Williams grabs second Lotus sponsor in a week as team pushes for the front again

Williams is celebrating its most successful season on track since 2003 and has enjoyed more success off track as it today announced a second new sponsor, which it has poached from the Lotus F1 team.

Williams saw a €30 million boost in income from FOM prize funds thanks to rising from 9th in 2013 to 3rd this season and it is set for further cash boosts with the arrival of fresh sponsorship.

Last week Unilever joined the fold with its Rexona brand and today Williams announced that it has signed up Avenade, a global business technology, cloud and managed services provider.

Both brands have been with Lotus for the past few years, but a combination of poor results on track this year, uncertainty over the team's future, lack of information about what is going on as well as Williams' history and resurgence seems to have won them over.

McLaren is known to have made strong overtures to Unilever for this deal, so beating their old rivals to the signature will be gratifying for the Williams commercial people.

Conversely for Lotus, the slide from 4th in the Constructors' table last year last year to 8th this year will cost them over €20 million, plus the additional loss of income from these departing sponsors.

Speaking to this site a few months ago, while it was working on new deals for 2015, Williams senior managers, Claire Williams and Mike O'Driscoll, said that the sponsor money was finding the team due to the attraction of Williams as a challenger to the currently established top teams,

"We have a lot of conversations now about ‘challenger brands’, because we are now a challenger brand,” said Williams. “People like that story. But we’ve always been a challenger in a sense because we used to win on smaller budgets than Ferrari and McLaren.”

O’Driscoll added: “We are seeing enormous interest in the team because of the success we’ve had this year,” He also observed that the team’s title sponsor Martini, “is showing growth in market share, which is directly attributable to the partnership they have formed with Williams. “

Williams shows that if you turn around your competitiveness the money will find you. The team took a big gamble on investing for success after years of mediocrity, even though it meant going £17m into the red on the balance sheet for the first six months of 2014. But it has worked.

Inspiring though this is for other independent teams, the uneven distribution of F1’s commercial revenues combined with escalating costs due to a doubling of the cost of engines under the 2014 regulations, means that the underlying narrative for the medium sized and smaller teams this year is a lack of sustainability.

The top teams are reluctant to consider any form of budget cap and a vote regarding channeling some of their additional funds from FOM did not pass last week. There has been little progress on this in meetings at the end of the season, but all teams have been called to a meeting on December 18 to try to find a solution to the funding crisis.