Max Verstappen’s sponsor explains reason behind not renewing their deal with 3x F1 champion

Max Verstappen's long-term sponsor 'Jumbo' has ended its partnership with the Red Bull driver ahead of the 2024 F1 season. The decision to split is part of the company's overall withdrawal from sports sponsorships.

Dutch brand 'Jumbo' has been sponsoring Verstappen since his early days in F1, when he was racing for Toro Rosso back in 2015. The brand, however, has now ended the association because of its position in the global market.

Speaking to a Dutch publication De Volkskrant, Ton Van Veen, the chief executive, explained that the brand has "lost its focus."

"In recent years, Jumbo has lost its focus somewhat," PlanetF1 quoted him as saying. "We have added a number of activities that have not necessarily strengthened the formula. We have also become very active in sports sponsorship."

While sponsoring successful athletes might look like a good deal for the brand, it supposedly does not help them in the market. Jumbo, as Van Veen explained, is "not even the biggest" company in the Dutch supermarket, so spending millions on sponsoring world-class athletes like Verstappen doesn't give them a lot of returns.

"But when you look at the successes of athletes and teams, you have to ask yourself if that suits us. Max Verstappen is a World Champion. But we are a Dutch supermarket company, not even the biggest. On the world stage, we don’t have much business," Van Veen said. "That means we no longer put tens of millions into sports sponsorship, but use it to lower prices. That is the essence of Jumbo as it was meant to be."

Max Verstappen losing Jumbo might look like a blow, but he has enough time to tie up with other major brands as he heads into the 2024 F1 season.

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Does Max Verstappen's comment about McLaren hint at competition for Red Bull in 2024?

The 2023 season was marvelous for Red Bull and Max Verstappen as they completely dominated the circuit. Verstappen won his third consecutive F1 world championship while the Milton Keynes team added another constructors' championship to their bag.

The team won 21 out of the 22 races that were held in the season. They only missed out on Singapore, where Carlos Sainz clinched his second F1 victory in his Ferrari.

In that race, McLaren's Lando Norris finished in second place. McLaren improved greatly during the second half of the 2023 season, and are expected to be quite strong in 2024, which is what Max Verstappen feels too.

"The one I think that was most impressive behind us from where they started to where they ended was definitely McLaren," F1 quoted him as saying. "It looks like they might be very strong next year."

Max Verstappen's Red Bull leading Lando Norris' McLaren during the 2023 Qatar Sprint (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Furthermore, Charles Leclerc posed some competition to Sergio Perez during the Las Vegas GP. Verstappen had mentioned earlier that the weakness of the RB19 was street circuits, referring to these two races.

Red Bull's rivals have seemingly started catching up with their pace, so a little bit of competition might be expected in the 2024 F1 season. At the same time, however, RBR have been working quite hard on their car, too.

It was earlier revealed by their performance engineer Ben Waterhouse that the RB20 has been in the works for the past six months so the team has started to 'think' about the 2025 car.