FEBRUARY 1, 2005

Who can afford F1 these days?

There is always a certain amount of whining and griping in Formula 1 about how hard it is to find money and how there are no big sponsors around these days. Clearly some of the whingers have been missing something. ExxonMobil, the world's biggest oil company, is obviously not struggling too badly having just announced profits for 2004 of $25.33bn. The huge profit came as a result of surging demand for oil and high oil prices and were also inflated by the fact that the US dollar is not worth what it used to be. The company had sales of nearly $300bn. ExxonMobil is a sponsor of both McLaren (with Mobil) and Toyota (Esso).

Shell is expected to announce results of $18bn later this week. Shell is a major sponsor of Ferrari.

So if you are looking for cash, oil companies are a pretty goood bet at the moment.