Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes.
Sponsorship[]
From 1972 until the team's departure in 1975, Lucky Strike sponsored the Scuderia Scribante team, which were also known as "Neville Lederle" and "Lucky Strike Racing". The cars, driven by Neville Lederle and Dave Charlton, were some of the first to be sponsored by a major tobacco company after the Team Lotus got sponsored by Gold Leaf in 1968, and Marlboro started sponsoring British Racing Motors in 1972 and later McLaren in 1974. The team mainly participated in the South African Grand Prix in Kyalami, but during the 1972 Formula One Season, the team also participated in the French Grand Prix in Circuit de Charade, the British Grand Prix in Brands Hatch and the German Grand Prix at the old Nürburgring. After the retirement of the team, it would take more than 20 years before Lucky Strike would participate in Formula 1 again with the British American Racing team.
As a result of British American Tobacco (BAT) buying out American Tobacco Company in 1976, Lucky Strike came under control of BAT. The company acquired Formula 1's Tyrrell Racing team in 1997 and rebranded it as British American Racing the following year, sponsoring the team with its Lucky Strike and stablemate 555 brands. In the team's début season, they originally wanted to brand Jacques Villeneuve's car in the red and white Lucky Strike livery, while branding Ricardo Zonta's car with the blue colours of 555. However, the FIA blocked the move, and the team were forced to run two similar liveries. They opted to have the Lucky Strike livery on the left hand side of the car and the 555 livery on the right hand side, with a zip going up in the middle of the nose. From 2000 on, the team solely used Lucky Strike branding. The team was bought outright by partners Honda by 2006, though Lucky Strike continued to sponsor the team until the end of that year. For races where tobacco branding wasn't allowed, the Lucky Strike logo was blocked out (from 1999 to 2004), replaced by "Run Free" on other parts of the car (in 1999), changed to "Look Alike" (from 2000 to 2003), to a barcode with Formula One cars (in 2003–2004), to "Look Left", "Look Right", and "Don't Walk" (in 2004), and "Racing Revolution" (in 2005–2006).