The Coca-Cola Company will return to Formula 1 in January 2013 through its global energy brand “burn” in a multi-year sponsorship of Lotus F1 Team.
Burn is available in more than 80 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“We are proud that The Coca-Cola Company has chosen Lotus F1 Team as the best vehicle to represent the burn brand in its most high profile partnership,” said Eric Boullier, Team Principal. “We are excited to partner with Burn to build a new and innovative model for sponsorships that will combine experiences, content creation and social media ; an area in which our team has been at the cutting edge in Formula 1 for the past 18 months, recording the highest growth rate amongst fans this year.”
The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, refreshing consumers with more than 500 sparkling and still brands. Led by Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable brand, the company’s portfolio features 15 billion-dollar brands including Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Coca-Cola Zero, vitaminwater, Powerade, Minute Maid, Simply, Georgia and Del Valle.
joeblogsf1 
You gotta love the PR speak.
We just need a pain medication company to sponsor HuRT now 🙂
Hormone Replacement Therapy is already medical. 🙂
Full Enstone team name then will be “Burn Lotus Renault” which is what the other teams will be shouting at them if Grosjean takes out their drivers.
Hurry! Run! Trouble!
But that is just explaining a friend’s experience of HRT . . .
I always preferred a lovely friend’s view (he became a notable doctor) that medicine was a running experiment, and that that you could be confident that whatever you took might save someone else’s life.
Incidentally, unless this comment nests nicely indented below my other, I think we might have some good old fashioned database fail, and it might be worth checking it doesn’t portend worse. Either way this goes, please backup your database, Joe!
Just checking again, never do something wrong unless you check it’s still wrong a few times. . . these WordPress things are built on two not superb tested technologies: PHP and MySQL. The former is glorious if you want to kludge together things that “work” under about zero formal test cases, and the latter, a misnomer except the SQL standards committee never got anything standardised, is a database outfit who started by ignoring or rejecting every thoroughly well tested piece of theory applicable to keeping things nice and clean with a database. Does it work? Mostly enough to give much satisfaction. Would I bet any business on it? Only when the odds are stacked against the costs of fixing things on the fly. Just about every major website based business glitch or failure can be pointed at, if not these two same outfits, then at the lack of methodology they applied.
Best comment ever.
ho ho very good – glad the consequences weren’t serious
Now that’s funny! Joe, you called it earlier in your posts. Are you surprised it’s Lotus as opposed to McLaren, Ferrari or another team?
Not in the least bit. I expect to hear more from Lotus on the sponsorship front in the weeks ahead. And maybe I will name some more names…
Joe, I gotta ask if these guys are serious about F1 or don’t they care because it is not the main brand? I cannot recall any major US corporation ever announcing a significant deal on Thanksgiving. Its is shut down over there today which means good luck to any journalist who wants to ask them questions about the sponsorship. If they had done this five days ago they would have had F1 in their home country for the first time in five years. It really makes me think they don’t care or haven’t thought this through.
It is not designed for the US market.
>And maybe I will name some more names…
Oh, go on, you tease! 😉
>> Not in the least bit. I expect to hear more from Lotus on the sponsorship front in the weeks ahead. And maybe I will name some more names…
Gosh, you are a wonderful tease! Thanks again for spending all that money on following this scene so closely.
I thought I had replied to optimaximal pic.
McLaren are already linked to GSK, so would not consider a rival brand. Ferrari would probably not consider such a product beneath them! RB & TR are obvious. Williams have a major national sponsor. Mercedes have their manufacturer backing. FI aren’t really the right fit. Sauber might be interested but they already have Mexican links. HRT/Marussia/Caterham aren’t high profile enough.
Personally I think the social media aspect of Lotus/Renault can’t be underestimated. They’ve done a good job with not-but-still- marketing Kimi through viral media.
Have you been holding on to that picture ever since Burn got mentioned in comments on the previous entry on this blog?
LOL, Lotus Burn! Or should we now call them the Burning Lotuses, to contrast the Silver Arrows :-).
A perfect match!
I see what you did there 😉
I was waiting for that one… 🙂
Wow, well, well done for them. Funny world this adland and sponsor game. How many people said “No Way!”? I know I didn’t come out with “Yes, Way!” as a positive assertion, but at least I never discounted the idea. What can be lovely about this game is nobody hardly ever knows what will work, so it’s almost always worth trying. Someone at Lotus, Bouillier version, has been having a proper try, and respect to them.
