The dark side of wellness in motorsport

We made an impressive sight. Anything up to 20 bods trooping into stages of the Rally of New Zealand, clutching coffee cups or munching on chocolate bars and fruit. All of us wearing the bright blue jackets and caps of the much-admired 555 Subaru World Rally Team.

That year, I ran a comprehensive suite of events around the team’s presence at Rally NZ. There was the pre-event press conference at Waipuna attended by media and invitees from the hospitality sector. Interview opps for local TV news. We had a VIP suite at the Manukau mudfest…er…Superstage and in the buildup to the stage we even had a TV link out to watch the Bledisloe Cup final. No surprises for guessing who won that one. Our TV was actually so we could take the live mixed feed from the TV3 Outside broadcast (OB) set-up a kilometre away.

Then we took our VIPs and overseas media on a van tour, switching out group members over the whole three days. We ended the tour on the Monday with a visit to Rally HQ and a chat with Morrie Chandler about the special place our rally occupied in the championship. Heady days, heady stuff.

The Prodrive team were running Kenneth Erikson/Staffan Parmander and Piero Liatti/Fabrizia Pons in four door Impreza WRX cars that year. Like all Prodrive efforts, the cars – under the watchful eye of John Spiller – were stunningly turned out and it was probably the height of local rally fans’ obsession with the blue and gold ‘fives’.

Funnily enough, not very many of the rally fans who offered to relieve us of our jackets that year had any idea that 555 is one of the bigger Asian cigarette brands and thus Prime Evil as a sporting sponsor. These were the years when New Zealand was lumbering toward a ban on tobacco sponsorship in sport and the government had set up Smokefree as a funding alternative to help bridge the multi-million dollar gap left as Big Tobacco edged away from the threat of legal action.

Also of note in passing, there were five manufacturers in the top ten of the entry list that year. There were 75 entries, local and international, and it was a WRC round and also an APRC round. Though in previous years Rothmans – seeing the writing on the wall perhaps – sponsored the event and Big Tobacco money played an essential part in bringing the big boys to New Zealand it was all going to end and it’s a credit to Morrie, Willard Martin, the media room masters Grant Morrison and Chris Grant (and others in a loyal band of volunteers) that the transition was as painless as it could be.

One step ahead…

Tobacco companies have sought ever more clever ways to skirt around a country’s prohibitions. Countries where advertising is prohibited are referred to as ‘dark markets’.

The stylized logo version (alibi branding) of the ‘fives’ used in such markets sailed so close to the fives that they became as popular as the actual logo. Marlboro’s stripes resembled a bar code – but fans knew exactly what that fluoro orange-red chevron meant. Price cards for ciggy brands were produced in the colours of the brand and with the logo intact and were ten times the size of the product whose price they announced.

All this in a time when there was no social media at all, when a dial-up modem ‘boinged’ your achingly slow access to the net, such as it was. When phones were for making phone calls.

One thing is certain, with the bewildering range of social and electronic media out there and the fickle nature of youth meaning last week’s favoured channel is this week’s Bebo*, lawmakers have their work cut out to prevent Big Tobacco and an increasingly naïve market of young people from connecting in the ether.

So what’s it all about?

Sport, and especially elite sport, is about excellence. Extreme effort, superhuman skill, abilities that are far beyond what the rest of us might possess. Setting aside the possibility of serious injury, taking part in sport is without doubt good for any individual. No wonder ‘vice’ products want to be associated with sport.

As a lifelong non-smoker, I can’t argue the merits or evils of that dreadful weed. For me, the tobacco century is over and gone, and good riddance to that dying habit. The thing that always irked me? The baccy-backed cars had ALL the cool graphics and paint jobs. Rothmans 956. JPS Lotus. The aforementioned Subarus. The Marlboro efforts in F3, rallying and more. Lucky Strike Hondas (motorcycle and F1). Even the Camel Land Rovers.

Cigarette sponsorship, once such a feature of elite sport, is widely taboo these days, at least in ‘mature’ or developed markets.

But with so many ciggy markets turning ‘dark’, how have the ciggy companies done this? By cleverly doing nothing at all that actually has anything to do with their products.

The new product? Wellness initiatives!

British American Tobacco will slide back into view with the McLaren F1 team just in time for the coming F1 season, focusing on development of tech for less harmful (smoking) products.

Alongside BAT, Philip Morris International has been a partner of Ferrari for years. It is now pushing that partnership forward with a project called Mission Winnow.

Er, what? The official website offers some guidance. Mission Winnow is an organisation with the ‘simple goal’ of ‘constantly searching for better ways of doing things’. It’s about finding cleaner, safer ways of smoking and developing ciggy product tests that don’t involve humans or animals. Mission Winnow appeared on the Ferraris in the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix, and yes, there was a bit of a furore.

Australian regulators have caught an unseemly whiff from all this and it remains to be seen if Ferrari will run with Mission Winnow branding on its cars in Melbourne next month, or indeed anywhere . But the change is real, and the dollars involved mean it was only a matter of time before the baccy companies found a way back in to premier motor racing.

* remember Bebo? An innocent networking website for the tweeny teens, established in 2005 and bought out by AOL in 2008 for $850 million. Remember AOL? Sponsored NASCAR in the USA and…oh, never mind.