The Dutch bank ING on Monday announced that it will end its Formula One sponsorship activities at the end of 2009. It was already clear that Renault's embattled title sponsor was reviewing the F1 programme - which also includes trackside advertising and naming sponsorship of Grand Prix - because of the global financial crisis. The Dutch government recently moved to safeguard ING Group, who had posted a second consecutive multi-billion dollar quarterly loss and decided to cut F1 spending by 40 percent this year. The three-year title sponsorship of Renault was due to expire at the end of this year. A statement said ING has decided not to renew the deal and therefore will end its presence in F1 beyond 2009. "ING has enjoyed the relationship with Renault F1 and will continue to work closely with the team during the final year of the partnership," the statement added. Which bring me to...Whats Renault's future?
I was wondering when they would announce this. Well, to focus on the positive, at least that horrible yellow/orange/white livery will change. I miss the blue Mild7 car.
I was actually surprised ING did not pull the plug before the season started. Probably some heavy penalties applied.
Sketchy at best would be my guess.... We "know" their board is not 100% behind it - I suspect this may be the ($100MM) straw that breaks the camels back in 2010. OTOH, if anyone can pull in the necessary $, Flav's got to be in with a shout. "Times is bad!"...... Cheers, Ian
Hopefully things don't turn into a domino effect. No one wants to commit contractually to anything BE is behind these days. Everyone wants to keep their options open.
This will hurt Bernie as much as Renault. There's an awful lot of ING trackside advertising. I doubt Bernie will be able to get the same money ING was paying for it.
IIRC, Santander is going to honor its sponsorship committment to McLaren and then is going to Ferrari in 2010. Santander didn't get too beat up in the European financial catastrophies, so I think they are going to remain a high-visibility sponsor in F1.
I don't know the exact situation of ING, but if they receive some sort of bailout money from the Dutch government, it's absolutely necessary to pull out of F1 sponsorship. I wouldn't want any taxpayer to finance a sport like F1... and Flavio's yacht even less!!
Well, we saw this comming. At least we can now look foreward to differnt liveries for Renault, if they even stay in F1.
I am wary of companies that advertise in motor sports. First of all, I have had terrible experiences with SAP and a few other of the big companies that advertise in F1, so I am thinking that these folks don't know $4!t from shinola as to how to get a proper return on their advertising expenses. Anybody that is sponsoring a race car (and this goes for NASCAR and IRL too) is throwing money away. I figure that if they are throwing money away on advertising, they probably aren't a good value in terms of what I get for what I spend when I buy the product.....
Agree 100%. A racing team owner I used to know once told me that team sponsorship is nothing more than a way for certain adv or marketing execs to get some perks for themselves or to pass up their company food chain. Perks like hospitality tent, hob-nobbing with racing enthusiast stars, parties with the drivers, etc. The cool part is that it is not their money! And they can write up any kind of "study" they want to "prove" how much this is improving their brand recognition...
They do it largely for the perks, freebie tickets, exec trackside suites etc. These days even that can only go so far. Oops, regurging the above post.
