Diagonal Comms has gone from strength to strength in 2025, expanding our client base, covering events worldwide, and driving some of the most impactful stories across motorsport and automotive. So, as we emerge from the holiday season, let’s take a look back at our super six moments from our work over the past year.
The Mansour Ojjeh Collection
Having worked with Tom Hartley Jnr – one of the world’s most respected and exclusive high-end dealers in classic and historic sports cars and racing cars – at the end of 2024 to amplify the news that he had been chosen to handle the sale of Bernie Ecclestone’s collection of 69 historic Grand Prix and Formula 1 cars, we shared in June the news that he had been appointed by the family of the late Mansour Ojjeh in respect of the sale of Ojjeh’s extraordinary collection of 20 McLaren road cars.
Ojjeh was a well-loved figure in the world of motorsport, having held an influential role in McLaren over almost four decades. Under his stewardship, which began when he took an ownership stake in McLaren in 1984, the McLaren F1 Team secured seven Constructors’ and ten Drivers’ Championships. Ojjeh was also instrumental in launching McLaren Automotive and the McLaren Applied Technologies division.
From his central position at the British marque, Ojjeh set about creating the ultimate collection of McLaren road cars. With the exception of the F1 (which has just 1,810km) and the P1 GTR (used occasionally during McLaren track days), every car from the stunning ensemble – which has since been sold by Tom Hartley Jnr – remains unused, in factory-delivered condition, and maintained under direct instruction by McLaren themselves – a service no other collector has ever received. Featuring the Speedtail, P1, Senna, Elva, and Sabre, plus special and limited Longtail and Le Mans editions, the Mansour Ojjeh collection is simply without equal.
Our team distributed the news via press release, which included bespoke quotes from Tom Hartley Jnr, Kathy Ojjeh, the widow of Mansour, and Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing. Paired with proactive media liaison and outreach services, our work helped land top-tier coverage across automotive, motorsport, business, and lifestyle outlets in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas – including titles such as ESPN, Car and Driver, Le Figaro, The Straits Times, Saudi Auto, Reuters, Robb Report, The Sun, and Hypebeast.
Deagen Fairclough’s Aston Martin F1 test
Throughout 2025, we worked with 19-year-old superstar driver Deagen Fairclough as part of an ongoing comms, PR, and content creation project. We followed Fairclough closely throughout his rookie campaign in the GB3 Championship, the United Kingdom’s premier single-seater category, to which he graduated following a record-breaking campaign in British F4 in 2024 that saw him win the title with 14 victories. We accompanied Fairclough at some of the United Kingdom and Continental Europe’s most famous venues, including Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, Autodromo Nazionale Monza, Circuit Zandvoort, and Brands Hatch. However, in August he travelled to Silverstone, not for another round of GB3, but to make his Formula 1 debut.
As part of his prize for winning the Silverstone Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award at the end of 2024, which also included a £250,000 cheque, Fairclough had the opportunity to drive two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso’s 2023-spec Aston Martin AMR23, which picked up seven Grand Prix podium finishes and is the Silverstone team’s most successful car to-date.
Fairclough labelled the test as a “dream come true” – one which we were on the ground for to capture videography and photography content. In the days that followed, we provided comprehensive comms and PR support and organised a press conference that featured a selection of top-tier journalists and led to coverage in numerous motorsport publications.
Cadillac F1 announces its inaugural driver lineup
Diagonal was chosen in March to provide a turn-key comms/PR solution for the brand-new Cadillac Formula 1 Team. Confirmation that the American squad had received final approval to join the F1 grid in 2026 was the team’s first major milestone in its journey to the upcoming Australian Grand Prix, but the largest was the announcement that it had signed Valtteri Bottas and Sergio ‘Checo’ Perez as its inaugural drivers. Over the course of 2025, we have managed multiple activations for Cadillac under our comms plan’s overarching objective ‘to bring people on the journey with the team’ – and this was no different.
It was all systems go as we travelled to the heart of Cadillac F1’s operation at Silverstone to break the news to the team’s 400+ employees. Diagonal Managing Director Matt Bishop hosted a staff briefing, which included a Q&A with Cadillac’s Executive Engineer, Pat Symonds, and video messages from both drivers. Shortly after, our team broke the news globally, issuing a press release, creating videography and photography content, and arranging landmark broadcast interviews with the likes of Sky Sports. We also hosted and moderated a virtual press conference that featured Valtteri, Checo, and Team Principal Graeme Lowdon, which further pushed Cadillac F1 and its central messages into key publications.
Independent analysis conducted by Zoomph revealed that the driver announcement was the biggest F1 news story of the season to-date, gaining 100million impressions, 7.7million engagements, and an estimated social value of $3.4million. Cadillac F1, despite having not yet even turned a wheel, attracted more eyeballs on a single day than any other F1 team in 2025.
