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I've built paid membership programmes myself and spent months studying what makes them hold up under real subscriber scrutiny.
McLaren has launched a new paid fan membership programme, Papaya Membership, and that work is why it caught my attention this week — laying out, almost by accident, where the value maths holds up for fans and where it still needs work.
Every team on the grid is running some version of a paid-vs-free fan bet right now.
Haas launched a free loyalty tier the same week McLaren launched a paid one.
Williams runs a free points ladder.
McLaren charged $90 AUD and called it Papaya Membership.
Today's issue is about why that split matters more than it looks, and what it costs the teams that get the pricing wrong.
In today's issue:
Why fans are pricing memberships against Netflix
What UK-only perks miss about McLaren's real fanbase
The beta stage McLaren skipped before launching Papaya
What's still missing from Papaya Membership's value case
COMMERCIAL NEWS
🛠️ BUILD
Tom Alder (Strategy Breakdowns) broke down how Logitech rebuilt a dying commodity mouse business into $5.25bn in revenue by pulling money out of the cheap line and pricing a premium mouse at $119.99 — undercutting your own category on price protects revenue today and kills the premium tier you'll need tomorrow.
Ryan Tinslay (AND THE NEW) launched Significant Figures with SAP, a scalable content format built around motorsport figures rather than a one-off activation — ownable IP compounds a partnership's value across a season in a way a single-race stunt never does.
📈 MONETIZE
Sarah Beakey detailed how LVMH used the Belgian Grand Prix to stage Moët & Chandon's $13,450 Out Lap dining experience and its La Maison pop-up — a title sponsorship doing double duty as a client acquisition funnel for the parent group's luxury houses, not just podium branding.
Lewis Hamilton launched Card Culture, a trading card retail venture with Dave & Adam's, opening a physical store in Frankfurt alongside the online shop — an athlete building commerce infrastructure around his own fandom rather than licensing his name to someone else's.
🌱 GROW
Terry Widdows (Coffee Corner Motorsport) went through F1's half-year report and found the fan-satisfaction survey behind its growth messaging draws from a panel representing roughly 0.007% of the sport's 830 million claimed fanbase — record attendance and social growth are real, but the sentiment data backing them is thinner than the headline suggests.
⚙️ OPERATE
Amanda Natividad (SparkToro) shared Dropbox's blackout-test data: attributed ROAS on mobile ads and search looked healthy, but causal testing showed both channels underwater, and reallocating $25M improved portfolio LTV:CAC by 53% — attribution tells you what got credit, not what caused the result.
🧑💼 STRATEGY
Matt Cleverley (Studio Novera) asked why almost every F1 hospitality brand uses the same red, white and black palette — when an entire market makes the same safe colour choice, safe becomes invisible, and none of those colours even read as premium to begin with.
Mercedes signed four of its first ten F1 sponsors before the car won a single race.
The full roster took five years, Petronas in December 2009 to Qualcomm in March 2015, and all ten were in place four years before Drive to Survive existed.
Drive to Survive gets the credit now. But Mercedes built its roster years before the series aired, and it built it while losing: fourth in 2010, fourth in 2011, no win until the 2012 Chinese Grand Prix.
If you sell sponsorship, at a rights-holder or an agency, the earliest partners are the hardest to sign, and you can't count on a boom like Drive to Survive to do the selling for you.
I worked backwards through the accounts, the period press and one person who was there from the start, to find what actually got those brands to sign, and to turn it into a method you can run on your own accounts.
FAQ
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The Commercial Table dissects how rights holders, brands, and suppliers actually grow their commercial operations in motorsport and beyond.
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