Jumbo, which has been supporting Max Verstappen since the days when the future champion competed in Formula 3, and is also one of the sponsors of the Dutch Grand Prix, has announced the complete end of all its sports programs, which will be at the end of the year.
This was announced by Tom van Ven, CEO of the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, who succeeded Fritz van Erd last autumn after a serious scandal about financial irregularities.
At the beginning of this year it was announced that Jumbo, having stopped sponsoring motorsport, would still continue to support Verstappen, but will now also limit this project.
“Max is of course a folk hero, but he is on the world stage,” Van Ven told Algemeen Dagblad. – Our company is a very good grocery store, but we are only active in the Netherlands and partly in Belgium. Every year we invest more than 20 million euros in sports sponsorship, but I can only spend every euro once. We can no longer return the money Max receives to our customers, invest in environmental or health programs.
We don’t want to do any more business with motorsport, we don’t want to let suspicion fall on us, but we stop working with Max Verstappen for a completely different reason. This sponsorship program has made our brand much more recognizable, but now we have achieved everything there was to achieve in this area.”
The head of the company emphasized that it would not only sponsor the Grand Prix of the Netherlands more, but would also stop financing the Jumbo-Visma cycling team.
Raymond Fermuhlen, manager of the two-time world champion, responds to the decision of the Jumbo management: “The Van Eerd Groep family and Jumbo supported Max from the very first days. Absolutely, at that time it was a unique phenomenon and we think our collaboration has been fantastic.
It is not surprising that this topic is being revised ten years later. The most important thing is that we are very grateful to Jumbo and look back fondly on all those years. I hope that we can win the third national title together in 2023, that will be the nice final chord of this program.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
