08/11/2009
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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Toyota Motorsport is to leave Formula One. I trust this will not affect pending criminal charges against former employees over the acquisition of Ferrari data. Now that the team will no longer be a major employer in the locale, perhaps Cologne's Finest could get their fingers out and take a closer look at current employees who knew about the scam. There was, for example, the internal e.mail in May, 2003, instructing everyone to destroy Ferrari data. That e.mail came from someone who is still employed by Toyota.
It would be pleasant to say that Toyota will be missed, but it would be untrue. We are speaking of the same outfit which was banned from the World Rally Championship for cheating big time. Toyota has spent more than any other team and never looked like winning a race.
While Toyota has been struggling in F1, the parent company has become the world number one car maker. That is an amazing achievement and it is well-deserved. Unfortunately it also torpedoes the notion that if you win on Sunday, you sell on Monday. Toyota has been selling without winning.
The fact that Toyota was in negotiations with Kimi a few weeks ago is neither here nor there. It is possible that the team did not know it was for the chop; it is also possible that negotiations were a charade. The company lost less face having seen the season out and, in Japan, 'face' is everything. What I would call 'honour', from my perspective, is another thing entirely.
There have been mixed messages from Tokyo. One day, reports said that the team was up for sale; the next day they said that Toyota was to simply close the factory with the loss of about 750 jobs, down from a peak of more than 1,000.
Toyota signed the Concorde Agreement so the team has value, with a place on the grid and a share of TV revenue. A problem is the sheer scale of the enterprise. Toyota Motorsport had a bigger budget than the GNP of Afghanistan. The only buyer I can think of, and for whom the team could be an asset, is Hyundai.
Hyundai entered the car market in 1984 with the 'Stellar', a Ford Cortina platform with Mitsubishi running gear, and it was dreadful. Japanese cars were once dreadful as well, they sold on price and equipment. Japanese makers were quick to learn and an early lesson was to make different seats for Western markets. And world-leading American backsides.
Hyundai has learned and the product has improved out of all recognition. The company now offers the best warranty in the world, better than Rolls-Royce, and recent sales in the UK have more than trebled. A presence in Formula One could give the company an improved profile especially since South Korea is to have a Grand Prize.
Even if Toyota was prepared to sell, Cologne would have to further downsize. Hyundai does not have Toyota's clout, but it does have huge ambition. Perhaps the opportunity came a little too soon.
The FIA is reported to be examining the 'legality' of Toyota's withdrawal, but if Toyota doesn't want to race, nobody can do much about it. The Inscrutable Ones will have had lawyers on the case. The FIA could impose a financial penalty and Toyota could decide to pay, so that it may compete in FIA-sanctioned events in the future. I wonder what would happen if Toyota gave the FIA what we Brits use two fingers to do while Americans use one.
I wonder how solid is the FIA. If the world's most successful car maker ignored the FIA. I wonder if anything could be done. If Toyota wished to return in the future, I wonder whether the FIA would be as accommodating and embarrassingly servile as it has been with Renault.
An employee of McLaren was offered Ferrari data, by a Ferrari employee, and the FIA slapped a huge fine. Toyota used illegal Ferrari data and the FIA did nothing, yet the corruption went throughout the team. Renault acquired McLaren data and the FIA did nothing.
Here is a thought, now that Max has stepped down, he will be able to pursue who it was who exposed his little ways. High-level investigators were employed, over months, at enormous cost, and the culprit was not among the usual suspects.
I always said that Toyota would fail in F1 and that was not a particularly clever prediction. It comes down to culture and the first mistake was locating in Cologne. The international language of motor racing is English, so the team has always divided between those who speak English and those who do not. This does not make for cohesion.
Formula One is centred just North of Oxford, close to the motorway network and Heathrow. Is it a cosmopolitan community, which has long been the case with all the universities in the area. Everyone senior in motor racing , regardless of nationality, speaks English. It is a given, just as all airline traffic is conducted in English and that applies even to the French. It applies especially to the French.
