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Formula One
SPECIAL: What Went Wrong with Prodrive F1
RACER's Adam Cooper takes an in-depth look at the reasons that prevented David Richards' team from becoming F1's 12th squad this season.
Adam Cooper  | http://www.speedtv.com  |  Posted March 04, 2008   Balen, Belgium
Opposition from other privateer squads was the main factor that kept Richards from returning to F1 as a team boss. (LAT Photo)

With a little over a week before Friday practice kicks off in Melbourne there’s still a great deal of confusion surrounding the Super Aguri team. The bottom line is that there is little or no money, Honda does not want to continue to throw the team a lifeline, and investment is urgently needed. And while the team may get its cars on the plane and all the way to Australia, as we’ve seen in the past, you can only get so far with no hard cash behind you.

Aguri’s current troubles have made us all forget that there should have been another team on the grid next week. But despite being granted an entry by the FIA, Prodrive long ago gave up on its plans to enter the sport as McLaren’s customer team. The prospect of there being four MP4-23s in the field was one that the opposition was not exactly excited about, but it was an intriguing project that nearly came to fruition.

Prodrive boss David Richards insists that the finance was in place and that the deal with McLaren had been agreed, and says that his plans were derailed by the lack of a Concorde Agreement, which caused his major backer to prefer to wait. A challenge from AT&T Williams as to the legality of a Prodrive customer car entry created further uncertainty.

“We have an entry, Max said you can come along,” Richards told me shortly after the end of last season. “That’s all very well, but Bernie won’t give us an agreement. We can even go the following year probably if Max says we can come, because the FIA has control of the entry. But if you’re not party to a Concorde Agreement, you don’t have any access to any funds or long-term security. Apparently the FIA can say you can come into the championship, but Bernie and the Concorde Agreement control the situation...”

So what went wrong? The FIA formally announced that Prodrive had won the 12th F1 slot for 2008 as long ago as April 28 2006, after receiving bids from some 22 interested parties. Richards insisted at the time that he was open-minded as to how he would go about putting a project together, but it later became apparent that he was talking to McLaren about a customer car deal.

Ron Dennis had been examining such a prospect for some time, initially involving finance from Dubai. He had approved a failed 2008 entry bid put forward by Japanese company Direxiv.

Richards said early in 2007 that he expected to announce his plans at the British GP in July, but that failed to come to fruition. However, Ron Dennis and McLaren Racing CEO Martin Whitmarsh – the man with specific responsibility for the Prodrive deal – confirmed that discussions were ongoing, and indicated that progress was good.

However, Prodrive’s negotiations with its prospective backer and with McLaren were taking place against a background of increasing uncertainty over the role of customer cars in F1, encouraged by Spyker’s ongoing arbitration case against Super Aguri and Scuderia Toro Rosso. This in turn contributed to a delay in the finalizing of a new Concorde Agreement for 2008 and beyond.
Opposing views: McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh (L) was ready to support Richards' entry, while Williams' Patrick Head was one of Prodrive's most vocal opponents. (LAT Photo)

Richards met Ecclestone several times, both with and without his main backer, in order to discuss the Concorde situation. At Spa last September he continued to insist that negotiations with McLaren were nearly complete, and told me: “It’s all in hand. I wish I knew the exact date myself, but it’s all going on schedule.”

The situation was complicated when AT&T Williams made its opposition to Prodrive’s plans known via a letter to Richards, which was also passed to the FIA.

The letter led directly to Max Mosley convening the International Court of Appeal to discuss the matter of Prodrive’s eligibility. On Friday October 5, while the F1 circus was in China, the FIA duly announced that an ICA hearing would take place in the unusual surroundings of at London legal office on October 24, three days after the World Championship finale in Brazil.

Shortly after the announcement Richards issued a statement that welcomed the ICA’s impending intervention:

"We are in no doubt that the sporting regulations for the 2008 Formula One Championship clearly allow the use of customer cars, which is why our entire F1 proposition has been based on this fact since the outset," he said.

"However, uncertainty spread by others, for their own interests, is not only harming the development of our F1 program, but is putting in jeopardy those of other teams already committed to a customer car program next year.

"Over the last 18 months we have committed a substantial amount of time, money and effort into developing our F1 plans. We are now at the point where everything is in place, however the fact that some parties continue to perpetuate the myth that there is uncertainty, in respect of the rules, is having a detrimental impact on the plans for our new team.

"We therefore welcome the FIA's decision to refer the matter to the ICA, as this position needs to be clarified as soon as possible. It is not only damaging to us but to the sport in general."

When the ICA hearing was announced Ron Dennis, Martin Whitmarsh and other senior McLaren personnel were in Shanghai, and were busy fighting for the World Championship. Whitmarsh had set the China weekend as a final deadline, and the day after the race, the team confirmed that it would stop any work it was doing on the Prodrive project.

Meanwhile Williams indicated to the FIA that the team would not accept a judgment from the Court of Appeal, and stated that it would pursue its own legal route if necessary. As a result, the FIA announced that the ICA hearing scheduled for October 24 was “postponed,” but in the end it never happened.

In effect at the start of October McLaren reached a cut-off point where it was going to be impossible to build and prepare the extra 2008 cars and associated spares required by Prodrive in time for the Australian GP. In addition McLaren needed to take on new personnel to support the project, and had been loathe to do so until everything was in place.

“The deadline had been moved several times,” Martin Whitmarsh told me at the time. “But in the end China was the deadline, and I announced it to our business on the Monday after China. It had been pushed back progressively during the last few months. We had reached the point at which I was fearful that if we had started later, we had damaged the prospects of doing it well.

“We had worked on it for months with Prodrive, and in the last few months with their commercial partner. We came to an agreement on how we would be working together, and there is still a good relationship between all of those parties.

“However, there was still some doubt on eligibility of entry, there was still some doubt on the longer-term commercial benefits that could be afforded to any new entrant. Those two factors added to the risk that after entering a new F1 program. And consequently the commercial partner felt understandably that they couldn’t proceed until they had those points clarified.
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