No apparently Infinity with a "y" is not the same as Infiniti with an "i" and Lotus F1 team also doesen't have anything to do with Lotus the car maker. So that's the funny and very confusing F1 world " title="crazy" />
Money from the USA, Abu Dhabi and Brunei is behind Infinity Racing Partners, the consortium which has acquired 35% of the Lotus F1 team.
Lotus has not named Brunei, saying merely that Infinity was comprised of “an American hedge fund manager, an Abu Dhabi-based multinational business group and royal family interests of a major oil producing nation.“
A little research reveals that the three companies in the consortium are Crescent Investment Management (New Jersey), Al Manhal International Group (Abu Dhabi), and Universal Sports Group (Brunei), with their shareholding split 20-20-60.
The individuals behind the project are Mansoor Ijaz, the boss of Crescent, and Suhail Al Dhaheri, CEO of Al Manhal.
Aged 51, Ijaz is of Pakistani origin but was born in Florida and studied in Virginia. In addition to his own investments he is well known as a journalist and media commentator on political and business affairs, and has been seen frequently on Fox News programmes.
Al Dhaheri, 52, is a former pilot. The Al Manhal company website describes itself as “a multi-faceted group with diverse interests including Investment, Structure financing, Project Management, Event Managements, Telecommunications and Renewable Energy, Digital Hospital, Motor Sports, Oil & Gas, Refinery Projects, Construction and Real Estate.”
Not much is known at this stage about the Brunei connection, although the country formerly had close links to Ferrari, when the team carried Asprey’s branding in the early Schumacher days.
ZitatNew Lotus F1 Team investor: ‘We’ll be number one in 12 months’
18 June 2013 | Posted in Quick-Fire Questions | By David Cushnan | Contact the author
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,
Lotus F1 Team is pleased to announce a new investor at Enstone, giving the team a further boost in its quest to once again reach the summit of the Formula 1 grid
Zitat Lotus F1 Team is pleased to announce new Technical Partner, Altran UK Published on 26 Jun 2013 11:32
Lotus F1 Team is pleased to announce new Technical Partner, Altran UK, who will provide the team with specialist engineering services for the remainder of the 2013 season. Services will be delivered by a team of Altran UK engineers who will be based on site at the home of Lotus F1 Team at the Whiteways Technical Centre in Enstone, Oxfordshire. Altran has a distinguished track record in Formula 1, having previously been a technological partner of the Renault F1 Team – a previous incarnation of Lotus F1 Team – for a decade.
Patrick Louis, Chief Executive Officer, Lotus F1 Team: "We are pleased to again welcome Altran into the family of our Technical Partners. Historically, the contribution of their support has had a tremendous impact on the team’s performance, while their desire to discover and nurture engineering talent fits perfectly with our philosophy. We look forward to re-joining forces in what I am confident will be a mutually rewarding journey."
Mike Simms, CEO of Altran UK: "Altran is extremely proud to be partnering with Lotus F1 Team; a Formula 1 outfit with an amazing heritage and development prospects. This is a partnership built on a shared commitment to engineering excellence, a passion for ground-breaking technological innovation and a desire to win. It is a privilege to be working alongside a Formula 1 team that has based its success on nurturing new talents and creative engineering and management. Altran will bring a wealth of expertise to Lotus F1 Team, enabling its engineers to explore new approaches and solutions to key engineering challenges and translate them into on-track performance."
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