In Memory Of...Phoenix F1

Goodbye Prost, hello farce. It's been a staple plot device for feel-good Hollywood movies throughout history. Take a rather dowdy, unpopular and put-upon character, usually female, and then perform a miraculous transformation ready for the film's climactic summer prom scene. It may not be very believable, or indeed particularly inspiring, seeing as it usually involves an actress spending the whole film dressing down before returning to her usual improbable self, rather than an actual makeover as such, but it makes you feel good, man.

And what works well on middling, porcelain-faced American actresses often works just as well in F1, as you'd expect from this sort of hackneyed analogy. In today's hugely competitive times, when new teams rarely have the startup capital to begin an F1 project from first principles, the de rigueur method of getting onto the grid has been to buy out an existing team and just paint everything a different colour. So Stewart became Jaguar, then Jaguar became Red Bull, Minardi became Toro Rosso, Sauber became BMW(Sauber) and Jordan became whichever team fancied buying them for a year.

But in 2002, the process went wrong. After Prost, themselves coming from a buyout and re-branding of the Ligier team, had finally and inexorably slid into bankrupcy, the potential for a cheap ticket to F1 opened up for prospective teams. Despite an effort to buy up the assets by Minardi's Paul Stoddart, who assumed that running any chassis would end up being more competitive than whichever heap his team were planning to throw together for the coming season, a mysterious consortium called Phoenix Finance, headed by British businessman Charles Nickerson and with backing from Arrows boss Tom Walkinshaw, won the assets of the insolvent team, and immediately announced their plans to enter F1 in Prost's old entry slot. Details of the team's plans for the new season were so thin on the ground that the BBC somewhat hilariously ran a story denying rumours that Skoda were behind the bid.

Losing bidder Stoddart was typically magnanimous about the whole situation, saying that: "If they do appear in F1 this season, it will only be after I've lost court actions and injunctions against them." But he need not have worried too much about losing his hallowed turf on the back row. Phoenix F1 would never enter a Formula One race.

Slowly, Phoenix F1's ludicrous plan became public. They were planning to enter the championship using Prost's 2001 chassis design, some engines from Brian Hart's company that were last run in 1998 by Arrows, and, as an extra show of determination to be the slowest F1 cars ever recorded in history, their driver lineup was to be the awe-inspiring duo of Gaston Mazzacane and Tarso Marques. All things considered, it was a plan that made Super Aguri's brief and tragi-comic stay in F1 look halfway professional.

In the end, the sticking point was, as is F1's way, a legal issue. While Phoenix had bought Prost's assets for a knock-down price of 2.2 million Euros, a steal up there with finding an Arrested Development box set in the bargain bin of a closing-down sale for a fiver, it didn't include the Prost name in it's list of assets, meaning that in the eyes of the FIA it was a completely new team and therefore was required to pay the $48 million entry fee to the governing body in order to be allowed to race. Bernie Ecclestone, grouch-master extraordinaire, noted of Nickerson at the time that: "He has bought nothing in Formula One. All he has bought is some show-off cars." Notwithstanding the fact that it would have been quite difficult to show off with a 2001 Prost (unless you're Luciano Burti), Phoenix tried to counter the wallet-sagging invoice from the FIA by claiming they had bought Prost's spot on the entry list as well as the chassis and the coffee machine, but Bernie was having none of it. Team entries could not be bought and sold, was the final say on that front.

Unabashed by the ongoing efforts to close the door to the pit lane in their faces, Phoenix travelled to Sepang for the second race of the year, having missed the opening round in Melbourne, a move which saw them add a $500,000 FIA fine to their already overly-large tab. Adding a touch more farce to the tale, the team attempted to sidestep the fine by submitting a pair of Prost nosecones to the Melbourne scrutineers, which were promptly rejected as proof that the team had "entered" the race weekend.

Surprisingly, in a sport so beset by overexposure, photographers and the like, what happened next remains something of an old wives' tale. Reports at the time said that "because Phoenix were not included in the official FOM cargo, the team had been simply held up in customs at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and therefore missed pre-race FIA scrutineering", a fact that was obvious, no Phoenix cars were ever seen at the track. The report from the airport seemed to confirm that the cars did at least exist, although apparently: "The cars present at Kuala Lumpur Airport appeared to the AP04 cars with a rear end from the Arrows AX3 three-seater". If they had been allowed in, they could have made history by running the first ever cut-and-shut F1 car.

While the odd driver and engineer supposedly linked with the Phoenix effort were spotted wandering around the pit lane, presumably because the team hadn't actually been allocated any garages in the pits, nothing else was seen of the effort, and the FIA finally put their foot down on the whole shambolic affair, releasing a statement that was the equivalent of an awkward chat with the weird guy at work to let him know he's not invited to your party at the weekend: "The FIA has...informed Phoenix and Mr. Nickerson that they are not entered in the 2002 FIA Formula One World Championship and that it cannot allow them to participate in Malaysia, even on a provisional basis."

Hilariously, Phoenix were still not beaten, taking the FIA to court over the whole mess even after it was revealed that the team had not completed a lap of testing, and had not even made plans for their car to undergo the mandatory crash tests. Eventually, the courts ruled in favour of the FIA, and Phoenix's long and incredible story was over, without ever turning a wheel. The Phoenix consortium was even handed an unprecedented ban on ever getting a license to run an F1 team in the future.

Scurrilous rumours later emerged that the whole effort had been a hideously contrived attempt to make a token effort for a few races before merging the team with Walkinshaw's Arrows squad and pocketing Prost's share of the TV money. In the end though, if that was the idea, it never really got off the ground. Perhaps Walkinshaw had good reason for trying something like that as well, his own team vanished from the grid in mid-season under a mountain of debt.

So yes, Phoenix F1. That is where their story ends. Not quite a fairytale F1 tale, more the sort of tawdry fable that is only really possible with the help of at least two bottles of really cheap gin. Which, in a funny sort of way, usually makes for a better story.

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