After four years of trying to get as high off the ground as his mega-succcessful budget airline AirAsia, Tan Sri Tony Fernandes on Wednesday sold off his struggling Caterham Formula 1 team to a group of Swiss and Middle Eastern investors with former driver Christijian Albers in the lead.
Albers, a retired driver who has competed in 46 grands prix over the course of his career, will take over the daily operations of the team, with the assistance of Manfredi Ravetto. Albers replaces outgoing Cyril Abiteboul, who was appointed to the Caterham helm in 2012 after Fernandws decided to step back from the team and focus on his other business interests.
Caterham announced in a statement before Sunday’s British Grand Prix that the team would continue to race under the name, and would still be based from their factory at Leafield in central England, for the imediate future.
The sale ends a costly and ultimately unsucessful venture into motorsports for Fernandes, whose sports interests now seem to be focused on his Premier League football team Queens Park Rangers.
Fernandes began to fade out of Caterham races this year, and opened the gates to speculation of his exit when he shut down his Twitter account – which had over two million followers – last week with the words “F1 hasn’t worked”.
The Star Online recalls how Fernandes burst onto the F1 scene with Lotus Racing, one of three new teams to debut that year on the strength of then FIA president Max Mosley’s promise of a budget cap to level the playing field.
When the budget cap proposal fell flat, and after Lotus Racing had to change its name first to Team Lotus, after a legal dispute with car manufacturer Lotus, and then to Caterham, it was apparent that F1 wasn’t going to be a clear stretch for Fernandes.
In the four and a half seasons they’ve been competing, Caterham has failed to score a single point, making them the only team on the current grid in that sorry situation.
Fernandes had warned before the season started that he was losing patience and would walk away without clear signs of improvement and his decision to sell shows that that was no empty threat.
He had also been critical of F1’s failure to introduce the sweeping cost-cutting measures that smaller teams have called for, and the lack of progress at a recent meeting would not have helped.
