Formula One racing teams McLaren Mercedes and BAR Honda are both attempting to persuade Intel to become a regular team sponsor, it has been claimed.

According to an EETimes report, both have separately made approaches to the chip giant in a bid to win a portion of its marketing budget.

Intel already has a connection with Formula One: its logo appears on Toyota's racing cars thanks to the team's decision to run its big-league number-crunching applications on a bank of Itanium-based machines. Last season, you'd have seen the Intel name on the nose of car.

HP sponsors Williams BMW, while Intel arch-rival AMD has its marque on the Ferrari car and gets its moniker on Sauber Petronas' cars thanks to that team's preference for Opteron-based modelling and simulation systems.

McLaren Mercedes' already enjoys the sponsorship of Sun, which also favours Opteron over Intel chippery, which might make for friction should the team indeed persuade Intel to come on board, though they're not direct competitors.

Ironically, Toyota's Formula One team website sits on top of Solaris, if the Sun logo appearing as each page's icon is anything to go by.

BAR Honda's partner line-up for the recent season was without a big-name computer hardware sponsor, so may have a more successful time courting Intel than McLaren Mercedes for that reason alone.

Meanwhile, Intel had a couple of cars running in the Lexmark Indy 300 at Surfers Paradise, Queensland last month. Its cars came in second place and seventh. It was also one of the race's major backers, and even sponsored one of the turns on the track. ®