JANUARY 30, 2004

Money will come says Faure

Renault F1 boss Patrick Faure said at the Renault launch yesterday that all the teams will be receiving a $10m payout once the deal is down between the Formula One group and the car manufacturers. The money will come from a fund which was frozen for some years as part of the Formula One Eurobond issue.

But although $10m sounds like a lot of money, many of the teams will be wondering if that is all that they can hope to get as a result of the deal. At the moment none of the team owners seem to know the details of the supposed deal between the two players and it is esssential that they find out as not all of them will necessarily be in agreement with the terms being negotiated. Some were hoping for a bigger initial payout and then a substantial increase in the annual returns from Formula One Management.

The other question to which the teams would like to know the answer is when they will be receiving the money. This is something that no-one seems able to answer because the details of the memorandum of understanding announced before Christmas have yet to be hammered out. The various parties said that there would be a press conference to reveal all in January and, inevitably, that never happened.

The devil in this particular deal was always going to be the detail and that seems to be the case at the moment.