Formula One

Back in 2005, BMW shocked the Formula One racing world by announcing it would leave its longtime partner Williams F1 in order to acquire its rival Sauber. But after four years of racing, the economy tanked and the coffers ran dry. BMW announced it would withdraw from the sport, leaving Sauber to look for a new investor.

A new investor was found, but reports now indicate that the deal could have been an elaborate fraud. The buyer was identified as Qadbak Investments, a mysterious Swiss firm that had recently acquired a football club in England and which was supposedly backed by wealthy Middle Eastern investors who preferred to keep a low profile. After an exhaustive chase of paper trails and dummy companies, it now appears that Qadbak is nothing but a front for one Russell King, a British national based in Dubai previously convicted of fraud.

According to the report, King was planning on using Sauber as a means to tap into the revenue sharing scheme in Formula One, worth tens of millions of euros.

Mercedes-Benz has a long history in grand prix racing. In the inter-war period, it competed with the famous Silver Arrows. After the war, the German automaker returned briefly, only to withdraw again after just one year. It wouldn't be until decades later that they'd come back to the scene, supplying engines first to the Sauber team (later acquired by arch-rival BMW) and then to McLaren, the championship team with which Mercedes has been tied – including a part-ownership and collaboration on the SLR McLaren supercar – since 1995. McLaren and Mercedes won several world championships throughout their fourteen-year history together, but now the two companies have gone their own separate ways. McLaren is building their own supercar – the MP4-12C – and Mercedes the SLS AMG, and now the two have announced a separation on the race track as well.

Although Mercedes will continue to provide McLaren with engines, the automaker has sold its stake back to the racing team. In its place, Benz has acquired a 75% stake in the Brawn GP team – which was previously Honda's, which in turn took over from British American Racing and Tyrrell before that. In its inaugural season, Brawn won both the constructors' title and the drivers' title, and will now be rebranded as Mercedes Grand Prix for the upcoming season. Eager to demonstrate German talent, the new Mercedes team has already signed Nico Rosberg – one of the youngest and most promising talents on the grid – and is preparing to announce its second driver shortly before returning for the 2010 championship in an effort to repeat this year's success.

There are few sports figures paid as highly as Formula One drivers...world champions especially. With the 2009 season already wrapped up, teams are preparing for their assault on next year's championship, with an unprecedented game of musical chairs taking place in the off-season.

Among the changes, two-time world champion Fernando Alonso is moving, at long last, from Renault to Ferrari. Trouble is, the Italian team already has two world-class drivers on contract. So to make room, Ferrari is willing to pay its 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen not to race.

According to reports, Raikkonen will be paid a whopping 17 million euros next year just to vacate his seat. He's free to move to another team, but if he does, Ferrari will only owe him 10 million euros. For his part, Kimi says he'll only consider McLaren, and knowing full well of the conditions of his contract, the British team (for whom he drove previously) is offering him only 5 million – a fair bit less than he'd be worth on the open market. The bottom line is that Raikkonen stands to make more money if he sits out next season than if he races.

The truly wealthy never seem to care about tickets. They park where they want and drive how they want, because the penalties never mean much more than pocket change to them. Well they might want to give that a second thought as one extremely wealthy motorist has received an unpredecentedly large speeding ticket in Mumbai.

The fine was imposed on one David Coulthard, one of the most successful Formula One drivers never to win a world title. The Scotsman recently retired from active duty, but still performs from time to time for the Red Bull Racing team he helped form. On a recent demonstration run for 50,000 fans in India, Coulthard reportedly hit a top speed of 162 miles per hour... in a 30 zone. The result was that the local officials withheld the $33,000 deposit put down for the team for the event. Which has to be the biggest speeding ticket ever issued.

The correlations between high-performance racing machines and high-precision timepieces hardly need any elaboration, and the examples are plenty. It seems every premium automaker and every top-tier racing team has its own line of watches, usually crafted by Switzerland's finest watchmakers. And now Brawn GP has joined the fold.

