Anton Rupert died in his sleep – peacefully – at 89. Born like many others who occupy a place on the list of great South Africans in Graaf Reinett – Rupert turned a £10 investment in 1940 into a multi billion pound fortune. At one time, Apartheid South Africa in the 60’s, Rupert was touted as a Broederbond moderate alternative as PM to the uber-racist apartheid crazed Amsterdam born leader, Verwoerd. But it is tobacco, his success at selling cigarettes, that made him his reputation and fortune more than his excellently whitewashed post apartheid digital footprint propounds.

At a time when cigarettes were good for you – he created the Rembrandt group. Millions of South Africans promptly became cigarette addicts. Who knew cigarettes were also a dangerous drug that kills. Not Dr. Rupert. Not when there was so much easy money to be made getting people to pay for his product.

Such was his brilliance in winning new smokers to his cause he invented a marketing device that is used to this day by Arab sportswash billionaires to make their child abuse seem normal.

F1 racing was born as a business in 1950. All the teams competed in the racing colours of their countries. (Red for Italy etc…) 17 years passed. Next up was the non-championship Rhodesian Grand Prix in Bulawayo on 3 December 1967. At that time the big tobacco farms servicing South Africa’s cigarette industry were in Rhodesia. (Now Zimbabwe but then a bastion of racist rule by Spitfire Pilot and battle of Britain veteran, Ian Smith.)

The Rhodesian Grand Prix suddenly had a new team. Gunston. A brand popular with customers of Dr. Rupert. The cars ran in the livery of the Gunston cigarette packaging. What a great idea. Paint the cars with product branding and seduce a new and unprepared audience that would grow to be hundreds of millions when TV screened F1 .

Rupert had invented a way to put product on race cars that would lead to decades of grand advertising of cigarettes creating millions if not hundreds of millions of new smokers.

Opening up a market of unprecedented value. You could speculate that since Rupert used F1 as the billboard for attracting smokers – the total business arising from that great initiative may exceed a trillion dollars. In 1967 Rupert’s grand plan put together leading SAF1 drivers John Love and Sam Tingle – who owned their own machines – and painted their cars in Gunston brand colours. Team Gunston was formed. To Gunston’s delight, Rhodesian born Love won the race in Bulawayo.

Their attention then turned to the full F1 South African Grand Prix. That fell on New Year’s Day 1968.
Could pictures of an orange and brown car with Team Gunston written on its nose soon be on every newspaper back page?
Love qualified 17th. He finished ninth. But never mind. The genie was out of the bottle.

The F1 paddock was watching this brazen move to marry shady commerce with the growing F1 audience – and funding teams. Colin Chapman, the manager and genius behind Team Lotus who had the greatest driver of all time – Jim Clark – knew funding was tight. He saw in team Gunston the future for funding Team Lotus. Three weeks after the SA GP, which Clark won easily, Clark was racing in a Lotus again in the next round in the same car, but not the same colors. No longer the Lotus green and yellow. It was in the red and gold of Gold Leaf Tobacco.

The link between tobacco companies and Formula 1 was gaining momentum. By 1970 the BRM team had attracted Marlboro. Every title-winning car between 1984 and 2007 carried the branding of a major smoking brand. In this era, critics of the sport dubbed the cars “mobile cigarette packets”.

By now hundreds of millions of new smoker’s owed their habitual dependence on big tobacco to that original visionary. Broederbond member, apartheid supporter when it was fashionable, and almost-leader of the National party, Dr. Anton Ruper

Eventually after millions of smoking related deaths F1 was forced to ban cigarette advertising. No longer could Ayrton Senna win titles in his Marlboro McLaren. In 2008 Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren MP4-23 was the first title-winning car since 1983 without any tobacco sponsorship.

But; in business as in politics, wherever power is ousted a power vacuum arises inviting a similar influence. Banning tobacco money from F1 created an opportunity for a new sponsor to access the enormous market of F1 viewers. An audience that has grown to many hundreds of millions, so mesmerized by watching advert led Television pictures of cars going in circles, they watch even the practice days.

It is perhaps symmetrically appropriate in this metaphor of things moving predictably for a dumbed down Television audience that the current sponsor of F1 replacing big tobacco, a product that kills, brought to you by a racist political-business model that exploited and often killed blacks in large numbers, is another racist white-male led political-business model predicated on the exploitation of the weak in large numbers, selling a product that kills people in large numbers.

The Saudi/Oil sportswash by obscene wealth buying approval has been enormously successful in football. Khashoggi who? But with their dominance of the F1 viewing audience so complete, I can only say; Hats off to MBS. Long may your ARAMCO products keep impacting on the very air that we breath for your ongoing obscene wealth. We’ll keep on supporting your TV show.

Gunston Plains may not be the South African smokers gold standard of Rupert’s day but many of his customers not dead by cancer remember that sweet addiction to throat scorching lung-burning profit.

Postscript: I grew up in South Africa. I was at Kyalami that day in 1968. (That story is HERE.) My first visit to the races. Several of my friends from those days smoked Gunston Plains and went on to die of cancer. My uncle Spiro, who took me to that race and introduced me to car racing in the best possible way – meeting Jim Clark on my first visit to the track – died at 52 of lung cancer. He smoked Lucky Strike Plain.

Andrew Brel Amazon Bookstore for Paperback and Kindle
Apple Books on EPUB here

My Paypal Patrons support is here