21/12/2009
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
 |
Sauber has been awarded a place on the 2010 grid and I am sure that many readers will welcome the news as much as I do. Ironically, this may be due to the intervention of convicted fraudster, Russell King, apparently the front man for the Qadbak group of investors. As the Qadbak bid fell apart, BMW came to its senses and struck a deal with Peter Sauber.
Qadbak appears to be an amalgamation of Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait and it, and its subsidiaries, operate from countries which are investor-friendly. Qadbak is registered in the British Virgin Islands and please note that I have not made any bad jokes about virgins, yet.
The media referred to a 'Qadbak bid', and terms such as 'mysterious' and 'secretive' were used of Qadbak. The fact is that there are wealthy funds that few outside the financial services industry have heard about. One has just bought into Renault and few F1 enthusiasts had heard of CVC before the fund infringed on our patch. We still do not know who has money invested there. We do not know who owns Formula One.
I have no idea of the details of the actual bid, but I do wonder about the real involvement of Qadbak bearing in mind what Russell King has done before.
About 20 years ago a business owned by King was in trouble, but he owned a rare Aston Martin valued at £600,000. King secreted his car in a garage, reported it stolen and claimed on the insurance. In 1991, he was sent down for two years.
While the buy-out of Sauber was in negotiation came news that King has had £1.8 million of his assets frozen by a court in Jersey because of an unpaid debt.
So far as I can make out, Russell King tried to buy Sauber on promises. Sauber has a factory, a history and, above all, a spotless reputation. It would appear that King hoped to secure agreement and then hoped to attract sponsors.
Perhaps I misrepresent the man, but it fits a pattern. A few years ago, King was involved in a bid to launch a Dubai F1 team. Some members of the ruling family gave it their conditional blessing, but put in no money. This was not the impression then conveyed. One rather had the impression that the rulers of what was then perceived to be an economic dynamo had committed.
There was also talk of the Dubai project having the conditional blessing of McLaren which had agreed in principle, to sell technical support. When the bid for Sauber was announced, Martin Whitmarsh was quoted along the lines that his enthusiasm for anything associated with Russell King was firmly under control.
Russell King may have done us all a favour since BMW, perhaps alarmed by his involvement, has sold Sauber back to Peter Sauber. My guess is that BMW did not want its reputation besmirched by selling a high-profile asset to an ex-con.
Perhaps King is a fantasist who saw an opportunity to break into the big time. He would not be the first in Formula One, or even in the first hundred. His bid for Sauber, was not necessarily fraudulent, perhaps he really believed he could pull off a deal and be the knight in shining armour.
Late in the day, BMW has done the decent thing and it surprised me that they did not do that unprompted. I guess they were trying to squeeze every last Euro from their investment, which is ironical given the cash they have thrown at F1. They spent a huge amount to burnish the company's image and then threw away a lot of the goodwill with a pfennig-pinching approach to the endgame.
If you cannot win with Williams. you are not going to win with Sauber plus corporate suits. The more suits a company shovels into a racing project, the harder it is for the team. This is because the suits are there on a temporary basis and they care more about their standing in their real jobs, with the corporation. This was among Toyota's problems.
The Ford GT40 would have been much better, sooner, had suits from Detroit not tipped up at Lola and interfered with Eric Broadley and Tony Southgate who knew what they were doing. Tony had the choice, so he left to join Brabham. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen Len Bailey credited with the GT40, but this was Ford politics. The GT40 was a Lola design, messed about by suits. I have yet to discover a successful car designed by Len Bailey.
Ford bought Lola on an exclusive basis for a year, and paid for a new factory at Slough for seven years. Suits demanded that the GT40 had a steel monocoque so the hundreds they would sell could be repaired anywhere. The Lola T70 was the car that Broadley wanted to make for Ford. My sources are Eric Broadley and Tony Southgate.
To be fair to BMW, the company did continue to pay the wages and work continued on the 2010 car though it must have been difficult to maintain enthusiasm and commitment in between writing job applications. BMW could have played it better.
Toyota could have exited with more grace as well. Five hundred people have lost their jobs and the official line is that they will be okay, they are motor racing people, they are used to that sort of thing. To underline the fact, Toyota made the point that people of 32 nationalities were on the team, it was a just a stopping off point for a merry band of wandering engineers.
In point of fact, most of those made redundant will have been recruited from around Cologne because that is how a factory operates. They will not have been engineers, they will have been fabricators, secretaries, regular people doing regular jobs. I thought that Toyota's breezy statement was crass.
Toyota may have data for sale, or maybe not. Here is another company confused over the endgame. Like BMW, Toyota had no need for Formula One apart from satisfying a few executives. BMW at least had the sense to align itself with a proper motor racing concern. Toyota had the arrogance to believe it could do it all by itself. This is the company that was banned from the World Rally Championship for cheating.
Toyota had a supercar under development and the plan was to launch it as soon as they won a Grand Prix. The supercar has arrived, badged as a Lexus, and they really think they can sell a few, priced at half a million dollars. Anyone care to guess how many they will sell?
Note to Cologne police investigating the stolen Ferrari data which arrived at Toyota. I can suggest a name additional to those already charged. Check out the internal e.mails for May, 2003, and see who ordered all the Ferrari data to be destroyed. This slimeball is still on the payroll.
