IT’S ALL IN A PARTNERSHIP
During the off-season, we are all taking time to reflect on the past season and look ahead to the future. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Cameron Maultby, is no different. In this blog, he shares his thoughts on the importance of race team partnerships and the benefits for all parties.
Formula E is the most future-focussed sporting property on the planet, with cutting-edge technology, sustainability-leadership and purpose at its core. It’s no surprise then, when businesses across the world choose to align with a race team competing in the series.
Partners become involved with Mahindra Racing to leverage these aspects and more to ultimately drive revenue growth by exploiting the high-profile, global platform we’ve created over the past decade. Our roster of brilliant partners play a very important part of our team in Formula E and we genuinely consider them a part of the family. We are lucky that many of the leading figures within the companies often join us at race weekends, seeing the drive, ambition and passion of our team in person.
But what role exactly do partners play in a race team? And what benefits can we offer back?
We offer partners the opportunity to be part of the exciting journey we’re now on as a team and business, at a time when Formula E itself continues to go from strength to strength, reflecting the rapid electrification of the automotive sector worldwide. Alongside monetary investment, which allows us to improve the quality of resource we’re running across our business, very often partners contribute technology, expertise, products and/or services that help us improve performance on and off the racetrack.
In return for their monetary and tech/product/service investment, we deliver against the objectives they set for the partnership, in turn helping them achieve the strategic ambitions they have for their businesses. Each partner is different in this respect, with their own unique circumstances and marketplace aims & challenges, and so what we create are very much bespoke solutions for each one. Each race event we take part in offers an opportunity for them to showcase their brand on a global stage and in markets crucial to their growth. However, there’s also a huge amount we do for partners away from race weekends – it’s very important that we deliver against their objectives 24/7, 365-days a year, so that the return on investment they see from the partnership is excellent.
As I look forward, I want to leverage the power of our partnerships even more than in the past, to ensure we once again become part of Formula E’s elite. As a result of a much closer alignment with Mahindra Automotive as they begin to launch their electric road cars onto the marketplace, we are on an aggressive campaign to improve all aspects of team performance, which will benefit our current and future partners.
Technology partners are ones we are looking at in particular because of this, and within the umbrella topic of technology, there are many subcategories whereby a partnership in Formula E would offer a huge amount of value for both sides. For example, areas of AI, machine learning, cyber security, cloud and data and analytics.
We’re looking for marginal gains when it comes to lap time – the most obvious area to judge performance in our world – and technology companies operating at the very leading edge of their respective fields are often able to deliver this for us, which results in a brilliant case study for them and tangible value for us. The perfect type of partnership!
Mahindra Racing, like all race teams, wouldn’t be able to operate without the support of its partners, and for that we are incredibly grateful. I look forward to strengthening current relationships and building new ones as we look towards Season 10 and a very exciting future beyond that.
