Now that Group Lotus’s announcement that it is buying the Renault F1 team has passed and things are beginning to settle down, Team Lotus is beginning to make quiet noises about its strategic plans for the future.
The original idea formulated by Tony Fernandes was to start out using the Lotus name in Formula 1 and then once that was established and credible, acquire the troubled Lotus Group from Malaysia’s national car company Proton. This concept was disrupted by the arrival at Proton of Dany Dahar as chief executive of Group Lotus and his decision to claim Team Lotus’s racing history and to attempt to push Fernandes out of the way. Fernandes says he is not giving up. He and his partners have made substantial investments and they are intending to continue with their project. In some respects Bahar’s desire to turn Lotus into a Ferrari rival is going to help matters as Fernandes’s goal was to maintain the existing Lotus market, while adding new customers in The developing markets of Asia and the Middle East. The decision to push Lotus upmarket means that there is an opportunity to get the core Lotus buyers to buy new cars, costing the same as a traditional Lotus and giving people the chance to buy nippy affordable sports cars with a link to an F1 brand.
The question now is how to brand the new cars. In Formula 1 Fernandes can go on using Team Lotus, but we hear that he might add another name to the entry, such as Team Lotus Lion, and would then start building road cars under the Lion brand. This is not yet finalised and there may be other names that have been considered that are better-suited to the project. In this way he can keep the old Lotus market alive and still be in a position to acquire Group Lotus if Bahar’s extravagant plans fail and Lotus finds itself in trouble again.
We hear that the various legal actions between the parties involved will not get to the courts before August. There are a number of them, and we believe that there have also been some attempts to injunctions but as yet these have not been granted to either party. At the moment it seems that there are three major suits to be settled: the Team Lotus claim that Group Lotus has wrongfully terminated its agreement to use the Lotus name in F1, which was originally a five-year deal. The team is seeking damages. There are the proceedings to decide who owns what – which is known as a declaration action. There are also claims that Group Lotus is passing itself off as Team Lotus. There are countersuits claiming that Team Lotus is misusing the Lotus brand. The only attempts at finding a settlement have not convinced Fernandes and his partners to give up on their strategy.
Thus it IS likely we will have two teams called Lotus in F1 next year. There will be only two Lotus cars, as the Group Lotus cars will remain as Renaults in all official mentions. Group Lotus has not attempted to convince the other teams to allow a name change. This is possibly because Bahar has had some problems with a number of the team owners in the past, as he worked for Red Bull and Ferrari and had dealings with a number of other teams, such as Sauber, along the way.
This is not going to help Bahar achieve his goals and will probably handicap Fernandes’s efforts, but one can see why both sides feel that they have a claim to continue – and it will be left to the judges to decide who is right.
joeblogsf1 
My sympathie is towards Tony..because he looks to be the one who genuinely wants to bring the Lotus brand back in F1…but on the other hand for him it also was a bit of a branding thing….but he took it in the right direction…
Lotus and especially Dany feels a bit stiffed…because he was to late to the party…and now they try to take over..at least that is how it feels to me.
On the other hand if you consider the elaborate collection of new cars they want to build…it could fit perfectly and I really would like to see Lotus achieve those goals they set for themselves….and then it would fit very nicely to have a good F1 team to promote the rest of the brand…
So the feelings says Team Lotus, but the logic says Lotus GP
I really hope that the TV commentators & press do not play along with the whole Lotus Renault GP thing and start referring to them as Lotus cars. The cars have Renault chassis and engines, to refer to them as Lotus would be misleading and wrong. After all, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes cars are not referred to as Vodafones.
Team Chapman?
Sounds to me like TF is just trying to piss people off, so that they pay him to go away.
Instead of “Lion” cars, why wouldn’t he use “Renalt”? That way, he can be Team Lotus Renalt. That should stir up a hornets nest, which seems to be what he’s shooting for…
During 2010 , I presume any investment by TF would have been the same whether his team was called Lotus or say AirAsia , so to play on the wasted investment is not credible .
As a kid in the 1960 ‘s my and fans view would have been that the racing team and car co were one and the same and Mr Chapman would have wanted it be be that way re sales etc . Separate Ltd co ‘s would have been for accounting and business reasons .
While backing TF these last months I am starting , the more I read to think he is the villain here . This dea of making road cars is an infantile spoke in the wheel .
