Marlboro and Ferrari: Half a Century Together in F1

For almost 20 of those years, Marlboro couldn’t put its name on the car. It kept paying anyway

MOTORSPORT

9/6/20265 min read

In 1986, Philip Morris looked into launching a cigarette brand called Ferrari. It never reached the shelves. What’s interesting is what happened next: the company kept paying Ferrari for another four decades, and for almost twenty of those years it couldn’t put its name on the car.

It’s one of the longest commercial relationships in sport, and it survived something that would have killed almost any other: a ban on advertising its own product. So the question at the heart of this story is easy to ask and hard to answer. What are you buying when you pay not to be seen?

Think of someone who pays club membership for years even though the rules won’t let them wear the badge. They aren’t doing it for the badge. They’re doing it for everything else that comes with being inside.

A relationship that started on a helmet

When Marlboro approached Ferrari in the early seventies, it found the door half closed. Enzo Ferrari only allowed technical suppliers’ brands on his cars: tyres, oil, brakes. A tobacco company wasn’t on that list. So in 1973 Marlboro started where it could, sponsoring the drivers, with its logo on helmets and race suits.

It’s what anyone does when they want into a family business with house rules: start small and wait. In the meantime, its great romance was McLaren, from 1974 to 1996. With Ferrari, its presence grew slowly through the eighties, starting with a discreet sticker on the car, until in 1997 Marlboro left McLaren and became the main sponsor. The team was renamed Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.

What came next is well known: Schumacher, Todt, Brawn and five straight seasons winning both championships, from 2000 to 2004. And the trust ran both ways. Ferrari ended up hiring from the sponsor’s side: Maurizio Arrivabene, Marlboro’s head of global communications, ran the team from 2014 to 2018, and Louis Camilleri, who had led Philip Morris International, was Ferrari’s CEO between 2018 and 2020.

The day the name disappeared

In July 2005, the European directive banning tobacco sponsorship of cross-border events came into force. In practice, that meant any Grand Prix broadcast across half of Europe. For most tobacco companies it was the signal to leave. Philip Morris replied with a line that says it all: in those countries, it said, it would keep supporting Ferrari “without branding.”

The logo was seen for the last time in 2007, at the few circuits where local law still allowed it. After that, nothing. Or almost nothing.

Because there was one thing no directive could ban: the red. Marlboro and Ferrari shared a colour, and nobody in the industry thought that was a coincidence. Paul Brennan, of design agency Fitch, put it this way in The Wall Street Journal: what Marlboro was after was “owning the colour red,” which he called “the holy grail” for a brand that wants to stand out.

It’s like the neighbourhood bar that loses its permit for a sign but keeps the front painted the same colour. The regulars still find it.

The barcode

Where the car used to say Marlboro, from 2007 a barcode appeared: red, white and black stripes on the engine cover and on the drivers’ suits. If you’d spent years looking at a Marlboro pack, it looked very familiar. If you hadn’t, it was just another abstract design.

Arrivabene himself, then at Philip Morris, went as far as calling the barcode “our logo” in an interview with GP Week magazine.

In 2010 it blew up. British doctor John Britton described it as branding that “creeps in”, and a spokesman for the European Health Commissioner criticised the design the week before the Spanish Grand Prix. Ferrari defended itself with an argument that made sense from its side: the livery changed every year, and if it were advertising, Philip Morris would have to own the rights to it. Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo called the accusation “ridiculous.”

And yet, in Barcelona in May 2010, the barcode was gone. In its place was a white rectangle. Ferrari said it was removing it to “remove all speculation,” and the decision was made together with Philip Morris. The following year it also disappeared from the suits, and the name Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro was dropped. It’s what anyone does when they believe they’re technically right but the argument costs more than the gesture: give ground on what’s visible to protect what matters.

Mission Winnow, a brand with no product

In 2018, Philip Morris renewed with Ferrari and changed its message. The partnership, the company said, would focus on “a smoke-free world.” In October that year, at the Japanese Grand Prix, a new logo appeared on the car: Mission Winnow.

The name has a nice touch to it. To winnow is to separate the grain from the chaff. But Mission Winnow didn’t sell anything. It was a Philip Morris initiative with a website, a slogan about finding better ways of doing things, and a logo with two chevrons that reminded many people of the roof on a Marlboro pack.

Regulators were quick to ask questions. Australia opened an investigation ahead of its 2019 Grand Prix, and Ferrari raced in Melbourne with a logo for the Scuderia’s 90th anniversary in its place. Philip Morris maintained that it complied with the law everywhere, but agreed to remove it. The same happened later in Canada and France. In 2020 Ferrari raced the whole year without the logo, in 2021 it carried it only for the first six races, and by 2022 the name had disappeared from the official entry as well.

From the outside it looks like a failure. From the inside, Philip Morris was doing what any company does when its main product can no longer be advertised: finding a way to stay present while it changes business.

What you buy when you can’t be seen

The relationship didn’t break. It moved. Since 2024 the team has been called Scuderia Ferrari HP, and on 3 December 2025 Ferrari announced it was renewing with Philip Morris International as a Premium Partner, in a multi-year deal that began in January 2026. For the first time in years, one of the company’s brands was back on the car at some races: ZYN, its nicotine pouches, starting with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Ferrari describes it as a collaboration of “more than fifty years.”

How much Philip Morris has paid has never been made public. The specialist press, citing various sources, has estimated it at around $100 million a year.

Academics have a name for what happened in between: alibi marketing. Bruce Grant-Braham and John Britton defined it in 2012 as reducing a brand to its most recognisable visual pieces, a colour or a shape, and using them in place of the logo. It’s the technical version of the bar’s painted front.

But stopping at the colour misses the point. During those years, Philip Morris bought something much harder to ban: a seat at the table. Its executives ended up running the team, its marketing thinking made its way into Maranello and, when the rules changed, the company was already inside, ready to put a name back on the car. Paying not to be seen was, in the end, paying not to leave.