John Hogan (motorsport executive) — BrandWiki

John Hogan (motorsport executive)

Overview

John Hogan

alt	Photo of Hogan in 2013
birth name	John Scott Hogan
birth date	May 5, 1943
birth place	Sydney, Australia
death date	January 3, 2021
death place	Verbier, Switzerland
occupation	Advertising and motorsport executive
years active	1973–2003
spouse	Anne Couchman (m. 1966)

John Scott Hogan (5 May 1943 – 3 January 2021; nicknamed "Hogie") was an Australian advertising and motorsport executive who led Marlboro's Formula One sponsorship program from 1973 to 2002. As the chief financial backer of McLaren Racing and, subsequently, Scuderia Ferrari, he helped grow Formula One into a global competition with nine-figure team budgets.

Hogan's influence in Formula One stretched across four decades. Hogan subsidised the early careers of several F1 superstars, including James Hunt, Gilles Villeneuve, Nelson Piquet, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, and Mika Häkkinen. He spearheaded McLaren's rise to prominence in the 1970s under Emerson Fittipaldi and Hunt, as well as its resurgence in the 1980s under Ron Dennis, Niki Lauda, Prost, and Senna. He bankrolled Michael Schumacher's dominant Ferrari teams at the turn of the 21st century. He also briefly served as sporting and commercial director of the Jaguar Formula One team.

Early life and family

Hogan was born in Sydney on 5 May 1943, to Justin, an Australian Army officer, and Enid Hogan (née Kirkham).[1]

Marlboro in Formula One

In 1973, Hogan joined the Lausanne, Switzerland, office of Marlboro manufacturer Philip Morris (PM).[8] When he joined PM, Marlboro had recently begun advertising in Formula One.[7] Marlboro's masculine brand image, personified by the "Marlboro Man" advertising campaign, meshed well with Formula One, which had a similarly macho reputation at the time.[1] Under Hogan, Marlboro became "by far the dominant sponsorship presence in F1", and its name became "synonymous with motor racing".[6] As early as 1975, Marlboro's annual Formula One sponsorship budget was $1 million, at a time when the highest-paid drivers were paid $250,000.

Finding the advertising loophole

Hogan was not the first advertising executive to link tobacco with Formula One. In, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) lifted its ban on corporate sponsorship unrelated to the auto industry, prompting John Love to rename his racing team after the Gunston cigarette brand in time for the season opener at Kyalami.[9] By the next race, Colin Chapman's Team Lotus signed Imperial Tobacco (the manufacturer of Gold Leaf and John Player Special) as its title sponsor, entrenching the practice in the sport.[10][11] Formula One was not a particularly large-scale enterprise at the time, and Imperial's payment of less than £100,000 covered most of Lotus' costs that year.

However, Hogan helped forge a link between tobacco and Formula One's growing presence on television.[1] He said that while Imperial Tobacco was "a British company and happy to be at the British GP ... [Marlboro] wanted to be global." European governments began outlawing tobacco television commercials in the late 1960s.[10] In response, Marlboro paid racing teams to put its corporate decals on F1 cars' racing liveries. Because the broadcaster of an auto race could hardly show the race without showing the cars, this strategy allowed tobacco companies to get their brands on television without violating the ban on purchasing ad time. Hogan later explained that he saw Formula One as a way to advertise on television "before the black curtain came down" and regulators introduced more stringent measures against tobacco advertising.[12] In the analogous context of IndyCar, during the 1989 Marlboro Grand Prix, it was calculated that Marlboro's name was spoken or shown 5,933 times in 94 minutes, and that Marlboro's name was on television for 46 of those minutes.[13]

Other tobacco companies followed PM and Imperial's lead, "driv[ing] Formula One into an era where big-name corporate sponsors were essential to fund technological advances and soaring salaries".[1] In 2005, journalist Dieter Rencken found that every World Drivers' Champion since 1984 had been sponsored by a tobacco company.[9] The clout of major advertisers Marlboro and Elf (a petrol company) was so great that the two sponsors helped play peacemaker during the FISA–FOCA war.[14] With sponsorships on both sides of the conflict (Marlboro was the title sponsor for both the FOCA-affiliated McLaren and the FISA-affiliated Alfa Romeo in the early 1980s), Marlboro took "an inevitable neutral line",[15] but Hogan pushed the parties to reach a compromise.[16]

By the end of the 20th century, European regulators began cracking down more harshly on cigarette advertising. France adopted a law restricting tobacco marketing at sporting events (the loi Évin) in 1991, and other European countries eventually passed similar laws.[17] Formula One Group chief Bernie Ecclestone lobbied the British government for help, telling Tony Blair that no other industry would match tobacco's financial commitment to the sport.[17][18] In 1997, Blair asked European authorities to exempt F1 from tobacco advertising restrictions.[19][20] Although his attempt to secure a permanent exemption was unsuccessful,[21] Europe granted F1 an extended grace period "to allow recipients of tobacco cash to find other forms of funding."[22]

Hogan also worked with Ecclestone to market Formula One around the world; he was credited with the invention of grid girls.[1][24] In addition, he was chosen to represent F1's sponsors on the FIA's F1 Commission,[2][3] which wrote the rules for the sport.[1]