If Group gave TF a license for 5 years and if this had a get out clause , and if Group had a change of plan and decided F1 was for them , then they had the right to terminate the license and TF would have known this …..
The car-buying-admass (as distinct from Fans) will wish to identify with the Lotus which finishes races nearest the front.
As to the added name to Team Lotus, instead of Lion I would suggest Tiger, as in the well known “Asian Tiger”, a business term for the aggressively rising worth of many Asian companies. This sadly does not include Proton although to be fair I have not yet looked at their accounts.
I did however download the Group Lotus bare bones accounts yesterday, (from http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/ they do not take long to read, since Mr Bahar’s arrival a small profit has been turned into a big loss.
The organisation of the companies seems to have them each leaning upon the other, but with PONSB a fellow subsidiary of “Proton Holdings Berhad” guaranteeing GL’s debts for one year. The many subsidiary and parent company statuses conveniently avoid the need for much of the normal reporting
The role of “Lotus Group International Limited” is not yet clear, but seems to be Group Lotus’s immediate owner, I need to look at those accounts as well.
As far as I can see, if Group Lotus and it’s subsidiaries were sold at current NAV they could run in F1 for maybe two years.
Ironically (I thought) an also owned but dormant company is “Lotus Motorsport Limited”
Somebody should remind Mr. Fernandes that money can’t buy him everything. A F1 team and part of the public opinion apparently yes, but if this is true then he is really losing the plot.
Fernandes built road cars would be nothing but cruel and childish attack towards Colin Chapman’s Lotus. You can’t betray people who trust you, then sue them and claim that you could buy the company they work in just so they would forgive you and be your friends again. I’ve always known that rich people have different moral than normal people, but this would be disgusting. Lotus doesn’t want to play with you Tony, let it go.
We finally have Lotus back in F1, Indy and Le Mans, but we can’t really celebrate because of Fernandes and all the confusion and bad blood he is creating.
Besides, how would this work anyway? Fernandes Cars couldn’t promote it’s vehicles with the past success of Chapman’s Lotus. Unlike Lotus Cars, who have been doing it since Chapman created the company, Fernandes really has no commercial advertisement rights to the name Lotus outside of that piece of paper that Hunt has been keeping under his pillow these past 15 years…
Wait until ‘Team Lotus’ tries to arrive at KL for the Malaysian GP. Methinks there will be an injunction awaiting them. Malaysian government ministers and courts have handed-down some real dooseys in the recent past and it wouldn’t surprise me to see ‘Team Lotus’ barred from competing.
This makes me really wonder… The company I work for owns an old offshot of Bruce McLaren called McLaren Performance Technologies and our company as a whole manufactures car parts. Imagine for a moment if they decided it would be in their brand’s interest to go into F1 or start to make a road car program that used F1 imagery or names to promote it. That really would be cause for legal actions as Ron Dennis would be certain to nip it in the bud early and fast.
Or imagine Porsche Design, the design and engineering firm that is contracted as a third party for its expertise, engineering a road car to take on VW’s Porsche. Really these actions wouldn’t stand. So why and how are they here?
Now that’s the way to go about it – if it happened and Fernandez built a ‘Lion’ sports car then I am with him all the way….
Not sure why Lion wouldn’t be a good name though – simple, easily recognisable in a number of languages, immediately recognisable symbol: seems perfect to me.
Let’s face it if you asked the public 30 years ago: would they buy a soft drink named after a coloured male cow – well, I am sure they would have said a ‘better-suited’ name was available !
I am intrigued why Renault will be allowed to run a cigarette company’s colours when Ferrari aren’t though……
I really think this is poor form by Fernandes to try build Lotus road cars. I can’t see any way that would stack up legally, especially considering Group Lotus is already active in this industry. Overall that just seems really low.
Bahar’s name is spelt wrong in your first mention of him (second paragraph, second sentence)
@RobK: But Ferrari do run in a cigarette companies colours, just (allegedly) without any explicit branding.
In a sense JPS could be quite pleased at the free publicity….
Does anyone read these days or just spout off on the headline itself? Joe clearly states Tony’s strategy was to bring Lotus glory back to F1 AND to eventually acquire LOTUS back from Proton and its Malasyian government handlers. No where does it say he’s going to build road cars.
