Allwyn and McLaren Racing will stage a public motorsport event at the Olympic Athletic Center of Athens (OAKA) on 3 October 2026, the first instalment of a global event series the lottery group plans to run across its main markets.
The event, billed as Allwyn x McLaren Racing: Live in Athens, puts Formula 1 machinery on a temporary track inside the venue built for the 2004 Olympic Games. Two-time world champion Mika Häkkinen will drive, alongside appearances from other former Formula 1 drivers.
The car list is the draw. McLaren will bring the car that won the 2025 Formula 1 World Constructors’ Championship and the MP4/6 raced by Ayrton Senna, plus heritage and modern show cars. Allwyn has also planned a fan zone and supporting entertainment on site.
Why Athens, and why now
Greece is the obvious place for Allwyn to open the series. The group completed its merger with Greek operator OPAP in March 2026 and took a listing on the Athens Stock Exchange. Greece is now one of the largest single contributors to group revenue.
That scale showed in the numbers that followed. Allwyn reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of €1.2 billion, up 21%, with the OPAP business folded into the group accounts.
Jan Karas, chairman and chief executive of Allwyn Hellas, said the company expects to welcome “thousands of fans in October” at what he described as “one of the largest motorsport fan experiences ever held in Greece.”
Pavel Turek, chief officer global partnerships at Allwyn, described the Athens date as the start of an international event platform.
Bringing more speed, thrills and excitement to this iconic sporting location is the perfect way to introduce our international event platform and entertain more fans.
Neither company has named the markets that will host the next events in the series, or given a date for a second edition.
The Formula 1 relationship behind it
Allwyn became an official partner of the McLaren Formula 1 team in February 2025, a global deal that put Allwyn branding on the race cars and on the overalls of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. Neither company disclosed the value or the length of that agreement.
Allwyn separately extended its Formula 1 partnership in a multi-year deal in March 2026, giving it a relationship with the championship itself as well as with one team.
Louise McEwen, chief marketing officer at McLaren Racing, said the Athens event lets the team connect with what she called its “passionate and growing fan community in Greece.” Formula 1 audiences in Southern Europe have grown alongside the sport’s wider expansion, and McLaren’s two consecutive constructors’ titles give it a stronger commercial position than it has held in two decades.
A different kind of gambling sponsorship
Gambling money in sport is under sustained regulatory pressure across Europe, with restrictions on betting sponsorship in place or under discussion in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Allwyn’s exposure is different in kind: it is a lottery and licensed gaming operator whose Formula 1 branding carries no betting product, and lottery advertising sits outside most of the sponsorship bans written for sports betting.
That distinction matters for how far the format can travel. An event platform built around a lottery brand can run in markets where a sportsbook brand could not put its name on the entrance.
Allwyn has not said whether the Athens event will carry responsible gambling messaging on site, or whether entry will be free or ticketed.
What to watch
The immediate test is turnout. The OAKA complex’s main stadium seats about 70,000, and Karas has put expectations in the thousands, so the venue choice is about the setting and the track layout it allows.
The longer question is which markets follow. Allwyn operates lotteries in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has been building out a North American business. Any of those could host the next date, and the choice will indicate where the group is spending its marketing budget as it integrates the OPAP business and works through a difficult period in its UK operation.
Source: Allwyn
