Formula 1 has two new team names this season, following a trend in the sport to focus on marketing: Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team and Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber.
Sauber Motorsport has been racing since 1993 under various names, most recently as Alfa Romeo. For this season and next it will be called Stake, with Audi taking over in 2026.
“Prior to the arrival of Audi, we felt it was important to present ourselves with this new identity and to create a commercial partnership,” said Alessandro Alunni Bravi, spokesman for the Stake team. “The Sauber Group has been in Formula 1 for 32 years, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten what Sauber is. It means that for the next two seasons we wanted to present ourselves as something new, fresh, different to help us attract a new audience.”
AlphaTauri, which entered Formula 1 in 2006 as Toro Rosso, acquires the Visa Cash app name.
“The head of sponsorship at Visa, Andrea Fairchild, said it’s a bit of a mouthful,” said Peter Bayer, the team’s chief executive. “The reality is that we said from the beginning last year that we would get closer to the Red Bull family.”
RB stands for Racing Bulls, a reference to the collection of airplanes known as Flying Bulls that belonged to team founder Dietrich Mateschitz.
“It’s a good fit,” Bayer said. “But then we had a big problem because we had Visa, one of the biggest brands in the world, and Cash App, one of the most spectacular brands in the financial world, especially in the US, both wanted to work with us.
“We’re like, ‘Well, we’re going to be the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team.’ I don’t hear many people calling Aston Martin, the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 team, and I don’t hear people talking about the MoneyGram Haas Formula 1 team, so we just have to be realistic and focus on the content, and it’s a really beautiful and fast car”.
Drake, a Canadian rap artist, provided the voice in the social media video announcing Sauber’s name change.
For 20 of the record 24 Grands Prix this year, it will be known as the Stake F1 Team. For the other four, in Australia, Spain, Belgium and Qatar, he will return to Kick Sauber.
The change is to comply with gaming advertising laws in these four countries because Stake is an online cryptocurrency casino. Its owners are also responsible for Kick, a live streaming platform.
“We will fully comply with all local applicable laws where Betting is permitted,” said Alunni Bravi. “So where gambling advertising is banned we will use a different name.
“Our car launch was broadcast live on Kick.com, our chassis name is Kick Sauber, so where we won’t be racing as Stake, we’ll be using the second team name.”
Both teams’ names have been criticized, with some fans taking to social media. “Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber might be the worst name for a team in F1 history,” wrote one fan on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“When you’re trying something new and you have a team name that’s different from other team names, it’s always easy to be critical,” Alunni Bravi said. “Of course, there was criticism from those who were close to the Sauber name and perhaps expected something different.
“Maybe we went too far, but we wanted to do something new and engaging for our fans. When Drake announced our name, we had 22 million views, a number we’ve never achieved with a single post on our social media platforms. It was huge.”
For Bayer, landing Visa was such a coup. “You see the pace of growth of F1 in the United States, a country that is a huge market for sports marketing and Visa is an amazing brand,” he said.
“They do the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup and now a Formula 1 team, which is an honor for us and a huge opportunity. They will bring so many fresh ideas.”
Kendrick Lamar, the American rapper, appeared at the group’s launch event in Las Vegas earlier this month. “We’re combining sports with entertainment, bringing in new fans, activating new fan groups with a new way of communicating,” Bayer said. “It’s an amazing opportunity for Formula 1.”
