Chinese GP

Several Formula 1 teams have had their freight delayed from Australia to China meaning preparations have been held up for the Chinese Grand Prix.

The FIA has stated that tyre supplier Pirelli did not have its freight at the Shanghai International Circuit on time, although the tyre manufacturer has received equipment in the pitlane on Wednesday.

At least four F1 teams – McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin – have suffered freight delays after two flights from Melbourne to Shanghai were delayed by at least eight hours, so the teams did not receive their cargo until late Wednesday afternoon.

These teams were only able to unpack their freight in the pitlane and build their cars from 4pm local time onwards.

But the FIA and the teams do not have any concerns about cars getting ready for the first and only free practice session of the weekend and the governing body has allowed the teams to break the curfew if needed.

Mercedes freight

Photo by: Ronald Vording

Ordinarily, teams are given five-and-a-half hours to work on their cars on Wednesday, but that has been extended by half an hour due to the late arrival of Pirelli’s freight.

The first practice session is not expected to be at risk of delays, but teams will have to work overtime early in the season – and during a physically demanding double header with Australia.

“There are no worries about free practice, but these days will be some late nights for our mechanics,” a team member told Autosport.

“The only free practice session of the sprint weekend starts at 11:30 local time, which means teams still had a day-and-a-half to prepare for the opening session.”

Several Formula 1 teams have had their freight delayed from Australia to China meaning preparations have been held up for the Chinese Grand Prix.

The FIA has stated that tyre supplier Pirelli did not have its freight at the Shanghai International Circuit on time, although the tyre manufacturer has received equipment in the pitlane on Wednesday.

At least four F1 teams – McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin – have suffered freight delays after two flights from Melbourne to Shanghai have been delayed by at least eight hours, so the teams did not receive their cargo until late Wednesday afternoon. These teams were only able to unpack their freight in the pitlane and build their cars from 4pm local time onwards.

McLaren garage

Photo by: Ronald Vording

But the FIA and the teams do not have any concerns about cars getting ready for the first and only free practice session of the weekend, and the governing body has allowed the teams to break the curfew if needed. Ordinarily, teams are given five and a half hours to work on their cars on Wednesday, but that has been extended by half an hour due to the late arrival of Pirelli’s freight.

The first practice session is not expected to be at risk of delays, but teams will have to work overtime early in the season – and during a physically demanding double-header with Australia.

“There are no worries about free practice, but these days will be some late nights for our mechanics,” a team member told Motorsport.com. “The only free practice session of the sprint weekend starts at 11:30 local time, which means teams still had a day and a half to prepare for the opening session.”

After a memorable start to the season in Melbourne, Formula 1 rolls onto Shanghai for the second round of 2025 – a perfect chance for all of the Chinese partners and sponsors to roll out the red carpet and showcase their respective businesses to the ever-increasing global audience.

All three of them, that is.

F1 currently races in Japan, China and Singapore and CEO Stefano Domenicali held talks this week looking at the possibility of introducing a street race around the Thai capital, Bangkok.

Japan has the most partners involved in the series, the majority stemming from the automotive sector, whereas China – which boasts the second-largest economy in the world behind the United States – has links to just two teams.

Social media giant TikTok is the official creator partner of Aston Martin while SenseTime is Sauber’s AI technology partner – and that is it.

The waters are muddied somewhat by the opaque ownership of some cryptocurrency partners in the championship, with a number initially launched in China but having since relocated due to essentially being banned in the country.

Politics, too – barring a few major examples – are often put to one side when it comes to sports partnerships that will make money.

There were no new Chinese-based partners announced ahead of the 2025 season, although Lenovo came on board as an official partner of F1 itself last year.

Yili, a dairy products producer was a partner of Sauber until the end of last year, while Ferrari’s deal with Riva Yachts also expired in 2024.

Zhou’s presence at Sauber didn’t lead to a major influx of Chinese sponsors

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Yili and SenseTime being part of the Sauber stable was no doubt tied to the fact Zhou Guanyu, the first full-time Chinese driver in F1, was racing for the team at the time the deals were struck.

