1Malaysia Formula 1 Team

If you are still clueless about what is going on.
Malaysia’s own F1 team
The cost of 1 Malaysia’s F1 bet
Malaysian F1 team plans grand HQ

Enough has been said on the blogosphere and Internet forums (90% of them are rubbish comments but 10% are worth your time). The cynic in me was just wondering wow this is a great plan for the government to divert the heat of public's attention away from the multitude of issues that is messing up this country at the moment - MACC, Seksyen 15 cow head protest, Teoh Beng Hock, BN's fledgling support etc etc. Sports have always been used as a popular tool for political control since the days of ancient Greece. Politicians like to use major sports events to drum up support as well as diverting the people's attention from more pressing issues i.e. employment, poverty, literacy rate, etc etc.

In the days of the Cold War, Commie states of Russia, China and East Germany were always keen to use athletics to drive the message of the superiority of their nation against the bourgeois people of Western nations like United States of America. Even Hitler pushed for Germany's increased involvement in motorsports to prove a point about the superiority of the Aryan race. Those Auto Union racers, silver arrow Mercedes-Benzs and even Germany's famed autobahn highways have their progress traced back directly to Hitler's involvement. Of course, motor racing and the autobahn have existed in Germany long before Hitler assumed power - but he was a strong guiding force pushing for their greater advancement so he could use them as a political tool.


But of course, I would be far too flattering to compare the sophistication of BN leaders to the likes of Mao and Nikita Khrushchev.

Anyway on top of the obvious that many have already said, there is one bit that I think many are missing - the team's eventual HQ location in Sepang. Anyone who has been following F1 seriously will know that all the major F1 teams, irrespective of their nationality (I know there is no such thing as nationality of an F1 team these days but for comparison sake lets assume the good old Ferrari=Italian, McLaren=British), are all based in the UK. Britain's auto industry manufacturing might have died a long time ago, but some parts of the industry are far from dead - they have just moved up the value chain. Even the Japanese and Germans recognise Britain's unique talent in motor racing and until today Britain is recognised as the world's centre of F1. All the best engineering brains, craftsmen, parts fabricators, mechanics, team managers are in Britain. Formula One is about money, technology and also efficient logistics. It is a myth that F1 is just about the team. The reality is that many parts of an F1 car are custom built and machined by numerous small expert machinist and fabricator services companies that are located around Britain, usually within the same area of many of the leading F1 team's HQ, i.e. Woking, Oxfordshire. They usually have many decades of experience and many of them have fathers who used to work there a generation before. These expert talents are able to produce parts with even greater tolerance than a computer controlled machine. These kind of "soft elements" cannot be replicated anywhere else overnight. Nationalistic pride was never and should never be part of any decision regarding Formula One. Team HQs are mostly based in UK due to the simple fact that the most brilliant team managers, race engineers and technicians are found in the UK. Even Japanese car companies recognise this fact and chose to run their F1 operations out of Europe.

You can't just expect to relocate an F1 team's headquarters to obscure South East Asian country whose local mechanics' most marketable skill is fitting dustbin size exhaust mufflers on horrible looking Protons and tiny Peroduas and creating cheap imitation fibre glass body kits, and then expect to produce results by virtue of some billion dollar investment into fancy equipment and technology. A F1 car will go through many different design changes throughout the season, especially the aero bits, exhaust and suspension. After each race engineers will review telemetry data collected and constantly fine tune the individual bits to shave off a milisecond here and another milisecond there off the lap time. Sometimes the deadline is so tight that engineers work round the clock and have the final part flown to the actual race location via express courier services, on the actual race day. DHL and FedEx's involvement in F1 is not just mere sponsorship, they actually fly out real F1 car parts from the factory to the race track!

Watch the video below to understand what is required of an F1 HQ.


Now think about it - where are these people who do these high-end jobs going to come from? This has nothing to do about inferiority complex, it's about leveraging on your own comparative advantage and realise what you can't / not ready to do yet. How about doing the basic boring bits like designing cars that people want to buy and will last 500,000km before we start talking about these space-age stuff?

Who are we kidding to think that we can produce winning cars out of some obscure country in South East Asia? The government likes to compare the efforts of Force India. But even Force India operates out of Northamsphire. Japan's Honda F1 (before Ross Brawn purchased it) used to operate out of Leafield and Northamptonshire. Toyota F1 too was not based in Japan but in Cologne, Germany. In fact one of the explanation by F1 analysts regarding the poor performance of Toyota F1 is due to its location in Germany, which is further away from the expert contractors in UK.

Like all this regarding the development of this country - there is just no clear direction. We already have a team racing in A1 GP. What's the objective of this new effort? To promote Lotus and Proton? Which respectable car industry executive actually believe in the old adage of race on Sunday sell on Monday anymore? It's rubbish in this time and age. Toyota, Honda and BMW killed their F1 programmes amidst falling vehicle sales and rising cost of F1 involvement. I highly doubt you can quantify if this has affected their brand any single bit. Porsche is no longer involved in any international level motorsport events as a works team (it's last appearance as a works team was with the 1999 year 911 GT1 Le Mans car), other than a regional GT3 Cup one-make series. Ferrari is still in F1 due to historical reasons. Has Porsche suffered any bit due to the lack of motorsports involvement? Not a single bit.


Hyundai-Kia is one of the fastest rising brand at the moment, and they have almost zero involvement in top-end motor racing. They are not even involved in WRC anymore. Take a simple lesson from the Koreans - they raised their brand profile by keeping in touch with their customers but not in a way that has anything to do with their vehicle's performance (which is nothing great); they sponsored World Cup! It's a lot cheaper than F1 and makes a lot more sense. Best of all, you won't embarrass yourself no matter which team win or lose. What good does being involved in F1 do if you are going to be last of the pack everytime, which 1Malaysia team surely will. I have the highest respect for the Lotus boys at Norfolk. But they have not raced in F1 for decades and I don't think they did any consultancy for F1 projects throughout those in between years. Toyota, with its mega budget (largest on the grid) failed to produce any significant results and made itself a target of jokes and further reinforced the negative perception that Toyota are rubbish at racing and sports cars. Is some misguided "Malaysia Boleh" mantra going to be used to coax the people into believing Lotus or Proton can manage a racing team better than Toyota? Killing the Toyota F1 team is not a difficult decision. It was one of the first few things Akio Toyoda did when he came on-board.

Toyota thought that armed with its mega budget and its often touted "Toyota Way," Kaizen philosophies and applying elements of its Toyota Production System into F1 it could succeed. How wrong they were. Toyota learned the hard way that throwing money in F1 does not necessarily bring results, though you still need mega budget to deliver results. What works on a mass production car plant does not necessarily work in F1. The top teams are where they are today because of their decades of experience, the quality of their people and their passion. They are run by people who eat, drink and sleep F1. Hiring Mike Gascoyne alone will not make much of a difference if he can't put together a winning team. By the way, Force India was not created overnight. Kingfisher airline's boss Vijay Mallya bought over the former (shortlived) Spyker F1 team, which was previously known as Midlands F1, and before that Jordan F1, whose history can be traced back to the 1980s. It was simply a rebranding exercise and the people who worked there are highly experienced in F1.


And we are to expect a Lotus led effort will raise the profile of Malaysia and Proton? Of course everyone in the cabinet knows the answer. But remember my earlier paragraph - sports as a political tool....