Miss the point much? Like I mean completely miss what this was always about?xpensive wrote:What a pathetic circus around a couple of 70s brand names with an overinflated heritage. Does anyone care anyway....
It's nothing to do with 70s brand names. It is and always was about doing an Air Asia to Proton Cars, Fernandes, partners, and political modernizers taking a failed state-subsidized lumbering monolith, and turning it into a proper business that is able to properly compete in free markets with products and choices that services the needs and the aspirations of an expanding sector of society in the region. Fernandes sees a huge market for cars of the classic Lotus, and now Caterham mould.
Clearly current Proton mis-management and some political factions weren’t quite so keen to be all out on their ear, hence Project Bahar … a high-stakes hyper-leveraged march to Stalingrad, burning vault-loads of other people's money on a raft of fanciful and imaginary motorshow concept cars, expensive overweight Lotus roadcars rammed into a hostile market sector, and unproductive sponsorship sticker deals with just about any spec of motorsport that they could find.
Fernandes, first by fighting for the Team Lotus name, and now acquisition of Caterham, signals that he is not folding, and will see Bahar's reckless bet.
Whereas license of Lotus F1 was supposed to be the basecamp, it will now likely be Caterham, building cheap, lightweight, innovative and exciting cars ... which was always the ethos of Classic Lotus, that will be the staging ground for his assault.
When Bahar fails, when hundreds of millions of dollars of debt comes to nothing, and when Proton collapses, guess who's going to be there with one Ringgit to sweep-up the wreckage and rebuild a proper car company built on proper market oriented principles, that doesn't require closed borders to survive and doesn't look to soak and defraud the much put-upon taxpayers of Malaysia.
So it is clearly nothing at all to do with faded 70s British brands, it is about building shiny new 10s Asian brands.