Max Verstappen won the first ever Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix on Sunday, taking the podium surrounded by turquoise walls in front of around 85,000 fans, capping a huge week for Oracle Red Bull Racing and F1.
Red Bull — and now Oracle, which joined the Formula 1 team as a title sponsor in February in a deal worth a reported $500 million — have seen major benefits from Formula 1’s rapidly growing presence and fanbase in the U.S.
On Thursday, Oracle Red Bull gained a sponsor with a distinct tie to the race: Hard Rock, which holds naming rights to the Hard Rock Stadium race site in an 18-year, $250 million deal.
“We obviously have engaged very heavily in the corporate world,” said team principal Christian Horner.
Uniting with Oracle has been uniquely fruitful for both sides.
- “We knew we needed to start looking into tools like AI and ML to advance our capabilities as a business,” Zoe Chilton, Oracle Red Bull Racing’s head of partnerships, told Front Office Sports.
- Oracle lends technical expertise to Red Bull’s fan platform, The Paddock, as well as its race simulations.
Crypto Connection
The weekend also brought heaps of exposure to its title sponsor, Crypto.com.
“It became very clear that this wasn’t going to be just another race,” Crypto.com’s chief marketing officer Steven Kalifowitz told FOS. “This was going to be a global event that might only be rivaled by the FIFA World Cup in terms of international attention.”
The crypto exchange announced last week that its user base rose from 10 million at the end of Q1 2021 to a current tally of 50 million.
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