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The Paul Stoddart Story Part One PDF Print E-mail
Contributed by Business F1   
Monday, 07 August 2006

Paul Stoddart breezed into Formula One 10 years ago as a bit part player. Five years later he was a team principal and five years after that he was out of the game altogether, richer and wiser. As he negotiates the rights to publish his memoirs in 2007 he decided to tell the story of those years to BusinessF1. This is Part One of his story.

Ten years ago, in 1996, Paul Stoddart was a 40-year-old businessman who had built a very successful aviation business. He had two companies, a new and reconditioned aircraft parts business, and a charter airline, both under the European Aviation banner. Both were based in freehold properties, in Ledbury and Bournemouth, and both, especially the parts business, were throwing off more cash than their owner knew what to do with.

Stoddart is a man of extraordinary energy and in truth he must have been bored. He admits he was never a brilliant businessman, and certainly not a brilliant salesman. But he was brilliant at buying – he could sense a bargain at any distance. It was his exceptional buying skills that had built him a fortune of at least US$80 million back in 1996.

So in May of that year, desperate for something to occupy his time and mind, and not one for taking holidays, he bought himself an old Tyrrell 019 Formula One car of 1987 vintage, from a trader in the south of England, and took it to Donington Park for a shakedown and, as he says now: “I scared myself shitless.” The car had been cheap but it was not concours, far from it. It had only cost him US$60,000, but he had no idea of what he was getting himself into. Through the many problems with the car, he got to know the then Tyrrell team manager Rupert Mainwaring. It was certainly a profitable departure for Tyrrell, as Stoddart quickly bought another Tyrrell, and another one, and by 1997 even had a team racing in the historic Formula One Boss series.

During this period he also got to know Ken Tyrrell and started sponsoring the team and flying its personnel around to races in his planes. He also discussed building the team a windtunnel, which it desperately needed but didn’t have the money for. But this was soon superseded by more important discussions. By then, Ken Tyrrell was ailing and wanted to sell the team. When Stoddart found out, without even thinking about it he offered Tyrrell US$25 million and they very nearly shook hands on a deal at the 1997 Spanish Grand Prix. But waiting in the wings was a higher offer, from British American Tobacco, being negotiated by his son, Bob, and Ken Tyrrell was persuaded to hold off. Stoddart had planned to buy the team in partnership with technical director Harvey Postlethwaite and they were hoping to get Honda involved as well. Had the deal come off, Formula One history would have been very different. Stoddart remembers: “I got very, very close to buying the team. I actually gave Bob Tyrrell a five mill deposit cheque and he tore it up, shedding tears as he did so saying ‘I can’t, I can’t do it’.” Stoddart was amazed at the theatre and picked up the pieces of the cheque from the floor afterwards and stuck them back together. It is still in his desk drawer 10 years on. It is a reminder that just a year after buying a second-hand car, he nearly bought the team as well. Soon afterwards it was sold to Craig Pollock and Adrian Reynard with BAT’s money.

Very shortly after that, Stoddart did get to buy Tyrrell, but not quite in the way he had expected. He explains: “Very shortly thereafter I did a deal with Craig (Pollock) and his general manager Rick Gorne. They were only interested in the name and the licence that went with it but not the team because they had plans to build a brand new facility, as we all know they did.”

So it was that Stoddart bought the Tyrrell team lock, stock and barrel but without the name, entry or cars. It all added up to seven-and-a-half tons of spares and equipment. He became, as he puts it, “a team owner in waiting”. Simultaneously, he began building a Formula One facility at Ledbury in the west of England where his parts business was based. He took over the team the minute the flag dropped at the last race at Suzuka in 1998, as he remembers: “It was all very amicable, there was no griping and everybody was happy. It was a good deal for everybody.” He adds: “So we were effectively a Formula One team.” But with nowhere to race.

He paid precisely US$1 million to Pollock, and then bought most of the cars from Ken Tyrrell separately for another million. Thus the Tyrrell team he was set to pay US$25 million for a year earlier, he now had for US$2 million. He also took on a few ex-Tyrrell staffers.

His objective when he bought the team was to wait for an opportunity to get into Formula One. He simply wanted to be ready. He also founded a Formula 3000 team to get some race practice.

In 1999 he came close again, when he nearly bought a share in the Jordan team. In fact he agreed to buy 20 per cent for US$20 million, but after Eddie Jordan had agreed a deal and shook his hand, he upped the price. Stoddart says: “Eddie, at the time, was riding on the crest of a wave and it was just too expensive.”

