wat the fuck is Petronas throw 30mil to sponsor Merc GP, but not Lotus... why huh..?? wat the goddamn fucking thinking they got..??
Well let's see...
Merc GP has the following :-
2009 Driver's Championship Title
2009 Constructor's Championship Title
Michael Schumacher
Ross Brawn (who engineered all of MS's seven titles at Benetton and Ferrari)
Majority ownership and major manufacturer backing from Mercedes
The new 1Malaysia Lotus F1 has :-
No F1 titles to its name
No track-record
Tony Fernandes (marketing man, not a motorsport guy)
Paul Gascoiyne (lol !! How many times have this guy switched jobs in F1 ?)
Admitted they realistically will only be aiming for best of the new teams in their debut
Why would anyone want to spend good money by branding their product on a Proton rather than a Merc ?
---------- Post added at 12:44 PM ---------- 6 hour anti-bump limit - Previous post was at 12:05 PM ----------
The f1 lotus team not benefit to our automotif directly,but most of it goes to the TUNE GROUP marketing strategy..very brave and clever move from the intelegent CEO,indirectly to the tourism industry. This has a very long economic chain invlove since ppl come and go,technology transfer and so on,for the short term we wont get the full picture. Any how, no one expect that air asia doing superverbly at the begining but look at they now...i do belive and respect TF
decision to enter in this industry at the same time i confident that they know what they doing.
When people talk about F1 it has become fashionable to use terms like 'transfer of tech' but without really qualifying what the term actually encompass. Transferring what tech ? and to what industry and what applications ?
The engineering and technology aspects of F1 is more or less confined to the teams actually directly involved in building and running the cars. Outside of this, there is little applicability of F1 tech in the pure engineering sense to everyday applications. Some F1 tech has been carried over to other industries, particularly aviation, composites, etc, but these are mostly within specialized applications.
Patrick Head gave an interview back in 1993 during Alain Prost's Championship year in which he made it very clear that the primary concern of engineering in F1 is to make the cars go faster and if it happens that, by chance, some of these tech benefit road cars, then it's purely coincidence because F1 was never geared towards an objective of benefitting the local car industry.
By default, I think a lot of people expect significant improvement to road cars and to the local automative industry just because a nation is backing an F1 team. This is a misconception.
If you look at it historically, the most consistently successful F1 teams over the years had invariably been British or British-based and even today many major F1 teams are based in England (McLaren at Woking; Brawn at Brackley; Williams at Grove; Red Bull Racing at Milton Keynes, Renault (formerly Toleman) at Enstone etc, etc).
However, in spite of this successful heritage of racing at the pinnacle of motorsport, it cannot be said that the British automotive industry has had similar successes. For that matter, the British automotive industry as a whole is a non-event, abject failure. Most of the famous British brands you have heard of have either ceased as a business concern or bought out by foreigners...brands like Jaguar, Cooper, Rover, Leyland, Austin, etc.
There is little to no causal connection between success in F1 and success in the local automotive industry. People need to get this kind of simple-minded nonsense out of their heads.
As you said, for those entities who are non-motorsport but who invest in F1, the primary interest is more to do with branding and marketing, which is what folks like Air Asia is doing. Invariably you get to nurture local talents in racecraft and engineering but at the end of the day the applicability of these skills will be confined to the specialized arenas of motorsport and certain industrial applications.
It definitely won't translate to a significant, quantifiable improvement to road cars.
Closer to home, Proton have had Lotus for a long time, but it does not mean our Proton cars have become cutting edge. Lotus itself was never a company renowned for building four door road cars. Historically, there has never been a sedan road car in the Lotus lineup. They serve a niche market catering for sportcars enthusiasts. If you ever sat in a Lotus car, invariably it's a vehicle built primarily for performance rather than pragmatic family comfort.