Zhou, now a reserve driver at Ferrari, was signed by the then-Alfa Romeo squad in 2022.
His boss at Ferrari, Frederic Vasseur, was the Alfa Romeo team principal who brought Zhou into F1, labelling those who suggested the signing was made first and foremost for commercial reasons as “stupid”.

Speaking to Autosport in Zhou’s debut season, however, Vasseur did concede it had been “difficult” to tap into the Chinese market and attract backing from the region despite having Zhou in the car.

Vasseur said it was “starting to work”, yet three years on, the number of Chinese partners in F1 has actually dropped – despite the continued growth of the championship around the world.

China has been a part of that increase itself with over 150million fans and over 1million new social media followers across the Chinese platforms, bringing the total to 4.3million.

F1’s own fan segmentation found that over half of fans in the country started following the series in the past four years, while they are younger than the average sports supporters in China and more diverse – with a 50% female demographic.

As of 2023, statista.com reported that approximately 99.79% of China’s population had access to television, well over a billion individuals – and F1 has started getting more of those eyes onto its product.

For 2024, television audiences in China were up over a third while the return of the Chinese Grand Prix for the first time in five years obviously led to an uptick in numbers across the board.

Audiences for the 2024 race were up over 50% compared to those who tuned in to watch Lewis Hamilton lead home a Mercedes 1-2 in 2019, and such figures have led to Tencent signing a new rights deal.

Chinese fans enjoyed their first F1 action since 2019 last year, and there was a surge in interest

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The multimedia giant, which owns WeChat among other significant Chinese technology brands, has signed a multi-year renewal until 2027 to cover every F1 race, as well as F1 Academy – which launches its 2025 season in Shanghai this weekend.

With seven of the 25 most profitable companies in the world at present based in China, the money is there, while the aforementioned growth in fan engagement means the opportunities for exposure are also increasing.

So why are there so few Chinese brands associated with F1?

“Could you name three Chinese brands? That is the key point,” Matthew Marsh, an F1 sponsorship broker who covers the Asian market, told Autosport.

“How many brands are there that we know, that are Chinese and internationally recognised, not very many.

“Compared to Japan or even South Korea, which is a much smaller country than China, but we know Samsung, Kia and Hankook and so on. China hasn’t produced international brands, why would we expect there to be more than two or three in Formula 1?

“Some of the brands we have heard of tend not to do brand building and, if they do, they spend money on the partnership because they think it is what they should be doing, not on activating the partnership.

Chinese companies haven’t bought into the concept of building a brand through F1

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“I think the key part here is that the leadership of Chinese companies don’t fully subscribe to the value of brand as we see it.

“International brands and mature companies see the value of building a brand because it allows you to build margin, and that’s what Apple has done, right?

“Their products aren’t any better, apparently, than Samsung’s, but they can command a much bigger margin because of the value of the brand.

“That’s not how Chinese companies operate. They’re much more interested in performance marketing than they are about brand marketing. If I talk to Chinese leaders about sponsorship, which I often do, they’re very interested in the things that they think will drive an immediate ROI [return on investment].

“It’s as if they’re buying a commodity. They’re buying coal or they’re buying rice or bolts. That, of course, isn’t the way it works in marketing because the whole point of marketing, to some degree, is that what you’re buying is a brand.

“You’re buying an association with a Formula 1 team or with Formula 1, which in itself has brand value, and thus there’s margin. It’s not a commodity. I think that’s the critical part, is that they don’t subscribe to it for the way their business is today.”

Just hosting a grand prix, Marsh adds, is not a compelling reason for Chinese brands to alter their respective thought processes when it comes to marketing.

The mere presence of an F1 race in China is not enough to tempt brands into spending money

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“There’s no governmental pressure around Formula 1,” he said. “Yes, Shanghai has a grand prix. That’s much more of a local, regional government initiative for Shanghai than it is for China.

“China’s all about, and has been for decades, the Olympic Games and then more recently soccer because they want to host the World Cup as part of the soft power of hosting huge international sporting events.

“You see brands, Hisense, one that I worked with in Formula 1 and NASCAR in the past, then they got into football. I always think they got told to do football. They’ve sponsored UEFA and FIFA for many cycles now.”

Could the tide change in the future and what would open F1 up as a viable market for Chinese brands looking to build an international reputation?

