Every six months someone puts up a story saying that Nick Fry is out of whichever team he is involved in. I used to react and ring him up and ask: “Are you still there?” And we would laugh about it. And yet it still goes on. It is like someone has it in for him. The thing is that I do not understand is why that would be the case. I guess that it has something to do with his ever-optimistic view and rather touching teenage-like enthusiasm for his job. He was one of the early members of the new generation of F1 team bosses, along with Martin Whitmarsh and while we used to joke about “Frymarsh 1” and “Frymarsh 2” and being unable to tell them apart, it is fair to say that each has developed his own style. OK, the style is a lot more corporate than the old buccaneers of the previous era: the Eddie Jordans and so on, but that was a necessity in a world where the corporate dollar was needed.
Fry has been been a solid survivor in Formula 1 for eight years now, since becoming the managing director of British American Racing in 2002. Since then he has been the chief executive of BAR Honda, Honda Racing F1, Brawn GP and now Mercedes GP. The team has just won the World Championship and while one might perhaps think that the Germans who have bough control of the team may want more of a voice in the strategic decision-making of the organisation, I doubt that they are arrogant enough to think that they could do a better job managing a bunch of Englishmen in Brackley, than a local.
The biggest fear there is about Mercedes GP is that there will be a clash of cultures between the Germans and the British and that this will upset the status quo. We will have to see if that happens but in the meantime I think the team needs its English management more than before, rather than less.
joeblogsf1 
I always felt that Fry was poorly treated by some sectors of the media, being scapegoated for the poor performance of BAR and Honda. The problems at that team were many and complex and it was always too simplistic to simply lay the blame at the feet of the boss.
Wherever he ends up, I wish him well. I too find his optimism and enthusiasm endearing.
It is indeed a strange story.
A certain website posts a story to the effect that Fry was out of the Mercedes team.
Team denies this, website pulls story. Later website reposts the story.
Now it’s been updated with a strange ‘clarification’.
But for a while a certain website had a great headline and got lots of ‘hits’.
Perhaps that was the point all along!
I don’t like him for his rather unseemly role in the demise of Super Aguri.
He also comes across quite insincere in the press as well. He is almost a caricature of what people consider ‘evil middle management’.
Remember too, in 2004 Honda/BAR had an outstanding season with Richards in charge. Then came Fry and the lean years that followed. Years that seemed characterised by management meddling and a lack of leadership.
Fry carries (whether rightly or wrongly, I’m not sure) much of the blame for that.
Well if he is out of Merc. perhaps he could get a job at Aston Martin 😉
The thing is, whatever you think of Nick Fry, the fact is that Companies House did indeed record that he – and all the other Brawn GP directors with the exception of Ross himself – had their directorships terminated a week or two ago (on the 5th, I think).
I take on board what Joe is saying about “the Germans…may want more of a voice in the strategic decision-making of the organisation”, but to retain someone as CEO without him being entitled to vote at board meetings is, as apparently Mercedes themselves even admit, “unusual” to say the least.
Given the Companies House filing, I can understand why the website concerned thought it had a scoop, even if the info did come via the usual suspect, so I cannot blame them for running with the original story.
@ HR,
All about the hit-and-run numbers I believe. Maybe they matters to site’s partners??
Nick Fry could be brilliant at his job – I am not in a position to know. To the outside world of us laymen, however, he is not impressive. His not coming from a motor sport background does not help the impression he gives. In interviews, he rarely says anything that one could not have read in “F1 Racing” magazine – his comments are always insubstantial and obvious. Also, there remains in the air the anomaly of Honda’s having sacked Dave Richards in Fry’s favour.
As to whether Mercedes think they could do a better job of managing a bunch of Englishmen, that may be a job for a local, but running the racing business is not the sort of thing that they farm out. They couldn’t have been aligned with a better team than they were with McLaren, yet they paid a lot of money to get out of that deal and go to a lesser organisation for the very purpose of calling the shots themselves. Ross Brawn may be in harness for as long as Schumacher’s comeback lasts, but I wouldn’t expect the Englishness of the management to be permanent.
It always stuns me how many apologists and supporters there are for Fry. How he’s managed to pull the wool over the eyes of large corporations for so many years is beyond me.
Of course it’s simplistic to lay all the blame for Honda’s failure at Fry’s door but few other managers have had as many opportunities to get things so so wrong. I struggle to think of anything he has done well. Contracting the Spice Girls PR guru and thinking up the Earthdreams disaster has to be his Pièce de résistance. He may well be a nice bloke but he seems to have failed in too many times.
