NTT Shifts From IndyCar Title Sponsor to McLaren's F1 Team in 2027

NTT is taking its sponsorship logic from IndyCar to Formula 1. The Japanese technology group will become a partner of McLaren's F1 team from 2027 under a multi-year deal, and the timing is telling. It arrives just as NTT's IndyCar partnership with Arrow McLaren reaches its conclusion this year, so the company is effectively swapping one McLaren programme for another.

A relationship that predates the IndyCar deal

This isn't a first date. NTT and McLaren first worked together in 2016, when NTT Communications, the company's name at the time, became a technology partner of the McLaren-Honda F1 team. That early arrangement was helped along by Just Marketing International, the agency Zak Brown ran before he joined McLaren, where he now serves as McLaren Racing CEO.

That history matters because Brown's involvement carried into later ventures. The next step was an IndyCar partnership that began with NTT Data in 2023. It ran alongside the arrival of IndyCar champion Alex Palou, whose car NTT had backed on its way to the title, as an F1 reserve driver with a future IndyCar race seat. Light NTT Data branding also appeared on McLaren's F1 cars at the end of 2023. When Palou chose to break his contract and stay with Chip Ganassi Racing, NTT's association with McLaren's IndyCar operation carried on under revised terms.

Why AI is the centrepiece

Here's the thing: the IndyCar sponsorship was a visible, race-day brand play. The F1 deal looks different. McLaren's announcement frames it around "AI security governance at its core," with the aim of helping manage security risks as artificial intelligence use grows. That's a more technical pitch, and it tells you where NTT thinks its value sits inside a Formula 1 team.

Brown put the rationale in direct terms. He described a long-standing relationship with NTT and said the company's expertise would help McLaren adopt new technologies "in a responsible and secure way." He also pointed to AI's reach across both the sport and the wider business, which is a fair read of an operation that runs large volumes of data through simulation, manufacturing and logistics. Any F1 team now carries a lot of sensitive design and performance information, so a security partner has an obvious role.

My read is that this is less about logos on the car and more about back-end capability. Sponsorship in F1 tends to shift toward partners who can offer a service the team actually uses, and AI security governance fits that pattern better than a traditional badge deal.

What NTT gets out of the move

NTT's own leadership was open about the bigger prize. Akira Shimada, NTT's president and CEO, called Formula 1 "a global stage where the world's brightest minds come together to continually push the limits of what is possible." He linked McLaren Racing's investment in people and technology to NTT's own transformation and its work on societal challenges, arguing the two organisations share much in common.

He also credited the company's IndyCar title sponsorship with contributing to motorsport since 2019. The new partnership, in his framing, builds on that experience and should accelerate NTT's global business. The reach point is the key one. IndyCar is a strong series with a dedicated following, but F1's audience and commercial footprint are on a different scale, and NTT has clearly judged that exposure as a priority.

What to watch next

For fans, the practical questions are how visible NTT will be on the car and in the team's presentation, and whether the AI work turns into something outsiders can see. Neither has been spelled out in the announcement, so those details are worth tracking as the 2027 season approaches.

The bigger signal is the pattern. A title sponsor that spent years building credibility in one of America's top open-wheel series is now aiming at the most watched motor racing championship in the world, and it's doing so through a team it already knows well. Teams in McLaren's position often use long-running partners like this to deepen ties rather than chase new names, and NTT's history with Brown and the group suggests that's the approach here. For a sponsor, that kind of continuity is worth more than a single season's exposure, and it's a model other F1 teams will likely be watching closely.