If Lotus retains Grosjean for 2013, he’d better tidy up his driving. Otherwise I fear we’ll all be subjected to a steady stream of woeful crash-and-Burn gags.
Very good news for the Lotus team! This sponsorship had been rumored for a few months. Hope this provides a sound footing for this well deserving team.
Is there any indication how large this sponsorship deal is? Will it be a small patch on Kimi’s shoulder, or will it be a logo featured prominently on the car?
Joe,
Big props (obviously), for calling both the deal and the team. (Well, that was how I interpreted your previous posts, anyway).
Two questions, if you can shed any light I’ll be grateful, if not I appreciate there’s only so much you can divulge.
1/ When you replied to a commenter that there were -3- sponsorship deals heading to Enstone, were you serious, and if so, are the other two still on track as far as you know?
2/ You were first with the story that the Rexona / Clear deal wasn’t necessarily as big a commitment by Unilever as it looked. Is -this- one the real deal? (As in, is it big enough to deliver Eric Bouillier’s claim that the team was previously one sponsor away from break even?)
Thanks.
Bonus question (because I seem to be turning into a paranoid conspiracy theorist):
– Did Prince’s Gate swing this one for Enstone (or help to)?
I would suggest that like most sponsors in F1, it is not a question of Princes Gate swinging the deal, but rather fighting the teams to get the money.
In general, yes, absolutely.
But (as you know), Bernie has intervened on the quiet on occasion to keep struggling teams on the grid. Given the well publicised rumours about Genii’s finances, I just wondered if he’d shoved the deal their way to keep the entry numbers up (& keep the Lotus name on the grid & Kimi in a fairly competitive car, all good for the show). Just me adding 2+2 and getting, oh, $44 mill or so…
Anything you can offer on my other questions?
That’s like privatising the Department Of Trade.
Oh, oops, pointing that out was the reason my pal, a very senior hatchet man with 30+ years diplomatic attachment in the old DTI got the push . . .
System. Broken.
Really? That’s the name of a drink? Burn? Why not just call it indigestion?
Highly inappropriate in racing circles I would have thought. Maybe in a gym “feel the burn” but crass and thoughtless for motor racing.
I suppose if you live in Georgia and are asked your address, the Coke lawyers pounce before you can finish the sentence.
But anyway congrats to Lotus, any idea how much money is involved?
That reminds me. Is it true that Pacific GP (rip) were about to seal a deal with the short-lived Death cigarettes brand until Imola happened?
I definitely remember an item on the eastern regional news programme at the time, and for what it’s worth, wikipedia says so so it must be true http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_(cigarette)
I seem to remember something like that. The irony of that was that Death pulled out of F1 because of the deaths at Imola in 1994
It’s F1, they don’t have to prepend the word Cash before the Burn.
“Lotus” seem to have been going out of their way not to mention the word “Lotus” recently. This was particularly noticeable when they won in Abu Dhabi with both Kimi and Bouillier referring simply to “Enstone” in the post race media scrums. Any chance this is related and they’ll be called “Team Burn” or something similar next season? Would make sense, if they (Coke) want to take on Red Bull – don’t just sponsor a team, be the team . . .
I’ve been getting this feeling for some time now. Not the least because a few months back there was a concerted, and somewhat strident, sudden push by a small number of new editors at Wikipedia to make sure that the “Enstone” name and terminology was all over the relevant pages. Added in to the recent form of words used by all and sundry during interviews and press conferences and it definitely looks as though someone within “Enstone” is trying to put some distance between the team and the Lotus brand…
I’ve been thinking the same thing, but teams can’t change their names that easily. I think a name-change requires approval from the other teams unless the team in question wishes to lose their share of Ecclestone’s hand-out.
I’m sure the other teams had to approve Honda becoming known as Brawn (to prevent a huge shortage of money to the team) and Team Lotus becoming Caterham.
If that’s correct then they’d probably have to phase a name-change in over a few years.
Just at a guess, I doubt they’ll bother changing name again. My -guess- is, that they’re playing a very sophisticated PR game.
On the one hand, they’re putting to bed the legacy of the bitter row with Tony F. Informed fans have made it clear that they don’t comsider the team to truly be ‘Lotus’. So, the team is acknowledging that, and focusing on its own history and its own achievements, which are actually pretty reasonable. That also gives them an identity of their own, and distances them from the Renault brand.
But on the other hand, to the casual TV viewer, this just is ‘Lotus’. A name they’ve probably vaguely heard of, and vaguely associate with, er, fast cars and winning. Maybe. And without the live conflict over the name, over time we’ll all just get used to calling them ‘Lotus’, because the endless explanations and havering get boring and everyone moves on.