Drivers as marketing sensations

Hogan is perhaps best known for his patronage of James Hunt, the 1976 Formula One World Champion. He got to know Hunt before joining Marlboro, having subsidised Hunt's junior career during his years at Erwin Wasey.[7][3] The 28-year-old Hogan cobbled together $2,000 (£820, or £10,424 in 2025 pounds) from Coca-Cola and Rose Bearings so that Hunt could compete in the 1971 British Formula Three season. Hogan recalled that the payment was "a fortune in those days." The two men became good friends. Although Hogan found Hunt's personality frustrating to deal with as a businessman, Hunt was a heavy smoker with a glamorous lifestyle, making him an ideal pitchman for the Marlboro brand.[12]

Hogan was credited with steering Hunt to the Marlboro McLaren team, where he achieved his greatest successes. Fittipaldi abruptly left the team before the 1976 season. The two contenders for his race seat were Hunt and Jacky Ickx.[7] Although McLaren's other sponsor

Creating the modern-day superheroes

Although Hunt never won another title, Hogan continued finding and sponsoring championship drivers. To maximise Marlboro's exposure on television, he hired ad men who "deliberately attempted to elevate the principal drivers from mere heroes to superhero status".[28] Autoweek 's Joe Saward wrote that Hogan, Bernie Ecclestone, and Elf's François Guiter were "the primary forces in creating modern F1, not only by providing money for the sport, but also by putting together great teams".[3]

Under Hogan, PM set up the Marlboro World Championship Team, a predecessor of the modern-day driver academy, to provide financial support to promising junior drivers.[3] After Hunt retired, Hogan hired him as an advisor and driver coach.[29] Many of the best Marlboro-sponsored drivers got their starts at McLaren, which was Marlboro's flagship team for most of Hogan's career.

Moreover, in at least one case, Marlboro placed a driver with McLaren because of the driver's personal ties to the tobacco industry: Philip Morris' leadership favoured

Outside Formula One

During the Hogan years, Marlboro's sponsorship work extended beyond Formula One. In Hogan's native Australia, Marlboro backed Peter Brock and the Holden Dealer Team, as well as Nissan Motorsport, Glenn Seton Racing, and Stone Brothers Racing.[36] In the United States, Hogan encouraged McLaren to start an IndyCar team in the mid-1980s, but John Barnard scuppered the deal because the IndyCar and Formula One chassis regulations were too different.[8] Ultimately, Marlboro sponsored Team Penske's open-wheel driving operations until the late 2000s.[36] At the end of the F1 season, Hogan arranged for Ayrton Senna to test a Penske IndyCar at Firebird Raceway.[37]

Ferrari (1982–2002)

Over the years, Hogan cultivated a relationship with Italian automaker Ferrari and its racing team, Scuderia Ferrari.[6] He was attracted to Ferrari's large and devoted fanbase, explaining that "Ferrari is the only team you can go to and have a bad year."[52] However, Enzo Ferrari was historically sceptical of advertising, and would not sell Marlboro ad space on his cars. Nevertheless, some Ferrari drivers, like Niki Lauda, supplemented their salaries with Marlboro personal sponsorship contracts. During Hogan's years with McLaren, the British team released Gilles Villeneuve during the Canadian's rookie year. Hogan arranged for Villeneuve to join Ferrari in 1978.[3] Villeneuve eventually became a personal favourite of Enzo Ferrari,[54] who allowed Villeneuve to lease out ad space on his race suit—thereby giving Marlboro a visual connection to the Ferrari brand.[55]

As the costs of running a Formula One team spiraled upwards in the 1980s, Ferrari grew more open to tobacco money. In 1982, Hogan brokered a Ferrari sponsorship deal, which was "the first time [Ferrari] had agreed to sponsorship from a non-motor industry source".[56][2] Ferrari's change of heart was prompted, in part, by Hogan's own work at McLaren, as Ron Dennis believed that "the only way to [dominate the sport] was to out-spend Ferrari".[6] Although Ferrari initially limited the amount of ad space Hogan could buy, Marlboro eventually acquired prominent advertising spaces on the Ferrari chassis.

In 1996, Hogan brokered Michael Schumacher's move from Benetton (whose title sponsor was Marlboro rival Mild Seven) to Ferrari.[12][57] Marlboro paid much of Schumacher's $25 million salary, which was the highest in the history of the sport. (It was rumored that Hogan had offered Schumacher even more money to join McLaren, but the German chose Ferrari instead.) The following year, Marlboro left McLaren and became Ferrari's title sponsor.[2] It spent as much as £70m/year on the Italian team; one writer commented that "so vast were its resources it would come to effectively supplant Fiat as the race team's parent".[12] A 2004 study found that Marlboro paid over a quarter of Ferrari's $336.2 million budget and that its annual expenditures on Ferrari exceeded backmarker Minardi's entire budget.[58] The then-struggling[59]

Hogan retired from Marlboro in 2002. Although Ferrari was still F1's dominant team, the sport was phasing out tobacco advertising. In 1997, the European Commission announced a ban on tobacco advertising in sports starting in 2006,[61][62] by which point only three teams had cigarette companies as their title sponsors.[63]