Advertising on a race car

[pacenotes]

I own my own company.

A Driver (Could be me) has asked if I would sponsor him.

I run a small company just two employees. Could I throw a sticker on the car and call it advertising?

Thought I would ask here instead of my accountant who might laugh at me and would rather PH laugh at me instead.

[ol]

No. HTH

[StevieBee]

You can call it what you like but as far as HMRC are concerned, you're using your business to fund your hobby so the money you use to do this would be classified as your earnings and taxed accordingly.

Even if it wasn't you driving, you may well still fall foul of the taxman.

For it to be advertising in the correct sense, there needs to be a viable, documented transaction between two legal entities.

[Eric Mc]

There was a tax case a few years ago where a father was sponsoring his daughter at show jumping events and claiming the sponsorship payments as a buisness costs. HMRC disallowed the expenditure.

[strattonkillick]

There is the McQueen case from 2007, I think he was a sole trader though.

Crown & Cushion Hotel case allowed similar expenditure although it was for the daughter of the owner rather than the owner of the business.

I would still say probably not if a client came to me with such a plan.

[StevieBee]

Just to add OP.... there is nothing to stop you placing a sticker of your company logo on the car to give your company some visibility. And the cost of physically producing the sticker would (I think) be a viable business expense. What we're talking about here is you taking money from the business to go racing.

However, from a marketing perspective, the amount of new business you can expect to win from such exposure is precisely nil. Sponsorship does work and can work very well but requires a whole host of extraneous activity, effort and spend before you start to see any viable return.

[simon_harris]

Sponsor the whole series instead, probably won't cost you that much more to have your logo on every car. Also expect zero return from it unless it is a televised event and even then I would still expect zero. Depending on what you do you are actually more likely to get business from fellow drivers you meet in the paddock.

If you really maximise the exposure through your social media channel, website etc it really helps but even then it is little to no return for quite a lot of effort.