If anything…it is Bahar, Proton and the Malasian officials that are the spoiled brats in this particular matter. They want to capitalize on Tony’s efforts which is nothing more than greed. Tony is legit…and he’s trying to bring back glory to not only Lotus in F1…but in road cars too, if he can purchase Lotus from Proton…which are neglecting and betraying the brand, to be honest. Tony was a big fan of Lotus going way back if you read into his background…he is sort of channeling Chapman if you will…at least from what I’ve read on the subject. I never saw Bahar, Proton or Malaysia ever doing that, nor would they even try. But all of a sudden they see a successful business man in Tony and his vision, and they’re trying to be greedy. I’ve news for them….they’re greedy ways and egos are going to take a massive fall, going against Mr. Fernandes.
I take it all back….It is I that missed a sentence. If Tony does build cars under a Lion brand…it will be more akin to Colin Chapman’s vision. Bahar will fail going against Ferrari. That is a market Lotus cannot compete in. Not with Ferrari, Porsche, Lambo, McLaren, Mercedes, and a host of other supercar niche players. Besides….government backed means failure. History dictates that fact. Bahar and Co. should just give up their power play.
mad-elph,
they settled their issues years ago. For example,when McLaren Performance was part of ASHA they used to own the TLD McLaren.com.
Now here’s an interesting thought … what if TF decided to buy Caterham Cars (assuming they’d want to sell it)?
Question is: why didn’t Bahar just combine resources with Fernandes after he’d given him a five year naming deal and the team itself had proven to be the best new team in 2010 by far?
By the end of that five years he might have had a proper, competitive manufacturer team on his hands with its OWN pedigree.
But, no, he jumps on Renault instead as a kind of short-cut.
Bernie should have had a not-so-subtle word with Bahar because Group Lotus/Proton/Malaysian Govt backing combined with Air Asia exposure in THE most important emerging market for F1 and car manufacturers would have made quite a marketing combination.
Common sense always prevails?
I’m a little uncomfortable with this news – after-all the strongest part of Fernadez’s position is the historical separation between the F1 team and the company that produced road cars. Now to be encroaching on the others territory, in a similar manner as Behar seems to be doing, smacks of double-standards. By his own argument either you are the F1 team or the road car manufacturer – not both.
Bahar’s plans will never work IMO. He’s literally writing cheques his company can’t cash! His commitment to enter every motorsport under the sun (I’m expecting a rally announcement any day now!) and the introduction of 5 new models aimed a completely different market to the one the currently sell in is doomed to fail. The idea of making engines for IndyCar when they don’t even put them in their own cars and they could produce an aero-kit instead really makes you think that they have put little or no consideration into the plans. If TF bides his time he could come out of this with a car company, purchased on the cheap, to go with his F1 team. That’s what I want to happen and I can’t imagine having to wait too long
What a story, Team Lotus Lion hahaha…
…sorry Joe, but I can only laugh or cry…
Joe et al,
Check out the “Lotus Racing” commercials on CNN: “Some people believe that a name is just a name”.
Cheers,
Leo.
Great shame this is all going on. Between the two of them these companies are destroying the Lotus cars brand. It’s little more than a name now as it is.
This is so crazy, maybe Fernandes is making a joke?
I mean, Group announcing new models like they were a major, and no-one much believing them.
You get four guys in the room, and each one is shouting “No, I’m Edsel”
Is it four. It’s definitely a crowd.
Amusing quote “I wasn’t actually aware that JPS [John Player Special] was still being sold in the United Kingdom and various parts of the Commonwealth. ” – Fernandes
Hmm, yeah, I understand the confusion. I mean you can still buy VAT69 in some parts of Asia, or could until not long ago. I confused the *^&* out of shopkeeper demanding where the Red Barrel was.
It’s a funny world, and it takes all sorts of sillies to keep it turning, i guess . . .
RobK,
“I am intrigued why Renault will be allowed to run a cigarette company’s colours when Ferrari aren’t though……”
I didn’t notice Ferrari changing their paint back to Ferrari red, from the Marlboro red tint it gradually acquired.
4u1e wrote: “@RobK: But Ferrari do run in a cigarette companies colours…”
Actually, they don’t any more. They USED to run in a lighter red, to match the Marlboro colour but they switched back to the (deeper/darker) traditional Ferrari red a few years back.
