There was no festive break for the commercial team at the Atlassian Williams F1 Team last year.
Getting everything in place for the 2026 Formula 1 season launch meant Christmas simply didn’t happen.
That sacrifice sits behind Williams’s busiest year of dealmaking in its recent history.
In 2026 alone, the team has signed Estrella Galicia as official beer partner, Barclays as banking partner, M&S as travel kit partner, Wilkinson Sword as men’s grooming partner, BNY as institutional banking partner, New Era as official teamwear and headwear partner, Nuveen as asset management partner, and Anthropic, naming Claude the team’s official thinking partner.
Commercial Director James Bower traces the run back to a longer rebuild rather than a single lucky stretch.
“We definitely cancelled Christmas to get everything done for the season launch earlier this year, but it’s been an incredible team effort from our investors and board right the way through the business,” Bower told Sector’s ‘The Business of Formula 1’ podcast.
“We’ve built the team up from literally 20 people in the commercial and marketing function to around 130 today across Oxfordshire, in central London, and then in New York and Tribeca.
“We’re able to actually be in the market rather than just be visiting (the US), and then we’re going back and forth there every month to have conversations and develop relationships with partners
“I think last year you saw the cumulative effect of that all coming together, which was, yeah, it was a big year for us.”
Bower joined Williams five years ago after a long spell at McLaren, where he built a reputation as one of the sport’s early adopters of data-led fan and brand strategy.
He brought that same thinking with him, and is candid about the state he found Williams in when he arrived.
“When I joined, I think the team had lost sight of the value of the brand and of the IP,” he said.
“That was demonstrated in the number of partners they had, but the very low commercial revenue that was generating, and more importantly, the activation wasn’t at the level that it should be either.”
Thinking outside the box
Among this year’s additions, the Anthropic and Claude partnership stands out as the one Bower describes as genuinely competitive to win.
Claude is the “Thinking Partner” of Williams as the use of artificial intelligence within the sport continues to spread to all departments.
“Anthropic were looking at obviously different sports properties, looking at Formula 1. They were considering multiple teams. So it was a highly competitive opportunity,” explained Bower.
“I think where we were competitive was in demonstrating that we really see the future of F1 in technology and how a number of our leaders have a background in computer science and AI.
“(Team Principal) James Vowles’s first degree was computer science. It wasn’t engineering. We have a relatively new CIO called James Smith. He’s ex-Google DeepMind. So there’s a real statement of intent around the talent that we have around artificial intelligence.
“I think we also provided the confidence that we would truly integrate the technology and do things that were really leading that other teams probably wouldn’t consider or wouldn’t enable Claude to talk about externally.”
Three new brands
M&S is the clearest example of Williams using a partner to reach an audience the sport doesn’t naturally have.
The retailer became Official Travel Kit Partner in February, supplying the team’s travel wardrobe for Grands Prix throughout the season, with drivers Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon fronting the campaign.
It followed M&S’s own broader push into F1, sitting alongside a separate Silverstone partnership signed weeks later, and this summer’s pit lane fashion show at the British Grand Prix, the first of its kind in the sport.
For Williams, the value was less about brand recognition, M&S hardly needs introducing, and more about what a genuinely ambitious retail partner could do with the platform. Bower pointed to Silverstone as proof of that ambition in practice.
“If you saw what they did at Silverstone this year, the British Grand Prix with a fashion show at the circuit, a first in Formula 1,” said Bower.
“It’s very sophisticated in terms of how they leveraged a partnership with Silverstone specifically, and then a partnership with us and other elements.”
Barclays sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, a deal built almost entirely around a single, narrow audience rather than mass reach.
The bank replaced Santader at Williams and its primary interest lies in its ultra-high-net-worth and high-net-worth private banking clients, for whom Grand Prix weekends function as a hospitality product rather than a branding exercise.
That meant Williams had to build something closer to a logistics operation than a sponsorship activation.
“We actually created a concierge function whereby Barclays will bring their guests into the country where the race is,” explained Bower.
“Then we take care of everything, getting them to and from hotels, to the circuit, to all the evening functions. That end-to-end management of the guests was a big part of how we actually came together for that partnership.”
F1’s always been strong for B2B. We think the next wave of growth is clearly in B2C, and we’re seeing that at the series level with the brands that Formula 1 have secured.
James Bower
Wilkinson Sword represents a third, distinct strategy again, one aimed squarely at demographics rather than either brand prestige or hospitality. Bower frames the deal as part of a wider industry shift he believes is only just beginning to reach team level.
“F1’s always been strong for B2B. We think the next wave of growth is clearly in B2C, and we’re seeing that at the series level with the brands that Formula 1 have secured, and then you’re seeing that come through to the teams,” he said.
“With them we’re really looking to engage this new wave male audience, kind of under 35, and to do that with content and experiences.”
Three deals, three entirely different jobs: M&S for lifestyle reach and fan distribution, Barclays for high-value hospitality, Wilkinson Sword for a defined younger demographic. That range is deliberate, according to Bower, and it’s also why he’s resistant to simply adding more partners for the sake of it.
The partner cap
Despite the scale of growth, Bower is deliberate about not letting the portfolio expand indefinitely. Williams, he said, will not go beyond 25 partners.
“We want partnerships to have their narrative in terms of their partnership with us and not to have like conflict or overlaps,” he said.
“If you have 30, 40, 50 partners, you’re going to disappoint a lot of people and it can create a lot of tension. So for us, it’s about capping it to protect the value that we’re creating for those partners.”
Looking ahead, Bower sees the same B2C shift defining whatever comes next for the sport as a whole, not just Williams.
“We definitely see B2C as this big wave of growth,” he said.
“The new wave fans are kind of the surging part of the sport internationally, and we definitely see B2C activation being the next piece that really grows and will continue to develop the sport.”
See the full Sector50 list here.
Listen to the full interview with James Bower as part of the latest episode of The Business of Formula 1
