Three Drivers & One Region: Why Formula 1 Can't Afford to Ignore Latin America

Mercado Libre’s latest campaign with Pérez, Colapinto, and Bortoleto, turns three national identities into one Latin American story.

Mercado Libre, a Latin American e-commerce marketplace, recently ran a campaign that says the quiet part out loud. At first glance, it could look like another playful Formula 1 adjacent advertisement: three drivers, inside a hotel while the rain delays the day outside, and a competitive instinct too restless to sit still. Then the scooters arrive. Checo Pérez, Franco Colapinto, and Gabriel Bortoleto race along the corridors, creating their own Grand Prix. It is funny, light, and almost absurd.

But, if you are watching from Latin America, there is something else happening underneath the lighthearted commercial. Three countries are framed, all with different racing stories, but under one regional brand.

To an audience outside Latin America, Mercado Libre (known as Mercado Livre in Brazil) reads as just another sponsor entering F1’s increasingly crowded commercial landscape. The shorthand sometimes used for the company, ‘the Amazon of Latin America’, doesn’t do Mercado Libre justice.

In Brazil and Argentina, Mercado Libre is closer to a digital habit than a simple marketplace. In Mexico, it stands alongside Amazon as one of the region’s most competitive e-commerce markets. Across Latin America, it is a big part of the choreography of everyday life: the search, the payment, the confirmation, the yellow van, the delivery notification that alters the plan of someone’s day.

There is a growing generation of F1 fans who are heavily influenced by TikTok edits, memes, fan accounts, and an online pride that operates between national loyalty and general obsession. For Latin American fans, this is felt even stronger for the LATAM drivers. Brazilian fans will follow Bortoleto, Argentinians see themselves in Colapinto, and Mexicans have spent years building a collective devotion to Pérez.

The importance of Bortolleo, Colapinto and Perez on the grid goes beyond national pride. Getting to F1 is already a complicated journey for any driver; the lifelong dedication, mounting costs and uncertain future plague every motorsport driver at every level. But for Latin Americans, the starting line is further back. Funding structures that do not easily reach across the Atlantic, visibility gaps, and systems built around priorities that are harder to obtain in Latin America. It’s no wonder that Colapinto moved to Europe, alone, as a young teen to pursue his dream. For Latin American fans, having three drivers on the grid is proof that, despite the additional layers of hardship, it is still possible.

Three Drivers. One Regional Frame.

Mercado Libre built its presence in Formula 1 the same way the region itself arrived: slowly. They worked by partnering with each driver separately, thoughtfully and intentionally. Which makes the current picture a more interesting one than if Mercado Libre had arrived all at once - this isn’t just another brand jumping on the F1 bandwagon.

Colapinto’s rise at Williams became one of the most compelling narratives in the sport’s recent history because it generated a level of Argentine pride rarely seen internationally. Then Bortoleto arrived, carrying Brazil’s relationship to F1 on his shoulders. A country still measuring the sport through memory, absence, and the shadow Ayrton Senna casts over everything (and everyone) that follows. Then Pérez brought Mexico in, not as a newcomer but with experience, and a fanbase that had already built its own world around him.

The thinking behind the Mercado Libre campaign was deliberate from the start. Matías Lafalla, Chief Creative Officer and Partner at GUT Buenos Aires, the agency responsible for Mercado Libre’s work in F1, says, “We started with Franco Colapinto, the only Argentinian driver on the grid.” Lafalla explains, “Because of this success, this year we added Sergio Pérez in Mexico and Gabriel Bortoleto in Brazil. Now we have three regional drivers, so we made them race.”

By the time all three appear together in the corridor campaign, circulating under the fictional name ‘GP de Scooters’, the brand’s mission is clear. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina are not interchangeable to Mercado Libre; each is a different entry point to the same wider feeling of national pride, and together they say something greater than one driver, from one country, ever could.

For Lafalla, the humour was not incidental. “We Latinos have a very particular competitive spirit. We take speed seriously, but never lose our wit. Humour is part of Latin American DNA.” The campaign understands Latin Americans at its core.

The Noise Has Meaning

Latin America does not tend to watch sports quietly. Athletes become heroes, the sporting event becomes a ritual, and victories become a collective release, spilling out into the streets.

One way Mercado Libre capitalised on the passion with which Latin Americans enjoy sport is by tapping into the subculture. La Checoneta began as a fan-made internet meme (a portmanteau of Pérez’s nickname ‘Checo’ and camioneta, the Spanish word for van) used by Mexican supporters as a rallying cry to show their loyalty. Súbale, as fans say: get on board.

What Mercado Libre did was take that already-existing cultural energy and make it physical, launching branded vans and official campaigns built directly around something the fanbase had created. Mercado Libre knows how to listen to its fans and turn culture into something worth capitalising on.

Latin America is becoming harder to frame as an atmosphere rather than a subject. It is in the drivers, of course, but also in the audiences brands are trying to reach, the humour, and the emotional register that keeps shaping how the sport is followed.

What Mercado Libre’s campaign recognises, and what F1 has not always known how to hold, is that Latin America is not a market segment with a flag on it. It is a way of watching, a set of references, a rhythm that does not need translating for the people who grew up with it.