The Chill of Mercedes’ Post-Hamilton Winter Sets In
The team's split with Puma and Tommy Hilfiger is more than just a business deal
In the musical chairs game of sports apparel outfitters, Puma has been the last one with a seat in Formula 1 over the past 23 years.
When Tyrrell Racing’s Stefan Bellof started the 1984 F1 season in Rio de Janeiro, he became the first driver to rep the leaping big cat logo. Despite stewards striking his race from the records — along with 10 other disqualifications throughout the season — the sponsorship would foreshadow Puma and F1’s lengthy partnership.
Until 2022, the brand outfitted all three teams locked in the title fight: Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull Racing. By the start of 2023, Red Bull had two shiny new Drivers’ World Championship titles and unceremoniously dropped Puma. A year later, Mercedes would follow.
With the departure of its star driver and the sponsor money he brings looming on the horizon, Mercedes is beginning to feel the chill of Lewis Hamilton’s switch to Ferrari in 2025 before he’s even crossed the finish line for the final time in silver and packed his helmet and gloves.
Few sponsors are as synonymous with Mercedes as Puma and Tommy Hilfiger. Last week, Sports Illustrated announced the British-based team axed its partnership with the two. Adidas will take their place.
Puma became a familiar sight paired with F1’s slanted emblem even before the brand stepped in as the sport’s official and exclusive retail partner in 2024. Now, fans can buy identical shoes as Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz in Scuderia Ferrari’s signature Rosso Corsa red and take the boots for a spin on Puma’s in-store racing simulators on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
At odds most of their lives, Adolf Dassler, the founder of Adidas, and his brother Rudolf Dassler, the man behind Puma, didn’t fight over motorsport. While European football and Olympic sports — along with Nazi Germany — sparked the feud between them, it wasn’t until after both brothers had died that motorsport sponsorship became a viable business opportunity. And when F1 came knocking, only Puma answered.
Unlike other sports’ tug-of-war between Puma, Adidas and Nike, motorsport’s slow popularity growth in the late 2000s made it prime real estate for the former to capitalize on. When the brand seriously stepped into the motorsport spotlight in 2001 by joining Jordan, in 2005 with a Ferrari sponsorship deal and again in 2011 by signing onto the newly minted Mercedes team, F1 was making more money than ever through a new private equity owner. By 2008, F1 was generating more revenue per race than any other sporting event, according to Motorsport.com. However, viewership and team profits didn’t reflect the sport’s bottom line.
Mercedes had inherited a team that was losing money even as it won the 2009 title and as Sebastian Vettel’s glory days at Red Bull continued to stretch into a four-year championship streak by 2013, viewership was slumping on just about every continent. The Guardian summed up F1’s slow death as “Formula One TV viewing hits the skids.”
While it became a difficult sell for even Mercedes to reenter the sport, other sponsors weren’t taking the bait.
Sportswear giants were focused on sports that promised a return on investment. Adidas was pumping out jerseys that would go down as some of the most iconic in the Premier League’s history and created what would become a Major League Soccer sponsorship monopoly. Nike had a stronghold on the basketball scene, raking in billions as superstar players scored free throws while wearing the signature swoosh. The brand had a brief stint in F1 during the 1996 season when Nike produced racing boots for Michael Schumacher. However, the Oregon-based brand decided the sponsorship wasn’t worth stretching into the sport and FILA took over as Ferrari’s shoe producer in 2002. Now, Schumacher’s Nike boots resell for upwards of $20,000.
Puma — failing to garner fierce competition from other brands — became the central producer of driving shoes, suits and gloves across all motorsport. Other sports would soon see just how profitable motorsport investment could be: In 2015, Forbes reported that F1 had surpassed FIFA in revenues.
Puma’s partnership with Mercedes made even more sense when Hamilton signed on in 2013.
When Mercedes rejoined the sport in 2010, it aimed to dominate with Schumacher and a young Nico Rosberg at the wheel of its two newly designed vehicles. But the team wouldn’t catch a glimpse of its full potential until 2013 when Hamilton dragged his silver Mercedes into fourth place in the Drivers’ World Championship standings — the best result since the British team stepped foot back into the upper echelon of motorsport.
In 2014, Mercedes would finish with both drivers scoring first and second in the standings, and then again the next year and the next. Hamilton — rubbing shoulders with movie stars, supermodels and Grammy winners at the Met Gala, singing a bridge on Christina Aguilera’s song “Pipe” and being labeled one of the most fashionable athletes by Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour — became F1’s connection to the world of mainstream stardom and, along with it, brought the Mercedes brand and its many sponsors into the limelight.
