Fernandes to buy Caterham & rebrand Team Lotus?

[CHT]

The more I read about this whole Team Lotus - Caterham setup, the more I like what Fernandes is building here. He is riding Chapman's legacy, but he does it with respect, keeping true to the "less is more" spirit.

Makes me want to buy a 7 kit, paint it green and go racing.

EDIT: But then again, I've been wanting to do that for ages. Anybody have an extra 20K pounds?

Tony needs to find a way to recuperate his lost investment in the Lotus brand and he needs to find a way to recuperate it. Buying Caterham (for a song I presume) might help package his team for potential takeover. Maybe by some rich Chinese or Indian company.

[marcush.]

I really like the Fernandes approach to F1 and recreating team Lotus.Nothing against Renault ,I love to see them on the rise.but Lotus -no question-is Team Lotus ,Fernandes
and Gascoyne.
I fear that Caterham is more of a deep hole to be filled with monstrous amounts of money than an asset right now.To transform this into a globally acting car manufacturer is for sure quite a task..and I´m not sure if Tony is aware of the difficulty to be allowed to sell cars to China or USA or the european market when you decide to be a manufacturer of cars not just building a few kits.

[CHT]

I really like the Fernandes approach to F1 and recreating team Lotus.Nothing against Renault ,I love to see them on the rise.but Lotus -no question-is Team Lotus ,Fernandes
and Gascoyne.
I fear that Caterham is more of a deep hole to be filled with monstrous amounts of money than an asset right now.To transform this into a globally acting car manufacturer is for sure quite a task..and I´m not sure if Tony is aware of the difficulty to be allowed to sell cars to China or USA or the european market when you decide to be a manufacturer of cars not just building a few kits.

Does anyone know if MG is a partner in this team or just a technical director on payroll?

[marcush.]

ah..he acts as it was his baby,so who cares?
Even if I have the feeling the 2010 contender happened mainly to fill his pockets.Otherwise they would have simply bought the Toyota assets ,right? God ..they lost an awful lot of time campaigning that rolling outdated disaster.

[xpensive]

As a something of a rogue engingeneer myself, I have always been the strongest supporter of Gascoyne and his sometimes pitbull antics, just like I always loved John Barnard for his strict independence, even from the old man at Maranello.

But why Mike is letting himself down to this level is beyond my imagination.

[Fil]

The plot thickens..

http://caterhamformula1.com/

Wednesday May 5th 2011

(which is interesting, as May 5th is actually a Thursday!)



Surely this date is close to the expected British Court ruling.

[xpensive]

Unfathomable. Mike, please get the hell out of there asap!

[marcush.]

Casterham is currently building 500cars per year...that´s two per day...compare this with Porsche ...
that´s 100+cars per day -per model- currently PAG is in the 150000cars per year range
just to give you some perspective in relation to Proton ,Lotus or Caterham..That mountain is huge...and to climb it you surely cannot afford the need to concentrate on your F1 project.....
500cars sold at 20k is the princely sum of 10 mill pounds so the race team has a considerably bigger turnover than Caterhams cash coming in by car sales....(don´t know how much they make with their race programmes and spares and if that was including kits sold).

[bot6]

How many passengers a year did Air Asia have before Fernandes?

Guys, don't forget Caterham's core buisness is to build racing or track day cars. That's also what the 7 is, it just happens to be road legal too. It's a completely different market segment from Group Lotus or Proton. And it's very complementary with an F1 team, as some of the engineering capacities can be put in common. F1 technology is much more relevant for a car like the SP/300.R than it is for a Lotus Evora.

The two parts seem to fit well together, and if they manage to keep the Team Lotus brand on top of it (something Caterham can use to brand the higher spec cars, the same way Mercedes uses AMG or Audi uses the RS badge) then that will be an added bonus.

[marcush.]

The point is :
Fernandes said that a F1 team for itself is NOT a sustainable business model.This implies that companies associated with the F1 project have to provide cash in response to profiting from the Formula1 association....
I´m a bit sceptic if Caterham can afford to sponsor a F1 team in any serious dimension.
No question Caterhaam will gaain reputation from the connection but where is the benefit for Team Lotus?

[bot6]

I could see Caterham / Team Lotus build an outside technology center similar to Cosworth, Red Bull Technologies or McLaren Technologies selling F1 derived tech to other competitive outfits in Motorsport or even in other fields (like the Cosworth ECUs being used in yacht racing for example).

Also, using the Team Lotus brand will help Caterham sell cars and enter new markets, which in turn will help Caterham fund Team Lotus.

It's all a big, long term project. But Fernandes has proved he's quite good at taking something small and making it big and successful with Air Asia. So why not with Caterham?

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Caterham is very well known for it's size. And it isn't where the guys are now, but where they will be in 5 years. It's requires an aggressive strategy and cheaper more usable models. Aluminium tubular frames complete with duratec ford engines for £30k? That's 10k too much even if you are getting hypercar performance, as the practicality is that of a motorcycle(which is cheaper).
Getting the brand out there, and dovetailing it in the next couple of years with a spiritual (lotus)Elise successor, and these guys will sell 5000 a year easily.

Just make it useable.

[bot6]

Then again, a proper sportscar for GBP13K as an entry model is pretty damn cheap. Granted, you have to build it yourself, but it's part of the fun of owning a British sports car to play with the spanner.

[xpensive]

Come on JET, the market for these kind of kit-cars is what it is and will hardly xpand far from the limits marcush outlined.

I fear that Fernandez is giving in to Proton and is planning to get out, Renault engines and RBR rear ends might be more costly than imagined at first sight. Hell, F1 is a money guzzler of biblical proportions as it is.

In a perfect world, I would see Mike Gascoyne at Williams, in a last attempt to bring the cars back into contention.

[bot6]

Mike would never go to Williams. He went to Team Lotus in order to have more responsability and more of a say in where the team is going, and he seems happy there. He's slowly but surely building a good technical team and he has Fernandes to back him up financially. Why would he want to go somewhere else?

As for Fernandes, I don't see what is happening at the moment as a will to get out at all. Quite the opposite. He's just bought a car manufacturer and talks about more synergies between his F1 team and his other businesses. That is not a way out, that is showing a will to be there on the long term. The key word here is "sustainable": Fernandes wants to build something that will bring long term success. And I'm pretty sure that's what Mike wants too.