F1 2010's lost teams: Prodrive

Thanks to the financial broadside levelled on Formula 1 by the coronavirus pandemic, the current cast of teams could be forgiven for getting a little hot under the collar when it comes to perusing balance sheets.

With the spectre of the last global financial crash from just over a decade ago still looming, F1 will have to pull out all the lessons it learned from the last recession to keep everyone afloat.

Last time, the global financial crisis almost changed the face of F1 altogether. Manufacturers Honda, Toyota and BMW all withdrew, while the Honda-backed Super Aguri squad had also hit the wall mid-2008 as money proved scarce. To fill the gaping void, and cover the threat of 2010's field consisting of just 16 cars, then-FIA president Max Mosley unveiled a new tender process to welcome new teams into F1, with a Resource Restriction Agreement: a promise of a £40 million - initially as low as £30m - budget cap to sweeten the pot.

• F1 2010's lost teams
  
• Epsilon Euskadi
• Lola
• US F1
• Campos Meta 1

For 2010, approximately 15 teams submitted serious entries, from which the FIA selected three - subsequently welcoming a fourth after Toyota's withdrawal. F3 stalwarts Manor, led by John Booth, was the first, joined by GP2 squad Campos Racing and the upstart US F1 squad headed by Peter Windsor. After Toyota elected to end its expensive and fruitless F1 tenure, Tony Fernandes' Lotus Racing team got the call-up too as late as September, meaning it had just six months to get an entire team together before the start of the following season.

This came amid a genuine threat of a split between the manufacturer entities that made up FOTA - the Formula One Teams' Association - and the FIA-aligned non-FOTA teams, consisting of Williams, Force India and any new teams added to the field. Thankfully, the FIA and FOTA resolved their eventual differences - but a divide akin to the CART/IRL break in 1996 was more than a distinct possibility.

Although the threat of an F1-FOTA split was eventually defused, the Resource Restriction Agreement became collateral in ending the prospective breakaway. Gone were any performance benefits that the new teams would get - leaving them in a precarious place before the 2010 season even began.

Although the presence of new entrants tinged the upcoming season with a modicum of excitement, the FIA's picks to fill the grid would arguably disappoint - and a selection of big names were left off the entry list and on the cutting-room floor. Lola, one of the favourites to receive an entry, was conspicuous by its absence. Meanwhile, Formula Renault 3.5 and LMP team Epsilon Euskadi was beaten to becoming Spain's first F1 constructor by Campos - which itself was very close to failing to make the grid.

A decade on, it's perhaps fitting to reflect the 2010 entry process and investigate the circumstances in which the bigger names failed to make the cut - and why some of those who did also struggled to put a fully-functioning entry on the table.

In the coming days, we'll document the planned entries of the larger teams in contention with insight from those involved. Firstly, let's begin with Prodrive.

There was one aspect to Prodrive's 2008 entry that caused considerable consternation among the existing teams on the grid: Richards had agreed a deal to run current-spec McLaren chassis

A hot favourite to make the move up to F1, the illustrious Prodrive team was ultimately given short shrift by the governing body. With years of success in diverse categories of racing, Prodrive had won the British Touring Car Championship with BMW and Ford and the World Rally Championship with Subaru.

Chairman and co-founder David Richards had also enjoyed a successful time in F1 with BAR, turning an inefficient squad squandering British American Tobacco's large war chest into the team which grabbed second in the 2004 constructors' championship before Honda took control of the team.

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A couple of years before F1 opened its biggest-ever tender process for new teams, Prodrive had already managed to claim an entry to motorsport's biggest arena. Planning to join the fray in 2008, Richards explains that the loosening of the requirements to manufacture everything was the stimulus behind Prodrive's initial entry application.

"I had actually spotted at that time that they changed the rules in terms of the Concorde agreements," says Richards (below left, with Ron Dennis). "There was the original Concorde Agreement that made everybody an individual manufacturer, they had to uniquely manufacture the car themselves. That was one of the fundamental foundations of Formula 1 in those days, everything had to be manufactured independently and you were an independent party.

"And in the revised version, they removed this element. And I'd asked Max Mosley about this. He said 'no, it's just wrong. It's making it too expensive for everyone. It's a ridiculous waste of effort. That's why I've removed it.' He said there was no reason why you can't go and get a car from another manufacturer or parts for a car from another manufacturer.

"So I thought about this for a little while, and had detailed discussions with McLaren about taking one of their cars because that was at the same time as the testing rules that were coming in as well; you were going to have very restrictive testing. And I said 'look, if you had a parallel team, with a number of benefits to a parallel team, we would double your testing time.'"

At the time, McLaren also had a surplus of "excess and conflicting sponsors", and Richards suggested that they could use Prodrive's team as a larger platform for exposure. With McLaren's support on board, Prodrive had tied up a deal with the Mercedes engines, while providing seats for the drivers on its young driver program - which at the time included the likes of test driver Gary Paffett.