His third attempt to buy a Formula One team came a year later, when he sent his accountants into Tom Walkinshaw’s Arrows operation to do due diligence. But that was soon over, as he recalls: “They only lasted two days and I got the phone call to say don’t touch it with a barge pole. It was the quickest due diligence we have ever done.” Stoddart admits that had Walkinshaw’s books not been in such a mess he would have paid him US$45-US$50 million for the team. But he says: “He was in debt for 10 times that and then some.” Stoddart himself was one of the creditors and when it eventually went down he lost US$2 million. He says: “Tom was hard work and you could never get a straight answer out of him on anything – it is a shame because Arrows was a good team and a good bunch of people, and they probably deserve better than they got, and I am happy for them now.”

Stoddart’s obvious solution was to start his own team. But the US$48 million bond put him off doing it from scratch, and in any case, at that time there were no spare entries.

While dithering about buying a Formula One team, Stoddart took the plans for the 1999 Tyrrell that never was, converted it into a two-seater racecar and built eight examples for track days. It was the start of a profitable business that endures to this day. His Ledbury facility, by now fully equipped, enabled the Tyrrell two-seaters to be built from scratch by a staff that included two aerodynamicists. He had 40 people on the project at one point, and says: “We built these cars to stay sharp.” The operating budget in 2000 was US$2 million and the two-seater cars cost US$500,000 each to build. He even bought an engine design from Cosworth and started rebuilding engines as well.

He says now: “The two-seaters put a lot of smiles on people’s faces and they have done a lot of running for a lot of teams. People do not realise that we did three years at Ferrari. We have done BAR, we have done Jordan we have done a lot of teams, and we have painted the cars in their colours. I am pretty proud of that.”

It was all good practice, because by the end of that year, at the fourth time of asking, his opportunity to be a Formula One team owner finally came. He knew the owner of Minardi, Gabriele Rumi, was ill with cancer and the team was on its last legs. In 1999, Rumi had turned down offers of around US$40 million when the team was riding high with millions of dollars of sponsorship from Telefonica. But it had suddenly declined in 2000, after losing Telefonica and most of its other sponsors.

Stoddart watched as a South American cable TV network called PSN dithered about buying it. He says: “I was well aware that they were in trouble, big trouble, because Minardi used to occupy the garage next to where I was. So I kind of knew what was going on. But did I want a team in Italy? The attraction of the other three was that they were all UK based and by then we had a very formidable facility to do it on our own.” The negotiations to buy Minardi dragged on through the close season. At one point, Renault nearly bought the team. But Stoddart’s patience eventually paid off and at the request of Mr Rumi, on 9th January 2001, he finally arrived in Faenza, Italy. Stoddart recalls: “It was just one of those things and it was all looking pretty gloomy.  Prost was shaky and we all knew that. Minardi was far shakier. I got the phone call over the weekend to say that Renault had pulled out and that it was available.”

By then, he wasn’t there to buy Minardi but to rescue it. At that stage no sale contract had been agreed, let alone signed, and no money paid over, but Rumi was astute enough to realise that Stoddart was the team’s most credible saviour. Rumi was desperate to save the team as he had guaranteed a US$12 million overdraft. He trusted him to do the right thing. Stoddart has fond memories and says of Rumi: “A nicer guy you are not going to meet.”

Stoddart had to write cheques for US$2.8 million almost immediately and there wasn’t time for him to buy the team. If the cars were going to make the opening round of the 2001 championship in Melbourne, on Sunday 4th March, he had to simply get on with it and start spending money. Wages had to be paid and Cosworth wanted a deposit on an engine.

But the deadline was much tighter than it appeared. It was exactly six weeks and three days from when the FOM freight planes would be leaving for Melbourne and the cars and engines had to be on board.

Stoddart recalls: “I quickly put together a few people. I rang Rupert Mainwaring, who was unemployed at the time, and Tony Lees out of Arrows and Graham Jones the PR guy. In fact we got together a whole group of people and we jumped on a plane, one of ours, and flew there.” He adds: “It was a complete risk but if I had not done that then Minardi would have gone down.”

When he got to Faenza it was worse than he feared. He found a wooden mock-up of the 2001 car, with a wooden mock-up Supertec engine in behind it – nothing else. And no deal to buy a Supertec had been agreed because there was no money, nor any to build the car, which by then should have been ready for testing. Luckily technical director Gustav Brunner had at least designed the new car.

