The 2025 season was already going to be a year of transition for the Mercedes Formula 1 team. With longtime championship driver Lewis Hamilton heading to Ferrari and George Russell taking over as the team’s first option, the upcoming season was always going to look different than it had in years past.Now, the squad has doubled down on reinvention, opting not to renew their longtime partnerships with Puma and Tommy Hilfiger and instead jump ship to a historic rival: Adidas.
Puma is all over the world of motorsport, arguably the definitive apparel brand of this generation in the field. They’ve long carried an overall license with F1 itself and have a number of teams under contract in F1 and other circuits, those of which include Ferrari, Kick Sauber, Alfa Romeo, Williams, and Porsche, and BMW. The license has seen the European sportswear giant supply uniforms, shoes, and apparel for those teams and their fans alike.
With the relative stranglehold they’ve had on motorsport, it’s been difficult for competitors to break in. Racing has finally exploded in the States over the last few years thanks to Netflix’s massively popular Formula 1: Drive to Survive docuseries, but folks haven’t quite taken to rocking Puma-branded Ferrari gear the way they do in the UK and overseas. Puma tapped A$AP Rocky as its F1 creative director in 2023, and while that linkup has delivered some solid capsules, it hasn’t quite seen the runaway crossover success either party was likely hoping for.
F1’s team apparel has always skewed slightly…left-of-center in terms of what North American sports fans tend to gravitate towards. It’s a lot of sweat-wicking polos, a lot of gratuitous sponsorship branding, and the sort of apparel that’s hard to pull off if you aren’t literally working the paddock of a Grand Prix. Adidas, across their multitude of sport and athlete sponsorships, takes more of a global approach to their sporting apparel. It stands to reason something as simple as a Three Stripes hoodie with the Silver Arrows logo could help break the barrier. They’re also promising to tap into the ethos of apparel provisions for other sports like soccer and basketball, teasing not only fan access to the sort of race-ready wares their favorite drivers suit up in but also limited-edition pieces for specific races and events (pure speculation here but an annual “City Edition”-type play could go over like gangbusters). And, of course, shoes—they’ll be providing driver boots to Russell and his new teammate, rookie Kimi Antonelli, but it feels safe to say we could be getting Mercedes Gazelles sometime soon too.
The new Mercedes x Adidas era kicks off immediately, with the partnership making its on-track debut on March 16 at the Australian Grand Prix.
