Written by Tarun Suresh, Edited by Vyas Ponnuri
Sponsors play a pivotal role in funding an F1 team’s development and resources. They are even more important in teams which aren’t that well funded, to begin with, like Haas. While sponsors generally tend to help the teams, it isn’t uncommon to see some dubious sponsors make their way onto the grid.
As someone who watches quite a fair bit of live streams online, I was naturally invested in the streaming platform “Kick.”
The same Kick that sponsors the Sauber Formula One team. However, since the platform’s launch, it has been involved in its fair share of controversies, to say the least.
Former employees have accused the platform of racism, regular use of slurs and discrimination against streamers suffering from cancer.
This does not come as a surprise, considering the moral standing of the platform. At one point, they even had a separate category just to pirate movies, sports and TV shows, something they promptly shut down only after immense backlash.
Kick has unfortunately turned into a breeding ground for streamers whose platforms have been banned elsewhere due to stricter rules being enforced.
The range of offences include racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, slurs and even crimes like drunk driving run rampant on the platform with, more often than not, no action being taken against them.
In the rare event of action being taken against them, it is essentially equivalent to a slap on the wrist.
Kick is owned by Stake, which also sponsors the Sauber F1 team. Stake is an offshore gambling site.
Stake’s main source of income is preying on gambling addicts, often ruining the lives of these people both economically and socially.
Since it’s an offshore gambling site, it is not restricted by the laws that gambling sites based in the US are.
It can prey on addicts, have algorithms in place to make the site more inherently addicting and so on. Their entire business model is built on financially ruining the lives of their customers.
The question we really have to ask is if these dubious sponsors should even be allowed into F1 in the first place.
This question holds even more relevance when you consider a sizable portion of the F1 audience is on the younger side, meaning these advertisements are going to influence them fairly easily compared to adults as evidenced by past research studies.
Since organisations like Stake only care about the figures at the end of their accounts statements at the end of each quarter, they clearly won’t stop doing what they are doing.
Is the moral loss really worth having morally bankrupt organisations of Stake and Kick’s calibre being the face of an F1 team? More so, one that has supported and shaped the careers of several big names within the sport.
Of course, there are other problematic sponsors, such as Velo, who make nicotine pouches, partnering up with McLaren, while Petronas, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the South Sudanese Civil War, has been a long-time title sponsor of the Mercedes F1 team.
They deserve their own articles, and my focus remained on Stake/Kick for this one. Although, it is worth making a mention: McLaren’s Velo adverts have disclaimers, and Petronas isn’t complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity at the moment.
One cannot fully blame the teams accepting these sponsorships, either. Even a few hundred thousand pounds could prove vital in F1’s ever-tighter development race, especially for teams like Williams and Haas.
If FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem believes punishing drivers for swearing is a pursuit worthy of his time, then surely, preventing a young and impressionable audience from being influenced by sponsors ranging from addictive to outright dangerous and life-threatening should be a goal he should pursue vigorously.
As a sport with more popularity, and therefore more influence than ever before, do F1 themselves not have a responsibility to make sure their audience doesn’t have their lives negatively impacted?
Most of you are probably thinking that nobody who watches F1 is going to look at a sticker on the side of a car and purchase the product. I beg to differ.
For starters, people are more likely to purchase a product if it is associated with a person or brand which they like, in this case, their favourite team or driver.
There is an effect called “priming” with regard to advertisements, which means when someone is exposed to a stimulus, it will subconsciously lead to another stimulus.
For example, if I see a Google Chrome logo on the wheel covers of my favourite F1 car, I will be more likely to click on an advertisement urging me to download the Chrome browser.
There’s also something called the chameleon effect, where one tends to unconsciously mimic the actions of another.
If I see someone use a product, I’m more likely to use it too. On top of all that, if my favourite sports team does well, I’m more likely to have a positive impression of the sponsors/advertisers.
These are just four out of a myriad of ways a logo on a car or a racing suit can influence one’s mind without even being aware of it.
I’m guilty of it too, I’ve noticed that I’ve started to prefer Shell over other sources of fuel since I started supporting Ferrari, and started buying Duracell batteries and charging cables over rival brands ever since Carlos Sainz announced his move to Williams.
Although subconscious, these are the minute observations I just realised as I was writing this article, something that only puts the principle of advertising into practical effect.
Personally, I think gambling, smoking, alcohol and other addictive products should be banned from sponsoring the teams.
Of course, having a profit-focused organisation decide the sponsors to allow and ban gives a lot of leeway for corruption and bribery to take place.
An independent committee with carefully selected members should be presiding over such matters involving F1 teams and their sponsors.
I will end this article by asking you, the reader, do you think there should be restrictions on sponsors in F1?
Komentar