Last year he finally had some success hanging onto Brawn’s coat tails. But the success of the car is not Fry’s department he was business and marketing. Maybe Fry was the brains behind Mercedes moving in (I doubt it) maybe he was also the brains behind the failed sponsorship deal.
So Pitpass got got things a little wrong about him being fired. But they were right about him being removed as a director. Now he is a CEO who does not sit on the board. A novel position. CEO of the tea trolley maybe
Never mind when he popped a few Brawn GP shares in his pocket he’s probably laughing his way to the bank so even if Mercedes do fire him in the near future he’ll cope.
M
I think this is unduly harsh.
Too close for comfort?
Have you seen Nick Fry in person? His head his huge. Literally.
Joe,
With due respect to those involved, isn’t it true that he has been a big part of the team’s lack of new sponsorship, not to mention the handling of Henkel?
Also, while he has not left the team, I think that as of 5th Feb, he and about five other directors of MGP have had their directorships terminated and no longer hold equity in the team.
I accept that this is probably for no other reason than to allow Mercedes people take over those positions, but I think Fry’s time with the team may be limited.
Richard
We will see how things develop. I do not think you can blame anyone for it being hard to find money. The Henkel thing was a weird story. Why would one check up on a sponsorship manager of a big corporation. One rightly assumes that he is working for the company and not lining his own pocket.
The vitriol that he seems to attract is a bit of a mystery to me as well. He wasn’t originally a motor-racing guy, but he’s had time enough in the last eight years to pick up what he needs — and people certainly don’t level the same criticism to the same extent at Vijay Mallya or Flav, who know as little or less. It might have been a mistake for him to be appointed as team principal after David Richards left, at least in terms of sporting cred for the team. But as a manager, he seems to have the trust of Ross, and to have worked integrally with Ross to secure the future of the team through the transition from Honda to Brawn to Mercedes — surely that’s credentials enough for anyone.
As to the CEO not being able to vote as a director, there’s nothing strange about that — the shareholders appoint the directors, and the directors appoint the officers (of which the CEO is one) to actually run the business. When Ross’s name was above the door, he and Nick Fry wore all three hats, but with a new majority shareholding bloc it not at all unusual that new directors would be appointed but the actual executives stay the same.
have to say i lick nick, but people like him dont get to where they are without a few skeletons in the cupboard! he may have committed some minor indiscretion toward someone, or gone back on a deal now and then, who knows, it may even be Mercedes laying the groundwork to pay him off soon(ish)! In some ways they are all working against each other up and down the pitlane, this is just 1 of the 1s we hear about. #:)
i am not his biggest fan. he’s done several things to fall out of favour with many in my opinion. the first for me was to be the guy responsible for looking for backers for the struggling super aguri team which at the time were embarassing his own massively funded team on a show string. strangely, no backers were found – he just smiled for photo’s as aguri got left to drown.
he also was responsible for looking for outside companies to take over brawn, whilst behind the scenes was a fairly significant player in the internal management take-over.
he was also at least partly involved with the total sponsorship failure of the honda team, resulting in the bizarre and pathetic earth dreams concept. even on the back of the best start to the season in recent times, he failed to entice any kind of significant sponsors to the world championship winning team
I’ve had a similar experience to Nick Fry… getting unwarranted flack in the press.
Many moons ago (in the 1980s) I used to write computer games. Most of them were shoot-em-ups and some were cute. Each time a game was released two things happened:
1) Certain magazines wrote articles along the lines of “Oh no, Stephen Kellett has done it again, another awful, unplayable game….”
2) The other magazines actually posted a review of what they thought of the game. Depending on the game I got reviews ranging from “awesome” through to “not too impressed with this one…”.
At the time I didn’t understand this. I didn’t really care, I knew which games I wrote were good and which were not so good (the worst ones I did not design myself) and thus it was easy to ignore the obviously biased reviews, even if you didn’t understand why the bias was there.
Then years later I found out that the software house I was releasing the titles through was owned by a magazine publishing house and it was one of their competitors that owned the magazines dishing out the reviews in category (1). They didn’t care about the game, if it was good or bad, all they cared about was bashing the publisher and I was some collateral damage.
I can’t help wondering if Nick Fry is in the same category.
People like ‘M’ above only care to see the negatives, they ignore (or conveniently forget) that he had his hands tied by the Japanese management oversight preventing him having a free hand and even when Fry manages to sell the team to Mercedes they don’t give him credit for it. Doesn’t matter what he does, they won’t give him credit. Nothing you can do with people like this.