Stoddart’s first move was to secure an engine. He quickly contacted Bernard Ferguson of Cosworth and bought the whole VJ engine project, which the team had used the previous year, along with a mountain of parts. It was a leftovers deal that involved Stoddart rebuilding the engines with support from Cosworth. The engines got built at Ledbury and an outside supplier for the parts.

But while the engine existed, the car did not. Stoddart realised that the workforce at Faenza was not going to get the job done on its own. So he gathered together all his non-aviation staff at Ledbury, some 30 people, and told them to pack bags for a month away. He flew them all to Italy and took over a hotel called the Cavalino. He says: “I realised that the only way we were going to make this car was to put everybody in the same place and cut down the possibilities of things going wrong. There were a lot of language problems, we did not have anybody that spoke Italian and they did not have too many people that spoke proper English.” 

Stoddart was faced with an unusual situation where he needed 100 people to work around the clock for six weeks. His own English crew were pushed the hardest, with him leading from the front. And the Italians stopped going home, too, as Stoddart hit on the novel idea of sleeping in relays to squeeze the maximum possible out of each 24 hours, as he confesses: “We got to the point where people were sharing rooms and when someone was so tired they could not work anymore, they would go back to the hotel and kick the guy out of bed to send him back to work, and then jump in bed.”

The staff accepted it because the boss led by example. Stoddart is a man of incredible energy with a time clock that has no borders. He enjoys his work so much that he will stretch the clock to suit. He inspired his people to do the same. He knew that if the cars didn’t get to Melbourne, the FIA would likely throw him out of the series. And if the cars didn’t qualify within the 107 per cent time, the team would likely fall apart anyway. There was no option to use the 2000 car as the chassis regulations had changed and the old car couldn’t be made legal. In any case he knew the chances of qualifying with the old car were virtually nil.

It took all six weeks and three days to produce the two cars – a spare was out of the question. In the end it all came down to some vital titanium engine brackets that were being made in Sheffield in the north

of England. Stoddart says: “It does not sound like a lot but you cannot run the car without them.”

The parts eventually caused a panic when they had still not arrived the day before the car was due to run its shakedown test before being freighted up for Melbourne. Stoddart takes up the story: “We rang through to the suppliers in Sheffield and said, ‘We have got to do a test tomorrow morning and we need your brackets.’ And this was about one o’clock on the day before and they said ‘no, no it will be finished by five o’clock, we have got two guys ready, we will out them on the ferry and drive through, they will be with you in 13 hours.’I said, ‘what if it goes wrong?’ and he said, ‘it won’t go wrong, it will be fine, it is going through a CNC programme fine’.”

Stoddart had been around long enough to know that plenty can go wrong with such an intricate technical operation. He knew that a temporary fix was not possible and sensed the entire future of the Minardi team rested on those parts being in Italy 24 hours later. He simply could not risk shipping the cars to Melbourne without a shakedown. Appearing at a race and not being able to run might have been worse than not appearing at all.

Then he did something that marks him apart from other men. On a hunch that there would be problems, he despatched his BAC 1-11 sitting on the tarmac at Forli airport to fly to Coventry airport in England and wait there in case the parts were late and it was needed to fly them back. He said to his pilots: “You might be on a wild goose chase but you might as well take the plane while you can. If it goes horribly wrong I have got you there to bring the bits over.”

Although it was a 24-hour airport, there were noise issues at Coventry and the plane had to leave immediately to make it in. The plane took off and flew straight to Coventry to wait on the tarmac.

Sure enough, at five o’clock, Stoddart took a call from Sheffield telling him the CNC programme had gone wrong and the parts would not leave until 11 o’clock. But even that was optimistic. He says now: “To cut a long story short, the parts finally turned up at 3am at Coventry airport and the plane took off half an hour later.” Stoddart’s hunch had proved right and the parts could never have got to Italy in time by road. But the saga was not yet over.

He stepped outside the Faenza factory at four o’clock in the morning to smoke a cigarette and was greeted with what he describes as “pea soup fog”. His instincts told him the plane would not be able to land at Forli, 20 kilometres away.

