Virgin GP

Sir Richard Branson is a man who understands value for money. What started as a market stall and some Mike Oldfield vinyl has grown into a vast empire that has touched everything from air travel to board games.

In the past the brand invested heavily in stunts like crossing the Atlantic in a record time, a balloon trip around the world and so on. Clearly there has been significant value in this, though what Sir Richards life insurance people must have thought when he decided to take part in some of these is probably unprintable.

Last year the brand got involved in F1 with a relatively minor $4m investment in Brawn GP, Virgin said the return was excellent and claim they got about $90m of TV exposure. This is the value of sponsoring a winning team at the sharp end of the grid. There was an interesting piece in one of the newspapers in the UK this week about Virgin and racing.

2010 year they are title sponsor for on of the new boys, Manor GP has been rebranded as Virgin GP. In return Virgin has inserted one of its very highly regarded directors as team principal. Alex Tai gets the Virgin brand, what it means and all but guarantees that Virgin GP will reflect the core values of the Virgin Group.

Sir Richard said “There was a temptation to write out a big cheque to Brawn and continue but when a team has won you can’t do any better and so we found a new one.”

Not sure I totally buy into this, once Mercedes had taken over Brawn it seemed unlikely that Virgin could stay as a sponsor, let alone have any say in the image put forward by the team.

Virgin GP is clear they have a limited budget, they don’t have a wind tunnel in the factory, an item considered so essential that many teams have two, and they are typically both in full time use. There is some software around that can reduce the need for wind tunnel time, but I’m told nothing available today really replaces putting a car in a tunnel.

I think chief designer Nick Wirth is an engineers, engineer. He’s been successful in the past as an aerodynamicist, chief designer and had brought new teams to the grid during the last phase of privateer growth in F1 as team principal of Simtek. A team who made a high profile entry with the MTV logo splashed on their cars and clearly tried to do F1 the right way. They were moderately successful in terms of results and finished 9^th in the constructor’s championship during their first year. The year was clearly marred when Austrian Roland Ratzenburger died in one of the cars at Imola the day before Ayrton Senna had his fatal accident.

With a smallish budget, a small team led by a team principal with limited racing experience, the technical side is lead by an engineer with a decent track record. I’m very interested to see how it plays out, clearly they don’t expect to be a force to be reckoned with in 2010, but the team seems to have what’s required to make it through the year and create something that a future can be built on.

Having Richard Branson involved, even if his role is limited to promoting the team, is a wild card that the other new teams don’t have. He’s made plenty of good moves in the past and understands the value of the media, going to be interesting to watch.