THE FLAMES DIE OUT! The Story of the Phoenix Finance Takeover of Prost GP (2002)
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- Ah, Phoenix Finance, one of those entities that show up, make some noise, and then disappear. They tried to take over the Prost team after it folded at the end of 2001. But they wouldn't take no from the FIA for an answer. And no wonder, when you see who they were associated with: F1's real life Del Boy.
But anyway, one of those mysterious stories so mysterious, most of it comes from the GP Rejects site, which is probably the best source for the full story, so thanks to them for putting it all together, as I learned a lot putting this together.
Enjoy! And remember to like and subscribe for more!
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From out in left field, Tarso Marques is actually going to run several NASCAR Cup races!
I saw that today. It is with a race team that has run one race in the last five years. It has to be pay driver arrangement with Marques bringing Brazilian money to the team.
@@williamford9564 it also has a crypto sponsor 🤔
@@mrterp04 Who almost certainly was bought in by Marques.
WTF?
That’s all well and good, but where’s Narain Karthikeyan? 😤
Walkinshaw and Briatore....if it wasn't for F1/motorsport, the amount of times they'd be done for fraud would be unparalleled. Briatore got a head start there too!
When I looked up Briatore's wiki CV, I was amazed that people actually employed him after ~1990.
Regarding Prost GP's final months, there an article in Unraced F1 where a potential deal with prince Khaled Al-Waleed was in place and it was almost a done deal. But then, something, something 9/11 happened and then the whole economy went into tailspin. Prost went on to blame the attacks on the World Trade Center for the deal falling apart, but in reality it was himself that was mostly to blame. Rumour has it that Altadis (owner of the Gitanes and Gauloises brands, acquired by Imperial Tobacco in 2008) and Renault were willing to come back as long as Prost wasn't involved, but Prost refused to budge. The negotiations (on top of the dealings with Diniz) dragged on and by November everthing fell apart.
Speaking of Frentzen - he was sacked by Eddie Jordan after disagreements between the two over the team's direction. Later it was reavealed that EJ hired Takuma Sato for the 2002 season in order to keep the supply of Honda engines for 2002. But after the conclusion of the 2002 season Honda pulled out their support anyway, redirecting all resources to BAR (despite Jordan finishing 6th and BAR 8th in the constructors' standings) while also taking Sato with them.
I remember around that time Tom had issues with the Holden Racing Team. He said to the press that he had not been in Australia recently as there were no problems with HRT, or financing or anything like that ... except I saw him in the airport in Australia lol. He was walking out of the business lounge with a suit on. I considered going and talking to him to ask him what was up with this teams, but decided against it in case he was sick of people talking to him.
Speaking of the old Phoenix street course, I’d love to see you do a short storytime vid on how the US went without a GP for over a decade in the 90s, and how they got the deal together to run Indy (which you touched on earlier)
Prost should have kept the Ligier name due to marketing and legacy purposes.
He had so much pride he wouldn´t sell his own team when bankruptcy was imminent and lost tons of jobs in the process for his employees, do you really think he would have kept the Ligier name? (although I would have loved it)
I always thought Walkinshaw came up with a scam where they'd use the old Prost cars (or papier mache ones), the Prost entry, some old, worthless ex-Arrows engines he had hanging around and for £2m plus £2m from Phoenix, turn up at race 1, bank the £12m constructors prize money, declare bankruptcy and everyone walks away 4m quid up.
I'd give up a testicle just to see an actual picture of the Phoenix-Hart cars as they appeared in Sepang. (And yes I've seen the renderings of the Repsol livery and the AP05 in the wind tunnel) and at least a wad-o-pubes just to see a Team Logo or crew shirt!
Also, I thought the cars were impounded by the Malaysian customs agency and not by the FIA.
DART changed their name back to Phoenix just days after it was changed to DART too.
And a DART is just a little Arrows too if you think about it! 😉
Marques and Mazzacane, that would’ve had to have been in the running for worst lineup ever. It really didn’t seem at all likely that Prost would take part that year, though I didn’t expect arrows’ mid season demise.
Exposure set to "Gloom", lighting set to "blinding" 🤣 Love you buddy.
