At the back of the ING Renault Formula One garage at every race is a glass-fronted booth like the producer’s cubicle in a recording studio. A small number of invited guests is placed in this hothouse to observe the workings of the race team.
A member of the team’s office staff conducts you through a maze of cabling and stacks of tyres. You are ushered into a seat facing banks of screens, some of which are full of running data, covering the lap-times of all the cars on the circuit, while others are television screens that carry pictures of the action on the track. You then put on a heavy headset through which you can listen to radio exchanges between the drivers and the team managers.
A blitz of sensations immediately assaults you. Wallops of noise, smell, colour, anxiety and a dense mass of bewildering information collide. When first the mechanics fire up the engines in the confined space of the team garage, the shattering scream howling up to 19,000rpm comes as a physical blow, like being on the safe side of an artillery barrage. The machine-gun chatter of the hydraulic wheel guns as the mechanics tighten the wheel nuts, the brilliance of the paint on the cars, the clashing insignia on the overalls of the drivers and mechanics, the pungent reek of the hot engines, tyres and oil, the procession of multi-coloured figures on the screens, the impenetrable language that buzzes in the static between the team and the drivers on the headphones – all this whirls together so intensely that, at the end of a session, as you remove the headset and stagger out of the booth, you may find yourself half-blind, half-deaf and reaching out for the walls to try to get your balance back.
Some such state of disorientation is a frequent sensation during a close encounter with F1. This tiny endeavour, which directly involves just 22 cars and their drivers, is one of the more perplexing activities on earth. The amounts of money involved are stupefying. The level of technological refinement behind the cars is stratospheric.
The sum total of the cost of the components in each F1 car is about $1.25m. Each engine lasts only for two race weekends. Then it is scrapped. Each team will get through 22 engines in a season and the total expenditure for each of the teams that develops its own engines will have been more than $100m.
According to figures compiled by F1 Racing magazine and generally accepted throughout the trade as reliable, the total spent by the 10 teams that were racing in F1 in 2005 was $2,808,480,000 – a sum roughly equivalent to about 25 big Hollywood movies or the entire gross domestic product of the Kingdom of Bhutan. The drivers’ earnings make Chelsea footballers look like paupers. Lewis Hamilton, the young British driver who has turned the world of F1 upside down this season, might not merely win the World Championship in his first year, he could also earn $50m.
F1 evidently operates on the Parkinsonian principle that the more they earn, the more they spend and, therefore, the more they need to earn. Bob Bell, ING Renault’s technical director – a trim, bright-eyed man of 49 – expresses the law directly: “It’s an expensive undertaking because it has the power to generate large sums of money [ING Renault F1 is said to have spent $287.56m in 2005. By the same reckoning, Toyota – the team that has never won a grand prix – spent $494.55m]. We don’t stick it in our back pocket and say, ‘Let’s keep that for our retirement.’ Within the team itself, the prime objective is not to make money but to win the championship. If you give me money, I will spend it on something to make the cars go faster.”
A weekend in the company of an F1 team thus includes many moments when you might be mentally reaching out for support to stabilise your intellectual and moral balance. One such moment for me came in conversation with Bell when he told me that the team now runs its own wind tunnel, with three shifts of technicians, every hour of every day, every day of the year. I estimate that it costs about $10m a year or more to run. Renault is modest in this outlay, however. Some teams run two wind tunnels.
Another such moment arrived when, on the first morning of practice at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix, Bradley Lord, senior press officer of the team, declared: “Our drivers, Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen, are not really racing today against Lewis Hamilton or Kimi Räikkönen. The McLarens and the Ferraris are clearly the class of the field this year. While we enter every race in the hope that we might win, our most realistic ambition in this race must be to beat our closest rivals, who are BMW.” Indeed, the race was won by Ferrari’s Räikkönen ahead of McLaren’s top two drivers.
This, however, is overwhelmingly Hamilton’s year and all other drivers and teams in the F1 circus must operate in his shadow. Whenever he appeared in the paddock at Silverstone, scrums of cameramen and photographers would form around him, all running in a frantic back-pedalling pack, trying to get a telling image as he walked from his McLaren team motorhome to the garage.
Meanwhile, other drivers such as ING Renault’s own Fisichella and Kovalainen make their way unnoticed and disregarded between the garage and their team’s sumptuous motorhome with its full-service restaurant. Slight, slender, boyish figures in their team caps and jackets, blue jeans and trainers, they might easily be mistaken for fans, except for the dazzlingly expensive watches on their wrists. How many people know the names of these drivers? How many people are interested in the Renault team in a season when it has been relegated to fourth position in the constructors’ (or teams’) championship, having been number one last year and the year before when Fernando Alonso won the World Championship, driving for Renault before he joined McLaren? How many people, for that matter, know the name of ING, the team’s principal sponsor?
