ic! berlin x Audi Revolut F1® Team Look Good Together, Don’t You Think?
Eyewear is one of the more obvious elements of Formula 1’s increasingly popular collaboration ecosystem, and as far as we’re concerned, easily the most overlooked. Drivers spend a race weekend obsessing over fractions of a second, but before any of that can happen, they need to be able to see. At 300 kilometres per hour, the track, the braking markers, the apex and the cars around them all have to remain sharply in focus. What sits on a driver’s face is therefore a slightly more consequential piece of equipment than most.
That makes eyewear a surprisingly natural fit for a sport that has spent the last few years expanding well beyond the business of racing. The modern F1 paddock has become a meeting point for fashion, design, technology and hospitality, with brands increasingly looking for ways to attach themselves to the teams, drivers and culture surrounding the championship. Some partnerships are primarily about visibility; others make a more convincing case for why the two parties belong together.
The arrival of Audi Revolut F1® Team is particularly interesting in that context. 2026 marks the manufacturer’s first season competing in Formula 1 as a full factory team, following its takeover of the Sauber operation. Audi Revolut F1®️ Team has arrived with its own car and power unit, and with a growing network of partners around it, as the team continues its long-term pursuit of motorsport excellence in one of the most visible and competitive arenas in motorsport.
And among those partners is ic! berlin, which became the team’s Official Eyewear Partner at the start of the 2026 season. On the surface, it is another brand joining the increasingly crowded F1 ecosystem. Look a little closer, though, and the logic is fairly straightforward. ic! berlin has spent more than three decades approaching eyewear through the language of engineering, developing thin stainless-steel frames, a screwless hinge system and lightweight constructions designed around flexibility, durability and comfort.
The relationship also arrives at an interesting moment for both brands. In its continued pursuit of racing excellence, Audi Revolut F1® Team is putting all its factory-backed motorsport focus into its Formula 1 entry, while ic! berlin is bringing a design philosophy developed in Berlin into a scene increasingly interested in what exists beyond racing.
At Monza, we saw how that looked in practice, with the ic! berlin team taking us from its own production story to the centre of Audi Revolut F1® Team first F1 season.
The team's presence in Formula 1 is, of course, bigger than a hospitality programme or a collection of partnerships. The manufacturer entered the championship with the intention of establishing a long-term factory operation, developing its own hybrid power unit in Germany and competing under its own name for the first time. The 2026 season is effectively year one of a project Audi Revolut F1® Team has said is aimed at challenging for championships by 2030.
The scale of that ambition becomes easier to understand once you get inside the operation. At the Marcolin showroom, ic! berlin’s team explained how its frames are engineered and manufactured. The brand became known for thin stainless-steel frames and its screwless hinge system. When manufacturers initially proved reluctant to produce the construction, the founders invested in their own machinery. Around 80 per cent of production is now carried out in-house.
There is plenty of engineering packed into something that can disappear on your face. ic! berlin works with stainless steel, titanium, acetate and carbon fibre, including its patented FLEXARBON material. The eight-layer construction is around 0.7mm thick, while the front of one frame weighs approximately two grams.
It is this obsession with small margins that the team and ic! berlin are attempting to connect. The eyewear brand’s frames are designed around reducing weight, increasing flexibility and eliminating unnecessary components. Formula 1 operates at an altogether more extreme scale, where fractions of a second and grams of weight can become competitive advantages.
Ahead of the Monza Grand Prix, ic! berlin Managing Director Davide Lunghi told us "ic! berlin's commitment to performance engineering and innovation over the past three decades has met the perfect match in Audi Revolut F1®️ Team as we join them in their continued mission for success at the pinnacle of motorsport"
That idea now forms the basis of ic! berlin’s first campaign with Audi Revolut F1® Team, featuring Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto. Shot by Rupert Tapper with creative direction from Leif Podhajsky and Sophie Holm-Nielsen, the campaign uses motion blur to place the frames within the visual language of racing. Its tagline “From 0.5 mm to 300 km/h” makes the connection fairly explicit.
At Monza, though, the power of the partnership came into 20/20. With perfect vision, it’s much easier to see just how much the details matter. From the construction of a two-gram frame to the engineering of a car travelling at 300 kilometres per hour, the same principle keeps surfacing: remove what you can, refine what remains, and assume that the smallest details will always matter.