Recruitment from other teams or subcontractors is easy. A guy does not have to move house, change his kids' schools or ask the wife to look for another job which, these days, can be a problem.
By locating in Cologne, Toyota had either to recruit from an area with little F1 experience, outside of Zakspeed, or buy expertise from abroad and pay inflated salaries. Cologne is a pleasant city, and well-placed, but it is asking a lot to move your family there unless they speak the lingo.
Then there is the Toyota corporate mentality, which is rigid and which involves moving senior executives around the company's overseas factories. Frank Williams has not been forced to move around, nor has Peter Sauber. They are men who established cultures.
One reason why Toyota went into Formula One, apart from all the goodies for the executives, was to generate a competitive spirit among its engineers. Honda had done this amazingly well. When Honda made its first F1 engine it had made fewer than 1,500 cars. The two company Presidents who succeeded Mr Honda arrived in England in 1965 as mechanics assigned to the Brabham Racing Organisation. They did not have a word of English between them but both have told me that they soon learned how to order whisky and Mr Kume developed a taste for English fish and chips.
Honda always appreciated a partnership with a proper racing team. There was Brabham, then Surtees/Lola, and even its most recent foray was with BAR/Tyrrell/Reynard. Toyota thought it could do one better than Honda, and go it alone. It could not. Toyota has always believed that it is superior to Honda, and it is not. Honda cultivated a competitive culture from its earliest days. For Toyota it had been an add-on, something to be bought.
On the subject of culture, and buying, there is the memory of Abu Dhabi. We have had further proof that Hermann Tilke knows Sweet Fanny Adams about motor racing. I can only assume that he gets the gigs because he has the negatives somewhere secure. There has to be a reason why he is employed having proven time and again that he cannot design a circuit.
Tilke does grandstands well, and drainage. The one thing he never gets right is the circuit layout. When you know that Tilke is involved in a new circuit, you feel a cold shadow pass over you.
Abu Dhabi is a new circuit built on an artificial island and some LCD panels meant that the lights changed colour. You can buy a kettle which changes colour as it heats. It grabs your attention the first time, but after it has done it you ask, 'What else does it do? Is it too much to hope that it also boils water?'
It is a one trick pony. It is vulgar. Does the White House change colour at night? Does the Taj Mahal? Does Windsor Castle? Do they need to?
Abu Dhabi is designed for people with more money than taste. It will appeal to footballers and their bottle-blonde bimbos, right up to the time when they realise that it is just another air conditioned, hermetically sealed, resort designed to take their money, like Las Vegas. There is sea and there is sand, but it is too hot to lie on a beach so, as a beach resort, Abu Dhabi is useless. You will probably be able to enjoy a look at the sea from your indoor swimming pool.
I would not been seen dead in Ferrari World because it will be so naff. If you want to see Ferraris, you go to a race meeting at Monza or Goodwood where you see them in context, not in some pavilion in the middle of nowhere.
I fail to see the connection between Ferrari and a strip of sand. Ferrari comes from a particular culture. In the Middle Ages, if you were a knight, and could afford it, you bought your armour from Milan. For centuries, a part of Northern Italy has been skilled with metal, a common local name is 'Ferrari'. Ferrari derives from the same root as 'ferrous'. Ferrari means 'Smith', but has more glamour. Ferrari Dino beats Alf Smith, but they mean the same.
Metal is part of the culture of that part of Italy which is why some of the greatest automotive styling has come from a relatively small area. Birrani wire wheels come from Milan. In due course, I will tell the story, but the other day I was in a friend's house and four boxes arrived. Inside each box was a work of art, with spokes, from Italy. There is a project in the making. My friend cannot bear even to throw away the boxes and he does need the space.
