The Ridiculous Sponsors of Racing

Those 5 US Armed Forces cars from 1991 weren't actually sponsored by them- RJ Reynolds bankrolled those cars but they chose to use USAF decals to honor the troops in the recently begun Persian Gulf War to make them not look unsponsored.

As an F1 fan, there's a ridiculous irony in F1 with how they let dodgy sponsors such as Rich Energy and FTX to market themselves within the grid, but they gatekeep fresh teams such as Andretti-Cadillac partnership. Just shows the sheer narcissism and corruption of F1.

20:42 There's one incredible story you missed about Formula One's movie sponsor liveries. Back in 2004, the Jaguar team was sponsored by Ocean's Twelve, the sequel for the classic heist flick Ocean's Eleven. Their decals were pasted on the nose of the car, but to spice things up, they placed a diamond worth around $200-400k on the front of each car, where the badge would normally be. Kinda cool, if it weren't for the fact that Christian Klien got involved in a first lap crash. And once the car was extracted, the diamond was nowhere to be found. Who knows, maybe this was all a ruse for an elaborate heist, not unlike the one in the movie... hmmmm...

Recently, a bike at the Macau Grand Prix was sponsored by Only Fans.

Fun fact about the Ferrari barcode sponsor, it was actually a Marlboro sponsor in disguise, when the car was at speed the logo would appear similar to the Marlboro logo, but at a standstill it would look like a barcode. I don’t remember if they were fined for this or not

“Well the only thing they hit was the wall” “They hit the WALLL

Another interesting sponsor is FTX, who is (or rather was) one of the major sponsors of the Mercedes F1 team. That aged like a fine egg.

20:24 A Hatsune Miku car is only weird until you consider the team Yamaha-the creator of Vocaloid software (Hatsune Miku is a voice though "Vocaloid" has since come to refer to the voices/characters as opposed to the software itself)-Good Smile Racing. They are owned by Good Smile Company which manufactures anime figurines, namely their line of chibi Nendoroids which I personally prefer to Funko Pops. Anime sponsorships in Super GT as a whole aren't too uncommon either thanks to their large fan base and more importantly that anime has always lent itself to advertising as a cheap industry (albeit at the cost of atrocious pay and working conditions for all involved in Japan and even in the US to a lesser extent). That being said, it's still weird when anime cars are abroad such as in the 24 Hours of Spa. I can only imagine the day when an anime car turns up in the US and turns heads

10:53 It's literally the human version of Rusteez Bumper Ointment from Cars 💀

17:13 As funny as this race name sounds, this race is my favorite 2021 season Cup Series race.

18:00 you should see the liveries that the V8 Supercars had to use when they went to Bahrain between 2006-2010 and Abu Dhabi between 2010-2012. They couldn't advertise any alcohol brands due to local laws so the Jack Daniel's cars were changed to read "Jack Lives Here", the Jim Beam Racing cars were reliveried to "The Team", the Bundaberg Rum car had to be changed to say "HUZZAH" in place of Bundaberg and the Bottle-O Racing team had to replace the wine bottles and corkscrews in their sponsor's logo with actual letter Ts.

Fun fact: Red Bull actually got its first ever podium on that Superman race (20:52).

I love it when races get ludicrously long names because of sponsors. I can't top 16:42, but the "FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO DEL MADE IN ITALY E DELL'EMILIA-ROMAGNA 2023" is pretty good as well.

You missed my favorite sponsored race. The Chevy Rock and Roll 400 at Richmond. They had various Looney Toons cars.

8:58 ah yes, the six branches of the military: national guard, marines, navy, army, coast guard and m o t o r c r a f t

One of my favorite cars with any sponsor was the HRT, short for Hispania Racing Team, from 2011 in F1. They didn't have any major sponsor so they decided to put stickers saying "This could be you" or "This is a cool spot" around the car. Too bad HRT had the slowest car in the grid but that was pretty funny. Also, there was a car painted to promote Promare, an anime film made by Studio Trigger (the same ones who have made Cyberpunk: Edgerunners), in Le Mans a couple of years ago.

In Australia, there was Daily Planet Racing with a nice red and black colour scheme... It was great except that major sponsor (The Daily Planet) was a well known brothel!

Surprised you didn't mention the period of time where Joey Logano was sponsored by Gamestop and would have paintjobs based on upcoming game releases (Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mortal Kombat 2011, Modern Warfare 2, God of War 3, etc.)

20:33 Also FYI there was a Taylor Swift car in IndyCar too, this one's advertising her 1989 album.

20:24 The Hatsune Miku sponsorship is actually pretty interesting. The team itself is led by Ukyo Katayama, a former F1 driver. And the sponsors are partially crowdfunded with different tiers and their names appearing on the roof of the cars for every race. They've also won several GT-300 Championships in the past and are still an upper midfield team so far. Commentators have been known to just call the car "hatsune miku" or "miku-chan" as opposed to "[driver] for [team]". The GT-300 series is also home to the Mach 5 Racing Team Toyota Supra (from Speed Racer) , The EVA-001 Audi R8 (from Evangelion) and one of the few teams running a Toyota Prius GT-300