Rich Energy Ends Deal With Haas In Bizarre Tweet Blaming "Poor Performance"

Rich Energy has announced that it is ending its sponsorship deal with Haas due to reasons which are entirely down to the team's performance and clearly absolutely nothing to do with the recent court cases...

Dan Thorn

10 Jul 2019

Rich Energy departing F1 as a sponsor isn’t entirely surprising - the recent court cases over copyright infringement with the similarly-logo’d Whyte Bikes were always likely to have some sort of effect on its sponsorship deals.

What is unusual however is that two days before practice for the British Grand Prix is set to get underway, it abruptly ended the deal with Haas via a Twitter announcement, of all things.

Today @rich_energy terminated our contract with @HaasF1Team for poor performance. We aim to beat @redbullracing & being behind @WilliamsRacing in Austria is unacceptable. The politics and PC attitude in @F1 is also inhibiting our business. We wish the team well #F1 #richenergy pic.twitter.com/9mAt2dOnYu
— Rich Energy (@rich_energy) July 10, 2019

Just… wow. It’s true that Haas has had some struggles getting the tyres to work this season, which has led to some disappointing results. But the notion that the team was ever going to beat Red Bull this season is just hilarious - and that’s not a slight on Haas, it’s just the way F1 is at the moment, and likely will be until at least 2021. The reasons for Kevin Magnussen being beaten by George Russell’s Williams in Austria are also as much to do with his penalty for being out of position as they were a lack of pace.

However, it seems likely that this is just a bit of a smokescreen to detract from Rich Energy’s ongoing legal dispute with Whyte Bikes, having recently lost its appeal and ordered to hand over details of the sponsorship deal with Haas.

Taking all of that into account, it wouldn’t actually be surprising to learn that the deal was actually ended by Haas rather than Rich Energy…

Comments

You don’t just end a sponsorship deal in the middle of the season for “poor performance”, 100% that’s just an excuse for something else. Especially considering that RBR was a world championship winning team just a few years ago, assuming that not beating them were “poor performance” is just completely out of touch with reality. Yes, they were behind Williams that race and Williams is last place in the championship, but not every race goes well so that’s by no means “unacceptable”

Imo either rich energy are not aware of what the guy running their social media does

Or its a parody account gone too far (its not a verified account so may be possible)

Or its some poor attempt to follow the rule that even negative attention is still good PR for your brand (kinda worked - after all so many ppl went out of their way to get their hands on the drink)

The Tweet does seem to be big butt hurt in it but to be honest I wonder what it would be like to see what Haas do next, maybe call up Whyte bikes and say “Hey could you sponsor us please?”