Social media is the new casino
Shift Happens #13 | Weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture.
Thank you for being here. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Idée Fixe, the newsletter for curious minds. I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’m a former tech executive who has spent the past five years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, and technology of motorsports.
⏳ Reading time: 4 minutes
Shift Happens, weekly pivots where motorsport collides with tech and culture. A quick roundup of the headlines in and around motorsport you should be aware of. I hope you enjoy this new curated format.
If you don’t have the time to read or watch anything today, please make 60 seconds for this masterclass in storytelling and the eye-opening reality that we are potentially all living inside a ‘casino’.
The lead lap
There is no Nike x Cadillac partnership. Let me be clear, it’s a great story, but it would make for a terrible business case, which is precisely why I don’t think the team is teasing an up-and-coming partnership. I saw one too many videos in the past week of people saying that a Nike x Cadillac F1 Team collaboration was inevitable. Why? Well, merely because a handful of team members were sporting matching panda low dunks.
However, Nike was once in the Formula One Paddock and that one partnership explains why a Cadillac x Nike collab isn’t in the works. But first, yes, the all-American” narrative, Nike’s nostalgic F1 history with Schumacher, and the massive streetwear/sneaker culture crossover opportunity would be huge.
However, Nike walked away from F1 in 2003, and their recent failed pursuit of Sir Lewis Hamilton (2023-2024) and to me, this proves that what Nike wants more than anything is individual athletes, not team deals.
Puma and now Adidas pretty much already dominate F1’s ecosystem, making this an already very crowded space with just eleven teams and 22 drivers. And the ROI just doesn’t justify the operational complexity.
Nike made their only foray into Formula 1 with Schumacher. In other words, this was Schumacher’s personal deal and sponsor. In 1996, they unveiled his signature racing boot at a press conference in Germany. Nike hand-made every pair at their Oregon headquarters and gave Schumacher fresh boots for every race.
The partnership lasted six years - from 1996 to 2001. Schumacher loved them so much that when FILA bought the Ferrari footwear rights in 2002, he made them replicate the Nike design. By 2003, Nike pulled out of racing entirely.
To this day, that era remains Nike’s only chapter in F1 history. That is, until now, when the Cadillac F1 team seem to be pushing them, but to me this is a clever play from the team to ‘show not tell’ Nike what a potential collaboration could look like.
Daniel (from Sports Verse) wrote about this extensively last week, and it’s well worth the read.
The number of the week
68,000 is the total number of tickets for sale for Super Bowl LX - price anywhere between $950 and $8,500 in the general sale. And if it feels like it’s almost impossible to get a ticket, that’s probably because 75% of these 68,000 tickets go to the NFL’s 32 teams.
As a true European, I know very little about the Super Bowl, and teh piece of this event I’m most familiar with is, of course, the half-time show. There is nothing more quintessentially American than American football and the Super Bowl. As Ben and David, from the Acquired podcast, have pointed out, it generates more revenue than any other sport in the world, and the team valuations are through the roof.
No wonder the Cadillac F1 Team decided to go with a Super Bowl ad for their livery reveal. As Madeline Coleman, from the Athletic, mentions, the team will be “revealing its livery in one of the most American ways possible: Through a Super Bowl ad.” Cadillac’s play here is clearly to pick up new non-F1 fans (but die-hard sports fans nonetheless) vs. trying to appeal to an existing crowd and audience - a smart move if you ask me. It’s also worth noting that this is a very expensive bet from the team so certainly not one they took lightly. According to a handful of sources, multiple 30second ad units were priced above $10 million each.
Three stories that need to be on your radar
There is a new documentary on Cadillac’s Formula 1 journey in the works. It will be a brand-new documentary series that will chart the journey of the Cadillac Formula 1 Team as they prepare to join the grid in 2026, fronted by filmmaker and motorsport enthusiast Keanu Reeves. I, for one, am really keen for this documentary because I worked on a story for the upcoming issue of Esses Magazine about Pirelli, but it was also about the work required from the Cadillac team to prepare to join the grid and be ready for Melbourne 2026, and everything I learned was absolutely fascinating.
The Double-Edged Sword of Casual Betting. There's no question Fanatics is breaking the mould by ditching ex-athletes and cash bonuses for Kendall Jenner and self-aware irony. I actually creatively loved their campaign - it's fresh, it's culturally fluent, and it will likely work. And that’s what has me worried, because marketing that makes gambling feel like a joke - literally built around a curse meme - raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility. The sportsbook industry already faces scrutiny over how it reaches new users; repackaging betting as celebrity entertainment rather than a serious financial activity doesn't help. Fanatics may attract new bettors with this approach, but will those bettors understand what they're actually getting into?
AI has commercially entered the grid. Williams F1 team announced just yesterday that Claude will become the team’s “thinking partner”. I’ve always loved and thought that Formula 1 - and especially its sponsors - are a reflection of its time. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was tobacco. Then came spirits. Oil giants. The crypto boom and somewhat bust. Then big tech arrived and has been stamping their logos on the fastest machines on earth for a few decades. And now it’s very much AI. Almost all of the F1 teams have an AI sponsor and/or partner. And as ever, the question isn’t whether AI belongs in F1. It’s who’s going to use it best.
One video worth your time
Simply a beautiful story, incredibly well told and a great way to spend five minutes of your time. Videos like these make me want to buy that vintage Alfa GTV.
One [event] that caught my eye
I loved seeing the Formula E cars out on track at the Miami International Autodrome this past weekend. A far cry from last year’s venue, which wasn’t bad, just simply not the right track for an FE race. A few days prior, I was asked by JPMorgan Chase (a new team sponsor) to moderate a conversation between Team Principal, Jaguar TCS Racing and Managing Director, JLR Motorsport, Ian James and Jaguar TCS Racing driver Mitch Evans. The single biggest takeaway from this conversation was the sheer amount of time the drivers spend in the simulators.
Is there a place we can see the video? I would love to link to this in my Sim Racing column on Motorsport Prospects.
The Puma/Adidas ecosystem observation is spot-on. Nike chasing individual athlete deals over team partnerships makes sense when you look at the margins. F1 is expensive brandactivation but the individual driver storytelling is where the ROI comes from nowdays. The Cadillac Super Bowl play is bold tho, $10M+ bet on converting non-F1 sports fans rather than chasing existing ones.