Oh Monaco. Outdated, impractical, and utterly irreplaceable
Shift Happens #24 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
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I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator and the Editor-At-Large at Esses Magazine. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past six years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, culture and technology of motorsports.
⏳ Reading time: 8 minutes
Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. And a quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of, as they explain the cultural shifts we are seeing in this space.
I’m sitting on my bed in one of the tiny rooms of the Soho House, staring out of my bedroom window, looking onto the rooftops of Paris, feeling incredibly grateful for the experiences I get to enjoy and be a part of. I landed in Paris Tuesday morning after a full week in Monaco for the annual ‘the circus is back in the Principality’ - otherwise known as the Formula 1 Grand Prix. I have a few days here before I head to Le Mans for the third of the three unofficial triple crown races - Indy500, Monaco GP and Le Mans, which now all seem to happen within the same 30 days of the year. This newsletter should have gone out last week, but life on the go and back-to-back races have proven tricky to juggle.
The piece I wrote last year about the Monaco GP still holds today - everyone will complain about the impracticality of this race, but the beauty and uniqueness of this location still make you stop in your steps.
The [lead] lap
Ivana Pavlovic (Founder of 134Atelier) invited me to chat with a group of incredible women and entrepreneurs, on Saturday morning, on a boat somewhere at sea - as you do when you are in Monaco. Two things I loved about the event: first, it felt incredibly intentional. As Pavlovic mentions, “progress does not happen by accident. It happens because people make a conscious decision to create spaces where important conversations can take place”. Secondly, we had the honour of hearing from Madame President Grabar Kitarovic. And if you know anything about me, you know my passion for the intersection of politics and sports. A topic President Kitarovis doesn’t shy away from. There are so many parallels between these two worlds but more importantly, they are tied at the hip, and whether you like it or not, one doesn’t happen without the other. I really wish more people in motorsports were more willing to talk about the role of sports as a soft power play.
As Pavlovic put it so beautifully, the event “is not simply about celebrating Monaco's achievements. It is about examining the responsibility that comes with leadership, the legacy we leave behind, and the pathways we create for those who will follow us.”
The [number] of the week
350,105 fans at Le Mans. This year again, the attendance at the circuit increased to 350,105 people in the grounds - up from roughly 320,000 last year. I can only imagine this number will increase again with the addition of both Ford and McLaren in the Hypercar class. I was delighted to join the Genesis Magma Racing team for their debut at le Mans this year, and will have a full breakdown of that press trip and experience in the Esses weekly newsletter - so stay tuned.
Three [stories] that need to be on your radar
Alo’s Monaco Play: The Rhode Playbook, But Make It a Superyacht
Rhode did it with a phone case and the WAGs. Alo just did it with a 72-metre yacht. For the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, Alo Yoga sailed its vessel - Alo Voyage - into the harbour, docking right alongside official F1 partner boats, including TAG Heuer’s. On board, guests were offered Pilates sessions, IV drips, and lymphatic drainage massages. It was a floating brand world, dropped into the most photographed harbour in motorsport. I’ve written before about how Rhode cracked the code on F1 cultural presence without an official sponsorship - seeding products through paddock adjacency, leveraging Alexandra Saint Mleux as a campaign face, and ending up embedded in the F1 conversation at a fraction of the cost of a formal partnership. The formula: find where your customer’s attention already is, and place yourself nearby. Alo is executing the same logic, but with considerably more infrastructure. The yacht follows an earlier takeover of the Hôtel Martinez pier at Cannes Film Festival and a forthcoming store opening in Cannes - a coherent Euro summer strategy, not a one-off activation.
After lifestyle and luxury, fashion, perfume… I think we are about to see a big appetite among wellness and lifestyle brands to own the perimeter of F1 - the hotels, the harbours, the social feeds, the drivers’ lifestyle - without buying into the official ecosystem at all.
Highsnobiety put out a piece on social media that was wrong from start to finish. When I talk about how the bar is in hell for good journalism, this is what I’m talking about. The second slide of the carousel celebrated Louis Vuitton as the first-ever title sponsor of the Monaco GP (this slide has since been deleted). Tag Heuer was actually the first-ever title sponsor of the Monaco GP in 2025. That slide may have been deleted, but the first line of the post’s caption still reads: “@louisvuitton took on a bigger role at the Monaco Grand Prix in 2026, becoming the race’s first-ever title partner.” When I see creators and influencers get so much shit for making mistakes or not knowing ‘basic information’ while mainstream media makes such insane mistakes and gets away with it. It drives me absolutely crazy.
Everybody’s in the Drinks Business Now. Pierre Gasly launched Minded at Monaco - two years in the making, 800mg of electrolytes, no sugar, built around the premise of making hydration something you actually want to do. I love knowing that I’m not the only one who struggles with hydration and how boring water is. But it’s the timing that caught my eye. Tom Brady dropped Good Nut, an organic coconut water, in the same week. Across the Channel, French YouTube trio Squeezie, Léna Situations, and Inoxtag launched Ciao Energy, positioning it as a cleaner alternative to traditional energy drinks. Three drink launches in two weeks. The more interesting question isn’t what they’re selling - it’s how. There’s a structural difference between being the face of someone else’s brand and owning the cap table. Gasly and his co-founder, Alexandra Kolasinski, spent two years building Minded. That distinction matters. Ambassadorship generates a fee. Ownership generates equity. Drinks are the obvious vehicle because the entry logic is clean: athletes already perform the authenticity of hydration and recovery in public. Every post-race interview, every training clip, every paddock walk is a product placement waiting to happen. The audience doesn’t need to be convinced the founder actually uses it. I am very curious, though, to see where Galsy can place Minded within the ever-restricted landscape of the F1 Paddock.
One [video] worth your time
You don’t have to understand basketball or be a Knicks fan to appreciate just how good this moment is.
[Bon goût] - for those with an acquired taste.
The Tag Heuer dinner and party are some of the unmissable moments of the race weekend - beyond the race and sessions themselves, of course. It’s the kind of event that's shifted from "nice activation" to genuine race-weekend tradition in just a few years. This year's edition followed the now-familiar rhythm: a tightly curated dinner on Friday, intimate enough to feel like an actual gathering rather than a brand exercise, followed by the bigger Saturday night party that's become the unofficial social anchor of the weekend. It starts with a fun yet informative Q&A with the drivers, the team principal and moderated by Calumn Nicholas - former Red Bull Racing mechanic, and then goes into an impressively curated musical programming that goes on well into the night.
TAG Heuer isn't trying to out-spectacle Monaco's existing chaos. I’m not sure that’s even possible. But it is carving out a recurring beat in the calendar that people now plan around.
Great read! I really agree on Monaco’s role in modern F1. It is less about producing great racing on Sunday (although qualifying is still one of the highlights of the season) and more about the value it brings off the track. One thing Liberty has done well is look at what a venue brings as a whole, not just the racing product itself.
Great read and so jealous of your week in Monaco. I had wondered where Calumn had gone to so happy to see him still in the sport.