The MIA hosts the most successful edition of CTS
In October, the Motorsport Industry Association (MIA) headed to the heart of British motorsport, Silverstone, to host the 2025 edition of CTS, the United Kingdom’s leading Motorsport Engineering & Technology Show, which proved to be its most successful edition to-date.
The MIA, which has been the UK’s only motorsport trade body for more than 30 years, has steadily grown CTS to become the go-to industry-only event. CTS is free to attend and offers a rare and valuable opportunity for members of the motorsport and high-performance engineering trade to connect with like-minded individuals, grow their network with potential buyers and suppliers, and fuel growth for their business, which makes it a core part of the MIA’s calendar and its strategy for delivering maximum value to its member network.
CTS 2025 showed that, since CTS’ inaugural edition in 2021, attendee numbers have more than doubled, the number of exhibitors has grown year-on-year to become a sell-out, and Speakers’ Corner, where thought leaders from across the trade shared the latest innovations shaping motorsport and engineering, has expanded to contain a record 38 sessions. Boasting 100+ exhibitors, including Xtrac, Prodrive, and Fortescue Zero, as well as feature displays from WEC team Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA, McMurtry Automotive, Speedworks Motorsport, HCI / Prodrive, and the Andretti Formula E Team, CTS reached new heights in 2025.
In the lead-up to CTS, our team helped the MIA shout about the unparalleled value of the show with a preview press release, which we subsequently distributed to tens of leading mainstream outlets and high-profile journalists, a stream of mailer content, and consistent social media posts, many of which featured bespoke graphics. During the show, we deployed a team of videographers to produce long- and short-form content for the MIA’s digital channels, and hosted a media workshop where key journalists were offered the opportunity to interview the CEO of the MIA, Chris Aylett. Meanwhile, in the show’s aftermath, we helped the MIA debrief the stunning success of CTS, helping them reinforce the show’s core position in the motorsport and automotive calendar.
Tom Ingram grabs his second BTCC title
After months of high-speed back and forths and nail-biting tussles, in October, Tom Ingram secured his second British Touring Car Championship title in record-breaking fashion at Brands Hatch after a thrilling season-long head-to-head fight with Ash Sutton.
When the ‘TOCA tour’ rolled into Kent for the 2025 finale, the overall drivers’, manufacturers’, and teams’ titles, as well as the Jack Sears Trophy, Independent championships and the Goodyear Wingfoot Award, were yet to be decided. That set up a thrilling conclusion to the year, which we sought to amplify via a comprehensive PR, comms, content creation, and digital marketing package.
While at the end of 2024 – Diagonal’s first campaign with the BTCC – six drivers were in contention for glory – Josh Cook, Colin Turkington, Dan Cammish, Ash Sutton, Tom Ingram, and Jake Hill – it was a direct battle of the two fan-favourites in 2025. Ingram and Sutton, two definitive modern greats of the BTCC, had been in a league of their own throughout the season and had marched 111 points clear of Sutton’s teammate, Dan Cammish, heading into the last three races.
The finale began with victory for West Surrey Racing’s young Filipino superstar, Daryl DeLeon, who claimed his first win of 2025, but come the fall of the checkered flag at the end of Round 29, Ingram was back on the top step to claim his second BTCC title. With a sixth-place finish in Round 30 on Sunday afternoon, his points tally grew to 462, which made his 2025 campaign the most successful in BTCC history.
From the media centre, our team was quick to ignite the BTCC’s online presence with a combination of analysis and emotion-driven material. Our team created and published short turnaround videography, photography, graphic design, social media, and press content across the BTCC’s pages, capturing the thrill of the UK’s premier racing championship.
George Kurtz’s Mercedes acquisition
In November, as the F1 circus descended on ‘Sin City’ for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, we shared the news that George Kurtz, the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, the most successful AI cybersecurity company of the modern era, had become co-owner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula 1 Team and been appointed Technology Advisor.
The 55-year-old, who is a globally respected business leader, executive, and entrepreneur, has a long and distinguished career in cybersecurity and technology. However, he separates himself from the average S&P 500 CEO (if there really is such a thing) through his accolades in motorsport: Kurtz has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Twelve Hours of Sebring, Petit Le Mans, Six Hours of the Glen, the Indianapolis 8 Hour, and 24 Hours of Spa; and taken the SRO GT World Challenge America Team & Drivers’ Championship and Asian Le Mans LMP2 Championship. That cannot be said of many born-and-bred racing drivers, even.
Kurtz’s CrowdStrike has been a Global Partner of the Mercedes-AMG F1 team since 2019, thus making his 15% purchase of long-time Team Principal Toto Wolff’s one-third ownership stake, and the seat on Mercedes-AMG F1 Team’s strategic steering committee that comes with it, something of a natural progression.
We broke the news of Kurtz’s Mercedes acquisition, distributing a press release to key global media and organising and hosting a press conference, during which journalists spoke one-on-one with Kurtz about the announcement. What followed was a vast wave of coverage across motorsport, sport, business, and finance outlets spanning the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, with Kurtz securing numerous headlines over the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend.
