The recently announced partnership between Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM) and Formula 1 (F1) team McLaren Racing represents a new direction for the REIT as it seeks to boost global recognition and understanding of its brand, while providing a storied sports team with new ways to access and share its rich history.
Iron Mountain operates in 61 countries, providing information management, digital transformation, information security, data center, and asset lifecycle management services. The company will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2026. McLaren, meanwhile, has been active in F1 racing for 60 years and boasts 21 F1 world championships, among numerous other achievements.
The multi-year partnership officially launched Oct. 19 at the 2025 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, where Iron Mountain branding featured on both McLaren F1 team race cars. At the core of the partnership, which was over a year in the making, is Iron Mountain’s AI-enabled digital platform which will protect McLaren’s iconic heritage media assets for future generations, connect them to fans and partners, and activate them to unlock value.
Karen Feldman, Iron Mountain’s first-ever chief marketing officer (CMO) who has been on the job for just over a year, explains that she was brought onboard because the company recognized it needed to do more to showcase the breadth of its capabilities to clients and prospective clients. While the preservation and protection side of Iron Mountain’s services are well known, she says, “what we can now do with data management and digital solutions, and how we can help digitize and unlock value and new forms of intelligence, is less known.”
Iron Mountain considered potential strategies to expand brand awareness before opting for a sports partnership. “There was a general belief that a sports partnership was one of the best ways that we could reinforce our brand story and drive the reach and exposure that we were looking for,” Feldman says.
While Iron Mountain already works with a number of sports teams, a formal partnership structure did not exist before. Feldman, who previously served as CMO at IBM Consulting, which had established partnerships with sporting events including the Masters, the U.S. Open, and Wimbledon, therefore came with a strong background and relevant experience in an area that was new to Iron Mountain.
Which Sport?
Once Iron Mountain had decided on the merits of a sports partnership, the next question was—which sport? Feldman explains that F1 was chosen for several reasons. “It’s one of the fastest growing sports across the globe. We are a global company with a global footprint, so that was important to us,” she says.
At the same time, “F1 gives you 24 races throughout the year, across the globe, to reinforce the brand. It’s a platform that we can tap into both digitally, but also in person, as we host clients and drive activations around those races,” she adds.
The decision to team up with McLaren, meanwhile, “really comes down to this notion of a mutual partnership that values heritage, innovation, and performance between the two companies,” Feldman says.
Iron Mountain is digitizing, preserving, and activating McLaren's historical assets, which range from early blueprints, to vintage films and iconic photography. “We are making all of that accessible to them through an AI-enabled digital platform so that they can more easily search, retrieve, and find those assets that they believe they can leverage for their fans and even for their engineers, as they look for insights and patterns that they can then use for future innovation,” Feldman says.
Working to Unlock Value
Iron Mountain works with 95% of Fortune 1000 companies across a swath of industries, providing full asset lifecycle solutions. Feldman says that what tends to be less well known about the REIT’s work is its activities in the fields of media, entertainment, and sports, as well as with private companies and private libraries, “where we help them unlock that value for corporate and cultural heritage.”
Among a number of examples, Iron Mountain is working with the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles to preserve and store content that can then be searched and retrieved through the REIT’s AI-enabled platform. Iron Mountain has also remediated and digitized audiovisual media on behalf of the Military Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Feldman says that the type of work Iron Mountain can deliver for sports team is “very natural,” given their longevity and the ravenous appetite of fans for team history and nostalgia. As to whether Iron Mountain would consider additional formal partnerships with sports teams in future, Feldman says the REIT will first wait to assess the impact of this new, “very public way” to tell its brand story. She stresses that finding the right partner, and making sure the story feels authentic, is crucial—something that Iron Mountain clearly has found with McLaren.