There are rumours that Stefan GP may be interested in buying Toyota data and Stefan GP has employed Mike Coughlan, of McLaren, prior to Stepneygate, to head its design staff.
(Note to Trudi Coughlan, if Stefan GP does buy Toyota data, you do not have to go to a local shop to get it copied. This time it will be above board. Why do I know that Trudi is one of those daft tarts who wears sunglasses on the tops of their heads where they do not actually work?)
Stefan GP is said to have the backing of the Serbian government. I would have thought that Serbia had a few needs more pressing than investing in Formula One.
While they moil and toil towards their ambition, I have advice. Lose the name. Steve GP? You may as well call it Clive, Malcolm, or Marvin. Or Trudi.
Would any major manufacturer launch a car called Steve? Actually, Honda did have the Cedric and the Parsley, on the home market. This is in accordance with the Japanese principle that they name cars no Japanese can pronounce, like the Corolla.
Steve GP is just silly.
It seems that Henkel sponsorship for the Mercedes-Benz team may not be forthcoming. Henkel is a company with many interests, it markets Persil in Germany so viter than vite it is. It seems that a senior executive persuaded Brawn GP that Henkel was in for mega-millions.
The executive would not have dealt with Ross Brawn, sponsorship is the responsibility of Nick Fry, long time a pin-up boy at Pitpass. No German executive would have tried it on with Daimler Benz. Within the company, it is always Daimler Benz.
Nearly 20 years ago a member of the board of BMW commissioned a BMW F1 design. The company that received the commission was Simtek, now the main technical consultant to Virgin. The member of the BMW board did not have the authority to commission a car.
The two partners in Simtek when the supposed BMW deal fell apart were Nick Wirth and Max Mosley.
Talking of Nick Wirth, he has declared the wind tunnel obsolete. The Meeja has worked this into a spat between Nick Wirth and Patrick Head. Relax, it is not. I have the greatest respect for Nick and reckon he could well be right, if he has primed his computers correctly.
The first Formula One car to be designed with the aid of a wind tunnel was the Brabham BT3 of 1962. Jack Brabham had all kinds of deals with road car makers and one, the Rootes Group, allowed him use of the time they had booked in the MIRA (full-size) wind tunnel.
The first F1 car designed to sound aerodynamic principles was the 1956 Vanwall which had a body by Frank Costin. I know about all the other claims, Connaught did indeed make their own wind tunnel. Brian Lister kept the wind tunnel model for his 1955 car in his office, I have seen it so trust me on this one.
Frank Costin was a dear friend and I know that he did not use a wind tunnel for the design of the many cars he designed, aircraft were different. Frank used a slide rule. You may have seen photographs of a Vanwall in the MIRA tunnel. The photos are from 1958, when Frank's genius was verified.
Frank maintained the aerodynamics could be calculated in the same way that hydrodynamics could be, there were rules and he used a set of rules laid down in 1926. A feature of the Vanwall was the clever ducting which allowed for still air in the cockpit. Young Stirling, who was being wooed, was sceptical about this so, during a test he yanked away a bit of the donkey dick, sorry for the technical term, which was feeding air into the cockpit. His head almost left his shoulders. He became a Costin convert.
The one fact that I ever queried about Frank is his claim that he once picked up a girl on the steps of Portsmouth Guildhall and was having it away with her on Portsdown Hill within 15 minutes and she was not a professional. I never doubted Frank's charm, only the logistics.
It was during the War and the Eastern Road had not then been built. I call on matelots of all nations to help me on this one because you have all had shore leave in Pompey. Frank was working for Airspeed on the design for the D-Day gliders and she was not professional, merely a gifted amateur.
A valued correspondent is Simon Perkins even though he is a lawyer. Simon, the scamp, has suggested that the proposed changes in the F1 Championship points system are designed with one aim, to ensure that some of Michael Schumacher's records can be broken. I cannot fault his thinking.
We cannot do much about the number of wins and pole positions that Michael won. Nobody cares much about win/start ratio, where J-M Fangio remains supreme. Nobody cares that Caracciola, Fagioli, Lang, Nuvolari, Rosemeyer, Varzi and Wimille are excluded from F1 statistics because they only raced in Grands Prix and not the World Championship.
Under Bernie rules, Caracciola did not win the German GP six times and always at the 'Ring, a track made for heroes, not some Tilke parody of a circuit. Sorry about that, Rudi. Hey, you have to see things from the point of view of Bernie and CVC. Six Grand Prix wins on the 'Ring, but not a single point to show for it. That really is not good enough. In 2010, finishing tenth will earn you a point and you never earned one point in your life. So, nah, nah, nah, to you Rudolf Caracciola. Your rival, and one time team-mate, Tazio Nuvolari, could not have been much cop either because, like you, he never won a single Bernie point.
The one record that can be broken in the foreseeable future is the number of points. Change the system and, after a time, nobody will kick up a fuss, because all that matters is the latest 'record'. The Meeja demands that everything will be ever better.
To my regular readers, thank you for putting up with me and I wish you all the best things that the Nativity of the Unconquered Sun means to you.
Mike Lawrence
mike@pitpass.com
To check out previous features from Mike, click here