F1 Fanatic

Volkswagen Group’s Wolfgang Durheimer (Bentley chairman and chief executive but, more importantly, head of motorsport) has been talking to German weekly business magazine Wirtschafts Woche about the company’s prospects of entering F1.

Here’s the story in German and an automatic translation.

The translation of the article suggests VW could enter as an engine supplier as a precursor to taking over a team of its own, such as Toro Rosso.

Durheimer made similar remarks last year – but said a Volkswagen entry into F1 wouldn’t happen before 2018:

Volkswagen Group suggests F1 entry in 2018

Hm, looks as if the appetite at VW to go into F1 is growing again. But if they want to get in anytime soon, they would probably have to team up with someone like PURE to get VW or Porsche branded engines.

Would make sense to get in to STR. A team without any proper long time goal (apart from being a place where Red Bull can test drivers – which can be easily served differently) and an owner looking for a buyer. And VW has long standing good relations with Red Bull as well.

I’d be content about Porsche as an engine supplier, but somehow I’d dislike them as an dntire team. Auto Union would be more to my liking as a team but they don’t own that name anymore.
In general I feel more engine suppliers would be a good thing. It keeps costs down for the development (no aero) but if its a good engine it still provides good advertising (and some lose change as payments for providing the engines) and possibly some useful research results. Then again, there should be more room to differentiate, otherwise there isn’t much room to show your particular value without running a team.
As Rudi Völler said: Tear out a hair off your behind and you’ll have a tear in your eye .. everything is connected ..

VW doesn’t own Porsche, but Porsche and VW are both majority owned by Porsche Automobil Holding SE, which is the Porsche/Piecht family. So in effect they are subsidiaries of the same company even though Porsche is not under the umbrella of the VW group.

If Bentley, Porsche or Bugatti were used I’d want to see actual involvement, rather than VW supplying the money, the sub-brand supplying the name and that being it. I don’t care if a non- sports/performance brand enters but actually there’s hardly any connection between the team name and the actual F1 team, but if it’s a prestige brand I’d rather it was more than just a marketing exercise. That is why I wouldn’t get behind Lotus at all if I didn’t love the look of their line-up.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but amongst brands owned by Volkswagen AG, only Audi (as Auto Union), Bentley and Bugatti have had prior history as Grand Prix winners, correct? Wouldn’t they be missing out on a spectacular marketing opportunity should they fail to enter any of these brands?

Well, Porsche got a lot of credit and therefore a lot of good advertising in the McLaren TAG Porsche “era”. That of course weren’t 5 titles and 25 won races for Porsche, but still they got credit and recognition for it, so I don’t see why that shouldn’t work again.
They are already building engines for sportscars and a kind of motorsport, so I suppose it shouldn’t be THAT big a step to build engines for F1 aswell but Keiths argument is valid, it’d be unusual to see a manufacturer have works teams in different sports (by the way, wouldn’t a Ferrari works team in LeMans be a nice thing again?). VW built engines for F3 so they might use their own brand. Still I’d like Porsche engines best.

(as a guest speaker in a seminar this semester we had a chief exec from Rothschild and he discussed a deal VW made where he mentioned that they will have billions (with a b) to spend in the next couple of years (for tax reasons and security etc reasons). So instead of investing all of it in acquisitions they might free up some of it for motorsports, but I’ll believe it when I see it.)

I’m not so sure how to feel about this one to be honest. VW strike me as a company which is very much run by the accountants. If they ran an F1 team in the same way, they could well end up beign like Toyota, Honda and BMW and simply pull the plug on their F1 programme if it turned out that they didn’t dominate the world within 3 seasons.