Hamilton’s exit from Mercedes threatens more than just the team’s future performance, but its identity as a whole. Recently, Nylon argued that Hamilton’s status is larger than the sum of the sport’s parts. The piece hit non-Hamilton fans hard, but its crux was true: Hamilton set Mercedes, and the sport as a whole, apart.
As the first, and only, Black athlete to compete in F1, Hamilton pushed the envelope of how sports stars interact with politics and laypeople. He was the first driver to speak out about police brutality in 2020, the only F1 competitor to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and one of the only motorsport athletes to bring that activism to F1 and the global stage. Hamilton quickly understood when a seven-time world champion with an Instagram following of nearly 40 million and a net worth of $300 million speaks, people listen.
Puma athletes have arguably always had an activist streak. Tommie Smith, a gold medalist, and John Carlos, a bronze medalist, raised their fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics in protest of the national anthem. The event would go down in history as the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute. Smith, Hamilton and former Champions League player Thierry Henry teamed up in 2020 to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement as Puma athletes.
While some companies may look at an outspoken celebrity as a PR nightmare, for Mercedes’ sponsors it largely worked as a brand marketing strategy. Not only did Hamilton have connections to Hollywood, but he also attracted a more diverse fanbase.
Now another team reaps the benefits of Hamilton’s defiant speaking and driving style.
Amid Hamilton’s move, Mercedes is left with an open seat and a less marketable main character in George Russell. The posh 26-year-old British driver made for an odd counterpart to Hamilton’s brazen neon race day outfits and mesh blouses plucked straight off the runway. Russell, instead, fit the Tommy Hilfiger brand to a T. His fashion sense — made up of chinos, cashmere cardigans and oxfords — reflects his driving style: precise and overachieving but decidedly not groundbreaking.
Ferrari’s duo of Leclerc and Hamilton, however, is a thing of marketers’ fantasies. Both sit front row at fashion weeks across the globe, hold a status as the sport’s resident heartthrobs and have a knife-edge steering style that can’t quite be taught. Puma’s retention of Ferrari means that it will possess the most sought-after two drivers and a growing investment.
Following Hamilton’s Ferrari announcement in early February, the prancing horse team’s share price jumped over 10 percent, reported SportsPro Media.
On the surface, Mercedes’ switch to Adidas is simply a better business deal. The reportedly multi-million dollar deal brings in a brand worth north of $10 billion more than Puma’s $4.5 billion market value. Despite its stronghold in motorsport, Puma rakes in the lowest revenue compared to its sportswear rivals and doesn’t come close to Nike’s 16.8 percent share in the global sportswear market according to Reuters.
However, once deemed unique by the sheer presence of Hamilton, Mercedes’ signing of Adidas signals a desperation to be singular more than anything.
The sportswear brand’s timing couldn’t be more convenient: competitors are flocking to F1 with sports and streetwear collaborations, like Kappa’s partnership with Alpine F1 Team, and the 2026 engine regulations leave the playing field open for anyone with enough money to snag the title. Unfortunately for Puma, its marriage to the sport’s several teams is showing signs of fracture. While Puma remains tied to Ferrari and the F1 brand, its dedication to the sport in times of profit slumps and in times of robust health hasn’t seemed to be valued as more attractive brands with bigger wallets — like Adidas — jump on the F1 hype train. Any interest from Nike was squashed when the brand sued Red Bull’s Max Verstappen following the release of his Max 1 clothing line. The “Air Max” shoes and “Max Force 1” branding violated copyright laws according to Nike, reported the Dutch newspaper De Limburger.
The deal with Adidas comes at a time when the company needs it most. The German sports mammoth will no longer produce jerseys for its home country’s Germany Football Federation (DFB). The World Cup-winning team cut ties with Adidas after seven decades in exchange for a reported $110 million per year deal with Nike. The betrayal seeped out of the sport and onto the social media accounts of German politicians. The country’s vice chancellor went so far as to say replacing Adidas’ triple stripe would be like abandoning “a piece of German identity.”
Puma’s departure, but more significantly Hamilton’s absence, threatens to invoke a similar identity crisis for Mercedes. As Ferrari sponsors froth at the mouth over their new poster boy, the consequences of Hamilton’s exit are only beginning to trickle in.