Lotus F1 team principal Eric Boullier has made his report of his team's first half of the season and sees no reason to believe that the strong form cannot continue into the second half of the season.
What makes you say that? It's not unusual for companies to make a loss, even a significant one. £56m is not that significant in the grand scheme of things.korzeniow wrote:£56m loss? that's insane! there must be some covered scam with taxes or something...
I'm sure the cash infusion will help them in the short run. Long term financial health tbd.Infinity consortium buys 35% of Lotus F1
After months of rumours Lotus F1 has finally revealed a new investor in the form of a consortium called Infinity Racing, which has acquired a 35% stake in the team.
Lotus has consistently posted major losses since the team was offloaded by Renault and was clearly in need of some extra funding.
Lotus says that Infinity Racing is “an investment consortium whose special purpose vehicle is comprised of private investors that include an American hedge fund manager, an Abu Dhabi-based multinational business group and royal family interests of a major oil producing nation.”
Genii Capital retains the remaining 65%, and Gerard Lopez continues as chairman.
Lopez said: “Infinity Racing’s principals have exceptional expertise and a proven strong track record in developing and delivering high quality technologies. This partnership will enable us to increase Lotus F1 Team’s competitive advantage related to KERS technology as it becomes more central to Formula 1’s push for environmentally sound racing, while also making Lotus F1 Team more marketable as a brand, opening up additional major sponsorship opportunities.”
Genii CEO Eric Lux said: “Since Genii Capital took over control in December 2009, we have been focused on growing the value of the organisation and developing the infrastructure at its Enstone headquarters. As Lotus F1 Team results have continued to improve every year, we have been waiting for the right investor who will help make the jump to the top spot in the Constructors’ Championship.
“In Infinity Racing, we have found a partner with the right connections in addition to technological expertise and a global reach in major markets with key sponsors to achieve this goal.”
Orignal Post: http://www.eurosport.fr/formule-1/qui-e ... tory.shtmlA common adjective describes the financial arrangements for the Lotus team and its new owner, Infinity Racing, which acquired 35% stake in the team: dark.
According to the official release, Infinity Racing (which has nothing to do with Infiniti, title sponsor Red Bull, Team Lotus itself has no connection with the Lotus manufacturer), is a "consortium of investment formed by private investors including an American hedge fund manager, a multinational group based in Abu Dhabi and the interests of the Royal a major producer of oil country "family.
After some research, the consortium is actually composed of Crescent Investment Management (based in the state of New Jersey), Al Manhal International Group (Abu Dhabi) and Universal Sports Group (Brunei). These three entities hold 20%, 20% and 60% respectively Infinity Racing.
Little information is available on Universal Sports Group, the majority of Infinity Racing and property of the royal family of Brunei shareholder. Just be aware that the Brunei once had close ties with Ferrari .
Crescent Investment Management is headed by Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani origin but born in Florida. Ijaz, a business man aged 51, is well known in the United States. He is a regular on Fox News in political and economic discussions chain.
Finally, Suhail Al Dhaheri, head of Al Manhal International Group, is an old converted aircraft today in the business driver.
I know it's a google translation but that's not true, clearly there is a connection - the right to use the name given by Lotus owners. Bad analogyfenix4life wrote:Translate with google translate
Orignal Post: http://www.eurosport.fr/formule-1/qui-e ... tory.shtmlA common adjective describes the financial arrangements for the Lotus team and its new owner, Infinity Racing, which acquired 35% stake in the team: dark.
According to the official release, Infinity Racing (which has nothing to do with Infiniti, title sponsor Red Bull, Team Lotus itself has no connection with the Lotus manufacturer), is a "consortium of investment formed by private investors including an American hedge fund manager, a multinational group based in Abu Dhabi and the interests of the Royal a major producer of oil country "family.
[............]
. Anyway they should call the team Infinity Racing Lotus Renault just to confuse people and piss Red Bull off.
. According to German press Lotus has been going bankrupt for four years now, looks like it's been postponed for a further season. Too bad that on the sporting side they're wasting their best car of the last seven seasons.SourceNew Lotus F1 Team investor: ‘We’ll be number one in 12 months’
On Tuesday, the Lotus Formula One team confirmed that its owner, Genii Capital, has sold a 35 per cent stake in the business to Infinity Racing Partners. Infinity is a special purpose vehicle set up by what Lotus called 'an American hedge fund manager, an Abu Dhabi-based multinational business group and royal family interest of a major oil producing nation'. Amongst the investors is Mansoor Ijaz, a US investment banker and sometime media pundit, who is the founder and chairman of New York-based investment firm Crescent Investment Management. In his first interview, he outlines his vision for the team and insists Lotus will be the sport’s top team in 12 months time.
