Alpine signs Valvoline, a brand Aramco already owns

Alpine has a new name on the car for Monza. BWT Alpine Formula One Team has announced Valvoline as a Global Team Partner, with branding appearing on the cars of Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto from this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix.

The team calls it a multi-year strategic partnership. It has not said how many years, and it has not said what it is worth.

A logo, not a lubricant

Read the announcement carefully and one word is missing: supply.

Valvoline is a lubricants company, so the natural assumption is that it will be putting oil in an Alpine power unit. The release does not say that. It says branding will feature prominently on the two cars “and around the wider BWT Alpine Formula One Team environment”. The title Alpine has given the brand is Global Team Partner, not technical partner.

The distinction matters. Alpine runs a customer Mercedes power unit in 2026, and a racing lubricant is developed and homologated alongside an engine rather than bolted on afterwards. Eni also remains on the car. The room for a second oil brand to do technical work at Alpine this season is therefore narrow, and nothing in the announcement suggests it is trying to.

For now this reads as a visibility deal rather than an engineering one. That is not a criticism. Visibility is what most Formula 1 sponsorship buys, and Alpine is selling a rebuild.

Aramco owns the brand

There is a second reason to look twice at this one.

Valvoline Global Operations is not an independent company. Aramco completed a $2.65 billion acquisition of Valvoline’s global products business in March 2023. Aramco is also the title partner of Aston Martin, and that is where Valvoline already has a genuinely technical role: it supplies lubricants for the power unit under the Aston Martin, Honda and Valvoline collaboration built around the 2026 rules.

So the same brand is now on two cars on the same grid, doing two different jobs. Technical partner at one team. Brand partner at the other.

None of that breaks a rule, and it is not new behaviour for Formula 1. Suppliers and sponsors have always appeared in more than one garage. Sponsorship income also sits outside the cost cap, so a team can bank it without it counting against what it is allowed to spend on the car, which we set out in The F1 Cost Cap Explained.

What it does show is how concentrated the money has become. A grid full of different logos can still trace back to a much shorter list of owners.

Two announcements in one week

This is Alpine’s second commercial announcement inside a week. The team has just moved its European race logistics on to Enilive’s HVO biofuel, a supply-chain decision rather than a car one. Now comes a global lubricants brand with a century of racing marketing behind it.

Both landed in the run-up to Monza, which is not an accident. The Italian Grand Prix is one of the most watched weekends of the year and one of the cheapest places on the calendar to make an announcement land. Teams stack their partner news here for the same reason brands buy advertising around a final.

For Alpine specifically, the timing does something else. A team that spent this season being written about for its results can spend this week being written about for its partners instead.

The claims, checked

Valvoline describes itself as a 160-year-old brand. That holds up: the company traces back to 1866 and the invention of a petroleum-based lubricant, which makes it one of the oldest continuously marketed names in the automotive business.

Michael Kirtman, Valvoline Global Operations’ chief brand officer, framed the deal as “another milestone in the company’s long-standing commitment to motorsports”. Guy Martin, Alpine’s global marketing director, called Valvoline a partner the team shares “a deep passion for innovation, engineering excellence, and competition” with. Both are the language of a launch rather than of a technical programme, which is consistent with everything else in the release.

Three questions this deal leaves open

Three things will tell you whether this grows. Whether Valvoline’s role at Alpine ever moves from branding to supply. Whether the brand keeps its Aston Martin technical work while expanding its commercial footprint elsewhere, which is the harder balance to hold. And whether Alpine can convert a good week of partner news into the thing partners actually want, which is a car worth being photographed next to.