“It wouldn’t take a massive change to turn this on its head,” added Marsh. “If Formula 1 became the sport, they would become part of it – but at the moment the combination hasn’t become exciting.

“It could if Formula 1 became bigger in China, if there was another Chinese driver who came and stayed in the sport or through another Drive to Survive type initiative.

“The initiatives that have built Formula 1 in certain countries haven’t worked in East Asia. The Netflix penetration in Japan is only 25%, whereas it’s 60% in the UK and 50% in the US – it is zero in China. No one sees Netflix, so the number of people that have seen Drive to Survive is very minimal.”

The FIA is imposing stricter load deflection tests for Formula 1 rear wings at this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix after analysing Melbourne footage.

As part of a clampdown on teams exploiting aerodynamic elasticity to an undesirable degree, the FIA told teams over the off-season that it would impose stricter loads tests for both front and rear wings.

The front wing clampdown will be introduced from the Spanish Grand Prix onwards at the end of May, while the stricter rear wing tests were already in use from the start of the season at last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.

Having further studied the findings from the Melbourne weekend, the FIA has decided to tighten up the rear wing rules for China as it felt teams could still exploit wing flexing more than intended. It will be reducing the maximum slot gap width between the mainplane and the rear wing flap from 2mm to 0.5mm, when subjected to 75kg of vertical load.

“The FIA requested to the teams to use cameras in Free Practice Sessions to monitor the on-track deformations exhibited by the cars during the Australian Grand Prix,” the governing body said in a statement.

Watch: Why Australia showed promise for both Norris and McLaren – Our F1 ‘Trackside View’

“Having analysed footage from the rear wing deformations combined to the static deflections measured inside the FIA garage in Melbourne, the FIA has concluded that sufficient grounds exist for a tougher test to be introduced from the forthcoming Chinese Grand Prix on the upper rear wing.

“More specifically, Article 3.15.17, introduced in 2025, states that if 75kg of vertical load is applied on either extremity of the rear wing mainplane, the distance between the mainplane and the flap (also known as “slot gap”) must not vary by more than 2mm. From the forthcoming Grand Prix in Shanghai, this limit will be reduced to 0.5mm. Due to the short notice for Shanghai only a tolerance of 0.25mm will be added to this new limit.”

The FIA said all teams were informed on Monday morning of the decision to revise its technical directive, and stressed that all cars were found to be legal over the Australian Grand Prix weekend.

The FIA is imposing stricter load deflection tests for Formula 1 rear wings at this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix after analysing Melbourne footage.

As part of a clampdown on teams exploiting aerodynamic elasticity to an undesirable degree, the FIA told teams over the off-season that it would impose stricter loads tests for both the front and rear wings.

The front wing clampdown will be introduced from the Spanish Grand Prix onwards at the end of May, while the stricter rear wing tests were already in use from the start of the season at last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.

Having further studied the findings from the Melbourne weekend, the FIA has decided to tighten up the rear wing rules for China as it felt teams could still exploit wing flexing more than intended. It will be reducing the maximum slot gap width between the mainplane and the rear wing flap from 2mm to 0.5mm, when subjected to 75kg of vertical load.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

“The FIA requested to the teams to use cameras in Free Practice Sessions to monitor the on-track deformations exhibited by the cars during the Australian Grand Prix,” the governing body said in a statement.

“Having analysed footage from the rear wing deformations combined to the static deflections measured inside the FIA garage in Melbourne, the FIA has concluded that sufficient grounds exist for a tougher test to be introduced from the forthcoming Chinese Grand Prix on the upper rear wing.

“More specifically, Article 3.15.17, introduced in 2025, states that if 75Kg of vertical load is applied on either extremity of the rear wing mainplane, the distance between the mainplane and the flap (also known as “slot gap”) must not vary by more than 2mm. From the forthcoming Grand Prix in Shanghai, this limit will be reduced to 0.5mm. Due to the short notice for Shanghai only a tolerance of 0.25mm will be added to this new limit.”

The FIA said all teams were informed on Monday morning of the decision to revise its technical directive, and stressed that all cars were found to be legal over the Australian GP weekend.