Di Grassi and Glock at VirginGP?

The news that Brawn GP has been gobbled up by Mercedes-Benz means that the team’s sponsor Virgin can now stop pretending not to be doing its own thing in F1 in 2010 and can get on with announcing that it is going to turn Manor Grand Prix Racing Ltd’s entry in Formula 1 into Virgin Grand Prix. This is rumoured to be planning to name Brazil’s Lucas di Grassi and Timo Glock as it drivers.

Although the Virgin team is supposed to be a secret, there is a paper trail that goes back to this time last year when Richard Branson’s Virgin Enterprises Ltd registered the www.virgingp.com domain name, indicating a desire to be involved in the sport. There was talk of a deal to buy the Honda F1 team, but ultimately this never happened and Virgin ended up becoming a last-minute BrawnGP sponsor this season. That was a good investment.

The desire to have its own Virgin-branded team can be traced through the history of Manor Grand Prix Racing Ltd, which came into existence at the end of March, under the leadership of former power industry engineer Graeme Lowdon, who has been running a diversified business empire called Nomad in recent years. This includes a watch company and a communications business that has been developing Internet for trains. Lowdon was a partner and operations director of a company called J2C plc during the dot.com era, in partnership with FIA consultant Alan Donnelly and others. Lowdon seems to have been the motive force behind the project.

In August, however, Manor nominated three new directors: John Booth of Manor Motorsport, Nick Wirth of Wirth Research and Alex Tai, a former RAF pilot who joined Virgin Atlantic to fly the Airbus A340 before becoming Richard Branson’s right hand man in Virgin’s special projects. He is chief operating officer of Virgin Galactic.

Wirth is building the cars, Booth will run them and Tai will be team principal. It is worth noting that the programme for the Motorsport Business Forum in Monaco in December lists him in this role as a participant in a panel called “How to improve the show” with the likes of Christian Horner, Nick Fry and (in theory at least) John Howett, late of Toyota.

If his past record is anything to go by, Branson will be trying to get maximum brand exposure for Virgin at minimal cost. In his other enterprises he has often made acquisitions and then sold shares in the business to fund the initial investment and thus gained free publicity. There have been stories in recent weeks that suggest that the British-based financial institution Lloyds Banking Group plc, which is controlled by the British government following the economic problems early this year, has bought into the idea as an investor rather than a sponsor. The Virgin strategy appears to be very similar to that used by the Benetton Family in the 1980s and 1990s, which owned an F1 team but sold off space to sponsors such as Mobil, Sanyo, Riello, Camel, Bitburger and Mild Seven and so recouped the investment and garnered free publicity by owning the team name. Marlboro has used a similar concept in recent years at Ferrari, owning the space on the cars and selling it on to other sponsors, thus reducing the investment needed but keeping the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro name. The Manor team has hired longtime F1 marketing man Jim Wright to find sponsorship. He was previously employed by Scuderia Toro Rosso.