New racing team unveiled at the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix doesn’t care if it loses
Mirror Sport sat down with F1 Academy boss Susie Wolff, LEGO chief product officer Julia Goldin and driver Esmee Kosterman at the Las Vegas Grand Prix to get the inside scoop on an exciting new partnership
Racing teams rarely settle for anything less than winning, but it’s clear that LEGO plan to do things a little differently. Mirror Sport was present in the pit lane at the Las Vegas Grand Prix as the brand famous for its plastic bricks confirmed its new partnership with F1 Academy – and its intention to fund its very own motorsport outfit.
LEGO Racing will hit the grid next year in the all-female series, which receives heavy support and funding from Formula 1 and its 11 teams, including new outfit Cadillac, with Dutch racer Esmee Kosterman behind the wheel. Like all racers, she wants to be the best – but her bosses have a bigger goal in mind.
“For us, the pressure is not whether this car is the most successful or Esmee wins the championship,” said Julia Goldin, LEGO’s chief product and marketing officer. It did not go unnoticed that Susie Wolff, F1 Academy chief executive and an impressive former racer herself, raised a small smirk when she heard that comment while seated next to her championship’s newest major sponsor.
Goldin was quick to add: “Of course, we wish for her to do extremely well! But for us, the pressure is more that we are doing this in order to raise awareness, in order to build belief, in order to build excitement. Those are the results, those are the KPIs, at least in my view, of what we want to accomplish together.
“I’m sure that Esmee is going to do well and I’m sure she’s going to gain a lot from this experience, because she’s going to be coached by the best and I think it’s going to build a lot of excitement and opportunity. But the pressure is very different from saying, ‘We’re doing this because we want to have a winning team’. That’s not the reason. We’re doing it because we want the overall F1 Academy to win. So that’s the pressure.”
F1 Academy is, as Goldin put it, “not yet established” – the championship is three years old and still very much in its infancy. But its relevance is rising all the time and Wolff hopes that the recruitment of another huge, globally-recognised sponsor will only serve to accelerate its growth.
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She said: “What’s most important other brands to see is that a heavyweight like LEGO has chosen to come in and support F1 Academy and, like Julia said, not just in a small way, but in a big way. That means so much to us and gives us a lot of credibility, it gives us a lot of exposure, it helps us change perceptions. That’s stuff that I hope other brands can at least be inspired by.”
LEGO and motorsport are both trying to solve the same problem – appealing more to young girls and women. That is why the Danish toy company has done more than just slap its logo on a car. LEGO is also releasing buildable versions of its F1 Academy car to join the Speed Champions range which already features the designs and liveries of the 10 current F1 teams.
It is hoped that the combination of the small cars to be built at home, combined with the real thing racing on F1 tracks around the world, will help to introduce a whole new generation of young girls to motorsport.
Wolff said: “We certainly want little girls to see that there’s a place for them in our sport. I think we’re incredibly lucky that the sport has such a big female fan base now, and it’s really about making sure that the next generation has the opportunity, through a Lego product also now, to see that motor sports and cars are not just for boys anymore.”
And Goldin added: “For little girls that want to race – and they think of it as a dream – actually having a car that they have built with a driver with long hair that sits in that car, that creates a lot of inspiration and credibility for the sport. But the fact that we have the real car perks up her interest to go and understand, ‘Oh wow, there’s a real car and a real driver, now I can follow it’. I think that’s the world of possibilities that this whole integration is going to open up.”
The car will race on track with the number 32, a nod to the company’s founding date in 1932. Kosterman would have preferred to use 65, the number her racing machines have borne since she was a child in karting, but what matters more to her is this step in her career which the 20-year-old says she would not have been able to make without the financial backing from LEGO.
As for Goldin’s suggestion that winning is a secondary concern, it’s safe to say that Kosterman has a different view. “It’s really hard to have expectations, because you don’t know who is going to join [the grid],” she said. “But my goal is to put this LEGO racing car on the podium. I know it’s a high pressure goal – but I like pressure.”
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