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See articlesPreserving the past to power the future: Inside the Iron Mountain and McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Partnership
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As the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team celebrates more than 60 years of racing history, our partnership is unlocking the potential of their heritage as a strategic asset—bringing stories to life, deepening fan engagement, and driving new value for partners.
As the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 team approached its milestone 60th anniversary, the team began planning to celebrate their incredible legacy and six decades of innovation, trials, and triumphs in a meaningful way. In the journey to bring their story and history to life for fans around the world, a new partnership with Iron Mountain has enabled the team to unlock the vast potential in their heritage to power their future.
But to understand how we got there, we have to back up a little.
Here at Iron Mountain, we had been exploring opportunities to demonstrate our powerful technology capabilities to the global market. Although many customers may think of us as merely storage providers, we help our clients do so much more with their assets. In fact, we have the expertise, the strategic vision, and the AI-powered technology platform to help our clients unlock what’s possible from every asset they own. This is as true for an iconic sports team as it is for any other type of organization: a hospital, a bank, an industrial manufacturer, or a hotel chain.
We ultimately chose to pursue a Formula 1 sports sponsorship, not only for its global appeal but also for the fact that success in this sport is defined by precision, innovation, data, and technology. When we looked for a partner who shares our obsession with data-driven value, we found the perfect match in McLaren Racing. As the team prepared to celebrate their anniversary, they didn't just need a place to store and protect their history; they needed a way to bring it to life. As a new F1 fan myself, I quickly discovered through working with McLaren Racing that the team’s “racing mindset” extends far beyond the track. From the outside, the sport can look and feel chaotic. But behind the scenes, everything is meticulously planned, data-driven, and executed with precision. Even more impressive is the team’s culture—they operate as a unified group of people who genuinely care about each other, their fans, and their partners. There’s a strong emphasis not just on competing at the highest level, but on how they race. From a cultural perspective, it’s a great match with Iron Mountain, especially with our emphasis on teamwork, innovation, and technology.
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Inside Unit 2: Preserving McLaren’s rich history
The first time our team had a chance to walk through McLaren Racing’s fabled archive stored in “Unit 2,” we were struck by the sheer scale and importance of what we were looking at — videotapes, photographs, race documents, and artifacts from the past 60 years of one of the most iconic teams in motorsport. But as with so many archival collections like it, our trained archivists noted that many of these materials were formats known to be vulnerable to degradation or obsolescence. We worked with McLaren Racing to identify which assets might be most at risk, depending on age, format, and storage conditions, and quickly moved the collection’s 17,000 assets to Iron Mountain’s secure facility, where it was stabilized and stored in a climate appropriate to the asset type.
As we worked together, our teams recognized that valuable media and artifacts existed across the McLaren Technology Centre. Slowly and strategically, we’ve been partnering with the McLaren Racing Team to plan for the ongoing management of assets such as trophies, champagne bottles, and engineering blueprints that are vital to McLaren’s history. These assets are important for ongoing celebrations and need to be accessed on demand. Instead, certain items are stored with Iron Mountain in preservation-grade facilities, which ensure long-term protection while also enabling quick access when assets are needed for events, exhibitions, or fan celebrations. For example, we’ve helped McLaren Racing manage their event assets for their Austin LIVE and Miami LIVE celebrations, ensuring display plinths and original artworks are securely stored between events and delivered upon demand, maintaining a fully traceable chain of custody from start to finish.
From heritage assets to digital insights
On the digital side, the progress is also significant: McLaren’s vast media archive is currently being digitized and made available for AI-powered search in our intelligent content platform, InSight DXP. Given the age and fragility of some formats, this process requires careful prioritization and archival expertise, including an understanding of historic formats and the capability to operate the original equipment used for recording and playback, some of which are decades old.
What I find most exciting about our partnership is what it will enable for McLaren Racing: the power to bring fans closer to the McLaren brand, especially those who may have been drawn to the sport more recently, through the growing popularity of IndyCar in the US, or through the Netflix series Drive to Survive. Taking advantage of the chance to celebrate important upcoming milestones for the team in 2026, such as their 1000th Grand Prix and the 50th anniversary of James Hunt’s world championship, McLaren Racing is launching unique fan engagement programs like interactive heritage experiences in their fan zones. This season at Miami LIVE, McLaren will showcase four iconic cars and eras in the team’s history. Iron Mountain will feature surround content preserved and digitized by Iron Mountain’s archival experts. Our partnership is helping the team to connect newer fans to decades of history, transforming casual followers into lifelong supporters.
The relevance and importance of protecting and activating archives extends far beyond sports. Whether you’re a sports team, a corporation, a museum, or a library—and whether you are serving customers or businesses—your organization’s history is a strategic asset. If properly protected, connected, and activated, historic content and data can unlock customer insights, inform product design, inspire employee pride, and serve as a competitive advantage for your brand.
The opportunity to turn heritage into a competitive advantage should be compelling on its own, but business leaders also need to be aware that the risks of inaction are real. Many organizations still rely on aging, fragile formats for their assets—magnetic tapes, film, and other media—and believe that these formats are stable when properly stored; but the reality is that no storage format was designed to last forever, and most formats have a lifespan of no more than 20-30 years. Without proper preservation, your organization’s history may be lost forever.
What we’ve built with the McLaren Racing Team is more than just a partnership; it’s a model for how heritage can come to life for brands. Together, our Iron Mountain and McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team came together to demonstrate how organizations can protect, discover, and access their heritage in ways that are both meaningful and measurable - for themselves, and for their fans.