Tony Fernandes has broken his silence to reveal it is “a relief” to have left formula one.<\/p>\n
The entrepreneur, best known for his Malaysian low-cost airline Airasia, recently sold the Leafield based Caterham team to mysterious Swiss-Middle Eastern investors led by Colin Kolles and Christijan Albers.<\/p>\n
“Yeah.\u00a0 It’s a relief,” he told the Independent.<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing wrong in trying and failing,” said 50-year-old Fernandes, who is now focusing instead on Airasia, his football club Queens Park Rangers, and second-tier teams in GP2 and Moto2.<\/p>\n
He said he did learn things from F1, including “how not to do things”.<\/p>\n
Fernandes admitted not focusing hard enough on Caterham was a mistake, but he also said the naming dispute with Lotus was a “major blow”.<\/p>\n
“I never said it to anyone, but it left me feeling that F1 was very nasty and vindictive,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Then Caterham didn’t really progress, a lot of investments didn’t come through and it started to get tough.”<\/p>\n
Fernandes also said Max Mosley’s vision of keeping costs low for small teams never materialised, meaning “everyone is struggling” apart from the sport’s grandee names.<\/p>\n
“Every team talked about working together but it never happened.\u00a0 So you’ve got to put your hands up and say ‘We’re beat.\u00a0 It doesn’t make sense any more’.”<\/p>\n
Fernandes said buying Queens Park Rangers from Bernie Ecclestone and seeing how football’s commercial model works was also an eye-opener.<\/p>\n
“Whether you’re a top team or at the bottom, you get enough money to survive, and that’s the major difference (between football and F1),” he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s a better dialogue (in football),” Fernandes continued.\u00a0 “There’s a general understanding that we are in it together.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tony Fernandes has broken his silence to reveal it is “a relief” to have left formula one. The entrepreneur, best known for his Malaysian low-cost airline Airasia, recently sold the Leafield based Caterham team to mysterious Swiss-Middle Eastern investors led by Colin Kolles and Christijan Albers. “Yeah.\u00a0 It’s a relief,” he told the Independent. “There’s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,3605,5262,5340,283,764,62],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23190,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23188\/revisions\/23190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}