The F1 partnership worth studying right now is the oldest one. UBS and Mercedes have run for 15 years while everyone watched the new announcements.

I spend my time on one operator problem: how to defend a spend in a budget review when the payoff is slow, and the person across the table wants a number today. UBS looks like a brand that designed that fight out of existence, so this week I want to walk through how.

UBS has partnered with Mercedes since 2011 and renewed the deal more than a dozen times. The spend sits inside the division it serves, lives within a brand platform that never has to justify any single sponsorship alone, and produces exactly the content that the division needs.

The justification problem

A sponsorship always has its set of challenges, activation, and negotiations. You name it. But more often than not, the trouble shows up in the budget review, where someone has to defend a number whose payoff lands on a longer clock than the cycle it is measured against.

That gap, between when a sponsorship pays off and when it has to be justified, is where I see good spends quietly lose their footing. UBS closed the gap at two levels: who owns the spend, and how the whole thing is packaged.

Who signs the renewal?

The tell is in who announces the deal. UBS renewals are led by Iqbal Khan, Co-President of UBS Global Wealth Management, who says the partnership continues to deliver experiences clients cannot get elsewhere. The 2025 Singapore activation was hosted by Young Jin Yee, the firm's wealth-management country head there. Two wealth-management leaders put their names to a Formula 1 deal.

The spend sits with the people whose revenue it drives, so the case for keeping it gets made by the person who benefits. A wealth-management president attributes client engagement to a line he already controls. Whether the budget formally sits inside wealth management rather than group marketing is not something UBS publishes, though everything visible points that way.

The Craft platform

The packaging does the heavy lifting. UBS's F1 content is one vertical inside a single brand platform called Craft, which also runs couture, horology, art, and music. The platform came out of the Credit Suisse acquisition and launched globally in January 2024, with brand lead John McDonald framing craft as the lens UBS now uses to describe what it does for clients.

That one idea changes the internal conversation. F1 is the motorsport expression of craft, and craft is the thing UBS sells, so no single sponsorship stands alone in a budget review. The justification gets designed out at the platform level rather than fought deal by deal.

The customer is a billionaire (of course)

UBS is the world's largest wealth manager, and by some counts, it serves close to half the world's billionaires. Impressions on a global broadcast are not as significant as the quality of people, because the prospect list is small and exact. What the partnership buys is access and a credible reason to convene, and one new relationship at this level can run past the entire sponsorship fee on its own.

Two arms, one funnel

Craft delivers through two arms that work as a funnel. UBS Craftmakers is the digital arm, documentary-style short films consumed through open hubs and social, sitting at the top of the funnel and doing value transfer at scale with no product mentioned.

UBS House of Craft is the physical arm, invitation-only events co-curated with luxury houses, gated for high-net-worth clients at the bottom of the funnel where relationship managers do the work. The format ran as a Hodinkee horology exhibition in New York in October 2024 and as a Dior couture showcase in New York and Singapore through 2025.

The two arms feed each other. Every House of Craft event is filmed, so one evening in a gated room seeds weeks of digital content. The race-weekend hospitality and the October 2025 Singapore roundtable, where Russell hosted young racers at the UBS office, are the motorsport version of the same logic. F1 is House of Craft with an engine.

The team and the driver do different jobs

The Mercedes side carries the engineering story. The Craftmakers film, built around Technical Director James Allison, frames engineering as a collective craft and is pitched at the people who run organisations and recognise what sustained operational excellence costs.

The team also supplies the championship association built since 2011, and the race-weekend setting that a relationship manager cannot recreate alone.

George Russell does a different job. His own Craftmakers film, launched in May 2024, runs on his King's Lynn-to-F1 arc and maps individual discipline and consistency onto the language a wealth manager uses about long-term performance.

He is the convening draw that makes a closed-room invitation worth accepting, and he doubles as a distribution channel by sharing the film with his own audience on X and Instagram.

When Lewis Hamilton was still at Mercedes and on his way to Ferrari, he made a similar Craftmakers film, and to my ear, the writing in his was sharper. George's version read as though he was working from a script. Hamilton's carried the ease of a conversation he might have with friends.

Regardless, the team is the institutional proof, and Lewis & Russell are the human who makes that proof travel.

The full content system

15 years is the proof

UBS has been a Mercedes partner since 2011, across seven drivers' titles and eight constructors' titles, most recently extending through the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix into the 2026 regulation era. In a category where sponsors churn constantly, 15-plus years is the evidence by itself. A deal that survives that long is producing something the wealth-management division can keep pointing at.

What the case shows

For a brand, the justification problem eases on two fronts. Ownership puts the spend with the division that benefits, so there is no awareness number to sell to a sceptical finance team. Packaging gives every sponsorship one platform story, and content built so the gated events and the open films feed each other turns one moment into months of reusable material. The talent works hardest when it doubles as a distribution channel.

For a rights holder, the content a sophisticated B2B sponsor wants is capturable access: intimate access, the ambassador's time, and the behind-the-scenes that become their owned, shareable asset. A logo on the car gives the sponsor nothing to feed into a content system, while access gives them evidence that their revenue division can attribute outcomes to. The sponsor who can keep producing their own renewal evidence is the sponsor who renews for 15 years.

The best sign a spend justifies itself is that nobody inside is fighting to keep it. UBS has not had to re-argue Formula 1 from zero in over a decade, because it runs a content system that happens to have a race team and a driver inside it.