McLaren close to deal to sell cars to Richards

A cut-price Formula One team will save £150 million by not designing or making their own cars but by buying the same machines that propel Lewis Hamilton to victory.

McLaren Mercedes are said to be days away from signing a deal to supply cars and engines to a team being set up by David Richards, the former BAR Honda team principal and now head of the Aston Martin car company.

Formula One has become as much a contest between constructors as drivers with teams such as McLaren spending tens of millions of pounds designing sophisticated cars to beat rivals from Ferrari, Williams and Renault.

But Richards will enter the sport next year by a route that may anger traditionalists but which has been personally sanctioned by Max Mosley, president of the FIA, Formula One’s governing body. Mosley wants to slash the costs of entering a sport that, at the moment, demands entrepreneurs find as much as £100 million to design and build their own cars.

But Richards will simply buy complete cars from McLaren and then run them at Grand Prix events in direct competition with the same cars being driven by Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, his teammate.

While McLaren’s annual spending on research, development and manufacturing is thought to be more than £180 million a year, Richards’s as yet unnamed team will do the job for a fraction of the cost, thought to be about £30 million.

Richards said yesterday: “McLaren is one of three possible options for us, but they are closest. We will not be able to make an announcement until next month but talks are progressing very well and we will be on the Formula One grid in 2008.”

Sir Frank Williams, one of the longest serving team owners, is known to be opposed to teams racing so-called customer cars but Mosley points out that entrepreneurs such as him, who started more than 30 years ago, are now barred from entering F1 because of the prohibitive cost. Eddie Jordan was the last of the entrepreneur-owners to enter in 1991 and his place has been taken by car manufacturers and billion dollar conglomerates, including the Red Bull drinks operation.

Red Bull, with Honda, are already involved in supplying “junior” teams but on a downgraded scale: Super Aguri is using the Hondas driven in 2006 by Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, while Red Bull provides Scuderia Toro Rosso with variants of their machines.

But the McLaren deal would be the first full-blown supply of up-to-date cars to an independent rival, effectively creating a McLaren second team. Some sponsors who have been unable to join the McLaren roster this year are thought to be interested in switching to Richards’s operation.

It will be a masterstroke if Richards can pull off the McLaren contract. He proved to be one of Formula One’s cleverest strategists when he rescued Button from oblivion, placed him at BAR Honda and then propelled him to third place in the World Championship.

Richards left when Honda took over the operation but his own company, Prodrive, is one of the most successful in the motor industry, designing and manufacturing for some of the world’s biggest car companies. He also runs the World Championship-winning Subaru rally team and now heads the Aston Martin car company, which he took over this year backed by money from the Middle East.

Final legal issues are thought to stand in the way before McLaren can start supplying Richards. But those loopholes are expected to be cleared quickly and then the FIA will give the go-ahead for Richards to start his operation and become the twelfth team on the Formula One grid at the start of the 2008 season.

(Source: Timesonline.co.uk)