TG wrote: “Question is: why didn’t Bahar just combine resources with Fernandes…”
What makes you think he didn’t try? If you go back to the original announcement of the 1Malaysia F1 team back in late 2009, it would appear to have been envisioned as a very different beast to what it has become (most noticably, the technical centre that was to be built at Sepang never materialised). It would not surprise me at all if Fernandes rejected greater involvement/control by Lotus Group. Also don’t forget that Dany Bahar was hired by Lotus Group around the same time that the F1 team was announced, which implies that Group Lotus’ owners had decided firmly upon an F1-focused strategy at that time.
I don’t buy the idea that there was a plan for Fernandes to start with a Lotus F1 team and then take over Lotus Cars. As a strategy, it’s arseways – if Fernandes wanted to eventually take over the Lotus car company, he should have taken a stake in and a seat on the board at Lotus Group, and established the F1 team as a subsidiary of Lotus Group, instead of licensing the name and establishing the team as a separate company.
As I highlighted above, Dany Bahar left Ferrari around the same time that 1Malaysia F1 was announced, which means that Proton had recruited Bahar while the plans for 1Malaysia F1 were being laid. Hence, Bahar’s arrival at Lotus Cars (and the attendant strategy of using F1 to market Lotus cars) was planned before 1Malaysia got off the ground so it can’t have disrupted anything, unless it disrupted a plan that Fernandes had all by himself, that wasn’t shared with or agreed to by Group Lotus.
Ultimately, we don’t know what sort of agreement there was between the various partners involved in getting 1Malaysia F1 off the ground. It seems less likely that there was a plan for Fernandes to take over Lotus Group than it is that Fernandes was aware of Proton’s plans to invest heavily in Lotus Cars and formulated some kind of scheme to grab a piece of the action, only to discover that Bahar was having none of it.
As for Fernandes’ planning to build road cars – it sounds insane to me. Either it’s a ploy to put pressure on Lotus Group or Fernandes is beginning to believe his own hype. Whether or not you believe that Fernandes’ acquisition of the Team Lotus name makes him the inheritor of Colin Chapman’s F1 legacy, there can be no doubt whatsoever that he is not entitled to use the Lotus name to launch a road car company.
Fernandes’ was quite happy to base his claims to the Lotus racing heritage on the name that he licensed from Lotus Group. If you accept that claim, you cannot now claim that Lotus Group are not entitled to make the same claim for their Lotus Renault team. At best, you can argue that the fact that 1Malaysia competed as Lotus Racing last season has muddied the waters somewhat but you can’t claim that Fernandes team is now the “true” Lotus F1 team, based solely on a one-year track record using a temporarily-licensed name from Lotus Cars and, now, a disputed trademark that was bought from the administrators of a team that went bust more than 25 years ago and hasn’t raced since.
Leo wrote about this ad
Just spotted this:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle/AllCars/254536/
Coincidence???
Gus82,
Yes, a complete coincidence…
I am rapidly reaching the point where I don’t much care what the outcome of this debacle is and I hope that all parties involved fail miserably. This is starting to become one of those stories that comes along from time to time that the media overhypes to death and all you can root for is an end to it so you don’t have to hear about it anymore. I understand that some folks are true Lotus fans from the old days, but those Chapman/Clark/Senna days are dead and gone forever. Just go away now, especially you Mr. Bahar.
fernandes is just waiting for when bahar brings lotus to it’s knees and he buys him out.
Dodger,
“4u1e wrote: “@RobK: But Ferrari do run in a cigarette companies colours…”
I thuought they were toning it out, just as the toned it in.
Are you watching on a calibrated REC.701 space screen, or are you watching live?
I just realized I’ve been piping the feed to a screen which lives to do ECI RGB, which is how pre -press works.
The differences are not subtle, but you’d only see side by side under controlled conditions, otherwise the brain recomputes the scene. Like driving under sulphur HID lamps.
TV, SD terrestrial analog PAL – SECAM broadcast (not NTSC, which has designed -in problems) is very well calibrated by great engineers. This is non – trivial work, the hard core of any broadcaster.
Press photography, if it calibrated at all, tends to get done to no reference meaningful in the real (colorimetric) world.