If you haven't heard of Brawn GP, it's been a while since you've watched a grand prix. The team – headed by strategic mastermind Ross Brawn – that took over when Honda packed up and left Formula One racing last year is leading the world championship with only two rounds to go. But they've run most of the season without the sort of multi-million-dollar sponsorship deals you'd expect of the rookie race winners. At the British Grand Prix at Silverstone this year, however, the team announced a new deal with Anglo-Swiss watchmakers Graham-London, which lays claim to the first chronograph in timekeeping history. Graham has debuted a small line of timepieces custom made for the team, including the Chronofighter and the Silverstone, featuring Brawn GP's signature colors and individually numbered. Only 250 will be made, so you'd better be faster than a Brawn racer to get your hands on one.

At the Pavilion Visconti in Milan, French champagne house G.H. Mumm just unveiled a special edition gift box designed for the recent Italian Grand Prix Formula One championship, won by Brawn-Mercedes driver Rubens Barrichello. Made from carbon fiber with gold plate details and a black velvet interior, the limited edition G.H. Mumm F1 Box will be available to order in Italy only for €5,000, or about $7,300. It's the cornerstone of a collection of champagne accessories commemorating the famed race designed exclusively for Mumm, founded in 1827 and now owned by Pernod Ricard.

[via BornRich]

Millionaire playboy and Formula One head Flavio Briatore is the center of major controversy today. Briatore, famous as much for his freespending and modelizing ways as his racing career, has stepped down as the head of the Renault team. Briatore told the Daily Mirror that he made the move for the good of the team amid allegations of race-fixing. Both Briatore and the team's executive director of engineering, Pat Symonds, left their posts after Renault refused to contest allegations that former Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr. was asked to deliberately crash in last year's Singapore Grand Prix. His crash benefitted the team's other driver Fernando Alonso who went on to win the race.

Members of the Renault team are set to appear before the International Automobile Federation (FIA) in Paris on Monday and face the possibility of being expelled from competition. Now that Briatore and Symonds are no longer part of the team Renault may not be banned but will likely face a fine or some other action. Piquet has already testified that he was told by Briatore and Symonds when and where to crash .According to CNN, Renault's chief operating officer Patrick Peralta has said that Briatore and Symonds are solely responsible for the incident.

Getting a piece of the action is what sports memorabilia is all about. And when it comes to motorsports, there's plenty to go around. Every year, each Formula One team complete redesigns its cars, and builds several of them in pairs to last its drivers the entire season. Once the season's done, many of the teams opt to sell off either the entire car, or pieces of the car to collectors. And while Toyota may not have fared so well in previous seasons, this year the team is in third place, ahead of recent championship-winning teams Ferrari, McLaren and Renault, making their memorabilia particularly attractive to collectors, especially at prices significantly lower than those of its competition. While a 1:3 scale replica of a Ferrari nose-cone from last year, for example, will set you back a whopping 5833 euros, an authentic example from Toyota (like the one pictured above) doesn't cost a fraction of that amount, and there are plenty of tantalizing collectible bits starting at just 200 euros for an authentic wheel, brake disc or carbon-fiber suspension piece.

A billboard featuring sultry model Jessiqa Pace (above) on the racetrack at the Monaco Grand Prix had to be taken down after it proved too distracting to Formula 1 drivers over the weekend. Pace, 29, appears in the campaign for Martini, the Italian winemaker founded in 1863 and famous for its iconic vermouth.

F1 team representatives asked for the posters to be taken down after drivers complained during trial runs; champ Lewis Hamilton crashed in Saturday's qualifying round close to the gigantic image of Jessiqa. "All the attention is overwhelming," she told the London Daily Star. "I find it really funny. Obviously it's very flattering that I'm distracting the drivers so much, but I'd feel terrible if someone got hurt."

