The TGR Haas F1 Team has spent eleven seasons on the Formula 1 grid operating with one of the leanest commercial structures in the paddock.
The outfit has historically run closer to the model of a pure racing team, with revenue directed almost exclusively toward the car.
Michael Heath, Senior Fan Engagement and CRM Manager, joined Haas ten months ago to build that function from close to zero – the first time Haas has invested seriously in this part of the business.
“All of the money that we’ve really made and invested is always going to car development, which is obviously still the case today because we want to have the best car we possibly can on track,” Heath said, speaking at a media roundtable at Silverstone alongside technology partner Infobip.
“But we appreciate that to get the commercial revenue you need to be able to support that car development, we needed to invest more into marketing.”
Fan growth sits above every other marketing priority as a result.
Heath said the ambition is to move away from broadcasting to fans in bulk and toward genuine one-to-one relationships, built on data the team did not previously have the infrastructure to capture.
“Fan engagement’s changed so much so quickly,” Heath said.
“What we don’t want to be restrictive is to put barriers of entry in there. So don’t want to make it paywall, don’t really want to always have a sign up wall.”
Off track, the team has also leaned into cultural crossover moments to build relevance beyond the paddock – part of a wider push to generate noise outside race weekends and the off-season lull, using its free Haas+ Fan First initiative, launched recently.
“In terms of off-season, we’ve obviously done quite a lot of work this year as a team with the Godzilla collaboration, we’ve launched a Jon Bon Jovi collaboration, where we’re trying to make ourselves more relevant outside of F1 to more relevant markets,” Heath said.
“That’s how we see that we can win in the off-season. So rather than just always talking about the car or performance on track, we need to make sure that we have enough media noise around us outside of that so that we can still talk about those kind of things in the off-season to keep fans engaged.”
A partnership, not a sponsorship
The clearest expression of that shift in practice is Haas’s year-long relationship with technology partner Infobip, formalised at last year’s Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix.
Infobip Chief Revenue Officer Ante Pamukovic was explicit about how the company views the deal.
It’s a completely different industry, but precision and efficiency technology makes all the difference, whether it’s on track or by delivering personalised communication and engagement.
Ante Pamukovic
“We are not like a typical sports sponsor. We never sponsored any sport teams up until this moment,” Pamukovic said.
“It’s more of a partnership. It’s a completely different industry, but precision and efficiency technology makes all the difference, whether it’s on track or by delivering personalised communication and engagement.”
Infobip’s own research gives some shape to the problem both organisations are trying to solve.
As Sector reported in May, a study of 1,500 fans across four major sports found two thirds feel disconnected from the teams they follow due to poor communication, rising to 81 per cent among fans under 35.
Always on
The partnership’s origin point was modest. Haas and Infobip ran a fan quiz over WhatsApp at Monza last year, offering entry and the chance to win a prize with no app download required.
Heath said the results reshaped how the team thought about fan engagement going forward.
“That was the most engaged platform that we probably had from the outset, in terms of getting users there and the amount of completed journeys,” Heath said.
“I think Monza was a 74 per cent completion rate, which is relatively high. It was our lowest point of acquisition, with the smallest amount of money we had to pay last year to acquire a fan.”
Running four or five further quizzes presented the partnership with an unexpected next step.
Fans began asking the WhatsApp channel unprompted questions it had no capability to answer. That gap became the brief for RaceMate, launched in April.
RaceMate is an always-on AI assistant running across WhatsApp, Apple Business Messages and RCS, built on Infobip’s agentic AI platform.
It answers fan questions on the Formula 1 calendar, standings and conditions at track, with strict guardrails keeping every response confined to Haas and F1 topics.
“That’s one of the things which we were probably most panicked about internally – was if it was AI and people were asking questions, was it going to give them the right response,” said Heath.
“But also, was it actually going to give away anything that we weren’t prepared to give away?”
The scale achieved in a year is not insignificant. RaceMate has been used in more than 60 countries, available in six languages, with a completion rate above 70 per cent and around 30 per cent of users returning – some with over 300 exchanges with the AI agent.
“We never looked at this cooperation as something that is kind of like one-off and then off we go,” Pamukovic said.
“We kept adding more and more use cases, and then topped it off with different channels.”
Revenue streams
Asked directly whether the platform generates revenue beyond engagement metrics, Heath was clear that direct monetisation is not the immediate goal, and pushed back on the idea of paywalling fan access outright.
“One of the key things which I really don’t want to do, because I don’t think it works too much, is basically charge a fan to be a fan,” Heath said.
One of the key things which I really don’t want to do, because I don’t think it works too much, is basically charge a fan to be a fan.
Michael Heath
“If you go down that route, we’re just not going to let that next wave of people through.”
Pamukovic framed that patience as consistent with how Infobip has approached similar projects elsewhere.
“Some of the best use cases we saw globally in different industries never started by pure monetisation immediately,” he explained.
“We really wanted to build something where people want to return to. Then, at a certain point, it becomes something that you can monetise.”
What comes next
Heath’s ambition for RaceMate’s next phase is to make it a genuine companion to race weekend viewing itself.
“I want RaceMate to be the second screen,” Heath said.
“Can we basically use RaceMate to unlock that conversation in fairly simple terms? So a fan can start to understand what they’re looking at on a pit wall, why they’ve made a pit stop at a certain point, what window they’re trying to come back out into.”
That vision – surfacing pitwall data, radio messages and onboard footage through the platform – depends on approval from F1, which Haas does not currently have.
Heath argued the wider prize is making a data-heavy sport accessible to fans who never get to see how teams operate internally.
“You’re talking about 5 per cent of fans globally who get to go to an F1 race,” Heath said.
“If 95 per cent of fans don’t get to go to a race, how do you make that race experience at home – which is the second-screen viewing – because that’s how you can then start to feel closer to the drivers all the time.”
