Apparently we were off a little in our expectations on just how much interest in the Brackley based F1 teams fire sale there would be. Outside of Andy looking to buy the team for 30 Pounds, apparently there have been as many as 30 potential groups with a list, having been narrowed by Fry and the 8-ball, are now being culled even further to arrive at the right group.
Nick said he was reticent about it but it seems that things are looking better for BBF1. Speaking at the Autosport show:
“It’s looking very positive at the moment. We had, as you might expect, a huge amount of interest at the start – probably well in excess of 30 groups came to us.
“We have narrowed that down to something in the region of a dozen, and we’re currently talking to Honda about what is the best bet for the future.”
“Right at the start of this process Bernie Ecclestone said that he was 100 percent confident that we’d be on the grid in Melbourne, and I have to say that I wasn’t quite so sure where his confidence came from.
“But as we’ve gone through this process, my confidence based on what we’ve seen has increased – maybe not to 100 percent, but it’s pretty close. And it has been very gratifying.
“We are in a very unusual situation at the moment. This is not a situation like some of the smaller teams that have fallen by the wayside, which frankly had an entry on the grid but did not have much in the way of technology, or in the way of engineering substance.
“The one thing that we have benefited from, to a level which is difficult to exaggerate, is the amount of money, effort and skill that Honda have put into this.
“We’ve got a team that have benefited from 75 million pounds worth of capital investment in the last three years.
“They have probably got some of the best automotive and other technology in the country, if not the world, and it has got an immensely highly-skilled technical staff, obviously led by Ross [Brawn]. So there is a huge amount going for it.”