You'd figure that after winning grands prix and driving the fastest cars on the planet, an accomplished F1 driver would have had his fill of extreme Gs and rapid acceleration, but these are speed junkies, and they're always looking for a new adventure. That could be why two seasoned F1 pros are lining up, among the myriad celebrities and billionaires, to experience a low-orbit space flight with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

Sponsoring the winning Brawn GP car at this past weekend's race in Bahrain, Virgin Galactic announced their two latest recruits: Rubens Barrichello and Niki Lauda. Barrichello, who is second in the standings for the F1 world championship this year, has already paid the $200,000 for his ticket on one of Virgin's space flights, which Branson delivered in person at the race. Three-time world champion Niki Lauda, however, is planning to take it even further by undertaking training, at age 60, to pilot the Virgin spacecraft and take other paying tourists up into space. Lauda already owns his own airline and sometimes pilots the flights himself, but even for the driver who's been to hell and back, this should be a new adventure altogether.

This week, rumors swirled that F1 racer Lewis Hamilton had bought himself a fancy new Sunseeker 90 yacht. They said he was painting the 90-foot yacht black and silver silver to match his McLaren racer.The Sun even has a picture of the sleek black ship.
But if he is buying a yacht he's certainly not admitting it. His website has a statement that says simply "Contrary to unreliable reports, Lewis Hamilton would like to confirm that he has not bought a super yacht. " Hamilton, who dates Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of The Pussycat Singers, is currently at Formula One training in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain.

McLaren spends all their energy chasing Ferrari around the race track. And as often as not, they catch them. But the British racing team is going after Ferrari off the track too, with new sportscars coming out to follow the departing SLR to take the fight to Ferrari in the road car market where the Italian team has been king for decades. In the meantime, Ferrari has come to dominate another area as well, with a vast empire of licensed merchandise on the market. So its arch-nemesis will fight it on that ground too, and to that end has launched its latest footwear collection.

Bearing construction and design inspired by its Formula One cars, McLaren shoes boast hi-tech materials and fashion-forward lines evocative of the technology-driven image which McLaren projects. Realized by Spanish licensee FasionVentures 21, the collection includes both casual and more formal models, recently supplemented by the collection's latest Spring/Summer 2009 line which you can see in the gallery below. Prices start around $200, available from McLaren's online shop and various retailers worldwide.

In our continuing look at the moves of savvy billionaires, it's hard not to notice that Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire is taking advantage of the economic downturn. Slim made news in November for picking up 29 million shares of Citigroup for around $150 million and Blogging Stocks reported that he also boosted his stake in luxury retailer Saks buying nearly 7.6 million shares of the company over a four-day period.

Slim's latest move may be one even closer to his heart. Slim, has been spotted visiting the UK headquarters of the Honda Racing F1 team,. Motor Authority reveals that a takeover by Slim would boost the chances of GP2 driver Bruno Senna, who is backed by the Telmex subsidiary Embratel, Slim's company. Other suitors for the beleaguered team include Force India's Vijay Mallya, a Swiss hedge fund and Greek shipping tycoon Achilleas Kallakis. Slim is known for savvy investments and so his interest in the racing team indicates he sees a future in a sport that is currently plagued by economic worries.

This ostentatious little beauty is a new 35th anniversary edition of the commemorative edition type 72D from Lotus. The edition is a tribute to the Lotus 72D's Formula 1 championship race car. The limited edition Lotus Elise will have gold wheels and gold pinstriping as well as a decorative helmet with a display case. There will be 50 of these cars worldwide with just 20 set to end up in the U.S. and they are expected to sell for under $60,000.

Mariah Carey may have gotten a diamond necklace from a prince but race car driver Michael Schumacher received an even higher ticket item. Dubai's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has gifted the Formula One driver with a piece of The World, the manmade island development located off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Schumacher's island is part of 'Antarctica' on the artificial globe, is worth about $7 million.

The World has attracted some big names so Schumacher is in excellent company. Richard Branson has visited, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are believed to have checked it out and Michael Jackson has stopped by and David Beckham and Rod Stewart are also rumored owners. When completed the development will also be home to several lavish hotels.

[Thanks, Lana]