Why Formula One, why Lotus?
In my view Formula One represents the pinnacle of sports. It is everything combined in one go. You have a measure of technology, you have a measure of the real sport in the drivers being able to navigate one of these complex pieces of machinery around a circuit, you’ve got teamwork – teamwork behind the scenes as well as on the racetrack, in the pits. There’s an incredible amount of coordination and everyone has their role to play, if you will, on the team: the driver does his part but so do the people who handle every aspect of the pit-stops, every aspect of the sponsorship, of the management of the team and so forth.
Then you have the sponsorship element which is bringing the business to the framework of the sport. We have strengths in several of those disciplines that we thought would dramatically enhance the capability of this particular team. In Erix [Lux] and Gerard [Lopez] I found people who were so similar and so congruent with my own thinking about the way in which business should be done, their ethics, the way in which they operate the business, the way in which they treat people. Probably one of the strongest elements of my investment decision was going and visiting the plant at Enstone and seeing how people work together. I’m a farm boy, I was brought up and raised on a farm in Virginia, and in the middle of the winter there where you have two feet of snow on the ground it’s all about teamwork to make sure you just survive. From my perspective I’ve not seen that kind of teamwork, that kind of proper attitude and everyone pitching in – I’ve travelled on the road with these guys, I’ve watched very carefully how they operate. For us it was an opportunity to bring our technological capabilities. I won’t go too much into that today because I want to keep some elements of surprise in terms of what we’re going to do to win the championship, but we have enormous technological capabilities that we can bring and we’re going to make Lotus the number one team for sponsorship within the next year. That’s simply a result of my network around the world, the people that know and trust me and believe in what we’re doing and we’re going to bring that to bear in one comprehensive unit.
I understand there are interests from the United Arab Emirates and also Brunei – how did the Infinity Racing Partners consortium come together?
I will not comment on the royal family, whether it’s Brunei or not – I’m not going to comment on that. What I will tell you is the people who are part of the consortium are old, dear friends, business partners, investors in other things that I’ve done. They represent a critical focus of my overall investment sphere and the activities we have as hedge fund managers and the general investment environment in which I’ve operated. I’ve done a lot of different kind of investments in my life, some of them have succeeded, some of them have failed miserably. Like every other good venture investor I get a few of them right and a few wrong but these are people I’ve known for a very long time – deep-trust bonds and people who are very close to me personally.
You’ve visited the factory, you’ve been on the road with the team – what was the timeline in terms of this deal coming together?
We have been looking at Formula One for about two years now. We looked at three other teams before we decided on Lotus. I won’t mention which ones but we had general discussions and in some cases very specific discussions. There were two things missing in the other teams we looked at. The first was the element of real team spirit, meaning across the board – vertically as well as horizontally – in terms of the breadth and depth of the team’s capacity – its interconnectedness. I just didn’t see that in any of the other teams that we looked at. The second element was the business brains that run Genii Capital and the business brains that affect the way in which Lotus is managed as a business; these are men cut from the same cloth as I have been throughout my career. There was a congruency in the way we thought the business ought to be run. They’ve done an incredibly good job to bring team harmony back to a team that had been fractured by the problems it had before. If Lotus was, on a scale of minus ten to plus ten, at minus eight because of the problems it had before Genii Capital came in and now it’s plus five, six or even seven, what we’re doing is topping it off to make sure they get to the championship. That has two key elements: technology and sponsorship revenue and that’s basically what we’re bringing to the table.
The knowledge of Lotus and Genii Capital and our system, on the side of the partners that formed Infinity Racing, has been there for about a year. We looked very, very hard and they really became our number one candidate as early as June/July of last year. But these are not easy men to get to and they are not easy men to deal with when you get to them, in terms of really gaining their trust and confidence. That’s good: that means they’re tough, they’re very careful about managing that process. We came together more recently than a year but less recently than a few weeks. It is a relationship that developed and there was a spark at the very beginning that made it clear that we were of the same cloth in terms of how we thought about things.