Just my fantasy. I’d still prefer them to be called Toleman. They’d done great things long before they left Witney for Enstone.
Nice one Toleman fan…
I just knew this thing would never go away…
Thanks to you I’m having to re-evaluate my thoughts.
Very rarely do the words “sophisticated” and “PR” go hand in hand. The reason is that at the best of the game, what you get is only how certain people think they might con themselves. The moment it’s reflexive, or clever, it ceases to be PR. Basically any good message is simply and clear to all. Someone from the next PR department to read this message is about to pull out their ray gun and zap me back to the stone age. But hey, I’ll feel more comfortable.
I’m not so sure. It feels a lot more like the team (i.e. employees of the entity based in Enstone) realising that hitching their wagon to the diaphanous fantasies of sponsored monikers for the last couple of decades has actually left them in a bad place. Had the team maintained one identity since Ted’s time perhaps we (and sponsors…) would now be appreciating their heritage rather than thinking of them as some sort of ersatz, plasticated, product placement shell. I think we might see a name change, but changed to something stable rather than driven by dollars. It took Frank Williams a few false starts to realise that an ever changing litany of Politoys, ISO Marlboro or Wolf chassis wasn’t actually doing him any good in maintaining a stable business year-on-year. When he set up in earnest he went with the neutral “Williams” team name. This model has worked very well for him and McLaren, so I’d be surprised if those whose bums fill seats in the Enstone facility aren’t trying to position themselves in a more comfortable place should Lopez et al. decide to offload the company.
That Joe Saward fella’s a clever boy…
https://joesaward.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/coke-and-formula-1/
Way ahead of the game and without the need for hyperbole as per other ‘journalists’ Joe.
Cheers.
Very interesting and hopefully this will give them the funding they need to keep up in the in season development race.
Joe do you have any idea if this will mean the team changes their name and/or colors again as I assume they no longer receive any money from lotus?
The Wiki site on Burn describes it as a Swedish energy drink distributed by Coca Cola, rather than as Coke product, if anyone cares. It seems to out-gross Red Bull (and I don’t mean financially). “In 2011 Burn also announced a partnership with French techno DJ and producer David Guetta, where Burn will sponsor Guetta’s F*** Me I’m Famous events.” (my asterisks).
And what impressed me most was that you managed to not use the phrase “as exclusively predicted”, Joe. The mark of a quality journalist.
So with Coca-Cola Burn entering the Sponsorship game, how long before we see Pepsi-Co? I think the Bright green and Yellow of Mountain Dew Energy would brighten up someone’s livery. Maybe Sauber or Williams (PDVSA would be compatible)
Mountain Doo is not really the F1 demographic
I don’t figure that. That was almost a iconic drink at one point in programming culture, I mean, why did Gosling name his language “Java”? (Mountain Dew is a kick up the bum of caffiene, and programmer culture idolises long hard undistracted coding sessions) and there’s often been a high proportion of geeks into F1, by my reckoning. Those that are not playing computer games, anyhow. Okay, I know one who sadly got addicted to “gaming” but is now back to watching the races and more human things. I do over emphasise my perspective on this. Just like the F1 fan on your plane the other day may have been doing a great job selling the sport, he was (random guess) doing a lousy job selling himself to the lady in the seat next to him. So I’d rather concentrate on bigger names to keep the engines running.
Is there any chance that this new sponsor will (at least) pressure Lotus to put a specific driver (or nationality of driver) into the second car alongside Kimi? Does Burn currently sponsor any drivers that have a chance in F1?
No
So is the improved financial situation the reason why Grosjean is not confirmed? I hope not.
No. Grosjean will be confirmed if he does not mess up any more!
Joe, didn’t you suggest something like this about a week ago.
The real Lotus F1 team was about to sign a 65 million UKPound sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola when Colin Chapman was messing about with DeLorean cars. When John DeLorean was getting investigated for “financial irregularities” Coca-Cola dropped the sponsorship deal. Ironic that they are back again with…Lotus.
Wonder how monster fits into all this. Cant help but feel Coca-Cola were planning on buying monster and then using the monster brand with Lotus but it maybe fell through. So now they’re using the Burn brand instead – which as far as I’m aware is only popular in a few european countries.
Kinda odd when Bernie is concentrating on everywhere except europe these days!
What goes around, comes around . . . Remember Coca-Cola sponsoring James Hunt and Gerry Birrell in F2 in the early 1970s?