WHEELS IN MOTION

26th November 2025

TAG Heuer has cemented its relationship with motorsport with a 10-year deal, one that interestingly includes sponsorship of the all-female F1 Academy. We look at why TAG Heuer’s deal has come at the right time and speak with F1 Academy class of 2025 member and brand partner Aiva Anagnostiadis. Words by Laura McCreddie-Doak.

It was probably the worst-kept secret in motorsport and watches. This January after 10 years on the sponsorship podium, Rolex handed over the steering wheel to TAG Heuer in a multi-brand deal allegedly worth $1bn over 10 years. Also on the podium, alongside TAG Heuer is Louis Vuitton and LVMH’s wine and spirits business Moët Hennessy – presumably one of those will be used for post-race celebrations and the other enjoyed in the VIP area.

This all makes a lot of sense for TAG Heuer. Its associations with the sport run deep. In the 1960s it was the first Swiss watch brand to enter the world of motorsport and has been associated with it ever since. In the 1990s, its relationship with McLaren’s F1 team and Ayrton Senna made TAG Heuer one of the most desirable watch brands on the planet, while recently it has sponsored F1’s Oracle Red Bull Racing, worked with current reigning champion Max Verstappen and been official watch partner of the Monaco Grand Prix. It not just the association with motorsport that makes this a canny move for TAG Heuer. For years now it has been positioning itself as the young buck of the LVMH stable, which aligns perfectly with F1’s new demographic, which has been brought to the sport courtesy of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. It hit the streamer in 2019 offering a behind-the-scenes look at motor racing and has completely transformed the sport’s audience. F1 is now the most followed sport in the world according to data from the data and analytics agency, Nielsen Sport. It has a global audience of 1.5bn, one in three fans are under 35 and 41% are female. The stats on who is watching Drive to Survive are similar to those watching the F1 season. According to a 2023 YouGov Sports whitepaper, 31% of the audience are 18–29-year-olds and of the 6.8m total viewership 46% are women. And all those eyeballs will now be looking at a very large TAG Heuer logo. Interestingly, TAG Heuer is also putting its sponsorship weight behind the future of the sport, especially a female future in the sport, with F1 Academy. Set up by Scottish former professional racing driver Susie Wolff in 2022 and launched in 2023, F1 Academy is an all-female single-seater racing series designed to identify, develop, and propel female drivers toward the pinnacle of motorsport. The series, which has been turned into seven-episode documentary series also on Netflix, with a second series on the way, provides a structured platform, increasing accessibility to professional racing and creating a talent pipeline for higher levels of competition. As well as sponsoring the Academy, TAG Heuer has also partnered with an individual driver, Aiva Anagnostiadis, a 17-year-old who started karting at age six and was part of the Alpine Rac(H)er Academy Programme in 2023and who aspires to become the first Australian woman in Formula 1. We sat down with her to find out more.

You started go karting at six. Do you remember how you felt at six years old the first time you put your hands on that wheel?
I think I was pretty nervous, really. I think I was like, really scared, to be honest, but then I was quite confident at the same time, like I was like, I want to give this a go. Let me have a go.I remember going at the grid, and my mum and dad were supposed to keep the throttle kind of 50% just for my first time. They forgot. I went straight at the grid, foot flat to the floor. I made it around, I think, two corners, and I was straight into the barrier.

One of the things that gets brought up about you a lot is that this was obviously inevitable for you because of your parents. Did you feel it was inevitable, or did you feel like you had some agency?
I wanted to be a dancer. I did contemporary, jazz; I did cheerlead for a little bit. I was a national champion, doing all that and karting. There was time when I was at nationals in the Gold Coast in Australia, and I had a jazz and contemporary championship to win, and we won them, and then I had to win the karting championship. I had that on Sunday morning. I had to qualify so I got a red eye that morning. I got to the go-kart with two minutes to spare before qualifying, and hopped in and went out and drove, and then my parents sat me down, and they’re like, “we can’t do this anymore. You have to pick one or the other.”

You’re now at F1 Academy in a team. How do they put you together? Do you did you know them before, from the circuit?
High Tech is very well-known team. I actually went to the High Tech factory when I first moved to the UK. So, at the start of this year, to arrive at High Tech to be a part of the team was a bit of surreal moment. Thing is, in motorsport, you have to know people to get the job secured. Tom Williams, my coach, he’s been with me since I was seven and he’s been working his bum off to get me in the seat as well, and then I had to do the job in the car. Then F1 Academy put me with a team and an incredible sponsor – TAG Heuer.

Did you know anything about the brand before they became your supporter?
Actually my grandpa loves watches. He told me about TAG Heuer, about in their involvement in motorsport. I’ve never really worn a watch, but now I do not take it off, I love it. It is such an iconic brand with so much history, especially their relationship with Ayrton Senna, one of my racing idols, and it’s great to be a part of that history.

F1 Academy has been set up to get more women to that point of racing in F1. Do you think that women don’t see racing or even like racing adjacent roles such as, being in the pit, as a career? Do you think they don’t see it as a career for them because male principals don’t hire women? Or is it a visibility thing, you can’t be what you can’t see?
I think it’s probably both. I think the teams have their own thing, which, is if they’ve got a boy to do a good job, then they think why do we need to go to another avenue? But also, for the girls taking a step into a paddock that’s full of boys, it’s quite intimidating. I also think girls just don’t see that they can go be an engineer or a mechanic or anything in Formula One pits, even a journalist involved in motorsport. In the last two or three years, it’s advanced, quite a lot. I went home to the karting community, and I hadn’t been at the track in a good three years, and I went to a race meet, and I saw, nearly 10 girls on this grid out of the 40 boys. When I was at home racing, I was the only girl, so it is improving quite a bit. I think it’s going to take a while to get there throughout the Formula categories. I think for Formula One, it’s going to take five or six years [to see a change]. Hopefully having F1 Academy on Netflix will improve that, and with Drive to Survive being incredible in terms of female engagement, it just opened up the understanding to the sport.

If everything goes to plan, and you do end up on that trajectory to Formula One. You’re saying five, six years? How long it will take for us to see you on the grid?
To get through F2 you do a couple of years in F3 maybe two more to get to F1. It depends on the driver. But this also has to line up with sponsorship and money. It’s like any other sport. You have to get a sponsorship behind you as well. As a female especially because, I don’t think there’s the funding there to help a girl get racing moments, and it’s probably the only thing stopping her. I wouldn’t have this opportunity if I didn’t have TAG Heuer. We need this to be able to get the funding to keep going in the sport. And I think that’s what people don’t actually understand. That yes, we do all this makeup, and we do the shows, and we do the whole “hoo ha” behind the scenes, but we’re all working our butts off to get the sponsors on board to keep going in the sport.

TAG Heuer watches are available from ROX Newcastle.

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