than just brand partnerships through their own products and creating documentaries.

That option is not always available for drivers like Ollie Bearman, who races for Haas F1. On a call recently about drivers, I was asked two questions.

Both are internal positioning questions. This is a short document with two or three things you want a buyer to think about him.

Keep this for the internal team before you decide what to film and which brands to chase and what messaging to go to market with.

Looking at his partner page, he has 8 partners:

Beats is Apple-owned, and La Roche-Posay belongs to L’Oreal. Both are household consumer brands.

Zoomex is a crypto exchange, Deus X works across capital markets, fintech and digital assets, and FunderPro backed him through F2 as a prop trading firm.

Aventum is a reinsurance group and his dad’s business.

So he already reaches household brands, including two of the largest consumer brands in the world. Every deal he has won sells him as a face, and the only B2B money on the roster is with Aventum.

This category would come after your internal diagnosis and segmentation analysis first, and it still needs some defined guardrails. B2B tech is a massive sector.

The case holds up anyway; it starts with how long these brands stay. Alphonso Davies signed a five-year deal with BMO in 2022. Capital One has run Samuel L. Jackson for well over a decade (not an athlete, but it makes a similar case). A five-year partner is a partner you’re not replacing, and most of a small commercial team will be better served to renew those contracts than to find new ones.

Banks also buy the national angle, which is the closest thing to a repeatable route in. Santander and Carlos Sainz are both Spanish, and when Sainz left Ferrari for Williams, Santander followed. The deal is attached to the driver. BMO and Davies are both Canadian. For a British driver, the equivalents are Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and Wise, and this is where the five-Brits problem bites, because Hamilton, Norris and Russell all sit ahead of him in that queue. Revolut's title deal with Audi is the version where the bank works out what it wants the sponsorship to move before it signs.

We will keep searching for hours if we don’t narrow down the B2B tech brand criteria. Whether that’s B2B SaaS, Tech Hardware and Infrastructure, enterprise security, or IT Operations. Within those, there are more subcategories.

Narrowing gets you the list. What decides whether the list is worth working is whether a driver can solve that category’s problem at all, which means being honest about what he does besides reach. An enterprise security firm selling to CISOs has a specific job to do, and a photograph of a fast car doesn’t do it.

Most enterprise tech brands partner with teams that are operationally ready to service them, either through a strong technical partnership or a demonstration (only if it’s a technical partnership).

Through researching all previous and active deals across motorsport, enterprise software partners with drivers only when it needs a face for a market it can’t otherwise reach through the team level. For example, Acumatica through Scott McLaughlin in the US mid-market.

Consumer tech buys reach instead, for example, PlayStation, Motorola, Beats, Insta360.

Instead of aiming for these enterprise B2B companies, it’s best to map out and target B2B companies more for the average B2B buyer or SMEs.This is an assumption.

This positioning starts with demand; if they can’t connect to what those customers care about, they will struggle to move that position.

As much as it’s a sport, if I am on the drivers team, I prefer to view the driver from a product POV. What does Ollie provide in this instance that customers are buying and paying for?

Typically, that is increasing their mental availability with people that are unaware of them. As an F1 driver, the best product they provide is global reach across the travelling circus.

As a driver in his second full year at a midfield team, he can give a partner a certain amount of filming days (let's say 30 for this example), whereas a title contender gives out ever fewer (let’s say 4 for this example).

That’s an asset to build on before it starts to shrink every season he’s in Formula 1. However, keep in mind the other new guys on the grid can also provide this inventory, especially someone like Kimi Antonelli, who will be sought after.

Being British with 4 million followers certainly helps his cause in attracting the right markets and brands. That his creator works, so to speak. So far he’s done:

In terms of answering the question, what he does outside of Formula 1? More collaborations with creators outside of motorsport would help. Organically finding what he enjoys doing when he’s off track.

He’s known to be a big foodie and is stubborn about letting anything get between him and his meal. So a collaboration with the food YouTuber Calfreezy would help.

All of these borrow audiences, and Tiggy Valen made the case in Esses that Liberty turned 20 drivers into media empires, with Hamilton running Almave, Dawn Apollo Films, and Plus 44. Norris building Quadrant, Leclerc launching LEC and SIDEQUEST, and Bottas selling gin under OATH.

The roadmap to get there exists, but it wouldn’t be the smartest choice since he’s still building his career.

But if B2B tech brands and banking brands are the customer, it’s worth looking at which markets he dominates and how he provides a solution for those particular brands. Some SparkToro analysis is required. Also, it depends on the list of brands and sectors his team selects.

These are tests of credibility. What can he genuinely deliver? What assets and capabilities make the chosen position believable?

Five British drivers are on the 2026 grid, the most in 30 years. Being British is something a UK Bank wants, and he can obviously deliver, and it still puts him fourth in line behind a seven-time world champion, a new British champion in Lando Norris and a race winner in George Russell.

What might be overlooked is that he races for a B2B manufacturer. Haas Automation makes CNC machine tools and sells them to factories, and then the F1 team runs as that company’s marketing programme. With his second season there, he has spent his working life inside a B2B brand-building exercise.

That opens doors with industrial and enterprise buyers who already understand why a machine tool company is in F1. JCB runs the same logic at Aston Martin, sponsoring to hold onto the customers it already has.

If the category says the same thing, that’s not a strategic position, so you need to set it against alternatives.