He remembers: “I could not believe it. I thought we have done all this effort and we get beaten by the fucking weather. I did not even go to the airport because I knew that we would not get in.” He rang his pilot on the tarmac at Coventry just as they were about to take off and told him: “You are not going to get in here, you might have to land somewhere else, but it looks like were fucked.” Then something extraordinary happened. The pilot, who for obvious reasons Stoddart will only refer to as ‘Nick’, defied his boss and said: “No we’ll be all right, we’ll get there.” The Stoddart spirit had infused everywhere and the pilots were, by now, clearly prepared to risk their lives to get the team to Melbourne. But Stoddart wasn’t, and he wasn’t having any of it. And by then he was prepared to take the cars to Melbourne without a shakedown. He told the pilot: “You bloody well won’t. I am standing here and I can’t see the fence.” The pilot said, “Nah don’t worry,” and then turned off his phone. Stoddart was distraught and jumped in a car to the airport and as he says, “went to the airport thinking I am going to waste my time”. He didn’t believe a landing attempt was even possible. But as he recalls: “I arrived at the airport and to this day, for obvious reasons I am not going to go into what happened, but he popped it on the ground. We got the parts and the test went ahead.” 

It turned out that the pilots had told the Forli airport tower that they could see the runway. They also knew that the BAC1-11 had a Cat 3 Autoland capability. Stoddart says: “It means that if you have got the balls to do it you can land in total blindness – if you have got that much trust then you can put it on the deck. It has never been done to my knowledge and I am not going to say that they did it. Anyway that is the kind of dedication that there was.”

Team driver Fernando Alonso’s car got its shakedown run, but Tarso Marques’s car was finished off in the Melbourne garage. The consequences of not testing Alonso’s car before it left could have been catastrophic, but as it turned out, apart from some overheating problems the cars ran sweetly. Marques crashed in qualifying and consequently didn’t qualify. But the car was repaired and the Melbourne stewards let the cars in on force majeure basis, as they were allowed to do. Alonso, after qualifying 19th, came home 12th. Stoddart recalls: “I will never forget, it was one of the most emotional moments in my life. I walked through the pit wall absolutely elated at my home Grand Prix.” At the time no one in the paddock or in the media knew the emotional and physical turmoil Stoddart and his team had been through to get to the race. To everyone else it was business as usual. Only Stoddart and his crew knew what had really happened. To them 12th place was like winning the championship.

He recalls: “As I came through all the mechanics were sitting on the ground crying and everyone else thought we should have been happy.” But the tears were of pure joy, as he says: “Nobody thought that we could do what we did, but we did it, with grit and

determination.”

It was a payback for the risk he had taken to buy the team. In the period from 9th January to 4th February he was very financially exposed, but he says he would do it all again even though at the time he had no choice: “People saw that there was money coming in, suppliers that had not been paid were getting paid. Everything was happening.”

Stoddart actually signed the contract to buy the team a month after he arrived, on 4th February 2001. In that time there was a danger that Rumi could have accepted another offer but, in reality, by that time any other potential buyers of the team had been frightened away. They thought the team was dead. But as Stoddart says: “They had gone anyway as no one else had the engine and without the engine they were dead.”

Stoddart says it is now difficult to recall exactly how much he paid for the team as it involved a cash payment to Rumi of US$9 million, his taking responsibility for the team’s US$8 million debts and also taking out a loan to pay off the US$12 million overdraft with an Italian bank.

The team’s main asset was the fact it had managed to take 10th place in the 2000 world championship. This qualified it for the FOM TV fund. The fund only pays the top 10 places in the championship and Minardi, although it scored no points, had beaten the nil-scoring Prost team by being better placed in races.

His accountants later assessed the final purchase price as US$28.2 million. But that was just to get started and didn’t include the money he had to spend to get the team on the 2001 starting grid. Stoddart admits he didn’t finish paying for the team until five years later, when the loan to pay off the overdraft was finally retired after he sold the team to Red Bull. He says: “We just kept rolling it over and paying interest.”

Even when he had bought the team, Stoddart had immediate financial problems. He was a wealthy man running a successful business, but was by no means substantial enough to own a Formula One team and fund it without sponsorship – the team had no on-going sponsorship contracts. He even had to pay for his tyres and fuel, although luckily not straightaway. He says: “We had to run it without sponsorship, that was not a lot of fun.”

And contrary to popular perception, there was no income from rentadrivers. Stoddart says now he was not paid to run Alonso and that Marques’s sponsorship turned out to be worth nothing. In the end, his cash income from both drivers was just US$15,000.  Marques was all promises, but at the time there was no one else and a promise became his currency. Stoddart says: “Tarso paid me the sum total of US$15,000 for the whole year. He was always ‘going to have a sponsor’ but he was such a lovely guy.”