But there was one aspect to Prodrive's entry that caused considerable consternation among the existing teams on the grid: Richards had agreed a deal to run current, 2008-spec, McLaren chassis.

"I went to Bernie [Ecclestone]," Richards recalls. "I said, Bernie, I've come to this agreement with McLaren to help us with this entry for next year and just check you're all happy with it.

"He said 'this is fantastic, I've always said that the teams should give their old cars to teams that come in and run like that', and I said 'not quite like that Bernie, I've actually got an agreement to use the new car to be identical!' He said 'why would they ever do that? I can't understand why anyone would ever do that'. When I explained it to him, he was okay with it.

"As things drip fed out into the press, and to the other teams, the first news we were coming was sort of 'oh it'd be nice to have another team on board, that's good news'. The next message came out was 'they're going to use old McLaren cars, so that's probably a sensible thing. They won't be very competitive. They'll be last year's cars, but yes, probably not a bad thing'.

"Then it was, 'are they going to use this year's McLaren cars and Mercedes engines? Well hang on a minute. I'm not so sure. This is a great idea, but they probably won't raise the money'. Then it emerged that we were actually working with McLaren on the funding of the whole thing, and then it was panic stations!"

Prodrive, the FIA and FOM were then under legal threat from Williams, which was the first team to sign up under the new Concorde Agreement. Eventually, under increasing scrutiny, McLaren and Prodrive eventually agreed to pull the plug on the deal. But two years later, as the FIA opened its doors for a new cast of teams to join in 2010, Richards and Prodrive attempted to rekindle the McLaren avenue for its own entry application.

"[It] was no great surprise to us that we didn't get one of the entries because [having Cosworth-powered teams] was clearly the underlying motive" David Richards, Prodrive CEO

"We licked our wounds and went back and thought about what we're going to do next," Richards says. "Then lo and behold, a few years later, for 2010, they opened up the entry [list] again and opened it up for bids to come in. And so we looked at it quite carefully again, and we thought 'we can do this, we have various partners lined up as well.'"

Once more, politics were at play, and it eventually contrived to leave Prodrive in the cold as it attempted to make a move into F1 under the new budget cap.

At the time, the mass pull-out of manufacturers left just Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault on the grid as engine suppliers, all with significant leveraging power. Having been burned by the big-spending manufacturer era, and concerned by the dominance that those left possessed, amid threats of a mass withdrawal, Mosley and Ecclestone elected to add an independent engine supplier that they could have dominion over. Cosworth, having already produced a V8 powerplant for Williams in 2006, was picked to be the FIA's chosen supplier for the new entries.

"We were going to do very much the same plan as we did previously," Richards explains. "We would do the same with McLaren, we'll run something like a sister team for them obviously still with Mercedes [engines], so we had everything placed there.

"What I didn't realise, and probably should have realised at the time at the time, Max and Bernie were getting very nervous about the power of the manufacturers. The biggest problem that they had was there was no other engine, there was no customer engine.

"Their solution to this was for Cosworth to produce a customer engine that would be on par with everybody else that would be taken up in reasonable numbers. With for all the customer teams they needed, I think, three customer teams to make the Cosworth economics work."

With customer cars eventually banned for 2010, the deal with McLaren would presumably have taken shape akin to Force India's eventual deal with the team - in which they took the rear end of the car in a precursor to the Haas-style B-team relationship seen in contemporary Formula 1.

But Richards and Prodrive, in the process of proving to the FIA that their submission was viable, was met with resistance. Suggestions from the FIA that there would be no entry on the cards, unless Prodrive played the game and opted for Cosworths, rather poured cold water on the fire as the Mercedes deal was already in place.

"The entries went in for that", Richards recalls, "but [it] was no great surprise to us that we didn't get one of the entries because it was clearly the underlying motive; increasing the entries and bringing new teams to the party was to try and get another engine manufacturer on board to break the deadlock of the manufacturers."

That approach exposed some of the flaws and vested interests intertwined with the application process for 2010, and appeared to reward gamesmanship rather than putting together the strongest package. A Prodrive-Mercedes entity in 2008 would have been in the mix from the very beginning, which irked the existing constructors on the grid, while a Prodrive-Mercedes team in 2010 bearing McLaren parts would surely have tussled with the midfield runners rather than tread water.

After the Prodrive project was pulled, Richards was one of the bidders for the Renault team after the French manufacturer sought to wind down its support, but was beaten to the punch by Gerard Lopez's Genii Capital group - which still retains a shareholding to this day. Following the company's F1 dalliance Prodrive returned to the WRC to run the works Mini project, but has since ceded its top-line operations of race teams to focus on non-motorsport activities and its planned Dakar entry next year.

But just as Prodrive was snubbed for its refusal to conform with the FIA's demands for Cosworth, another engineering company versed in motorsport had also fallen short of making the F1 grid in a similar fashion. We'll come to that next.