Hello Aidan: I'm Australian living in Australia. I can remember when TWR was huge here. Thank you for making it clearer on what happened to them. Stay well and safe.
I love to history of old f1 teams and well just the history of F1 overall and this was something that I actually didn’t know thought Prost had just gone didn’t realise what happened behind the scenes also what happened to you on Spotify?
i remember that Burti Spa shunt. Honestly thought he was dead. The way Martin Brundle and Murray Walker kept imploring the Belgium director to *not* show replays of the crash until they knew more about Burti's condition.
i was wounded by Prost disappearance of 2002 because they did have one of the best looking cars of the 1990’s-2001, The same race Burti crashed is the same race Frentzen qualified 4th but stalled at the start so i double nut punch for prost that day
Ah yes, an (almost) remake of the Guy Ligier story. But more on Prost now. Which is a weird and effed up story in and of itself.
Also, fun fact: Burti was supposed to be Eddie's team mate in Jaguar for 2001. That is until Gaston Mazzacane got shown the door after Imola by Prost and replaced by Burti, himself replaced by the world's greatest test driver in Jaguar.
The moral of the story is it seems that it pays to be a friend of the Parti Socialiste back then as if Mitterand's got your back, everything's okay even if the car's a mess.
@@heliumtrophy Being buddy-buddy with Mitterand came with benefits for Ligier - a socialist in his own right. Ligier was also buddy-buddy with the people at the Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours - the reason why Magny-Cours was hosting the French GP from 1991 to 2008 (replacing Paul Ricard) was that Mitterand poured millions of French Francs not only to redevelop the track, but to also build Ligier's new factory nearby
You are the best! As an American I love learning about all these bits of racing history that we don't hear much about in the States.
Can you talk about when Minardi turned into Toro Rosso then AlphaTauri as they are now please?
Not really much to tell, tbh:
- Minardi couldn't afford to develop new engines for the 2006 2.4L V8 rules.
- Paul Stoddart therefore wanted to sell the team to a company that could help the team progress, but without moving from Faenza. Red Bull came along and said they could do that.
- In 2020, Red Bull decided to rename the team to Alpha Tauri as a marketing exercise for promoting their Alpha Tauri clothing line.
Tarso Marques, the only driver who’s name wasn’t mentioned in the Formula One 2001 game by Studio Liverpool.
Ah Tomas Enge the guy who handed Bourdais the 2002 F3000 title due to a...actually I don't know wtf was going on with all that. Point is. He failed a drug test. That much is fact.
There's so much weird shit around it I feel like it'd make a good episode all on its own. The fact Enge was one of the Prost drivers in Grand Prix 4 says a lot, really.
EDIT: Oh, and...Enge had a wild career after that, IIRC. Something something US sportscars, something something controversy.
Story Suggestion: The Dubai F1 Team from the Mid 2000s
Love stories from this time. New enough to have me following F1 on a regular basis, but old enough not to now everything about it since we didn’t use the internet on a daily basis back then.
I thought the Phenix of Formula 1 that comes to people's mind was Lauda, not Grojean.
0:50 the most French thing to ever exist. Prost, Gauloises, Canal+, Peugeot, Alcatel, BiC, Total and Olivier Panis in a single car. 😂
We need an Arrows Verstappen video Aiden 👍
Hmmm team mate to boss seems like the thing to do in NASCAR these days.
Well in NASCAR usually it's reversed. In trucks u might get someone like Kyle Busch as your boss and if your good enough you'll end up at teammates on the cup team! That's exactly what happened to both Erik Jones and Christopher Bell.
I love the " It is I LeClair " reference. It fits the topic at hand. It's funny because everyone always knew that it was him. Great show I was surprised at It's reference it goes so far back. Just Saying
Luciano Burti's accident really scared me back in the day. He has a picture on his Instagram of his wrecked helmet from that day
More to this story than I thought. I was only 15 at the time and only had F1 Racing magazine and the ITVF1 website to go on, but the most I understood was that there was a consortium, it had 'bought' Prost and the FIA said 'hahaha, no.' I did not know about the rules about buying the entry at that point, and didn't understand how they could have turned up at Sepang, but still not have an entry according to the FIA. I also didn't know Walkinshaw was involved, he was in charge of Arrows, and that was the limit of my knowledge. Using the '98 tech is like what Super Aguri did in '06 with the Arrows chassis, except Super Aguri actually got onto the grid.
