FEBRUARY 3, 2005

Monteiro and Karthekiyan to be confirmed today

The new Midland-Jordan Formula 1 will announce this afternoon that it has signed contracts with India's Narain Karthikeyan and Portugal's Tiago Monteiro. The news means that the team will go into the new season without either driver having any racing experience in Formula 1, which would appear to be a fairly dangerous thing to do. It is, however, not unusual for F1 newcomers to underestimate the difficulty of being competitive in Formula 1 and the need to have people who know what they are doing. It is a pattern which has been repeated many times in the history of the sport and it can be very dangerous for small teams which do not have the money to dig themselves out of trouble at a later date. In recent years we have seen the same concept with Toyota and British American Racing.

However, the good news about the announcement is that Formula 1 will have more of a representation in India and Monteiro will add interest in Portugal and Latin America.

Both Karthikeyan and Monteiro are men who are well-known to the new team boss Trevor Carlin, having driven for his Carlin Motorsport in the junior formulae. Karthikeyan won Carlin's first Formula 3 driver in 1997 and went on to win the team's first F3 race in 1999. This paved the way for the successes that were to follow for the team with Takuma Sato, Anthony Davidson and Alan Van de Merwe. The team has also won races with Michael Keohane, James Courtney,

Shinya Hosokawa, Jamie Green, Clivio Piccione and Danilo Dirani. Karthikeyan also went on to race for Carlin in the Nissan World Series.

Monteiro came out of French Formula 3 and was briefly in Formula 3000 in 2002 before joining Carlin in the Nissan World Series after an abortive Champ Car career.