From F1 Pit Stops to Payments: What Mastercard and McLaren Have in Common
By Ali Paterson · 25 September 2026
In brief: With a McLaren F1 car at Mastercard's Sibos 2026 side event, Pratik Khowala compares a two-second pit stop to Mastercard payment speed, and the shared drive to keep innovating on both track and payment rails.
| Event | Sibos 2026, Miami |
|---|---|
| Key Speaker | Pratik Khowala, Mastercard |
| Organisation | Mastercard |
| Focus | McLaren F1 tie-in and the parallel between pit stops and payment speed |
Quick Summary
With a McLaren Formula 1 car joining Mastercard's side event at Sibos 2026, Pratik Khowala draws the comparison between a two-second pit stop and the speed of a Mastercard payment, and the shared drive to keep shaving that time down through innovation on both track and rails.
How does a two-second F1 pit stop compare to a Mastercard payment?
Asked to compare an F1 pit stop, which takes about two seconds, to a Mastercard payment from tap to approval, Khowala says Mastercard continues to meet and beat that two-second benchmark in money movement.
What is the real parallel between racing and payments?
Khowala sees a genuine parallel: both racing and payments need to "continue to innovate using the technology that is available" to keep improving on that two-second mark. That improvement, he says, happens on both sides of the operation, in the back-end infrastructure and in track performance, at the same time as it happens in money movement performance.
FF NEWS TAKE:
It is a fun sponsorship soundbite on the surface, but Khowala's answer does real work: tying Mastercard's engineering culture to McLaren's, both obsessed with shaving fractions of a second off a process under pressure, is a tidy way to make payment speed feel tangible ahead of Sibos. Expect the F1 car to be a magnet for booth traffic in Miami.
Frequently asked questions
Why is a McLaren F1 car at Mastercard's Sibos 2026 event?
It is part of Mastercard's Sibos side event, tying its McLaren sponsorship to a comparison between the speed of an F1 pit stop and the speed of a Mastercard payment.
What does Mastercard say is the parallel between F1 and payments?
Both require continuous innovation to shave time off a critical process, whether that is a pit stop or a payment from tap to approval, improving both back-end infrastructure and front-line performance.
Part of our Sibos 2026 coverage.