You can find some of these games on the web and play them on emulators. Nothing like todays 3D games – we didn’t have the hardware – you had 8K or 16K to cram the game into and a slow processor to work with.
I don’t play video games any more. I find them boring. I would not recommend a career writing video games to anyone.
Nick Fry? I think he has done a good job consider the meddling from senior management he has had to put up with.
I’m a big fan of the site you refer to but I will admit that the constant sniping at Nick Fry is rather unpleasant. It used to be the same with Martin Brundle and ITV.
I like his optimism and positive style, however I think he says but too much and it’s like “butz”.
Conspiracies, conspiracies, we all love conspiracies. Accepting the I do not know Nick Fry (nor am I likely to in circles that I mix in … and I have no opinion as to his “F1 leadership qualities” ), I would pass the comment that it is hardly surprising that all the “previous” board members (with the exception of Ross) of Brawn GP resigned when the Mercedes deal was done shares etc. will have been transferred. There would have been a reasonable amount of paper work to be carried out which can/does take time to transfer any legal rights and responsibilities.
The fact that based on the open and publicly available records record of Companies House certain people have this, own that does not may not reflect the true situation. It takes time for records to become publicly available – think about it, when was the Mercedes deal done? When were the publicly available Companies House records changed? A slight time difference.
Based on the type of event people are talking about – i.e. some form of takeover – then the only way to know exactly what the terms of any deal may be is to see the minutes of the relevant Board Meetings and those of the EBM (Extraordinary Board Meeting) which ratified the changes concerned.
For a company to exist there has to be at least 1 shareholder –even if they only hold a 1 pound share – and 1 director otherwise the company would have no authority to act or transact any business.
I don’t think anyone was out get Nick Fry. When a team sweeps their board of directors clean without announcing it, suspicions will rightly be raised.
Mercedes seemingly wanted to keep this change low key, but the team should have known the F1 press would quickly suss it out. For the ensuing mess, the team (and Fry) have no one to blame but themselves.
Mercedes should have announced this change of directors the day it happened and included a clarification of Fry’s current position.
It’s really hard to blame the press for an imbroglio that was almost entirely of the Mercedes making.
The strongest impression that comes through all these posts is that 99% of the crit is pure conjecture.
To me, Fry has always come across as a slightly vacuous English schoolboy type straight out of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster. A man who always looks slightly surprised to be where he is and running such a sharp business.
But the impression I have simply has to be wrong.
If it had been true he’d have been out of F1 on his ear years ago. F1 is such a cut-throat business these days that if you have weaknesses they will betray you. Eventually.
And the really interesting fact is that teams as powerful and well-organised as Mclaren, Ferrari and Williams have all. at one time or another, made decisions about the people they employ or the direction they choose to take in vital technical areas have proved to be disastrously wrong.
Nobody, but nobody gets it right every time.
And Mercedes is not immune from such brutal realities.
Like many other keen supporters of F1, I am utterly bemused by Daimler Benz’s decision to pull out of their staggeringly successful partnership with probably the best F1 organisation there has ever been. Mclaren. And it all fell apart because Mclaren stubbornly refused to sell their independence and tow the Mercedes party line.
So to sum up, I really don’t know enough to decide that Nick Fry has the skids under him, but in a couple of seasons time, and not before, well find out just how good Mercedes turns out to be at running an F1 team. Or whether massive their hubris will destroy them.
It’s happened before. It’ll happen again.
Joe,
Which of my comments do you think are unduly harsh?
I can think of many of his bad decisions but few of his good ones.
His rather shady selling out on Prodrive to his own benefit
The terminal decline of Honda GP under his management
There have been many rumours he’s a little dictatorial.
As has been mentioned the Aguri ending did not smell right
Willis fired and replaced with Nakamoto
Even the sale of Honda where he claimed he had 30 serious bidders but somehow do a deal with himself and Ross for no money.
It’s an odd one. There’s an almost pathological drive on the part of PP.com to heap as much vitriol as they can on Fry’s shoulders… I can see how he’s perhaps not as impressive as other team leaders; certainly an outsider would draw the conclusion that Brawn’s intervention has dragged Fry up to the heights he currently enjoys, and that before Ross got involved Nick was languishing. But Fry hired Brawn, and others who’ve contributed to the success of that team, and presumably managed / delegated to them in a manner which ensured they could thrive.
