Shropshire Star

Business of sport is where Brian Sims became a champion

He battled the likes of Nigel Mansell on the track, but Brian Sims’ biggest Formula One victories came in the boardroom.

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From a business career that started with Wolverhampton’s Goodyear Tyres, Sims worked his way up to the pinnacle of motorsport – bringing in more than $100million of sponsorship.

It was a craft honed to fund his own racing dreams, but one that would prove the most crucial to his ascent to marketing director of the championship-winning Benetton F1 team in the late 1990s, securing ground-breaking deals with Gillette, FedEx and more along the way.

“The deal I am most proud of in my life is I brought FedEx into Formula One for the first time,” said lifelong Wolves fan Sims, who lives in Shrewsbury. “What started as a cold call at my desk in London, I did a £15million deal.

“To walk out of FedEx head office in Memphis with a deal for £15million, I had to pinch myself.”

To understand Sims’ approach to sports business and the innovation that allowed him – ‘a driver with very little skill’, he concedes – to race across the globe and mix with the most powerful people in F1, you must go back to humble beginnings.

Born in 1946, Sims grew into a young man with big dreams – but dreams that involved him taking to the sky, not the track.

Catching up with triple world champion Niki Lauda at the 2016 Bahrain GP

After being knocked back in his attempts to follow his father into the Royal Air Force, the business world came calling – starting with Goodyear Tyres from 1969 until 1971, training in Bushbury for eight weeks as a part of his role as a trainee area sales manager.

A move to Rank Xerox followed – treading the same path as future World Cup-winning England rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward – but it was when he became the UK sales training director for ITT that he could take his first tentative steps into the world of motorsport.

It was love at first sight for Sims and racing after a chance trip to Silverstone to watch some club racing: “I thought, wow, I could do a bit of this.”

ITT helped fund his early racing career, but by 1977 he had gained enough sponsorship to turn professional in Formula Ford, where he raced alongside future F1 stars such as Mansell and Derek Warwick.

“They were all better than me and going to Formula One, but because I could get sponsorship, I could get the best team, have more practice and really use it,” he said. “There were 14 drivers in the Formula Ford championship at that time who went on to Formula One.”

The deal that allowed Sims to turn professional remains one of his proudest achievements, securing £27,000 from Sodastream.

He said: “We put a race car in major departmental stores around the country and gave out samples.

Sims has run courses across the globe

“It’s not always about stickers on the car, it’s about using innovative ways.”

Though F1 never came calling, Sims was able to win a touring car championship – leading to a drive for the Mercedes factory team in South Africa.

“This racing driver with very little skill, but an ability to make himself look better than he was got himself a contract with Mercedes,” he proudly reflects.

And it was from there his off-track career really began to take off – thanks in part to a meeting with Max Mosley on a flight to South Africa, which led to him becoming the manager of the country’s Kyalami F1 circuit in the early 1980s.

Off-track politics dominated his first couple of years there though, with Bernie Ecclestone’s group of constructors (FOCA) locked in a battle for supremacy with Jean-Marie Balestre’s FISA, who had control over the regulations.

The 1982 race nearly did not go ahead at all because of strike action by the drivers – led by Niki Lauda – over controversial proposed changes to their licences.

“Niki led the strike, they organised a coach, brought it into the paddock and locked themselves in,” said Sims. “The idea was they were then going to drive back to the hotel in central Johannesburg and wait until something happened.

“The team owners were going ballistic and Bernie (Ecclestone) was going ballistic because of the potential breach of contracts there were with sponsors.

“John McDonald drove an old minibus across the front of the coach to stop the drivers leaving the circuit.

“Jacques Laffite, a French driver who was driving for Ligier at the time, got out of the coach and into the front of this minibus and couldn’t get it in reverse!”

It was a story he was able to revisit with Lauda – who passed away last month – at the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2016.

“I’ve got a lovely photograph of the two of us standing chatting about Kyalami, how we loved winter testing in South Africa and the drivers’ strike.”

Sims’ racing career took him all over the world – here he is in his final race at Kyalami

Busier and busier, Sims finally retired from driving in 1987 to set up the first motor racing school in South Africa – but four years after hanging up his racing gloves, F1 finally came calling, as he became the marketing and PR director for the fledgling Lola Ferrari team from 1991 until 1994.

However, it was an ambitious deal to finally bring Gillette into F1 – with Benetton – that really announced his arrival.

“Every year, every Formula One team was knocking on their door with these unbelievable proposals of a Gillette Formula One team,” he said. “If you think about it, it doesn’t seem that unreal, it’s a good fit.” Working for former Olympian Alan Pascoe’s agency, Sims witnessed a Bennetton pitch to Gillette that left the shaving firm’s chiefs yawning.

“I was shocked at the presentation ­– a five-year-old could do better than that.”

And that was when Sims sprung into action, meeting Allan Boath – president of Gillette’s shaving division – who told him: “We would love to be in Formula One, but nobody has shown us why we should be.”

And it was from there he came up with the unique idea to create a six-part lifestyle documentary about the Benetton F1 team and sell it around the world – as long as the stations agreed to take free Gillette advertising around it.

The only branding they took on the car was a small rear-wing logo – all for the sum of £5m, which went to developing the car for Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger so they could compete with Williams and Ferrari in the World Championship.

“Gillette didn’t need brand awareness – everyone knows Gillette – they needed product awareness, which is very different.

“We did the deal and it was based on asking the question ‘What are the issues facing your company? How can we perhaps help?’

“The biggest problem is you have got people going out trying to get sponsorship without understanding what sponsorship is capable of delivering.

“It is far more than brand awareness, hospitality and PR.”

With commentary legend Murray Walker

That deal helped persuade Benetton Sims was the man to become their commercial director, which led to the £15m FedEx deal, and similar ones with Accenture and Marconi, bringing all of them into the sport for the first time.

“It’s strange, it’s no different to talking to a small company in my very early days, like the Sodastream deal – that was £27,000, but the budget to run the car was £12,500 for the season so I had a salary and was able to turn professional.

“That was exciting, so to then be able to do it in Formula One and walk out the FedEx boardroom with a deal like that, my thought was ‘It’s just a few more noughts on the end’ – the concept was exactly the same.”

And that concept has transferred to other sports too, whether it be Sims working as head of marketing for Bath Rugby or being called upon by the World Academy of Sport to help senior executives learn how to bring money in.

And he has since taken those talents on to the advisory board of Oxford Brookes University for six years, developing business partnerships and lecturing on sponsorship, before he was asked to move to the Telford Campus at the University of Wolverhampton to work with their motorsport programme as a motorsport industry consultant.

Now living in Shrewsbury, Sims will be passing on his sponsorship secrets to sportsmen and women at a special seminar next month.

An Evening With Brian Sims – which costs £12 per ticket and takes place at Shrewsbury Town Football Club on Wednesday, July 3 (6.30pm) – is open to anyone in sport looking to maximise the sponsorship they bring in.

“In three hours, I’m not going to teach you to get every deal out there, but what I’m saying is you need to change the way you think about it,” he said. “It’s hard work to find that money – whether it’s £500 or £5million, it is not easy.”

For ticket booking information, email sponsorshipsalestraining1@gmail.com