Team Lotus: No excuses in 2012

Tony Fernandes is intriguing. Owning grand prix teams and Premier League football clubs is no sure thing.

With football clubs in particular it's often a vanity project - a rich fan wanting to take control of a long-supported team. Fernandes is a West Ham fan.

His first London abode, however, was in west London on the Uxbridge Road. Appropriately enough for a football man, number 424!

He tried to buy West Ham three times, but such was the lukewarm reception from owners David Sullivan and David Gold, that he probably won't revisit that.

Instead, last month he bought Bernie Ecclestone's majority interest in Queens Park Rangers.

The most recently published Premier League club accounts tell you that only five of them are in the black. Add in a lower-ranking F1 outfit such as Team Lotus and you might conclude that Fernandes has more money than sense.

Then there's also what you know of Mr Ecclestone. Would he be selling something he thought there was money in, unless he'd already made it?

Yet Fernandes is a trained accountant and graduate of the London School of Economics. He thinks he can make money out of F1 and football.

"You've missed out one critical point," he smiles when you present him with the doom scenario. "I own an airline! And many, many people have lost a lot of money doing that."

Yes, you point out, but that came cheap - for one Malaysian ringgit, to be precise - and with the benefit of a new open-skies agreement in the region.

"Getting it cheap is one thing. I got a Formula 1 team for nothing - I didn't have to buy it. But you have to make it work.

"We managed to make AirAsia work when 99 per cent of people, including Warren Buffet [renowned as the world's shrewdest investor], said that nobody was going to make money out of the airline business any more.

The Lotus drivers have been closely matched over the past year © sutton-images.com

"We bought it for 25 cents and it's now worth about three billion [dollars]."

Fernandes saw F1 as a business opportunity because the days of free-spending are over, but he still wants to compete.

"The trick is not to make F1 a black hole of Calcutta. I think we've run a sensible team; we're not going to do stupid things and try to be further ahead than you can be and destroy everything.

"I always said 10th in the first two years, become a Column 1 team [and gain entitlement to a bigger share of F1's revenues], which changes the economics of the whole thing, then get closer and closer.

"Next year we have to make an impact. If we haven't, then I'm going to give up."

He drops that in like a bomb, but later clarifies the point. He doesn't mean he really will walk away - he means he'll make changes.

He knows these things take time, just as they did for Red Bull when it bought into Jaguar, but already this year there have been strong rumours of fairly drastic changes ahead.

Although Fernandes says he didn't expect to be in Q2 this year, the whole thing is still a bit precarious.

Lotus is currently 10th in the constructors' championship and on course for that Column 1 status achieved by consecutive top 10 finishes, but it's on a countback of three 13th places to the one that HRT achieved in Canada.

Virgin currently has a pair of 14th places to its credit, but all the while, Lotus is vulnerable.

Vulnerable to, say, the sort of first-corner fracas seen at Monza eliminating a whole heap of cars, followed by, for example, something inspirational from Timo Glock on a wet track.

One 12th place from Virgin would unstitch the whole thing.

And next year, with Virgin's McLaren link and HRT believed to be chasing a similar agreement with Renault, Lotus will likely face a stiffer challenge from its new-team contemporaries.

"If we're still 19th next year then someone's not doing something right and ultimately I'm the leader, so someone else has got to do it," Fernandes says.

Gascoyne, Fernandes and Kovalainen: Lotus dream team? © sutton-images.com

A not-so-coded message for technical chief Mike Gascoyne?

"I think Mike would be the first one to say it if he doesn't produce a car that's in the middle of the pack next year having been given all the tools.

"I think he's done a fantastic job to get us to where we are, but next year is the year that everyone's head is on the block."

Fernandes happily embraced the concept of Lotus, Norfolk and all that heritage, but recent speculation suggests a factory move from its Hingham, Norfolk base to somewhere closer to Silverstone and the UK's 'motorsport valley'. The old Arrows premises at Leafield is favourite and the thinking is that it would make recruitment easier.

Renault sporting director Steve Nielsen, due to attend his last race for the team in Singapore, has been linked to Lotus, and Fernandes says there will be a couple of announcements coming soon.

You hear, too, that as a quid pro quo for a recently-acquired 20 per cent stake in Malaysian Airlines, Fernandes may be about to rebrand his team as Caterham and, whisper it, give up the claim to the Lotus name.

Fernandes is surprisingly candid about all of that. "This is an evolution. I didn't come in with all the answers on day one.

"We've now got a decent windtunnel, we've got Mark Smith in, we're making a couple of other key appointments and we're looking at where we're going to be.

"I think the best scenario is that the cars leave for Australia next year and come back to a new home. There's no two ways about it.

"But Hingham will always be there, because we're developing a technology and engineering division.

"I always had a problem with, 'Am I really Team Lotus?' I always said that era was theirs; we were just bringing it back under new ownership.

"It was up to the fans whether they liked us or not.

Trulli's deal has been extended for 2012 © sutton-images.com

"But there was a business behind it as well. You can't have a name and not monetise it.

"Effectively we are marketing someone else. I don't think this is healthy for anyone - Lotus Renault, Team Lotus, whomever.

"I've always said that protecting the brand is paramount, and it's not me that started all this. I didn't have a claim; they [Group Lotus] had a claim. And they lost that case.

"But I've always had the door open and it may be a win-win for everybody and we walk away.

"I also always said we wanted to be in the car business and I never hid that fact. And now we have Caterham."

The vibe you get from Lotus this year is that Heikki Kovalainen is the number one son.

Jarno Trulli was renowned as the qualifying specialist, and yet it's Kovalainen who has outqualified Trulli at all but two of the races - the Italian unhappy with the power steering system that - he says, robbed him of front-end feel.

Fernandes waxes lyrical about Kovalainen, equating his position to that of his recent QPR football signings!

"If you look at the players we've signed at QPR, they've all got something to prove," he says.

"It's like Heikki. I really wanted him. I believed he was the stepchild at Renault and McLaren when they had Alonso and Hamilton there. I think Heikki is driving the best he ever has.

"Similarly I told Neil Warnock [QPR's manager], look for players who have something to prove.

"Joey Barton's got quite a lot to prove. Shaun Wright-Phillips still feels he can play for England, so he's going to get out there.

"[Armand] Traore... Arsene Wenger never really gave him a shot and I think he's a class player.

"Luke Young felt [Fabio] Capello overlooked him, and Anton Ferdinand was lost in the North East and is glad to be back in London."

He laughs heartily, knowing he's talking to a geordie...

You may have concluded that Trulli's days at Lotus were numbered, especially when it was he who made way for Karun Chandhok in Germany and him again who is likely to be stood down so that Chandhok can drive in the inaugural Indian GP.

But on Sunday Lotus put out a release announcing that it had extended Trulli's deal into 2012.

Maybe it's reading too much into it, but some of the wording seemed a bit strange.

Fernandes spoke of having the benefit of Trulli's "experience and knowledge into 2012", while the driver spoke of being pleased that "his contract had been extended".

Trulli's speed was referred to, but nowhere did it mention him actually racing the car.

It's not unknown for teams to have drivers under contract whereby the commitment is to pay them, but not necessarily to put them in the race car.

This could be a case of putting two and two and getting five, but let's wait and see.

Fernandes is a doer. At Monza, he asked Gascoyne and his crew on the pitwall where they thought Lotus would qualify at the same track this time next year.

The consensus was 14th or 15th, with one optimistic soul saying ninth.

"I think the reality will be 14th or 15th," Fernandes says. You get the impression that if that's not the case, he may just run out of patience.