The EarthDreams thing was a turkey, and one that you just resulted from the team’s inability to secure enough ‘regular’ sponsorship – but hey, it was a face-saving experiment, and if it had worked he’d be now lauded as a genius. He took a risk; one that if Flavio or Ron had taken would have been viewed more sympathetically.
Eventually dross will be revealed – you can hide your inadequacies in a corporate situation for just so long before you’re exposed as a chancer; the fact that everyone else involved with the teams Fry has been leading appears content to still work with him (including arguably the greatest business manager currently working in Britain, Ross Brawn) suggests that he’s not half bad at what he does.
Could Chris Balfe manage a racing team? One wonders…
I used to read a certain website all the time as part of my daily routine, but got fed up with the creator’s constant Fry bashing and politics. His inability to understand the meaning of libel, with repeated and unprovoked protestations of innocence and accusations of bullying, were the last straw for me. I don’t even have it bookmarked any more and I’ve got hundreds of sites I don’t look at.
I’m not surprised to see this story has come from the same source. I don’t know whether the story is true and won’t have an opinion until it’s all played out, but if it is then I’m sure the same site will be claiming to have played some kind of part in this ‘victory’, even after all this time.
If Ross Brawn rates him that’s good enough for me. We must presume he does, unless you know different?
Joe,
Wrt the Henkel deal, regardless of whether Nick Fry himself was to blame, someone was to blame. Although one does not expect a Josef Bloggs with a Henkel business card to be a fraudster, there were several other lapses here (judging from what we know).
First and most important, this would have been a very big deal: $130m to a team that for the previous six months could hardly give away space on its cars. Therefore this sponsorship proposal required a great deal of attention and care from the Brawn side.
Second, although agents will put together sponsors and teams, and try to retain an intermediary position after the introductions have been made, why did Brawn continue to deal with a Dutch letterbox company either exclusively or at least primarily? Did Brawn not notice the difference in the mailing addresses or telephone country codes, for goodness sake?
Third, no company large or small is, out of the blue, going to parachute down with 130 million simoleons just to slap its name on the side of a couple of racing cars. For that sort of (title) sponsorship, Henkel would have expected a lot in return – co-branding, endorsements, paddock access, private events, further commercial links with Daimler. Surely Brawn should have been keenly curious as to what would be expected of them for the money. Nobody would have relied merely on the assurances of Henkel’s “sponsorship manager”, with no contact with other, and more senior, Henkel people. For Brawn, working with only this one Henkel guy, they just couldn’t have known what they would be getting into – with even a legitimate deal.
Fourth, Brawn were in the process of selling the team to a big German company. They claim to have reasonably expected to be paid $130m by another big German company. It is inconceivable that Mercedes would not have both needed to know about the sponsorship (conflicts of interest? They arise all the time.) and already had substantial senior relationships with Henkel. If you are Brawn, how can you possibly keep Mercedes out of the discussion, unless your game is to squeeze Merc on purchase terms by establishing a sponsorship revenue stream that is independent of Merc, and leverage that into a higher price?
As I said, I don’t know that this thing was Nick Fry’s personal responsibility, but clearly – on Brawn GP’s part – it was a Foxtrot Uniform of major proportions.
The only thing of any merit Nick Fry has ever done in F1 is to get Ross Brawn for Honda.Remember he worked for Prodrive and was no2 to Dave Richards when he ran BAR.When Richards left BAR he didnt take Fry back to Prodrive…says it all really…
And Fry was responsible for the worst livery/concept ever seen in F1..Earth Dreams!
A CEO who isnt a director….?!!He will be gone soon enough….
Well, as long as the car is fast, there won’t be that many problems.
And Ross Brawn might just be the right person to manage the current situation, having managed a German driver at an Italian team with some English engineers and a French “CEO”. Surely not an easy job.
No, I think it will be fine, als long as nobody mentions the war 😉
Joe, this is a case when we, let’s say outsiders would really need insight into the situation, because from here it seems to me that there have been a few examples that _might_ indicate that Fry is doing smart things but he isn’t always effective when we see the bigger picture.
Until the end of 2006 the Honda Racing F1 Team was a well supported and financed team by a tobacco company, but it remained one of the very few teams that didn’t have a clue about how to solve the problem that the tobacco ban created. We all know how questionable were the earthdreams campaigns and I’m sure that this failure was a big part in losing the company. OK, this might not be Fry’s direct responsibility, but he was leading the ship.
The need for financing the works team created an impossible situation for Super Aguri and Fry let the team die.
