Suzuki (left) and Audetto found the financial side of F1 to be increasingly unviable. (LAT photo) » More Photos

Then there was the financial side. Despite having the hugely popular Sato on board, despite Suzuki’s fame and reputation, and despite the massive media coverage it received at home, the team manifestly failed to find any worthwhile sponsorship. Last year the name SS United appeared in large letters on the car, but it seems that the company didn’t pay its bills.

“The headquarters are in Hong Kong,” Audetto told me. “And they are a major player in the oil business, the extraction of crude, distribution, refining. What they say is today the money that you make with oil has to go through several levels of investigation, because sometimes you can make illegal money from oil, because you can take it from a bandit country.

“The speculation could be huge. So there is a very tight control. So even if they have the money, and I know that they have the money, what they say is they have problems to clear all the stages of sending the money. It’s anti-terrorist, anti-laundering, all that stuff is so strict.”

Clearly Aguri did lose money due from that arrangement, but it seems to me that a team should be pretty sure of who it is dealing with when it gives them such prominent coverage on its car, and when its very future depends on the money coming in.

The fact that Aguri made the non-payment so public (and emphasized it again this week) seemed to me to be a convenient excuse for the overall commercial failure of the operation, and in particular the struggle to find meaningful support in Japan. That was despite the presence of giant ad agency Dentsu as a team partner.

Audetto seemed bemused by the deal: “Dentsu, let’s say, is our official agency. The problem with Dentsu is that it’s just an elephantine agency – they do not really specialize in sponsorships. They can make the big deal with the TV companies for normal commercials, but I have to say that we have been quite disappointed that Dentsu cannot generate a minimum level of sponsorship, because they are the largest ad company in Japan and the third largest in the world. They just lacked culture and expertise to focus in small deals.

“For them maybe to find $5-10m sponsorship is not a big deal. At the end of the day we thought that Aguri and Dentsu made a fantastic deal, to have access to all these clients. You spend $100m to do a campaign, why don’t you spend 5-10% on sponsorship? But it didn’t work!”

He admitted that it was strange that it was so hard to find money in Japan:
“It’s true that we have a lot of publicity in Japan, because we have two superstars – one is Aguri himself, and the other is Takuma. But you also have to see that the Honda big team don’t have a sponsor. It is quite intriguing why we don’t have a major Japanese sponsor. I think Aguri, with his personal contacts, will generate serious sponsorship next year. We will be an established team. You know, in the second year big companies still think they won’t make it, because we’ve seen many teams that happened like a mushroom, and then after one year they really had a difficult time. The difficult year is the second year...”

It’s something of a joke that Honda has been portrayed as the villain in all this, and apparently fans are as upset as they were in 2005. And yet the company has been very patient, and quite possibly, compromised its own works efforts.

It gave Suzuki a massive head start, but he wasn’t able to turn that into a viable operation. One can only imagine to what extent Honda has subsidized the team, especially since the end of last season, and at some point enough was enough. Don’t forget it was engine bills that killed Prost and Arrows, who were paying something in the region of $30m a year six or more years ago. Whatever nominal figure Honda charged was a lot less than that, and clearly the company was pretty relaxed about deadlines.

To be fair, Suzuki came close to rescuing the situation. He had a deal in place with British company Magma, which was to be financed by the Dubai government. In the end, the men with the money got cold feet. You could argue that Suzuki was hung out to dry after promises had been made, but maybe the investors realized what they were buying into was not what they had expected. The uncertainty over the customer car situation did not help, but then the team had taken full advantage of that for a while.

As I said at the start, it’s a shame for the drivers and the personnel, but they were lucky to get this far, and this year’s four races were certainly a bonus. Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA went out of their way to allow it to happen, and like Honda, gave Aguri a chance that no one else has had. The big question is, with customer cars now outlawed, will we ever see an 11th team again?

Adam Cooper is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine. For details about the current issue, visit www.racer.com.


The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, SPEED, or Haymarket Worldwide.