What happened to......

[BTCC2]

Lola?
All I remember was them turning up to Australia in 1997 with awful looking cars that were about 10 seconds off the pace and then I don't recall what happened to them...Did they just give up? or was there another reason?

[rob01]

Lola were involved with a few F1 projects, there first in 1962 i think. The 1997 project was something to do with the strange Mastercard sponsorship.

[jso1985]

and when MasterCard pulled out just before the Brazilian GP, it was all over... thankfully

[Sleeper]

As I've read it, Mastercard forced Lola to bring the project forward by 12 months as they didnt like spending all that money on a car that wasnt racing. As you can imagine, a car that is designed and built from scrathct in something like 6 months is going to be dreadful. After they failed to qualify in Australia, Mastercard were unhappy and pulled the plug before Brazil in an attempt to avoid more embaressment.

[ArrowsFA1]

As I understood it one of the issues was the structure of the Mastercard sponsorship. As F1Rejects (http://www.f1rejects.com/teams/lola/profile.html) say:

The MasterCard deal was said to be 'innovative', in that it depended upon using Lola's racing activities to draw in customers to the credit card program. This was never a guaranteed success in the first place, and it meant that cash was only trickling rather than flowing into the team.

[Azumanga Davo]

As I've read it, Mastercard forced Lola to bring the project forward by 12 months as they didnt like spending all that money on a car that wasnt racing. As you can imagine, a car that is designed and built from scrathct in something like 6 months is going to be dreadful. After they failed to qualify in Australia, Mastercard were unhappy and pulled the plug before Brazil in an attempt to avoid more embaressment.

I think the money ran out so quickly it was being wound up that same day on qualifying for Australia?

Guess we can be thankful that Senile Racing (or Stewart Cosworth as it was known :D ) was mostly a successful venture.

[52Paddy]

Shame that MasterCard forced Broadley and his crew to develop the car in such a short space of time. With Lola's experience, I'm sure they could have produced at least a competent car for the 1997 season and held on for a while in the sport.

[inimitablestoo]

And, possibly because of taking their eye off the ball with the F1 car, that year's Champ Car wasn't up to much either, so they lost most of their customer teams. The F1 side of things virtually bankrupted them, only for Mondello Park owner Martin Birrane to take over and - somehow - get them back up and running.

Another knock-on effect of the Lola disaster was the $48 million bond that teams were required to pay to the FIA to become an F1 entrant (the 12 team limit was introduced at the same time) to prove that they had the werewithal to do the job properly, the idea being that the money got paid back over, IIRC, 24 months.

[jso1985]

IIRC the 48m bond was added later, as I remember Stewart saying some years ago that with that bond he couldn't have entered F1

[inimitablestoo]

Not much later, and I don't think the two events were entirely unrelated.