The Internationale Nederlanden Groep may be the 10th-largest company in the world (according to the 2007 Forbes Global 2000) with 60m clients in 50 countries and a workforce of more than 115,000, but it is clear that the company’s identity is a mystery to many. Including, as he admits, Flavio Briatore, the managing director of Renault’s F1 team. Notorious as the former boyfriend of the models Heidi Klum and Naomi Campbell and allegedly the second most powerful man in F1 after Bernie Ecclestone, Briatore says: “I myself had never even heard of ING before they became our sponsors.”
In sponsoring Renault, it is evidently ING’s purpose to repair that deficiency. ING’s logo is plastered all over the team, not just on the cars and the drivers’ overalls and helmets but on every surface that can bear the letters ING and its corporate lion. ING is printed on every item of stationery, even down to the label on the little canisters of foam earplugs that the team gives out to its guests at the circuit. It is sewn on the blouses of the women in the motorhome who serve the meals and on the backsides of the mechanics. You would not be entirely surprised to find ING-embossed paper in the lavatories.
Those letters are hugely prominent on the car itself, where they dominate the entire cowling behind the driver’s headrest. In this position, however, they look like the suffix of a word that ends in -ING, as if another section of bodywork further forward has been removed which might have borne the beginning of a word (such as RAC).
If, however, the world has been ignorant of ING, it is no less true that, until recently, ING was in a state of absolute ignorance about the world of F1. Just four months ago, as he flew to Melbourne to attend the Australian Grand Prix – the first in this year’s F1 calendar – Hans van der Noorda, a member of the executive board of the ING Group, immersed himself in a detailed study of Formula One Racing for Dummies. The studious and serious-looking 46 year-old – chairman of the insurance and investment management division of ING for Asia/Pacific – felt that the moment had arrived when he ought to find out something about the sport.
Some might be surprised that he had left this initiation so long. During the winter of 2006/7, van der Noorda had been instrumental in agreeing to hand over something like a quarter of a billion dollars of the bank’s money to the Renault Formula One team – which was, at that time, the World Championship-winning team both for drivers and constructors. When ING agreed to sponsor Renault F1 – at a total cost that they decline to disclose but that is estimated to be worth about $80m a year, over three years, and that they acknowledge to have been “a lot of money” – it might easily have been the first big sponsor whose senior executives were not rushing to fritter the company’s money on a pet boondoggle.
Hans van der Noorda says: “In the board, there were no F1 fanatics, which is good because then you view the facts dispassionately. You see a lot of examples of sponsorship where the chairman has a hobby and then he tries to convert the whole company to support his whims, and that’s not what we did at all. We looked at the data dispassionately. We investigated carefully what our clients might think, our prospective clients, our employees, our shareholders, and we were pretty much surprised by the positive feedback we got from that research.
“We then had a very tough debate in the executive board before we decided. We had a lot of discussion there – looking at the pros and cons, asking ourselves, ‘Do we understand enough about this proposal? How does it fit our profile?’ And that took at least two months. The whole process of consideration took about six to nine months.”
The reason why ING was interested in F1 was because they were looking for a promotional vehicle to make their brand better known around the world. Van der Noorda explains: “We wanted to push the ING brand as a global brand because the size of our company was not well reflected in global brand awareness. Our previous sponsorship efforts had been largely local. We sponsored the New York Marathon, which is a great event but the coverage it gets is mostly local. We did a lot of homework looking at sponsorship in sports and culture. At the end of the day, if you really assess the quality of the opportunities, you see that F1 is the only global platform where you get global coverage in a very professional way and which also has a track record of success. It is expensive but the good thing is that you know you get the global coverage. The statistics tell you that it’s about 800m people you reach with F1.”
At this point in the discussion, a degree of caution might be in order. The case that van der Noorda and his colleagues saw as crystal-clear might – like much in F1 – appear to be more muddied if it is held up to the light. Take that figure of the “800m people you reach with F1”. The global television audience for F1 has been the subject of questionable claims for nearly 30 years, indeed ever since Bernie Ecclestone began to promote the sport as a worldwide business. It was often reported in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the worldwide audience for F1 races was 1.5bn. At that time, F1 was not seen in China, Russia, the Warsaw Pact countries, India, most of Africa, most of North America and most of South America.
