ALL THE GEAR, NO IDEA:
THE JAGUAR FIASCO
If Ford’s involvement in F1 with the DFV engine was a master class in timing, strategy and understanding, the blue oval’s next major association with grand prix racing would be a disaster class in maladministration, false entitlement and naked hubris.
Competing under the ‘Jaguar Racing’ banner between 2000 and 2004 would do little to hide the blue oval’s humiliation. A failure by Ford’s hierarchy in the USA to grasp the extent of the challenge and fully understand what was going on in F1 had caused the problem in the first place.
On paper, the deal for Ford to buy Stewart Grand Prix had seemed logical enough thanks to the persuasive and heartfelt words of a man held in the highest regard by those who mattered at Ford’s HQ in Michigan. Jackie Stewart’s three world championships with Tyrrell and Ford had been matched by the Scotsman’s eloquence as a global ambassador for the motor manufacturer. When Jackie and his son Paul entered F1 with their own team in 1997, Ford helped bankroll an operation that managed to avoid making a loss; an achievement as worthy as winning the 1999 European GP. It seemed to Ford that the hard yards had been covered and Stewart Grand Prix was ripe for purchase as a ready-made entry to F1. The rest, it figured, would be comparatively easy.
That was the prevailing attitude at the London launch of Jaguar Racing. The loudest of many warning bells was unintentionally sounded by Wolfgang Reitzle when the new team principal said in all seriousness that Jaguar would win a couple of races in the coming season and the championship 12 months later.
Jaguar scored four points in 2000 and established a regular place near the bottom of the table. Managers came and went, Reitzle replaced by Indy winner Bobby Rahal, who lasted less than a year after being embarrassed by his friend, Adrian Newey, agreeing to become technical director and then changing his mind.
Niki Lauda’s appointment as team principal had seemed logical enough but not even the Austrian’s knowledge and searing rationality could cut through the web of red tape emanating from Michigan. Forgetting, for a moment, the hopeless expectation of a competitive car emerging from a succession of technical directors, Lauda’s experiences would sum up the institutionalised methods being brought to bear on a team in need of free and fast thinking.
On Lauda’s first day at Jaguar, he had been presented with a copy of Ford’s ‘Compliance Rules’. “When I asked what this meant,” recalled Lauda, “the finance guy said whatever I did, it had to comply with these rules. When I asked for an example, he said: ‘Say you are in a hotel and you take a water with soda from the mini bar, you have to pay for it. But if you take one without soda, you don’t have to pay for it.’ I told him to keep the book. I would pay for everything with my own money. There would be
no expenses from me.
“When everything ended between me and Ford [December 2002], people came all the way over from America and asked to see my account. When the guys at Jaguar said there was no account for Niki Lauda, they said: ‘What do you mean? He must have expenses!’ Can you imagine: they came all that way to look for this bloody mineral water with soda! We had a very good race team in the end, but the people in charge, put there by Ford, had no idea.”