The failure of selling the Super Aguri was almost happened again, when nobody was able to purchase the assets of the Honda works team, so the Brawn commando had to take it over. This was a great solution, with Brawn’s knowledge it turned out well (because he was responsible for the technical/sporting side, not anybody else) but commercially it was a total failure, even through 2009 was not an easy year economically. Financially the team was unsustainable, the Henkel saga is ridiculous, and Fry might have played an important part in the Merc take over, it is clear that the key was Brawn, he is why the Brawn GP was bought.
Looking at this I agree with the author of a previous comment that there seem to be too many failures in the last few years, but of course we have no right to judge because of the lack of proofs.
It is my personal view that Fry is a very smart man, who has always found a way to fix his position. When he was a part of the management buyout, I expected him to be remaining for a long time for obvious reasons.
By the way I’m surprised that the character of a member of a team management is able to raise emotional-driven attitudes on the internet. Recently I was a part of an argument on the Twitter, and for me its strange that people care about who exactly is in position in which team. Personally I don’t mind if Fry stayed or got removed because I don’t know him personally and I don’t have so many proofs related to his work. I only know that we would need people who is able to maintain at least their teams but on the other hand can be innovative for the sport itself. OK, McLaren is a strong organisation, but look at what Martin Whitmarsh survived in 2009 and where is Fry and a few others.
Thanks for reading and sorry for being broad.
You raise another interesting point here too , German managers and UK managers working relationship.
In the past we have seen a few prime examples go all pear shaped.
Williams – BMW being one of them.
I too dont know why Fry – or Wi-Fri – comes in for so much comment. Dont know enough – I’ve always thought it was because of long managerial connection with the BAR, Honda soap saga of not quite deals/ sponsorships ‘Earthforms’ and also runs etc etc.
Up ’till recently it was always long on funds, high on hope, and short on results. Its a kind of guilt (wrong word) by association. Then he took over from the swashbuckling Dave Richards which was then questioned…
On the other hand He it was who pounced and persuaded Ross Brawn in – And Ross was confident enough to work alongside him so there you go – then again there was Henkel. So.. Unfortunately perception is what life is mainly about.
I wish the guy well – was delighted to see his face when it all fell finally into his lap. One other final thought. A lot of Pollocks, Villeneuves, Willis’s and Richards’s have fallen by the wayside in this story. Fry – is last man standing. QED
I dont know – thats why I have to follow Paddock Tipsters like Saward for the real racing gen’..
I think the problem is that he has a slightly wet voice, so it was a mistake for him to be the spokesman for Honda when they weren’t doing very well. It just sounded a bit limp and that made people think nobody was getting a grip. Ross Brawn isn’t exactly macho, but he has such an air of calm about him that he reassures people that he is in the right state of mind to take wise decisions.
People used to blame Nick Fry when the Honda was slow, but it could easily have been the engine that was at fault (they certainly dropped it in a hurry when they were trying to sell the team) and nor did he control the appointment of the most senior design engineers, some of whom were installed by Honda HQ with no experience outside motorbikes.
Still if he has fifteen million consolations since he sold his shares to Merc, I don’t see we need feel too sorry for him. The bottom line though is that once the other teams had got onto a level playing field with Brawn in 2009, the car wasn’t that fast. Certainly not fast enough to satisfy Merc’s high standards, nor Schumacher’s. If the 2010 car lags behind Ferrari, Red bull and McLaren, something will have to give. They already have two bosses in Brawn and Haug, so you might think Fry could be in an exposed position.
Pitpass does tend to like to swim upstream though. Pretty much any major issue they’ll take the contrary position.
That certain website regularly posts some far-fetched stories. A while ago they claimed MS secretly tested Ferrari in the summer of 2009 and that’s why he came up with the excuse of the sore neck after he realized how bad the car was (which indeed it was, just ask Fisichella).
Back in 2007 they claimed that Kimi was leaving for Toyota…
Now they are sacking poor Nick.
Not sure what kind of journalism that is, or whether it’s journalism at all…
M,
> Willis fired and replaced with Nakamoto
To be completely fair to Nick Fry – who I must admit has never terribly impressed me either – apparently he fought to keep Geoff Willis but was overruled by the Japanese who wanted GW out because the car wasn’t making good enough progress. Probably their biggest mistake, that, alongside the actual pullout.
I think M pretty much nails it. There is a reason why Fry has his critics and the proof is well laid out by M. Unduly harsh? Not by a long shot.