Even today, no two spokesmen for F1 seem to agree on the numbers for the global TV audience. And even within the ING Renault organisation, conflicting accounts abound. Briatore says: “F1 is a big TV event. It’s like the Olympics or the football World Cup every two weeks, nine months of the year. [The audience is] 300m people around the world.”
The PR department of ING says: “Each race is watched by approximately 40m-50m viewers globally.” To reach van der Noorda’s figure of 800m, therefore, you would have to add up the total number of viewers for each race over the whole season.
Viewed in that light, the attractions of F1 don’t look so overwhelming. They are dwarfed by the official figures for the World Cup and the Olympics, which claim cumulative totals of billions of viewers.
Despite these contradictions and the lowly place in the current championship standings of its chosen team, ING is evidently pleased with its investment in Renault – even “super-pleased”, as Isabelle Conner, managing director of ING’s F1 programme put it. The super-elegant and formidably focused 42-year-old explains that ING’s media-tracking agencies have produced data showing that the ING logo – both on track-side billboards and on the drivers, cars and mechanics – appears most frequently in TV coverage of the races. It is even more visible, they claim (and they are eager to produce the graphs that demonstrate the case), than the Marlboro logo on the Ferraris and the Vodafone logo on McLaren-Mercedes.
Using focus groups and interviews with 16,000 people worldwide, ING has also systematically tracked the growth in awareness of their brand and logo in all the markets where F1 races have been held. It has found consistent advances both in recognition of the company name and in the willingness of members of the public to consider becoming an ING customer.
Conner says: “A podium position for a Renault driver would be the cherry on top but, right now, the sundae is fantastic. The fact that people actually go to the merchandising stalls and pay money for an ING Renault cap, that makes me feel really good. We get so much out of this sponsorship which has nothing to do with the on-track performance.”
Looking around the 80,000-plus crowd at Silverstone, you can see unquestionable evidence (a rare treasure in F1) that Conner is right. Great numbers of fans – about 95 per cent male, 97 per cent white – are obviously buying and wearing T-shirts and caps that sport the ING logo.
These people have shared a fanatical devotion to the Renault team for many decades (Renault is celebrating its 30th anniversary in F1 this year) and they also conspicuously share a faith that Briatore’s genius will guide the team to further world championships, if not this year, then soon. If that return to triumph should occur after the three-year period of ING’s present commitment expires, and if they then find themselves advertising another brand, those fans won’t care. They might hardly notice.
Flavio Briatore, playboy of the paddock
Wild in hair, tempestuous in temperament, flamboyant in his personal life, cunning, calculating, unpredictable and inspired – Flavio Briatore is one of the outstanding characters in a Formula One paddock packed thick with titanic egos. None of the other leading team principals – Ron Dennis of McLaren, Jean Todt of Ferrari, Frank Williams of Williams – is capable of outshining or outmanoeuvring Briatore. Yet, while they have been devoted to motor racing all their lives, Briatore had no connection with F1 until he was almost 40.
Born on 12 April 1950 in Verzuolo in the Italian Alps, Briatore comes from a family of primary school teachers. His first jobs were as a ski instructor and restaurant manager. He then opened a restaurant, which failed.
After working on the stock exchange in Milan in the late 1970s, Briatore met and befriended Luciano Benetton of the Benetton clothing family. He became director of the the group’s North American operations and was ultimately responsible for 800 stores. Under a franchising agreement, Briatore took a cut from each store, making him rich.
At the end of the 1980s, Luciano Benetton turned to Briatore to manage the Benetton F1 team. Despite his lack of experience in this highly-specialised domain, Briatore was astonishingly successful. He hired the tough and experienced Tom Walkinshaw and, together, they lured Michael Schumacher to join their team from Jordan. Briatore was astute enough to recognise Schumacher’s exceptional talent and built the entire Benetton team around the young German. Schumacher duly won his first World Drivers Championships for Benetton in 1994 and 1995 and the team itself won the World Constructors Championship in 1995. “The F1 team became more famous than the shops,” Briatore says.
After Schumacher left Benetton for Ferrari, the team’s fortunes waned and Briatore was fired in the late 1990s by Rocco Benetton, who took on managing the team himself. Rocco sold the team to Renault in 2000 and Briatore was re-established as managing director and team principal. He again proved his judgment in drivers by firing Jenson Button and replacing him with Fernando Alonso who had been, until then, the team’s test driver. Alonso and Renault duly won the world championships for driver and constructor in 2005 and 2006.
Briatore has had many glamorous girlfriends and had a daughter, Helene, with model Heidi Klum in 2004. He is now reported to be engaged to the 26-year-old Wonderbra model Elisabetta Gregoraci. He lives much of the time in Monaco on his 200ft yacht Force Blue.
