Can You Make Money From Brawn GP Like Richard Branson?

Sir Richard Branson has long been known for making astute business deals, but the deal he struck to enter Formula 1 racing on the eve of the 2009 season looks like genius - it's unlikely the rest of us can repeat it, but there's still money to be made from Brawn GP team...

March 2009 and as the first race of the 2009 F1 season looms in Australia, Sir Richard Branson is on one of his own Virgin jumbos down under to meet with Ross Brawn and the rest of Brawn GP team.

Brawn had only himself bought the team at the last minute, but his experience had led to the team having mechanical advantages over the rest of the field that put his cars at the front of the grid.

Branson and Brawn signed the deal the evening before the race, estimated to be around the quarter million mark.
The Brawn cars came first and second in the race, netting Branson a figure from TV rights estimated in the couple of million - not a bad return!

Plus of course the famous Virgin brand logo is on the cars.

As Branson tries to sign a bigger deal, possibly involving changing the team name to Virgin F1, how can us mere mortals make money from the Brawn success?

Well, one answer is merchandising - F1 is a big seller of merchandise, from team shirts to caps to replica car models, and they all sell at fairly big prices.

If you affiliate with a site that sells these products, you then get paid a commission on any sales from traffic you send.
That may not sound like much, but if a replica Brawn F1 car sells for $50 and you get 25%, that's $12.50 for every sale, and those small numbers can add up to big numbers.

The other easy way to profit from F1 is to write about it. Sports fans in general, and F1 fans specifically are ravenous for information, in fact the whole deck of cards is based around gossip from the pit lane.

So you can write about the sport, and then the readers to sites which you then monetize.

So although it may not be possible to make the tidy return that Richard Branson did, you can still make good money from the success of the Brawn GP team.