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...Group are prepared to lay out "several hundred million dollars" to have their logo plastered all over F1, says Andrew Barrett, the company's VP of global sponsorship, who recently inked such a deal. "We were looking for as broad a global reach as we could get with one sport, and nothing else even came close." (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...what the big numbers and the gaudy pageantry hide is how close the sport came to a total crack-up last year, and just how rickety it remains. At times over the past few years, Formula One has looked as ungovernable as California: big teams quit, and more threatened to do so; the financial industry canceled its lifeblood sponsorship almost en masse; track attendance is down; and scandals have tarnished everyone from a world champ to the former head of motor sport itself. Bernie Ecclestone, the septuagenarian who is usually described as F1's principal stakeholder (a description that doesn...
More Dash Than Cash Last summer, it looked like the sport might cease to exist altogether. Angry at Formula One's decision to impose a team-spending cap, Ferrari, the oldest team on the grid, threatened to lead the biggest marques in a rival series. The teams pulled back at the last minute, but demanded that Max Mosley, the president of the governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), stand down after 17 years. Mosley...
That didn't stop car manufacturers like Toyota and BMW from pulling out of the sport anyway (Honda had quit at the end of 2008.) That leaves only three major carmakers - Ferrari (owned by Fiat), Mercedes-Benz and Renault (though the latter recently sold a majority stake in the racing team to Luxembourg investment firm Genii Capital) - still in F1. "The sport just wasn't delivering the value," says John Howett, head of Toyota Motor Sports. For the new season, some of the old names have been replaced by entrepreneurs with more dash than cash. Ecclestone calls the new teams...
...last few seasons' have been turbocharged doozies. First, in 2007, McLaren was fined $100 million after an engineer was caught with documents supplied by a rogue Ferrari employee. Then, last September, one of F1's most flamboyant team managers, Renault's Flavio Briatore, was barred from the sport for life after the FIA determined that he had ordered one of his drivers to crash in a 2008 race to help out Renault's other driver - Alonso, in this case. Briatore is still fighting the ban. (In January, a French court overturned it; the FIA is appealing that decision.) "At times...