It sound like you’ll be hands-on – but how hands on? Will you attend races?
I would say we will be integrally involved in the technology development side, as the engines change next year, as technology comes to the front. I have a younger brother, my youngest brother, who is very bright. Where I’ve developed the capacity in the financial sense, he’s got the technological abilities that are quite astounding. His name is Mujeeb and he is the chief technology officer of A123 Venture Technologies in Boston. He was for the better part of his career a senior design engineer at Ford Motor Company and while he was at Ford he set the land speed record at Bonneville, 202.9mph in a hydrogen-powered car. He also set, with his technology in lithium ion batteries, the land speed record at Bonneville in the Venturi – a dragster supported by a Monaco billionaire. He’s an important part of the story of what we’re doing because he brings a certain capability as a systems integrator and an expert in battery technology that will, I think, dramatically enhance what we’re doing on the technological side come next season. My own background is engineering and science and I had a fairly significant, long history with different kinds of engineering and science and technology – our whole family has.
Part two, as far as the management of the team is concerned I don’t really see much need to interfere in that. Eric and Gerard have done just a superb job in what they’ve done so far – there’s an old saying, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. In that sense I will participate but not be very much hands-on. We will be deeply involved in helping to raise the sponsorship revenues by bringing title sponsors to the team – that will happen pretty quickly – and we will bring some significant players to the game. I will basically bring my global network to bear on the business of our Formula One team and just make it the best team in Formula One.
What’s the endgame here, the longer term plan beyond making Lotus successful?
First of all, what’s wrong with making a profit? Of course we want to make a profit, but it’s not the primary objective. Next year, when there is a change in the way the races will be run, there’s a lot of opportunity going forward to differentiate one car from another technologically. Today the cars all have fixed parameters around them – there are simply things you cannot change – and then it becomes about who’s the best driver. We have really great drivers. In Kimi [Raikkonen] we have, in my view, the best in motorsports and he’s a fraction shy of getting to that very top spot. We’ve got terrific support team and staff around, so now it’s a matter of trying to make sure we get a differential advantage and that’s where we’re going to try and make our difference going forward. The differential advantage as far as sponsorship revenue is concerned is huge because at the end of the day we all know that it costs money to make this sport go. It costs money because you have to get good brains, good technology, you have to have a proper factory that can constantly modify and change and evolve with the needs of the sport.
Where do you see the team in 12 months?
We’ll be number one in 12 months. I say it simply, flatly, completely – we’ll be number one in 12 months.
Bankruptcy, as you may know, is a legal process whereby you say thanks to all the people and suppliers and investors who lent you their time and money by paying them back with pennies on the dollar - it they get anything at all. 
Run away, Kimi. Quick as you can.I would say we will be integrally involved in the technology development side, as the engines change next year, as technology comes to the front. I have a younger brother, my youngest brother, who is very bright...
Don't be too hard on them, as they are/were one of the leading firms in the field and even supplied kers batteries to McLaren for a while. How their finances were handled says nothing about any one engineer who worked for them. I think a lot of their trouble was related to Fisker's (which was largely related to battery problems, however). The question is what did he do and what does he do for the new company, which, as I understand, is more of a venture capital arm that was spun out to market their technology.MOWOG wrote:2. A123 is/was a battery company that sought to ride the wave of hybrid vehicles. They were so well managed they went bankrupt. They have now changed their name to B456 Systems. Gee, maybe their next go will be C789 Systems?
If the guy's as smart as it sounds and if he doesn't use the "my brother owns the place" type attitude, then I see no problem. Now I know that a very big IF, but he sounds like he has the perfect expertise to push forward integration between car and "power unit".Pup wrote:Run away, Kimi. Quick as you can.I would say we will be integrally involved in the technology development side, as the engines change next year, as technology comes to the front. I have a younger brother, my youngest brother, who is very bright...
I wonder if this is the real reason that Allison left. I mean, if a potential investor was insisting on pushing his little brother into a senior technical role, it'd send up red flags all over the place to me, regardless how good of an engineer the guy might be.
Oh, I know that their engineering was not to blame. It just frosts my shorts that so often, big time money men get to keep all their ill gotten gains while the little people get it in the neck. My distaste for the investor class is closely tied to the financial meltdown that has afflicted the world for nearly a decade. But those at the top made out like bandits - which is precisely what they were.Don't be too hard on them,
