I went back through every one of those signings and dated them.

The full roster took five years, from 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 for all of it now, the 2019 Netflix series that pulled a younger, global audience in and turned F1 into the biggest commercial story in sport.

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 Nico Rosberg took the 2012 Chinese Grand Prix, the works team's first in 57 years.

For anyone whose job is selling 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.

There's no roster to point to and no results; the value a win would swing your way hasn't arrived, and it might never come at all. A brand that comes in that early is buying a promise.

Mercedes landed them before a win, so I worked backwards through the accounts, the period press, the livery archive and one person who was there from the start, to find what actually got those brands to sign.

It bought the reigning 2009 champions, kept Ross Brawn, and inherited an older, affluent audience that premium brands were already desperate to reach.

Mercedes didn't start from scratch. It bought Brawn GP, the reigning 2009 champions, and kept Ross Brawn as Team Principal, so a brand-new team walked in with a proven winner already at the helm.

Daimler took 45.1 per cent and Abu Dhabi's Aabar 30, with Brawn and Nick Fry keeping the rest between them. The people doing the early selling had their own money in it.

New name, new silver image, untested in the new colours, but carrying the pedigree of the side that had just won the title. It was Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan turning up at a new franchise that hadn't won a thing: unproven in the new colours, and hard to bet against.

The Brackley operation had been built from scratch in 1998 as British American Racing, became Honda, then Brawn, and carried more than a decade of the same people into the Mercedes era.

I know that because I asked someone who lived it. Nicole Bearne joined at that 1998 start and was there through all of it.

A team that had just won the title, with Ross Brawn as principal, the Mercedes brand behind it and the seven-time champion Michael Schumacher driving, she told me, "would have been an attractive proposition to potential sponsors."

The audience it inherited was nothing like F1's today. This was a decade before Drive to Survive pulled in a young, global, far more diverse crowd.

The fans watching in 2010 skewed older, wealthier and male, with premium tastes and premium spending habits, and almost none of the young and female fans the sport now counts in the millions.

That audience is the reason the brand-building leaned on heritage, engineering and prestige, and it was exactly the buyer its sponsors wanted. UBS, IWC and Hugo Boss all chase the same affluent customer, and an older, wealthier F1 crowd is where that customer sits.

No: the accounts show the team losing money through its winning years, with the sponsorship revenue arriving a full year after the results.

I pulled the filings for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd off Companies House and read them year by year.

The team spent about £126m running fourth in 2010, went through what the reports call the "low point of the cycle of investment" in 2011–12, and kept losing money even as it started winning: a £76.9m loss in 2014, the title year, a £22.3m loss in 2015.

The 2015 turnover jumped £66.3m, and the accounts say why: it came "from higher sponsorship revenue and increased income from the commercial rights holder flowing from improved on-track performance in 2014."

The sponsorship money arrived a full year after the results. The early partners had signed years before any of it, on the strength of something the scoreboard couldn't offer yet.

It made the team known, recognised and wanted, by fans and by brands, before any result existed to justify it.

Brand building is the slow work of making a team known, recognised and wanted before it has the results to justify any of it. The technical name is mental availability: how readily a brand comes to mind, and how good it feels when it does.

For Mercedes it meant three things a sponsor could feel in 2010: a name people already knew, a look they already recognised, and a set of associations (heritage, engineering, prestige) that made the badge feel safe next to their own.

It had to work on two audiences at once: the fans who watched, pulled by heritage and a returning legend, and the brands who paid, reassured by premium and engineering.

The parts that lasted were the distinctive assets. The "Silver Arrows" name goes back to a 1934 race and is one of the most evocative in motorsport; Mercedes still uses it despite the cars wearing very little silver.

The three-pointed star has run consistently since 2010. The silver-and-Petronas-green colourway became the team's signature.

These are the things that compound. A rival can outspend you on a campaign, but it can't manufacture a ninety-year-old name, and recognition only deepens the more a fixed set of assets is repeated.

It signed Michael Schumacher and revived the Silver Arrows, pulling global coverage a fourth-place car could never have earned.

When I traced the coverage back, the fame came from two people and one story.

Michael Schumacher's comeback, confirmed in December 2009, was the biggest F1 story since Niki Lauda came back in 1982, and it pulled global coverage while the car ran fourth.

I couldn't find a number from the time for the scale of the announcement (nobody counted the outlets), so that stays a gap. But the effect showed up on television: RTL's audience for the 2010 Bahrain opener roughly doubled, from 5.35m in 2009 to 10.51m.