The lighting at launches is far enough off an ideal CRI to cause metamerism. It merely ouputs enough peak at 6 to 7,000 Kelvin to fool the mind it’s “good” daylight. If they went for better lighting, the lighting rigs would be distracting from the cars, and we might become lighting geeks, not F1 geeks.
LCD / Plasma are still in the process of getting things right. Yes, we use flat screens for work. Real estate costs too much. They cost an awful lot. Calibration kit costs as much as a modest car . . . learning how it works is almost by necessity a passion.
I know people who stockpiled Sony CRT broadcast monitors at real capital cost, because they are not satisfied with flat screens.
However, this teaches me to get out to a race or 20 this season. (John curses under his breath at a certain driver for putting him off that for too long 🙂
– j
Dodger,
I don’t know about this:
“As I highlighted above, Dany Bahar left Ferrari around the same time that 1Malaysia F1 was announced, which means that Proton had recruited Bahar while the plans for 1Malaysia F1 were being laid. Hence, Bahar’s arrival at Lotus Cars (and the attendant strategy of using F1 to market Lotus cars) was planned before 1Malaysia got off the ground so it can’t have disrupted anything, unless it disrupted a plan that Fernandes had all by himself, that wasn’t shared with or agreed to by Group Lotus.”
1. Things take time, why would 1Malaysia not have pre – roll, and the Bahar to Group – Lotus move so well planned? How do you know which action, or even thought, has temporal precedence?
2. “Hence [. . .]” ? you are imputing an underlying logic there, please share? Your logic reads that because of the Proton> 1 Malaysia deal, Bahar was moved to Group.
3. You speculate Bahar’s move disrupted Fernandes’s plan. But that speculation rests on your earlier two interpretations.
In friendliness, your editing was much better a few days ago.
yours,
– john
Sorry, Dodger,
my bad,
append to point 2, “*when* Bahar moved to Group, it caused problems for Fernandes”
You see, if Bahar is Fernandes’ bete noir, your argument goes that Bahar was brought to Group, and then Group did some deal with Fernandes. But that then contradicts the idea that Fernandes is guilty because he acted later.
– j
Team Lotus Lion? 😕
And the spin off is to build basic Lotus-type cars as “Lion” road cars – ie. small nippy sports cars in the original Lotus tradition as Bahar goes too far upmarket, buggers it up, and does a runner?
Not sure about the name Lion cars….trying to sound too much like Lotus and a bit Peugeot for me.
Pity they couldn’t use Team Lotus Clan.
Now I would say that wouldn’t I? 😆
Fernandes could easily use the Clan name for their intended road cars (wouldn’t cost him much to buy the rights that’s for sure) and there’s a direct historic connection with the original Lotus cars too so it would be like reviving a “Lotus spin off” that didn’t quite work at the time but did well in motorsport and still does even today.
John wrote: “In friendliness, your editing was much better a few days ago.”
In a similar vein, your posts make very little sense.
Out of interest I just typed http://www.teamlotus.com into my browser . . . . . I was redirected to the Lotus Cars website!
What I fail to understand is why Tony Fernandes thought he would be able to enter a team in the world’s most watched motorsport with a name the same (ignore the pre or post nomenclature) as an actual car company.
Like starting a football team to play in Italy called Manchester United Town, OK bad analogy but hopefully you get the point.
Neither company will be coming out of this with reputation intact and Bahar is being underhand but I still think it was silly to think that encroaching on an obviously existing brand was risky at best, despite what state the company was in at the start (it was around the same time but they had already got new models ready to go).
George,
Because he thought of doing, bought a licence to do it, and did it before Dany Bahar showed up. There are three good reasons for a start.
Bahar, in any case, has no understanding of the Lotus brand. It is, as far as he is concerned, a lump opf meat to be bought and sold. Fernandes may be a businessman, but he also has a feel for racing.
I really don’t understand why people (who should really know better) keep pointing the finger at Dany Bahar. It’s like denouncing a duck for quacking.
Bahar was hired by the powers that be at Proton to run Group Lotus. He has a track record of leveraging Formula One to promote and market brands, first at Red Bull and then at Ferrari. You do not hire someone like that to run your car company unless you want him to promote and market the company’s cars through an F1 team.
Therefore, Proton’s management had already decided to go down the use-F1-to-sell-road-cars route when they hired Bahar.
Full stop. Period. End of story.
