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McLaren Racing Partner with Hedera
McLaren Racing has announced a multi-year partnership with Hedera, naming them Official Partner of both the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team and the Arrow McLaren IndyCar Team
Pet Berisha
January 26, 2026
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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:
1) McLaren Racing Partner with Hedera 🏁
2) McLaren Racing’s Track Record 📆
3) The Commercial Reality 💵
4) Concluding Thoughts 💭
➡️ Quick disclaimer — Sporting Crypto is sponsored by Hedera Foundation, part of the Hedera Ecosystem ⬅️
McLaren Racing Partner with Hedera 🏁
McLaren Racing have been one of the most prolific and, by many metrics, successful sports franchises when it comes to blockchain innovation.
And this week, they announced a multi-year partnership with Hedera, naming them Official Partner of both the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team and the Arrow McLaren IndyCar Team.
The deal will see Hedera branding appear on the MCL39 and MCL39X cars, team kit, and McLaren Technology Centre.
It marks McLaren's return to blockchain-powered fan engagement — this time on the Hedera network.
Their web3 activations go back to 2021, and they are one of the only teams in sport that have a function internally dedicated to this sector.
2) McLaren Racing’s Track Record 📆
Through their previous partnership with Tezos, McLaren Racing put up some great numbers.
Their "23 of 23" programme throughout the 2023 F1 season generated over 2.8 million collectible claims — the largest free-to-mint NFT collectibles series in sports. The model was straightforward: free to claim, simple onboarding, tied to real race weekends. Fans claimed one collectible per race weekend.
That approach recruited 650,000 wallets to the Tezos network in a single year.
But the most telling metric isn't the mint numbers. It's the community they built.
McLaren's Discord server grew from 10,000 to 114,000 members during this period due to 23/23 — generating the largest in-house managed sports server.
The stereotype is that F1 fans skew male, white and affluent.
Their Discord tells a different story: majority under 27, majority female, tech-savvy, more engaged, and with higher spend than any other social channel McLaren operates.
McLaren have also been for many the first ever touch point with anything blockchain related.
"You look at these super fans, they're on our Discord server every day, they're crocheting Lando Norris dolls, they're painting Oscar Piastri on their bedroom wal. Hey, I just opened my first crypto wallet, and I just got my first NFT.' And that's really powerful."
Double-clicking on engagement, the community they’ve built through this program is second to none.
Wolfe went on to say that "We [McLaren Racing] generate about the same amount of engagement out of 114,000 people as Instagram does from 16 million”, adding that their Discord server on a CPM basis “blows their other social channels out of the water”.
One-to-many communication channels for superfans are rare to see, but it feels like McLaren have cracked something here. To the extent that this super engagement is something they’ve been able to impress internally.
Wolfe said that "We're [McLaren Racing] starting to get sophisticated enough, and we're starting to get enough internal understanding where we're judging metrics that more accurately value what we're bringing to the table."
Fundamental to the success of the program and their bubbling Discord community is a framework they’ve used over four years:
Wolfe said:
"When we create programs that are fan-facing using web3 technologies, we always want to make sure that we're considering the needs of the fan, the needs of McLaren, and the needs of our partners that we're working with to deliver these. And I think that's the real key in building a sustainable web3 project. I've seen a lot of web3 projects come and go over the last four years, especially within sport, and we're still here. And I think we're still here because we always keep those three tenets in mind."
The free-to-claim model reflects this.
Fans get access without financial barriers.
McLaren gets data and community engagement.
Partners get wallet acquisition and ecosystem growth.
On their success and room for growth, he said:
"I think the success we found is in this way to get fans into the top of the funnel, through sort of proof of engagement, free to claim based collectibles. And I think the next step is looking at how you bring people further down."
And that is indeed where the commercial reality steps in.
The Commercial Reality 💵
There is no shying away from the business case here for the F1 team.
Wolfe said:
"As McLaren, as the commercial function, our job is to fund the race team. Our job is to make sure that our Formula One team can operate at the maximum cap of the budget, so that they can afford the best people and the best equipment to go out and win championships.
Web3 for us — yes, it's an exciting technology, it's something we are passionate about, we believe in, we look at it from the fan innovation standpoint — it's also a commercial opportunity.”
An acknowledgement that fan engagement and commercial return aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, the former enables the latter.
They are tracking merchandise spend, loyalty programme conversion, and lifetime customer value — the holy grail for many sports marketers.
The sophistication is building over time.
The Hedera partnership commercialises the program from the outset and allows McLaren to double down on the existing success whilst iterating to create something potentially even more substantial.
And that’s where the excitement could lie. McLaren have already put up great numbers from a marketing perspective. And the loyalty metrics and spend conversion sound good.
But how do you ingrain the technology further into the business?
That will be the challenge.
Blockchain rails have matured, and although there is waning engery from many over ‘Web3 loyalty’ — there are some, myself included, that think it will make a resurgence over the next 18 months.
And if anyone in sports makes a splash directionally here, you can bet it will be McLaren.
Concluding Thoughts 💬
(1) McLaren are a beacon in this sub industry
Most sports properties are struggling to reconcile fan engagement with commercialisation. Through sponsorship, McLaren are doing that and doubling down on their existing success.
(2) The real test is what comes next
Proof-of-engagement collectibles are an excellent top-of-funnel strategy, but the next phase is where things get harder. Converting passive participants into active ones is something nobody in sports has cracked yet.
(3) Blockchain rails are mature, tokenized loyalty is inevitable
A lot of Web3 loyalty applications were too early. But now, the tokenization of payments is happening, and tech stacks are much more mature. McLaren have a much wider playground to play in. But the question is; will they?
And will they see ‘doing the same’ as a failure or a success?
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