Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Refinery That Went Home
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Four months ago, Aston Martin's title sponsor handed a Johor refinery back to Petronas. The biggest sponsor story in Malaysian F1 isn't history — it's this year's news.
Here's what happened. Aramco — the Saudi oil giant, Aston Martin's title sponsor at a reported $75 to 95 million a year, and the fuel and lubricants partner for the team's 2026 Honda works power unit — signed a deal on May 26, 2026 to transfer its stakes in PRefChem back to Petronas. PRefChem is the refining and petrochemical complex at Pengerang, Johor: the massive industrial site at the southeastern tip of the peninsula. The transfer ends an eight-year joint venture between the two companies. What's telling is what didn't end: the crude-supply relationship, which both sides describe as a multi-decade partnership. The refinery went home. The oil keeps flowing.
Now zoom out to the starting grid at Sepang. On the green cars: Aramco. On the silver cars: Petronas. Two national oil giants — one Saudi, one Malaysian — who just spent eight years as joint-venture partners in Johor and have now restructured the deal, both with their names on Formula 1 cars, both racing this weekend at a circuit an hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur.
I've been writing this series on the sponsors with Malaysian roots, and most of the stories are about the past — a well drilled in 1910, a brewery founded in 1964. This one is about the present tense. The Johor handover is four months old. It is, as far as I can tell, the freshest corporate story on the entire grid, and it happened in Malaysia's backyard.
There's a bigger picture here that I don't want to lose. Petronas keeps showing up in this series — on the Mercedes, on the circuit name, and now on the receiving end of a refinery in Johor. Malaysia's national oil company isn't just a sponsor in this sport. It's a player: buying, selling, partnering, restructuring, sitting across the table from the biggest oil company on earth and walking away with the refinery. When people ask why Sepang feels like a home race for more than one team, this is part of the answer. The money, the fuel, the industrial muscle — a surprising amount of it runs through Malaysia.
Watch the green cars this weekend. Their sponsor just did its biggest Malaysian deal in years.