They activated the heritage deliberately, and well beyond a press release. The January 2010 launch staged the Silver Arrows revival at the Mercedes-Benz Museum for 200 journalists.

After Rosberg's first win in 2012, Norbert Haug ran Fangio's 1955 W196 Silver Arrow and Schumacher in demonstration laps at the DTM, linking the new team to the 1955 legend in front of a home crowd.

Each of these built recognition and association (the assets that last) rather than a single sale.

Then it compounded across channels, and I could date every link.

Press fed TV: the December 2009 frenzy became RTL's doubled audience by March 2010. Sport fed the mainstream: the 2014 Hamilton–Rosberg rivalry, Monaco to Spa to Abu Dhabi, put Hamilton on Sports Personality of the Year. All of it fed social: by February 2015 Mercedes was the first F1 team to a million Twitter followers.

Two drivers in the same car made a fresh story every other weekend, and a rivalry pulls coverage the results can't, with no media invoice attached.

A place next to the three-pointed star, where a century of premium did the de-risking that on-track results usually do.

Mercedes-Benz's own CEO has called brand-building the "core commercial value" of the F1 programme. Mercedes sold what it had (a hundred-year badge, the heritage, the engineering story) because it had no results to sell.

When I lined the signing dates up against the results, Petronas, UBS and a Swiss bank had all signed before a win.

A sponsor in 2010 was buying a place next to the three-pointed star, and a century of premium did the de-risking that results usually do. They were buying the badge, and the car barely came into it.

For a property, signing its hardest early partners- whatever sits next to you that a buyer already trusts does the work your own record can't yet.

It co-created products with partners like Petronas and IWC, so each deal kept producing, and every activation grew the team's fame in return.

When I looked at how the deals were actually built, they were made to do more than sit on the car as logos.

Petronas came in as title and technical partner, co-developing the fuel and lubricants ("Fluid Technology Solutions") that the team actually raced on.

IWC signed in 2013 as "Official Engineering Partner," on what both sides called shared "Performance Engineering"; Nick Fry said they'd found "another company that espouses the same principles, with the same insistence on absolute perfection."

A logo is rented and forgotten; a co-developed integration keeps generating product and story.

And it paid both ways. Petronas's own campaigns and the team's platform grew each other.

Petronas reported its F1 media exposure up around 400 per cent between 2012 and 2015, to a self-reported $901m in 2015, a media-exposure figure, one to take with a pinch of salt, as we've covered before.

The technology it built with the team fed Mercedes-Benz's road-car lubricants through a "Race to Road" programme. IWC ran its own advertising around the partnership and built co-branded watches in Petronas green.

Every partner's activation added to the team's fame, and the team's fame made the next partner easier to sign.

For its first three seasons, the car was famously bare, and it stayed that way on purpose. Wolff has described keeping "a small selective group that fit the brand and had more purpose than a sticker on the car."

In 2013 the team cut partners it judged a poor fit, and Nick Fry has said they came close to selling the whole car to a betting company before Mercedes killed it, because a car of that stature covered in betting logos would have looked wrong and cheapened the premium the whole strategy rested on.

A bare car makes the slots that are there feel rare, and rare holds its price.

A commercial team of five, led by Richard Sanders, landed the hardest partners in the sport before the team had won anything.

The bare car started as an inheritance. Brawn GP had carried barely any sponsors into 2010, so the big categories (oil and lubricants, clothing, watches) were open, with no existing contracts to work around.

That gave the team a category to own with each signing: Petronas in oil, Puma in clothing, IWC in watches, each the defining name in its space rather than one logo among many.

The work of putting those deals in place fell to a commercial team of five: commercial, partner services, marketing and communications, the whole operation in five people.

Richard Sanders was one of them, a sponsorship specialist who'd come from the agency Sportfive to Brackley late in 2008, just before the Brawn title year, and written his university thesis on how F1 sponsorship shifts a brand's image.

Nick Fry, the CEO, fronted the early negotiations, and Norbert Haug represented Mercedes-Benz on the biggest deals.

That team signed the hardest partners in the sport with no results to sell; Nicole Bearne credits Sanders and his group with landing the big sponsors, Petronas included. They're the names that don't appear when the partnership gets announced.

When Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda bought in and took over in 2013 (Wolff with about a third of the team), they put capital and structure behind the commercial side, and Bradley Lord arrived to build out communications.

The five-person team of the Brawn days was scaling up just as the winning arrived.

