- 21 Nov 10, 19:30#226718Group Lotus should just drop it unless they want to act like a decent company and create good feeling. They dropped a big bollock when they bought Lotus Cars. Whoopsy, that doesn't include the Team Lotus F1 company or trademark? Damn! They had well over a decade to buy the rights to Team Lotus if they were thuper therial about getting into F1 as Team Lotus but they didn't. Instead, they've traded on the fact that Team Lotus had considerable success in F1 decades ago to try and sell cars made by a separate company.
It would be akin to buying McLaren Automotive and telling everyone you have an F1 racing team by rights. Well no actually. Two separate companies. You want them both, stump up more readies and buy out the McLaren Group proper.
I think Fernandes et al have acted in good faith. Norfolk base, investment etc and is negotiating with Hunt to acquire the full rights to the Team Lotus brand. It seems Hunt, and for good reason, is getting a little wary of the whole situation. Pressure by the Malaysian Gov. and so on.
Let Group Lotus go racing wherever and in whichever series they like, but unless they acquire the right to the TL brand, then they'll just have to call themselves something else. After this though, not sure it would matter.
What's really sad, for me, about this is that should Group Lotus get the rights to Team Lotus and go racing, we most certainly will have a situation where a bunch of opportunistic vultures have brought the name mainly for some thin veneer of legitimacy and not out of any true sense of wanting to go racing.
I understand this is a business, hence Fernandes even being interested in a known F1 "brand" like Lotus to begin with. But, he's put his money where his mouth is. I feel that, besides not losing money hand over fist by being tied in with the Lotus name, he is actually interested in racing, which can only be a good thing. Group Lotus suddenly start squealing and bleating about wanting to get into F1. Why now, what for? They had a decade+ (which was full of literature claiming Lotus Cars have a glorious history of F1 success - uh huh) and nothing. Nah, they want to get into racing alright. To get the Team Lotus name on the cheap, as they must have presumed they had in 1996. Not to actually go racing and try to win though. That's my feeling. It would be the absolute worst of both worlds. The slow, very public death of the Team Lotus legacy.
