I Went To Japan To Drum Up Some Sponsorship And All I Got Was This Lousy F1 Team
There are many reasons to take out a subscription to AUTOSPORT Plus, not least of which is that you’ll occasionally get to read stuff by me.
Tony Dodgins caught up with David Hunt, notional owner of the Team Lotus name, at the Singapore Grand Prix. Many commenters have questioned Hunt’s motives in relation to the Team Lotus legacy, and I would commend this story to them so that they can take a balanced view.
I was particularly taken with this quote, about how he came to acquire the whole mess:
I had been helping with the sponsorship, consulting to the Peter Collins-led management and was asked to help try and rescue the team from the administrator. Kenny Wapshot and I had gone to set up Team Lotus Japan and bring in Japanese money. We were asked to represent a consortium who wanted to buy it but didn’t want their names known.
I was asked to front it and they didn’t have the money ready. Kenny and I were prevailed upon to put the funds up, which we did. We were told that if we bought it certain things would happen and we’d be alright. We did, and we weren’t. We were left holding a rather large and expensive baby.
There was certainly no plan to own a Formula 1 team, and certainly not one in trouble. We literally woke up one day and realised we’d been had over. We owned a Formula 1 team that had all its contracts breached, we had no sponsorship, no drivers and 96 staff, most of which had been there a long time, some of them 25 years plus, since Chunky [Chapman] himself.
You can read the full story here.
I was never quite sure how David Hunt came to own Team Lotus. I always assumed he had just turned up at the auction and boutght a few things including the name. I have no recollection of him going to Japan at the time but there were all sorts of racing drivers and other people shuttling back and forth from Japan at the time that I could have read it and forgotten.
It is probably hard for people new to the sport to believe how many drivers went to Japan but there were so many Autosport sent Adam Cooper to live there and report.
…and get beaten up by Ross Cheever, but that’s another story…
@Stuart C
Oh come on! You can’t leave us hanging like this!
Ross the younger brother of Eddie Cheever was a big star in Japan despite having achieved nothing of significance anywhere else.
A lot of drivers like for example Eddie Irvine spent a few years in Japan and came back with a big reputation despite the fact that all they did there was consistently lose to second rate drivers. It is probably too late for it to be of great interest now but there is a great blog post in analysing who did what in Japan compared to the reputation the arrived and left there with.