Authenticity and entertainment were front of mind, SMG has consistently created and tailored platform-specific content designed to appeal to SF1TKS’s vast and varied audience across its different social channels. In line with this goal, SMG prioritised forging a strong working relationship with the team’s drivers, forging unique online personas.

By understanding what content the drivers enjoy making and, in turn, catering the content to their respective personalities, we succeeded in maintaining a level of authenticity that has helped generate a more genuine bond between the team and its Followers. This is demonstrated perfectly with posts such as ‘The Lifeguard’ – an amusing edit filmed at the Australian Grand Prix in 2024, which was designed to appeal to F1’s increasingly younger, more entertainment-focused fan demographic through the use of humour and bold visuals.

The video plays into former SF1TKS’s driver Valtteri Bottas’ humorous personality and recent ‘Aussie-bloke’ image rebrand, generating over 3.55million views on SF1TKS’s TikTok Platform. The team have been trendsetters creating appealing content to the broader F1 audience, showcased with SF1TKS’s ‘Paddock Pets’ post that featured Zhou Guanyu’s cat, Sweetcorn, who quickly became a popular character on the team’s channels. This post alone generated a reach of over 2.24 million with over 473,000 engagements.

SMG's in-house 3D design capacity has also allowed our team to add an extra layer of creativity to our services, creating novel, animated video content that has delighted SF1TKS' followers and produced high engagement across all platforms. SMG's 3D-graphic posts, such as the 'Christmas Garage' and 'Twerking Car', have generated a reach of over 1.3 million.

SMG will continue to work with the team throughout the remainder of the 2025 season. Read more about our work with Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber from our Digital & Brand Lead and Senior Social Media Manager.

In addition to running Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber's (SF1TKS) social media accounts, SMG's social & digital teamworked closely with our activations team to ideate, facilitate and manage multiple strategic and impactful activations for the SF1TKS team across the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

The client's primary objective surrounding their activation campaign was to create digital 'noise' and breakthrough traditional F1 audiences. Through carefully planned and executed activation and content campaigns that SMG's team helped develop and implement, Stake grew their digital engagements and following, and subsequently became established for communicating in unconventional but impactful ways.

When SMG began managing the SF1TKS channels, the team was, by far, the lowest followed team on the grid. While the rest of the midfield teams sit at 3-4 million, SF1TKS had only 2.2 million followers. Growth here was an exceptionally important KPI and we knew this would require a steady building of team personality through our content, while respecting the legacy of Sauber and appealing to both traditional F1 fans and newcomers to the sport.

Throughout our two year with SF1TKS we have been able to grow the Instagram channel to over 3 million, moving the team out of last position in followership, as well as producing the highest engagement rate of any of the midfield teams.

The SMG retained the STF1TS social media accounts for the 2025 season as they entered a new era for the team, with two new drivers in Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto. With the brand built and the F1 fanbase engaged with the 'Green Team', the next challenge was building on what we had already created.