Speed Date

What to wear to Ladies’ Day at the Australian Grand Prix?

“I’ve never been to motor racing dressed up, I go in sneakers,” Dame Pieter Stewart, founder of New Zealand Fashion Week and trackside familiar says. “But this is Ladies’ Day, it’s different. You can dress up and watch the cars go round.”

Her slim high heels and slim black pants are sportingly paired with a transparent Coop by Trelise Cooper bomber jacket as we chat trackside at Albert Park, Melbourne. Stewart is a VIP guest at the Mercedes-Benz Ladies’ Lunch held three days before the opening Formula 1 race of 2015 at which Mercedes driver and reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton started from poll position and finished first on Sunday.

His win is a dream one-two start to the season, with teammate Nico Rosberg coming home next, 1.3 seconds behind. Cue Champagne corks popping.

Melbourne’s fashionable crowd got in early, with drinks at the exclusive lunch at the Mercedes-Benz Star Lounge. With a deck that looks across the track there was ample opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of practice rounds for heritage touring cars and V8 Super Cars.

A safety buffer zone of tyres piled five-wide from the fence did little to separate the insistent keening and intermittent popping sounds of speed. For Stewart the noise is no surprise. Her father-in-law, the industrialist and electrical equipment exporter Sir Robertson Stewart, was a motor-racing enthusiast and event sponsor. His five sons, including Dame Pieter’s husband Peter, and her own son, Soren, have all raced.

The successful Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 association is part of a luxury brand outreach that extends from the automotive world to fashion. The company supports fashion events in 27 countries, including, for the first time last year, New Zealand Fashion Week and is naming rights sponsor to some of the bigger weeks, including in New York.

Stewart explains the continuing association will soon extend to the 2015 announcement of a New Zealand designer for the Mercedes-Benz Presents accolade. Dame Trelise Cooper was the inaugural choice, with overseas recipients having included big name designers such as Carolina Herrera, Derek Lam and Badgley Mischka. The relationship is about leveraging opportunities, not just sponsorship, says Stewart.

Premium brands like to keep each other company. In the lead-up to the Grand Prix, the drivers are feted, with much focus on Australian hopeful Daniel Ricciardo. He appears on the front page of Australia's largest circulating newspaper photographed with country woman and Sports Illustrated model Jessica Gomes.

Gomes and fellow model Montana Cox are at the lunch with socialites, telly types and women of uncertain age with the affluent air of regularly updated appearance, handbags and luxury cars. They nibble canapes from chef Shane Delia, whose restaurant Maha leads the way in modern Middle Eastern food. Spiced kale leaves topped with pumpkin hummus, chicken and cashew and Turkish delight-filled doughnuts with walnut honey are a menu sampler.

This year the Australian Grand Prix coincides with Melbourne’s Fashion Festival, which, given the regularity models appear on the arms of racing car drivers, is a handy coincidence.

Elle Macpherson once went out with the lost legend Ayrton Senna, British bad boy driver James Hunt dated a 1970s roll-call and now Lewis Hamilton is free again, having last month reportedly told his on-again, off-again partner Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Pussy Cat Dolls, that he wasn’t going to marry her.

The latter's life story has yet to be made into a movie, but check out Senna and Rush for fascinating on and off track action. The power of racing is palpable. (After 35-year-old Brazilian three time world champion Senna was killed in a crash in 1994, an estimated three million mourners flocked onto the streets of his hometown Sao Paulo).

• Viva will carry the exclusive announcement of the next NZ Mercedes-Benz Presents designer.