Bahar is doing exactly what he was hired to do. Please stop demonising him for doing his job.
As for Fernandes, it’s becoming pretty clear that his plan all along was to exploit the Lotus brand for commercial reasons. He’s boasted that “AirAsia made a lot of money selling Lotus T-shirts” and he launched an energy drink using the Lotus Racing brand (do a Google Image search for LR8 energy drink). Even the acquisition of Team Lotus Ventures Limited was done by Tune Group, not the 1Malaysia F1 team company. I expect that Fernandes’ will “licence” the Team Lotus name to the 1Malaysia F1 team and then proceed to plaster the Lotus name over all sorts of products and services sold by the Tune Group.
Anyone who thinks that Fernandes’ interest in the Lotus brand is anything other than purely commercial has drunk the Kool-Aid (or should that be LR8?).
Let’s not forget that the Lotus brand was licensed to the 1Malaysia F1 team as part of a partnership to build a Malysian F1 team, with a technical base at Sepang and partnerships with Malaysian companies and educational institutions, none of which has been delivered.
Group Lotus have clearly had their fingers burnt dealing with Fernandes. Whether he always intended to screw them over, was just smarter than they were or whether the relationship deteriorated because Bahar came in and decided that he wanted Group Lotus to have greater control than Fernandes was willing to surrender, is irrelevant. There’s absolutely nothing wrong, whatsoever, from a business perspective with Bahar wanting to have control over the manner in which the Lotus brand is used in F1. Who, in their right mind, would relinquish control of the company’s brand to someone whose only interest is exploiting its goodwill for their own commercial ends? You don’t need an MBA to realise that’s not a smart thing to do. I’m actually glad that Bahar is rectifying Group Lotus’ mistakes in this respect.
As for Fernandes, doing a deal behind your licensor’s back in the manner he has done is sneaky at best and dishonourable at worst. He’s done a masterful PR/spin job to convince so many people that he’s a saint and Bahar is the devil but, in my eyes, he’s tainting the sterling work that he and Gascoyne did in getting the team off the ground.
It’s worth noting that Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian prime minister, has come down very firmly on the side of Group Lotus and has commented that the “Lotus name was supposed to be used only for racing, but it is said that the name is also being used for other products.”
I really hope that Fernandes gets his comeuppance in the High Court because, no matter what anyone tries to claim, Colin Chapman’s lasting legacy is the Lotus Cars and Engineering companies. If he were alive today, I can’t imagine he’d be particularly happy about the Lotus name being exploited to launch an energy drink.
Dodger,
Actually, I think if you knew more about the story you would not be spouting forth such ill-informed opinions. Bahar was hired because he arrived promising huge private investment in the business which never materialised. The people at Proton who took him on were then in a situation in which they either had to say “We screwed up” and look stupid or they had to cover their backs and support him and borrow taxpayers money. If you were a Malaysian taxpayer you might have something to say about that. The stuff you have written about Fernandes is simply not true. And while your belief in Bahar is touching, I think you will one day realise that he has left a trail of unhappy people behind him in his previous jobs, which perhaps explains why he cannot get the chassis name changed. There are at least five teams opposed to a name change. Why? I am even told that one of these former employers is on the verge of instigating legal action… but we will see if that materialises. And as for Chapman, I think my colleague Maurice Hamilton summed it up very well today: “Lotus-Renault talks about brand image and investment. Team Lotus talks about a proud racing heritage. Which would Colin Chapman support? He would surely see the former as being important – but purely to fund the latter.” Which, of course, is the real story way back when. Group Lotus has never owned any of the racing heritage it is now exploiting… I am pretty sure that the High Court will chuck out Group’s claims because they are hogwash. The rest of the Group’s plans seem like smoke and mirrors to most of the automotive industry, but perhaps Bahar (and you) know better…
Perhaps not.
Joe,
The idea that the powers that be at Proton/Lotus would have given Bahar the job as part of a package deal that included outside investment, without any guarantees around the outside investment piece fails the Occam’s Razor test. I’ve heard of CEOs being hired to revitalise a company or take it in a different direction. I’ve heard of new CEOs taking over at a company as part of an actual deal involving outside investors injecting capital into the company. I’ve heard of CEOs being hired because they have experience of attracting outside investment or readying a company to be sold.
