As the business of Formula One waits for the 2020 season to restart amidst the Coronavirus pandemic one company that is not sitting still is that of Williams Racing who continues to push ahead looking for further commercial opportunities. In order to enhance this drive they have appointed the London-based sport and entertainment agency 1920 Worldwide to help develop and sell its new commercial programme.

The Williams team has been evaluating various agency’s in terms of them been able to develop strategies and they have settled on the 120 Worldwide company. The partnership aims to develop new opportunities for the Williams team in terms of their attracting future partners.

Tim Hunt, Commercial and Marketing Director at Williams Racing said: “Over the past few months, we’ve taken a thorough look at the marketplace as we thought about how to support our new commercial vision and it was clear from the beginning that 1920 understood both what makes Williams unique and what it is going to take to evolve our commercial programme.”

“We have recognised that partner needs have changed, and we must be prepared to think differently to help them accelerate their growth – whether that is finding new uses for traditional F1 assets, embracing emerging technology or creating big ideas, we’re very excited to see what we can make possible.”

Simon White, chief executive of 1920 Worldwide, said the agency will help Williams “re-define what’s possible for partners in and around the fast-moving world of Formula One”.

For the Williams Team the offseason saw a raft of changes take place in the commercial area with the loss of several sponsorship deals including Rexona, Tata Communications, Omnitude and Symantec. But these have been offset by the arrival of partnership with Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Lavazza and an increased involvement from ROkiT and Sofina.

With the lack of revenue coming in from their participation in races the Williams Team is now relying increasingly more on commercial deals to keep them afloat. An insight of the loss of revenue from the races came from Franz Tost, head of AlphaTauri, who stated that his team were losing up to US$2 million for every Grand Prix cancelled. On top of this poor performance in recent seasons have seen Williams losing significant revenues from their position in the Constructors championship seeing them post a loss of more than UK£16 million (US$20) for the first half of 2019.

With the Williams Team racing operations most likely staying closed until the end of May with their shutdown period been extended from 35 days to 63 days.

Hopefully this new collaboration with 1920 Worldwide will see new commercial opportunities open up for the Williams Team. Given the fact that 1920 has had an impressive list of customers including Unilever, UPS, Omega, and Engie the prospects are looking very promising.