Mercedes GP - Inauguration and 1st season

[Morteza]

I found this link about Allianz sponsership :

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/merce ... 24379.html

The interesting thing is that both Petronas and Allianz were BMW's sponsers too

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

[...]

[andrew]

Lets put the Schumacher re-retiring into perspective regarding in 2 words.

Eddie Jordan.

The bloke is a gobsh*te*.

I need say nothing more on that one I think.

*Traditional Irish word uttered by Father Jack Hackett in Father Ted.

[segedunum]

Deutshe Post is in DTM with Mercedes and the rest have German links by virtue of being German companies or having been associated with BMW. Quite what that has to do with Schumacher is anyone's guess, but I suppose people have to make out that he's of some use somehow.

On top of this you see no reason why the W01 should not be competitive this year, conveniently forgetting all of 2009.

What happened in 2009, apart from the fact that they steadily squandered a winning position? Oh, and if you think they had no money it turns out they weren't quite the paupers they made out to be:

http://adamcooperf1.com/2010/09/14/braw ... t-in-2009/

Which means that what some of us have said all along is true - that Honda more than ensured the survival of that team and that they had significant monetary resources in 2009 - and they then got a significant top up from their championship position at the end. All we need now is to fill in the blanks of Mercedes's involvement around the time of the engine supply and we'll have a pretty complete jigsaw, although I suspect that Mercedes will probably not want that to be made known. Everyone knew a Mercedes team was in the offing for quite some time and there's no way Honda would have done what they did without some offset. Funding Mercedes's Formula 1 team startups would not have been one of the things on their agenda.

xpensive's suspicion that Mercedes had to come up with a significant financial settlement with Honda or make it worth their while in some other way doesn't start to look so silly now, not that it ever did.

I have criticised the incompetence of that team ever since Villeneuve and his manager started the whole sorry affair because they have deserved it, and it's still a load of Pollocks.

[...]

[segedunum]

Lets put the Schumacher re-retiring into perspective regarding in 2 words.

Eddie Jordan.

Unfortunately, Eddie Jordan was the one person who said straight away that Schumacher would be returning and driving for Mercedes, and no one believed him - me included. He might look like an idiot sometimes but he has an excellent nose for these things.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Honda/Brawn/Mercedes are the 4th most succesful team of the last 15 years, yet you label them "incompetent". [...]

Daimler and Aabar paid the team around 100 million (from Bloomberg).
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... rw2vyaO_os

[...]

Mercedes would have had to explain where these hundreds of millions of euros where going after sacking 10 thousand staff. Do you seriously think a limited company would withold information to the stock exchange that would have had an influence on its share price? That is a prison sentence right there.

[747heavy]

Income comparsion 2009

Dieter Zetsche: €4,820,000 + bonus
Ross Brawn: £4,771,000 ~ €5,707,640 + dividends

who says F1 is a bad deal
not bad for an ex-March machinist

[xpensive]

...
So not only do you detest the team, you now think Mercedes did a secret deal with Honda that escaped the labour unions, board and shareholders?
Finally Mercedes did a deal with Brawn, in essence buying the team twice.
...
Mercedes would have had to explain where these hundreds of millions of euros where going after sacking 10 thousand staff. Do you seriously think a limited company would withold information to the stock exchange that would have had an influence on its share price? That is a prison sentence right there.
...

In the age of Enron, Madoff, and the Greek government covering up a deficit which was three times reported, anything is possible, xcept for Honda pissing away their GEUR investment to Mercedes and sending one year of financing to go with it.
No way.

[WhiteBlue]

JET is correct. Just read the annual report 2009 of Brawn GP. Some figures are found here and the rest can be found at company house for a fee of 1.5 pounds.

http://formula-one.speedtv.com/article/ ... 09-profit/?

Honda gave Brawn m 92.5 pounds for 2009 when they sold the company for one pound to Brawn and the other directors in 2008. This was incidentally almost exactly the profit (m98.5) Brawn made in 2009. Out of this profit m78.5 went into reserves to strengthen the equity and m20 were payed as dividends to the share holding directors.

Brawn had sales of m234.5 in 2009 of which m92.5 came from Honda, m9.5 from Virgin and perhaps another m7.5 from various small sponsors. It follows that Aabar and Merc paid approximately m125 for 75.1% of Brawn GP.

Any payment to Honda is purely anecdotal and cannot be proven by the accounts of the company. I think that no serious person would pay a single pound to an ex share holder. Certainly Merc would not do this. The only way this would have been possible is a payback clause in the sales contract between Honda and Brawn if the company was sold within a certain period. In this case the payment would have been made by Brawn and would have shown up in the books. The fact that no such payment is recorded is positive proof that it never existed. Honda simply got none of the m92.5 pounds back.

[andartop]

It does not look like Schumachers on track performance does any bad to them at this time...

+1
Now it's all clear to me.
Mercedes actually want Schumi to perform poorly.
After all these years they know well that he has as many haters as fans.
The sponsors got all the exposure they could ever dream of to his fans in his Ferrari years.
Now they know that actually more people want to see him fail rather than win, as witnessed by this forum as well.
No publicity is bad publicity!

[marcush.]

+1 as they cannot win ...the big news is that schumacher is struggling to beat Rosberg..
brilliant PR everyone is looking how the 7 times champ is falling from grace.. eh ..on thing is missing there. Schumacher won´t play that game..and if brawn does it ...we will(not) see a big internal issue ...ending with a bang.

[xpensive]

JET is correct.

No he's not, and neither are you, you are both gullible to the xtreme, I think.

Plese note the underlining, something to consider perhaps?

[segedunum]

Fourth best team? After over a decade and countless billions? I'm not sure what kind of statement that is supposed to be making. That's why Honda and Toyota pulled out.

The fact that no such payment is recorded is positive proof that it never existed. Honda simply got none of the m92.5 pounds back.

There is a logical fallacy for that that escapes me right now. Absense of proof either way does not mean that something didn't happen.

Logic then tells us that Honda are not going to spend 100 million keeping a team they don't want any more going in order for them to turn into Mercedes's factory team. Toyota chose to mothball theirs. Where's the weight of argument there?

[marcush.]

I don´t get your point here.Please explain.
100mill € will not simply disappear in one company and reemerge in another without a trace.
For sure in Stuttgart are ALOT of people looking exactly for something like that to happen as this would be Sudden Death for the whole programm no question.
as it is not something norbert could decide this would cost zetsche and several others their jobs..

[aral]

Fourth best team? After over a decade and countless billions? I'm not sure what kind of statement that is supposed to be making. That's why Honda and Toyota pulled out.

The fact that no such payment is recorded is positive proof that it never existed. Honda simply got none of the m92.5 pounds back.

There is a logical fallacy for that that escapes me right now. Absense of proof either way does not mean that something didn't happen.

Logic then tells us that Honda are not going to spend 100 million keeping a team they don't want any more going in order for them to turn into Mercedes's factory team. Toyota chose to mothball theirs. Where's the weight of argument there?

I agree with you. TRhere is such a thing as creatie accounting, and large sums can be disguised under arious headings, such as marketing, advertising, etc. The real winner in all this is Brawn himself. Does he deserve it, maybe or maybe not. I hope that he looked after all the staff that were sacked.