However, I’ve never heard of a CEO being hired because he’s promised outside investment which then didn’t appear.
Maybe I’m being naive but it seems to me that if Proton really wanted to attract outside investment in order to revitalise Lotus’ fortunes, they would find plenty of eager investors (not least in China). We’re not talking about a company like TVR or an empty shell of a company that owns nothing but a brand (that’s TLVL!). We’re talking about a company that builds and sells very good, affordable sports cars and provides expertise to companies like Tesla, Nissan, Spyker and Jaguar.
I can only make judgment based on the information that’s available to me and my application of logic to that information. Vague rumours that fail the test of Occam’s Razor and mutterings about
I’m no Dany Bahar fanboy. I’d never really paid him any attention until he joined Lotus. Howeber, his appointment makes sense to me because, while Lotus build great cars, they need to get better at selling them. Building the Lotus brand is an essential part of that and Dany Bahar has experience of building, promoting and exploiting brands.
I think that four new models (plus the new Elise) over five years is ambitious but I see nothing wrong with having ambition and the staged approach (i.e. bringing the new models in over time rather than all at once) seems sensible. I know that some people are poo-poo’ing his plans to take Lotus upmarket but I seem to recall the Lotus Esprit being compared to Ferraris and Porsches.
Besides, I have little time for people who criticise a plan without suggesting an alternative. If Bahar’s plans are smoke and mirrors, then what should Group Lotus do? Present me with an alternative strategy and I’ll judge it on its merits.
As for Bahar’s popularity in the paddock, I doubt he’s the only person involved in an F1 team who’s ruffled a few feathers. So people don’t like him? Boo hoo. Without more solid info, it says more to me about their pettiness that they would refuse to allow a chassis name change after the team has changed hands, than it does about Bahar.
You say that Group Lotus has never owned any of the racing heritage that it is now exploiting but even if that IS the case, I don’t see how Fernandes’ can be judged to have a better claim to that heritage.
I think it’s disingenuous to claim that the separation of Group Lotus from Team Lotus for valid legal reasons represented a complete separation of both organisations. They were owned by the same people and had the same directors. I seem to recall that the active suspension used on the Team Lotus F1 cars was developed by Lotus Engineering. To my mind, the real separation happened after Chapman’s death, when the team was sold.
And what’s the connection between Team Lotus Ventures Limited and Team Lotus? Nothing but a tenuous and disputed trademark, bought from the administrators of an F1 team whose last owners led it to the back of the grid and oversaw its bankruptcy. Team Lotus may talk about a proud racing heritage yet it hasn’t raced in 16 years. It never raced under David Hunt’s ownership. In my opinion, a true racer will race whatever he can. He won’t sit around waiting for an F1 slot to present itself. He’ll race karts if nothing else is available.
How people can paint Fernandes’ acquisition of Team Lotus as anything other than a cynical attempt to grab ownership and control of a Lotus brand that he can exploit for his own commercial ends is completely beyond me. His interest in the Lotus brand is no less commercial than Group Lotus’.
Last December, Fernandes was saying that “Lotus will probably buy into the team at some stage. More and more technology from our side will flow into Lotus cars and we will promote the Lotus brand. I see it in time being no different from how Ferrari works.”
What a differece a year makes.
Joe
Great insight and forthright opinion, as usual!
My theory FWIW is that the plan is for Genii to take over Group Lotus in such a way that Proton can tell the Malaysian taxpayer they have recouped their investment. Then it’s obvious why GL is sponsoring (and at some point buying some or all of) Renault F1 and not Lotus Racing/Team Lotus.
Dodger, far more eloquent than me but agree 100%
I really think this is poor form by Fernandes to try build Lotus road cars. I can’t see any way that would stack up legally, especially considering Group Lotus is already active in this industry. Overall that just seems really low.
car,
I think you are missing the point. Fernandes is not trying to build Lotus road cars. He is going to build road cars called “Lion” or something like that. If Group Lotus collapses then a Lotus Lion could become part of a new range, but otherwise it will remain a separate company.
why not?! if it could capture the demand , I believe the team has evaluate the market segment.
So, with all these rumours about Tony Fernandes buying Caterham, are you preparing another article as a follow-up to this almost prophetic article?
I’m sure everyone is eager to know your take on the latest rumour doing the mill!