Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Fuel Partner That Discovered Malaysia's Oil
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Shell has been in Malaysia since 1891. Ferrari's fuel partner drilled the nation's first oil well at Miri in 1910 — the deepest sponsor story on the grid.
Sit with that date for a second. 1891. Malaysia as a country didn't exist yet. Shell was already here, in the kerosene-trading days, when the region's oil story was barely a rumor. Then, on October 10, 1910, the company struck oil at Miri — the Grand Old Lady well, the first in the country. Four years later it built Malaysia's first refinery and laid its first submarine pipeline. The modern Malaysian oil industry doesn't just involve Shell. In a real sense, Shell started it.
And now the same company's name rides on the side of a Ferrari.
That's the thing I keep coming back to with this sponsor series. We talk about liveries like they're billboards — and they are — but some of them are also history books. Shell's partnership with Ferrari is one of the most famous technical relationships in racing: the fuel and lubricants inside the red cars, developed together, raced together. But in Malaysia, that partnership lands differently. This isn't a foreign brand renting space on a fast car. This is a company that has been part of the country's industrial story for 135 years — longer than any other sponsor on the grid, by a distance.
Think about what that means at Sepang this weekend. When the Ferraris roll out for Friday practice, the fuel in those cars comes from a partnership with a company that drilled Malaysia's first well before the First World War. The fans in the grandstands filling up at the petrol station on the way to the circuit are customers of the same company. The circle is almost embarrassingly neat.
Every sponsor on this list has a Malaysian connection. But there's connection, and then there's this — not a branch office, not a marketing deal, but the literal ground the country's oil industry was built on. If you want one "did you know" to drop on your friends at the track this weekend, make it this one: the company fueling Ferrari discovered Malaysia's oil.