Shamir partners with the Alpine F1 Team

Shamir Optical Industry has become the optical performance partner for the Alpine F1 Team.

The new collaboration will see the establishment of what the two groups have called the first vision performance lab in Formula 1.

Established through the sports marketing agency FUSE France, the partnership will aim to improve the visual quality and safety of race team members.

The vision performance labs will provide ophthalmic assessments for the Alpine F1 Team and Alpine Academy drivers, as well as the pit crew, pit wall and personnel at the team bases in Enstone, UK, and Viry-Châtillon in France.

Shamir will also provide the Alpine F1 track team and base personnel with ophthalmic follow-ups and Shamir safety equipment and lenses.

Zohar Katzman, chief technology officer of Shamir, commented: “This partnership sparks our imagination and passion for innovation.”

“Our focus and mission will be to attain perfect vision under any conditions, tailor personal vision solutions to our Alpine F1 partners and enhance team performance and safety,” Katzman added, continuing: “The challenges and extreme conditions and needs of F1 will drive us toward developing better vision solutions.”

As a technical partner to the team, Shamir’s logo will appear on Alpine F1 Team equipment.

Through the partnership, Shamir and Alpine engineers will also investigate new technologies to improve racing and safety performance, with a focus on vision. This will include reduced glare goggles and coloured visors, as well as anti-fog lenses for the pit crew helmets.

Welcoming the partnership, the Alpine team highlighted that visual performance is “underexplored” in Formula 1.

Reflecting on the opportunities to explore visual performance, Davide Brivio, racing director for the Alpine F1 Team, agreed: “Vision is often overlooked as a key performance differentiator.”

He added: “We have seen from many different sports, such as skiing and rallying, that if an individual can focus precisely, without distraction from glare, blurring and flare, it allows them to perform better.”

Cédric Journel, vice-president, sales and marketing for Alpine, welcomed the opportunity to explore new avenues for improving performance, commenting: “There is huge scope to collaborate on many creative and innovative new technologies that will initially help our team but also consumers across the world.”

Building on this, Antoine Magnan, Alpine’s director of strategic partnerships, suggested that Formula 1 offers a “unique laboratory for brands to push the boundaries of their technology and develop new processes and materials to enhance Alpine F1 Team performance, that can also be applied in the real-world to consumers.”

“It is an exciting partnership, full of potential to explore areas of human performance not yet analysed in Formula 1,” he continued.