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What draws a major sponsor into Formula 1? And how do F1 teams get companies to commit to backing them, rather than taking their support to other teams, or even to other sports entirely?
In September 2025 Red Bull announced that it was forming the first partnership in F1 between a team and a major global private markets firm, when it signed a multi-year global partnership with Carlyle.
Over the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz and Red Bull Racing team principal Laurent Mekies sat down with Sara Fischer, media correspondent at Axios, as part of the latest event from The Race x Axios series, which brings together business leaders across Formula 1, media, investment, technology, and global business.
Asked why Carlyle got involved in F1, Schwartz said: “We could be involved in a lot of sports. But F1 was a natural fit.
“The demographics, it’s a young audience, it’s more than 40% female. It’s global and we’re a global firm. We manage $500billion on behalf of people really of all ages. We’re one of the largest in the world at doing it.
“That was one. Two, we wanted to be attached to an extraordinary brand. Extraordinary people that were focused on excellence. That clearly was Oracle Red Bull Racing.
“The trajectory of Formula 1 now is explosive. It’s exploding globally with over 800 million fans, and the F1 Movie, and everything happening with Drive to Survive [on Netflix]. Because of that, it fits.”
Remarkable timing
Schwartz and Mekies revealed that they met in the first week after Mekies took over as team principal at Red Bull in the summer of 2025, with Schwartz joking at the time that if Red Bull didn’t win the next race, the deal would be off.
As it happened, the next race was the Belgian Grand Prix, where Max Verstappen won the sprint race that kicked off the weekend.
Mekies added: “We met about three or four days after I joined. And it’s true that he said, ‘If you don’t win the next race, we don’t make the deal’.
“But joking aside, I think what resonates specifically with what Harvey said is we choose one by one our partners in order to create a competitive advantage. That’s the only thing we do.
“We are here to win races. That’s the only brief we get from our shareholders. And in order to win races in such a competitive environment against all the other giants of the industry, you need to make sure you surround yourself with the right people.
“You get the right people, you win the races. You don’t get the right people, you don’t win the races.
“Red Bull Racing today is 2000 people to invent, design, produce these two cars. And since this year, the Red Bull Ford Powertrain, our own power unit. So it shows that we tend to take things a bit too seriously, but I know the guys do as well at Carlyle.
“As soon as we engaged in the conversation with Harvey and his teams, we realised that we were actually in an incredibly similar business. We live and die with our performance.”
Schwartz said the same thing applies to his team.
“We operate a complicated business in a complicated world, but you can really simplify our business too,” he added. “Performance is the sole metric by which we have to judge ourselves.”
Personal connections
Schwartz also paid tribute to Mekies for the role he’s played in steadying the ship at Red Bull, and highlighted the importance of the personal connection they’ve made away from the track.
“As a leader I have deep, deep respect for everything Laurent has done. Our ability to forget is amazing. People forget he stepped into this role at a very critical time when the team wasn’t performing very well and instantaneously, like some sort of magic dust landed, the team started performing.
“Watching him as a leader and seeing how humble he is and how hard he works and how he’s brought the team together, there’s a lot to be learned from that.
“As soon as we connected with Laurent and the rest of the team, it was quite natural instantaneously. The focus on excellence was a prerequisite, but the personal connection made it special for us. Laurent and I text over the holidays, and I ask how his family’s doing.”
Mekies said that his style at the head of the team is not to think about leadership, but to focus on the culture and environment he can build for the people at Red Bull.
“The only thing that matters is to win,” he said. “If we win, you get, everything else gets sorted. That’s the way we look at it at the factory. So we don’t care too much about leadership style.
“We only care about building the right cultures, the right environment, the right connection, in order to have our people in a position where they can express their talent the best and fundamentally bring performance to our business. That’s really how focused we are on that single aspect.”
