Artical

Late in 1999 I got a call from a headhunter with whom I’d been registered way back in my career in advertising. The result was a job as Motorsport Director at Interpublic. They were going through a severely enthusiastic period of investment in motorsport sponsorship, marketing and even bought Brands Hatch circuit.

After two years in the wilderness doing door to door selling and a little helmet fitting and painting work, finally I was back to a normal job. It was strange to work back in an agency after so many years doing other things, but a pleasure to work with Simon Clinton and later John Hackney and all the staff at the agency. They knew the advertising and marketing side, I was rusty on that, but I knew the racing side and working together it made for a pretty successful three years.

Interesting to be the person negotiating rights for a sponsor from an F1 team, when I’d been doing the opposite at Team Lotus for many years in the past. Probably a bit uncomfortable for some of the teams I negotiated with too. Despite that some of those I negotiated with are friends still!

The agency was already involved in a sponsorship of Tyrrell with Brother and YKK. Tyrrell’s sale to British American Tobacco and the formation of BAR F1 meant those sponsors needed a berth elsewhere. A variety of deals took place for Brother, YKK and also for MasterCard, Lucent and Nortel with Williams and Jordan. At the end of my time at Interpublic I was involved in negotiating for Nortel to sponsor Ferrari, but the world market went bad and they dropped out of sponsorship – Vodafone took the place that Nortel would have been in.

At the end of those years I continued consultancy with Brother for another couple of years on their F1 sponsorship & corporate entertainment, working together with Rebecca Reaston-Brown (who as an outside contractor had handled the hospitality part for Interpublic).

It was a good three years and when Interpublic took the decision to stop involvement in racing I was back on course and able to resume where I’d left off in 1997.