Alonso’s deal rested solely on his bringing the Dutch leasing company, LeasePlan, as a sponsor. But even that was not cash, and it involved LeasePlan supplying vehicles to the team, worth around US$800,000.

Stoddart isn’t afraid to admit he was in a cash bind straightaway. He just about had enough cash to buy the team, but he was not in a position to fund a whole season as well. Marques was told he was out as soon as a driver with some money came along. He lasted for 14 races, which worked out at US$1,071 a race, the cheapest rentadriver in Formula One history.

Alonso may have brought no cash, but his obvious potential as a driver and nationality attracted a host of small sponsors. Stoddart also did as many trade support deals as

he could.

And then the financial miracle that the team needed actually happened. Halfway through the year a Malaysian driver called Alex Yoong appeared, with the apparent financial support of the whole Malaysian nation. Yoong debuted at the Italian Grand Prix in September 2001.

Stoddart says: “I funded it until the middle of the year and after some pretty serious discussions with Malaysia, the Magnum corporation came along and gave us some much needed funding at the end of 2001. It set us up for 2002.”

The Magnum deal was worth US$5 million in cash for 2001 and US$10 million for 2002. It was nothing in Formula One terms but a lifesaver for the Minardi team. Stoddart, to this day, is not sure how he would have got by without it.

That US$5 million and the TV fees from FOM was all the cash the team had for 2001. The TV money came to US$14 million in cash, which meant the team had a budget of US$22 million with contributions from testing and small sponsors. But by year end the team had spent about US$25 million in cash and got trade support worth at least US$10 million. It was US$12 million less than Stoddart had budgeted for. In all he lost around US$4 million in cash operating the team in that first season. With the purchase price, in the first 12 months he was out by just over US$32 million, half of which he had borrowed. But there was also a hidden cost. European Aviation had contributed another US$6 million by flying the team around and rebuilding the engines.

To him it was a fortune, but in Formula One terms it was ridiculous: Ferrari had spent eight times more in cash and 10 times more overall. Stoddart put prominent Michelin logos on the cars and hoped that the French company would forget about its invoices, and in the end it mostly did.

The money situation was a continuing worry all through the year. It was made worse by the fact that, as Stoddart admits, he did no due diligence before walking in. Just as Rumi took him on trust, so he took Rumi on trust. It was an amazing deal and inevitably the debts were nearly double what Stoddart had assessed. He explains: “Part of my deal was to take out all the suppliers and the creditors, and they were very significant.” But it was more than that. He was used to English accounting methods and unprepared for the Italian way of doing things. He confesses: “I was trying to work out how to read Italian figures and then work out the amounts.” He was lucky that he inherited an exceptionally able and honest finance director from Rumi called Stefano Sangiorgi, as he explains: “I placed my trust in two or three people and I backed the right horse in the finance director Stefano Sangiorgi. Stefano was fantastic, he was just so good.”

In fact, Stoddart reveals that Sangiorgi, a man few people will have heard of, ran Minardi day-to-day until Red Bull took it over. He cannot praise Sangiorgi enough and credits him with saving the team: “They do not come much better than that, he is honest, straight and one of the best financial guys I’ve ever met. He knew how to duck and dive and he did it the right way, unlike some others, and he kept telling me you need this and you need that.”

But there was one difficult moment with Sangiorgi. The team had a tricky tax situation with the Italian authorities, but Sangiorgi insisted it owed nothing. Stoddart was not so sure. He was simply not familiar with the Italian way. He remembers: “There were all these investigations, things I had nothing to do with, and I did not understand what we were being investigated for.

Stefano said, ‘don’t worry we just appeal, we appeal’. But you can’t keep doing that, you have to solve problems.” Stoddart decided to take the English approach to a tax demand by paying up. But luckily in Italy there is a process called tax amnesty, which enables errant payers to clear old tax debts by agreeing to pay 10 per cent of a blind assessment. He took the risk, as he says: “The first one that came along we availed ourselves of, paid the amnesty money and of course that cleanses everything and so that took enormous pressure off me and it was over.” But even then he admits Sangiorgi did not want to pay: “I said ‘that sounds like a good deal’ and he said ‘no, no, no we do not owe them anything’. I said we’ll pay the 10 per cent for the grief factor, and that sorted it out.”

Stoddart admits there were some bloody battles with creditors who sought to take advantage of the team’s perilous situation and he lost a few court cases along the way. He explains: “I inherited some horrendous baggage going right back to before Rumi’s time – right back.” Even now Stoddart isn’t quite ready to admit what a terrible year 2001 was financially for the team. Without the arrival of Alex Yoong the team would probably have closed down after the first year. Luckily that never happened.