I'm also amused at it being renamed DART, another thing I didn't know. RTE's commentators would not have taken that seriously, and neither would I. DART being the name of Dublin's electric train service, which has been in operation since 1984, and is a part of my childhood summer holidays. If it had been green instead of blue, the farce would have been complete. With the Hart engines, there would have been inevitable jokes about the car going about as fast as a DART. This phoenix's ashes were incinerated with its body, arf arf.
So i was thinking about this the other day you read my mind 😁
I loved the color of the prost cars
Alain and pride in the same sentence 😵💫
Imagine having so much pride that you wouldn´t sell your Bankrupt team and allow the jobs of all your employees go to waste :(
And the kinda humourous thing is, it was Walkinshaw (and Briatore) who sold the team to Prost in the first place.
Commenting before watching, I've been so waiting for this video. PLEASE let the sarcasm flow PLEASE, this was a farce of biblical proportions
Both parties basically kept pulling uno reverse cards on each other until one of them couldn't take it anymore, Prost in this case. Pretty interesting story all in all.
Aiden, can you possibly do a video on the 1994 Japanese GP? As an avid F1 fan of about 20 years, and a deep interest in history, I'm surprised that I never heard of a race decided by an aggregate race time (whatever that means). Would be a great topic!
Bring Back V10s podcast has a great episode on it. Although every episode is great tbh
I almost thought you were going to bring up the phoenix gp too with your list of phoenix’
Would love to know more about Mark Skaife & HRT.
Lovely to see Diefenbaker.
D E E F
Still lookin fukin good 😎
Pictured inept ownership does exist in f1 (both prost and tom walkenshore)
5:13 I like the dog.
Love it
Toms son turned a handy profit building HSV commodores (vauxhall r8, pontiac r8), still trading in Melbourne but the GM holden links are long dead now.
Kinda weird to say that Burti was "fine", when he had a concussion and facial bruising. That crash was one of the reasons HANS was made mandatory.
"fine" in that time meant "alive". Five years earlier he'd have been dead.
You should do a video on the end of arrows team pretty good story
great video as usual
People watching not from the UK or being too young, not getting the 'Allo 'Allo! reference 😂😂
Will you be doing a run down of testing and your thoughts of the season ahead afterward?
Thank god they were rejected by the FIA. A woefully under powered, out dated engines which wasn't even competitive in 1998/99 let alone 2002. Two very slow pay drivers and most likely a poor chassis and Areo. If they actually raced they would have been so far of the pace that they would have "matched" the performance of the Forti Course team in 1995
Look up “dodgy” in a dictionary and there’s a photo of Tom Walkinshaw on the same page
That’s obviously a Siberian husky crossed with a chihuahua🔥🏁✌️
I like the wolf 🙂
His name is Diefenbaker
Are you sure you and JAMES EARLY are not related
You both look like brothers
When he finishes the race, gets out of the car, and then lifts his helmet visor, does Charles LeClerc say "It is I, LeClerc"?
Skaife and HRT had an agreement with Holden Motorsport for favourable costings, then TWR bought Holden Motorsport and jacked up the price. Skaife had $3.6m in debt with walkinshaw and only paid 3.2m to buy HRT from holden in the first place.
I loved the livery on the Prost cars in ‘98 and ‘99. It’s too bad that the car was horrible performance wise.
I can't believe Haas didn't sign Grosjean ...
Because he’s tied to Indycar now…
Ah, another example of the best way to lose a small fortune - start with a big one!
I like your wolf-dog.
Walkinshaw = epic shenanigans
Nyyyom!
I am pretty sure Prost had zero financial investment in the team baring his name.
I am quite sure he was asked in an interview early in proceedings and basically said “do you think I am crazy”
All the money was from investment with him providing the expertise.
Alain Prost, a legendary race car driver, but man, what a lousy team.
Lesson: F1 teams are for racing, not buying and selling.
When I see pictures of the 2022 Williams I just think of the Prost cars
Aidan..change your font..it looks terrible..
First!
good riddance to Walkinshaw.
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