In the media coverage from Abu Dhabi, we heard the usual garbage from people put up in swish hotels. We heard the same platitudes when Shanghai first staged a race. My information is that the Shanghai facility is falling apart. The city wanted to upstage Beijing and its hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and ever since the circuit has been a white elephant. They cannot sell seats, they bus in schoolkids to make the place look full, but otherwise it stands idle. They now give it a lick of paint before a Grand Prix. Essentially, the place is falling apart. And it cannot happen too quickly for me.
The race at Abu Dhabi took place only because they imported 350 marshals from Britain. They were all of a certain seniority in experience. They had all been marshals at a Grand Prix at Silverstone. Excuse me, Bernie, but do any of your glittering new circuits send marshals elsewhere?
Silverstone lost the plot. It up-dated the circuit layout, and never lost the essence, but it forgot about the coloured lights. Clearly, Bernie likes pretty lights. We know he does not give a tinker's cuss about track layout or Tilke would be out of work.
Message to Damon Hill and the other guys at the BRDC: buy a load of Christmas decorations, but don't tell Bernie. Keep his eyes covered and then let him see Stowe Corner covered in tinsel. He likes that sort of thing. His eyes will light up and he will go 'oh!' and 'ah!' and clap his little hands together.
In his private life, Bernie has exquisite taste. He is renowned as a collector of Japanese paintings and Georgian silver. He reckons that the rest of us should be content with kitsch. Abu Dhabi is the Franklin Mint of motor racing. Bernie holds us in contempt.
You cannot run a motor race meeting without volunteer marshals. Abu Dhabi does not have any. I'd say that if a country does not have marshals it does not qualify to host a World Championship event.
An apologist on a Pitpass forum has written that traditions have to begin somewhere. This is true, but all traditions which have strength begin at the grass roots. Look at motor sport around the world, it flourishes in many different forms, but all come from a time and a place. Hot rods came from California, not from Montana, and they came from California under a particular set of circumstances.
Traditions begin at the grass roots. It is tied in with culture, the descendents of the Milanese craftsman who made the best armour in Europe now make cars. It goes against the laws of nature to impose a tradition because a handful of mega-rich people decide that is what they want to do. I look forward to seeing the Abu Dhabi project fail.
I know that it will fail because there is no organic growth. Take Ferrari World. I am sure there will be all the latest gizmos: holograms, simulators, anything you can get at any theme park, but who is going to visit it? The sort of people who can afford to stay in mega-luxury can afford their own Ferraris.
For a fraction of the money we can visit Milan, which drips with culture. You have Monza and Maranello close to hand. There are great restaurants and shops, Milan is a world centre of style. The Italian lakes and the Mediterranean Sea are a short distance away. There is the cathedral, galleries and La Scala opera house. All share a common history. Abu Dhabi has no heritage apart from fanciful tales of goat-herds.
And there is the Alfa Romeo museum in Milan. I was indifferent to Alfa Romeo until I visited. When I left, I was a man in love. And it is local culture, all those fabulous bodies were made close by; it is not a brand, a culture, or a history hijacked by unearned money.
If you want to experience Ferrari, you go to where Ferraris are made and where they have been raced. Only the very dim would travel to a nowhere place and spend time in a capsule because that is all any hotel in Abu Dhabi is. A capsule. It is bang up to date, so very 2009 and by 2019 it will be dated, old hat. Abu Dhabi is vulgar beyond words. It is a desert dweller's idea of chic and, apart from anything else, it is an ecologoical abomination and further evidence that the FIA has not thought things through beyond delegates being put up in luxury.
This is not me dripping with envy. Car makers have put me up in some of the world's best hotels. One thing I learned is that if you have a comfortable bed, for most of your stay you will be asleep and you do not know whether you are in a motel, or Gleneagles.
Gleneagles is in a class of its own except for one thing, it has a golf course. That means golfers, boring people who wear peculiar clothing. I could just have described Toyota executives. Abu Dhabi hopes to attract such people and that is an indication of how misguided, and naff is the entire project.
Mike Lawrence
mike@pitpass.com
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