There was one other nasty taste in his mouth that first year and it hit Stoddart like a bolt from the blue. On Monday 7th May it was a bank holiday in England and he went into his deserted offices for a few hours’ quiet work. As he sat down, the fax machine that sits on the left-hand edge of his desk, started to whir. It was a letter from his technical director Gustav Brunner, a man who he thought he had a great relationship with and regarded as an enthusiastic hard-working individual. It read: “Dear Paul, I have bad news. I am leaving for Toyota. I hope you understand. Thank you, Gustav.”

Stoddart admits he was shocked rigid. Brunner was one of the team’s key assets and its highest paid employee. He had built up a big reputation with the team and was under contract until the end of 2003. The next day, the 8th, Toyota issued a press release. Stoddart responded angrily and said he would sue Brunner and Toyota. At the following race he met with Toyota team principal Ove Andersson. It soon became clear that

Brunner had not told Andersson about his contract. He says: “I don’t think they

knew he had a contract. They are genuine people and Ove was mortified when I showed him the contract.” Toyota later settled with Stoddart.

But he soon forget about that and appointed Gabriele Tredozi as new technical director.  As the 2001 season wound down, the arrival of Malaysian money heralded better times for 2002. There was also a free engine on the horizon, as midway through the season, Stoddart signed a deal with Asiatech that would save him US$5 million a year.

But there was much sadness when it became known that Fernando Alonso, against his will, would be a Renault test driver in 2002 instead of racing again with Minardi. Stoddart says: “Fernando wanted to race again with us but Flavio wanted him to test. He had shown that one day he was going to be world champion. I knew how good he was. At the last race he told me, ‘I am going to go out and show you just how good I am’, and if everyone needed a sharp lesson that was it. Then he went out for the Japanese Grand Prix, put in 53 qualifying laps and drove the race of his life, his times only varying by tyre degradation and fuel load. I thought this one really has got what it takes.”


------------------



Next month in BusinessF1 the Paul Stoddart Story continues with the true account of the 2002 and 2003 seasons: the triumph in Australia with Mark Webber, the bad debts from sponsors, the bitter battle with Tom Walkinshaw over Prost, the aborted mega deal with Gazprom and the year of the fighting fund and the intense struggle to survive.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 August 2006 )
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  The Paul Stoddart Story Part One

Paul Stoddart breezed into Formula One 10 years ago as a bit part player. Five years later he was a team principal and five years after that he was out of the game altogether, richer and wiser. As he negotiates the rights to publish his memoirs in 2007 he decided to tell the story of those years to BusinessF1. This is Part One of his story.

 
  David Richards big 2008 F1 gamble - No hiding place
March 2008 will be the most significant year of David Richards’ life. Now only 21 months away, he has undertaken, possibly irrevocably, to enter the 2008 Formula One World Championship with his own team. Is this the culmination of a dream or the start of a nightmare? The jury is certainly out on that.      

 
  The life of a genius
Keith Duckworth’s DFV engine design and the way it was sold and marketed made Formula One racing what it is today. In terms of importance to Formula One, Keith Duckworth was right up there with Bernie Ecclestone, Colin Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher.  Certainly one of the most important half-dozen people in the history of the sport. He died on 18th December 2005. His legacy is Formula One.

 
  Flavio Briatore - The years of living dangerously pay off in 2005
2005 belonged to one man. Not only was he team principal of the championship-winning team but he was also manager of the championship-winning driver. The twin victories were the culmination of three painstaking years of building a strong technical team that is the equal of anything in Formula One across engine and chassis technology. This is the story of how it was done.
 
  The Senna family affair
Ayrton Senna always said his nephew Bruno was an outstanding talent, something he recognised as he battled with the youngster on the go-kart track he had built on the family farm in Tatui. Senna died before the promise could be fulfilled and Bruno’s career was frozen in time. Unfrozen again, he has come to Europe with his sister Bianca to see if the Brazilian magic can work a second time around.

 
  Peter Collins used to be about running teams. Now he is all about making stars of young drivers.
Peter Collins is renowned as the best talent spotter in Formula One. A man who has discovered more world champions into the sport than anyone else. But curiously, this talented individual who has been there and done it all, is under appreciated and almost a forgotten man in Formula One. But in a legendary 25-year career he has effectively run four teams in Formula One. 
 
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