When Ford bought Stewart GP and launched Jaguar Racing five years ago, the Dearborn company heralded their new adventure with extravagant promises and fine speeches. Now the cat is leaping out of Formula One, and their legacy remains that of a failure on the part of Ford to understand the true nature of the sport. Atlas F1's Roger Horton reflects on a plan gone wrong, and explains why Jaguar could still leave a positive mark on F1

When Jaguar launched their F1 adventure just under five years ago it was accompanied by fine speeches, extravagant promises and the claim that soon the legendary leaping cat would be clawing its way past glamour teams such as Ferrari and Mercedes. Yet when the Ford’s Dearborn bean counters finally put the crawling feline out of its misery, the news was buried deep in the press release’s fine print, just thirteen words that ended the dreams of thousands and rocked the already unsteady world of Formula One to its foundations.

Just hours earlier, Jaguar’s own press release had announced that their ‘Brand’ would withdraw from Formula One at the end of 2004. The team, the cars and facilities with all the thousands of hours of sweat and human sacrifice reduce to a mere brand, just another commodity to be tossed aside when it had outlived its usefulness like last year’s line of hipsters.

In a final irony, the news from Jaguar was transmitted under the headline, “Plan announced to put Jaguar back on track.” Once again a media department that was so often out of sync with the realities of Formula One carried the wrong message although few can bring themselves to care much anymore.

The gloom was deepened once it was realised that Ford’s decision to “exit all its racing activities” included Jaguar’s engine supplier Cosworth, who also, of course, currently power both Jordan and Minardi.

The brutal fact that now faces the sport of Formula One is that the hard men of Ford decided they were no longer prepared to spend the dollars to keep Jaguar alive. Paddock sources at Monza indicated that the team had found additional funding that would allow them to continue with the current level of support from its parent companies. The head office suits, mindful perhaps that they were also closing factories and announcing layoffs, decided that the Ford Motor Company, the world’s third largest automaker, now considered spending almost anything on its racing team to be too much, and so pulled the plug.

A good case can be made that the team itself brought about its own demise. At times, watching the team operate on track was almost comical. In Melbourne, at the opening race of the 2002 season, Eddie Irvine and Pedro de la Rosa qualified nineteenth and twentieth after just about everything that could have gone wrong did, and the team realised that it was going to have to race a totally dud car for an entire season for reasons that could have been foreseen. Such was the length and intensity of the subsequent debrief that a scheduled media briefing was cancelled because all the principals were heavily engaged in the trench warfare that was so much part of the Jaguar outfit of that era.

Constant corporate interference and plain bad management by Ford, especially in the team’s formative years, are the reasons why the Jaguar racing programme was such a fiasco. The Dearborn managers never succeeded in finding the right man to run to the show and then give him the backing to get the job done. In future years, the Ford/Jaguar misadventure will become the classic case study of how not to run a serious racing programme. From its earliest days the Stewart-Ford team was under-funded and over sold, its one lucky win seized on by the ill informed ‘Brand Managers’ as evidence that they had a winning team on their hands and glory beckoned.

More recently the team has at least achieved a respectability of sorts and one can only lament that the current management team was not in place at the start, but Ford was never really prepared to match the sort investment that its other GPWC partners spend every season to support their efforts. Norbert Haug, Mercedes-Benz’s top racing man, recently confirmed that his company along with their four GPWC partners (Ford, Renault, BMW and Ferrari) are spending over a Billion dollars annually on their F1 engine programmes.

Whatever Ford was spending, it obviously wasn’t enough, and a case can be made that the sport’s inability to control its costs and increase the revenue stream to the participants, strengthened the hands of those wanting to end the programme. If you are spending X and your car is at best a mid field contender, it is hard to convince a non believer that spending 2 times X will make any difference. It must have also been painfully obvious to the decision makers in Dearborn that talk of any serious cost cutting was just that – talk.

Perhaps now the shock of Jaguar’s withdrawal will at last concentrate the minds of the power brokers to finally address some of Formula One’s core problems. Pretty soon F1’s commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone is going to have to realise that he can no longer lay claim to such a large share of Formula One’s still considerable revenue stream. At the end of the day even 100 percent of nothing is still nothing, which could be all he is left with should the carmakers make good on their threat and actually go ahead with their breakaway series.

A worst case short term scenario is that Cosworth’s new owner, assuming that one is found, decides not to continue to build Formula One engines. A 14 car grid would put Ecclestone in breach of his contractual obligations which require a minimum 16 cars on the grid to satisfy his TV contracts. Should this eventuate, Formula One will have effectively morphed into GPWC in all but name, leaving Sauber as the only remaining ‘independent’ team, because even though the remaining manufacturers Toyota and Honda are not officially members of the carmakers' cartel, they share identical interests. Given the ramifications of such an outcome to all the current stakeholders, there will be real pressure to ensure both Jordan and Minardi are provided with engines to allow them survival in some form.

So the most pressing question now is: can Jaguar as a going concern be saved and if so by whom? Although various names and entities have been bandied about there is no obvious White Knight on the horizon clearly riding to the rescue. And time is everybody’s enemy, because next year’s car is taking shape around the structural requirements of next season’s Cosworth engine, which may or may not be available. Given that the lead time to build the new car is a minimum of five months and it will have to be ready sometime in February 2005, then the deadline to find a buyer is within weeks, not months. And of course, the engine specifications for next season are still not confirmed, confusing the picture still further.

The withdrawal of Jaguar also finally, and probably for ever, heralds the end of what might be termed the franchise era. An era that started in the mid nineties and saw fortunes created as the value of the best privately held teams increased as the motor giants manoeuvred to join the F1 circus. Now the circus has left town and even as it arrives in the great Promised Land that is the Chinese market, there remain fundamental question marks over its long term future.

Jaguar entered Formula One with a bang, promised much and delivered almost nothing that will be remembered on the track. Perhaps by its leaving, a touch of real world reality will finally penetrate the artificial world that exists inside the F1 paddock long enough to enable the long overdue package of rule changes that will cut costs, increase revenue to those that incur those costs, and improve the show for its long suffering fan base.

If they can achieve that, then it might finally be said that Jaguar left its mark on Formula One even if it had to leave the sport to do it.

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