Stepping down in 2013, Fry set that commercial haul next to the 2009 double championship: the team had "gained the support of some of the most important companies in the world," he said, building "a strong foundation for the future success of the team."

In his interview with Darren Cox for The Race, How F1 sponsorship moved on from 'stickers on cars', Sanders, now the team's Chief Commercial Officer, described from the inside what that operation actually is: "a marketing agency … very good, highly specialised."

That team of five is now about 150, and the sponsorship and licensing revenue it built has gone from "literally zero" to over £500 million.

The commercial growth most of the sport still credits to winning and to Netflix was run, from the first five people in the room, as marketing.

The one clean read, YouGov's around the 2014 title, shows a genuine lift in buzz and purchase consideration, though no long-run tracker exists to prove the whole build.

The public record thins out here. I went looking for brand-attribute tracking (the surveys that measure whether people rate a brand differently over time), and almost none exists for the team in this period.

I'll flag that plainly rather than dress up exposure figures as perception data.

The one clean reading I found is YouGov's. Around the 2014 title, its BrandIndex tracker showed Mercedes' Buzz score up +6 across all respondents and +12 among motorsport fans, and Purchase Consideration up +11 overall, +14 among fans, and +17 among fans by early 2015.

YouGov's own conclusion was that the F1 success "helped to alter perception of the overall Mercedes brand." That is a snapshot around the win, not a tracker run across the whole build, so I'm treating it as one data point.

The longer signal I could find is brand value, and it rose steadily through these years: Interbrand valued the Mercedes-Benz brand at $23.9bn in 2009 and $36.7bn in 2015.

That is a value figure, not an attribute score, and Interbrand credits its products and marketing rather than F1. It sits here as a proxy that points the right way, not as proof the F1 programme did it.

Run Ritson's order on your own property: diagnosis, then strategy, then tactics, selling a consumer audience to a business buyer.

Strip away the cars, and this is a B2B job. You've got a consumer audience (fans, viewers, followers) and your task is to sell it to a business buyer and prove it moves their numbers.

The way to do that is Ritson's order: diagnosis, then strategy, then tactics. Get the sequence right and the hard part, getting in front of the right brand with a reason to care, gets easier.

Diagnosis: stop guessing, start knowing.

Before any pitch, do the honest audit. Who is your audience, really, in hard research rather than what you'd like to believe? Which properties are chasing the same sponsor money, and how do they position themselves? What forces are moving demand? And what do you honestly have, and not have, to sell?

Mercedes' audit was a premium badge on a fourth-place car, a near-empty roster with open categories, and an older, affluent crowd. Reading all of it is what told it which brands to chase.

Strategy: the big call.

Strategy is three choices, and each one is a sacrifice: unless you've said no to something, all you have is a wish list.

Targeting: name the two or three categories your audience is the dream customer for, build a list of twenty brands, and ignore the rest.

Positioning: find the one thing you offer that a rival property can't- the access, the heritage, the data- and own that place in the buyer's mind, the way Mercedes owned heritage and engineering.

Objectives: decide the measurable outcome and build the model for it, because a brand's CMO has to defend the spend to a CFO. Put a number on what your audience is worth against the brand's real goal: pipeline, a launch, entry into a market.

Tactics: the four Ps, once the strategy is set.

Product is what you offer: co-create something their team can build and market from.

Price is your rate and how you protect it: category exclusivity and a short list keep the slots rare, and rare holds its price.

Place is where you show up: the channels your buyer is in, and staying in front of your twenty brands long before their budget exists, so you are the first call when it appears.

Promotion is the story you tell: nobody opens a rate card, so your first touch is three lines, the asset they can't get elsewhere, one idea built for them, and a single ask for twenty minutes.

Do the diagnosis and the strategy first, and the tactics almost pick themselves.

Get the sequence right, and you stop chasing brands and start being the one they come to, the slow, compounding work that builds a roster and a career.

Public record only: the UK company filings for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd, period press, exec interviews, partner announcements, and the livery archive, plus one first-hand account from someone who was inside the team from 1998.

Where the record is silent, I've said so: the scale of the 2009 Schumacher announcement is described everywhere and counted nowhere, and there is no public brand-attribute tracker running across 2009–2015 for the team. The YouGov reading is a single snapshot, and the brand-value series is a proxy.

Reported figures (Petronas's €30m, the $901m exposure) are flagged as reported or self-reported. Treating the roster as a brand-health signal is my lens for reading this, not a claim about how the team thinks.