Tobacco sponsors creep back into F1

TOWARDS the end of last season you might have noticed something new about the Ferraris – not that they were getting consistently spanked again by Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes having been the quicker car for much of the season, rather the strange new branding that appeared on the car from the Japanese Grand Prix onwards.

Across the engine cover were emblazoned the words: Mission Winnow. As for what that meant or means your guess was as good as ours. The important thing to know is that Mission Winnow is an initiative of PMI or Philip Morris, the largest tobacco company in the world.

Philip Morris through its Marlboro brand have had a long association with the Scuderia, maintaining their sponsorship of the prancing horse even after tobacco advertising was phased out of Grand Prix racing.

The Mission Winnow brand is, to our eyes at least, hugely reminiscent of Malboro’s, but hey what do we know? Speaking at the launch of the new livery Riccardo Parino, a vice president of PMI, stressed that Mission Winnow had nothing to do with tobacco or tobacco products.

“It’s very important to say the logo, the campaign, is not related to any tobacco products. It’s about us,” he said. Okay so it’s got nothing to do with tobacco, but it’s about us, us being a tobacco company? Right you are Riccardo.

If it felt like the thin end of the wedge then that’s probably because it was. In the wake of PMI’s new strategy the world’s second largest tobacco company, British American Tobacco, has announced a multi-year deal with McLaren.

BAT – which ran its own team in the late nineties and early noughties – will have, like PMI, a presence on the McLaren car, but again stress that it will have nothing to do with tobacco... okay then. It’s hard to take any of this at face value. This is tobacco sponsorship by the back door and needs to be clamped down upon immediately. We can’t backslide on this.