Ferrari is set to have a new driver for the 2025 Formula 1 season, with Lewis Hamilton leaving Mercedes at the end of the 2024 campaign to join the Italian flagship for next year.
Now, according to reports, Ferrari will add a new title sponsor as well as a new driver.
As first reported in SportBusiness, Hewlett-Packard (HP) is poised to join Ferrari as their title sponsor. If the deal does go through, HP will become the team’s first title sponsor since the 2021 season, when Ferrari was partnered with tobacco giant Philip Morris and competed as Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow.
According to SportBusiness, the proposed deal is on par with the title sponsorship relationship between Red Bull and Oracle, which at the moment is the most lucrative in the sport. “Sources say the deal’s annual value is comparable to Red Bull Racing’s title sponsorship deal with technology company Oracle, which is currently the most valuable of its kind in F1,” writes Matthew Williams in SportBusiness.
Why might this matter? As Williams notes, driver contracts do not fall under the sport’s “cost cap,” leaving teams the freedom to pay drivers without impairing team operations. With Hamilton’s Ferrari contract rumored to be in the $100 million range, bringing HP aboard as a new title sponsor will ease that burden.
“Ferrari’s deal with HP will help the team afford the salary of seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who will replace Carlos Sainz [Jr.] at the beginning of next season,” writes Williams. “Driver salaries do not count against Formula 1’s ‘cost cap’, allowing teams an unlimited spend on star acquisitions.”
This is not HP’s first foray into F1. The team sponsored Williams from 2000 to 2005, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprises (HPE) has a current relationship with both Mercedes and Sauber. (Hewlett-Packard Company spun off two divisions to create HP and HPE, with HP focusing on hardware while HPE focuses on servers, storage, and networking.
This season, Ferrari looks to have perhaps closed the gap to Red Bull at the front of the field, as the Scuderia currently trails Red Bull by 44 points in the Constructors’ Standings and Sainz as the only non-Red Bull grand prix victory, as he did a season ago.
Perhaps the hope in Maranello is that Hamilton, and HP, can help them bridge that gap to Red Bull even more.