ELECTRIC racing team NEOM McLaren has named cybersecurity company Trend Micro as its official partner for its Formula E team from 2023 onward.
The electric racing team announced a multi-year partnership with Trend Micro that kicked off this past weekend at the ABB Formula E season 9 double-header finale, which took place in London.
For display purposes, Trend Micro’s logo will appear on the rear wing and halo of both NEOM McLaren Formula E cars, driven by Brit Jake Hughes and Germany’s René Rast.
The NEOM McLaren Formula E team touched South Africa’s shores in February this year when the ABB Formula E Series debuted in Cape Town for its fifth leg of the ninth season.
NEOM McLaren drivers Rast and Hughes ended the race in fourth and 10th places, respectively, with a victory going to Tag Heuer Porsche driver Antonio Felix da Costa.
“I’m excited to welcome Trend Micro to our team. As we travel around the world, cybersecurity is critically important to us,” said Ian James, managing director of NEOM McLaren Electric Racing and team principal of the NEOM McLaren Formula E team.
“With Trend Micro, we will explore ways to collaborate and keep our operations safe. We are two brands with great synergy, and I’m looking forward to our years of partnership,” James said.
Both organisations have said the partnership will open doors for further collaboration in motorsport, automotive technology, and security.
Trend Micro’s African branch is located in Bryanston in Gauteng. Their clients have included CIT carrier SBV Services, the South African Bank, and Capillary Technologies.
Karina Brijlal, head of marketing at Trend Micro, said a partnership with an elite motorsport brand working in sustainable technology was inevitable for them.
“We’ve been around for 35 years, but in the last three years we have gone through this innovation process, and it’s about time that we joined one of the leading sports. Trend Micro has moved to the same sort of track, so partnering with the NEOM McLaren team was inevitable.
“For us, it reflects that we have the same cultural stance as well going down the route of innovation, and I think everywhere is moving into that space of sustainability,” she said.
Brijlal explained that Trend Micro's cybersecurity platform protected thousands of organisations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.
She said the company had since redesigned its logo and created sustainability plans that would positively impact their customer base and the broad cybersecurity sector.
Considered a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, the platform delivers a powerful range of threat defence measures optimised for environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.
The senior vice-president for global marketing and sales at Trend, Dhanya Thakkar, said the partnership with the racing team was a perfect match for the company for many reasons.
“Innovation, speed and sustainability are at the core of this Formula E team and Trend Micro.
“Our organisations have common philosophies, and together we plan to accelerate innovation in the industry, accelerate resilience against cyberthreats, and accelerate you,” Thakkar said.
In a statement, Trend Micro wrote that they have innovation initiatives specifically for the security of electronic vehicles as well as vulnerability detection in vehicles of the future.
Their initiatives underscore their dedication to securing the future of automotive technology not just for customers and racing partners but for society as well.