Flying High, My Story Page 14

  A month later, at about midnight, I was in my house in Chester Square, London, and the phone rang. It was Max Mosley.

  ‘You’ve got a Formula One team.’

  I’m not sure I ever quite believed it. From the first call from Déj, to the sums of money involved, to the circus that surrounds the sport: it had all been so surreal.

  Now we had to move at breakneck speed. If we wanted to race as Lotus then we had to get a team together, find the drivers and have a car ready inside six months – the pace of events was making me tired, let alone the people doing a lot of the work. At the point at which we got the slot, the ‘team’ consisted of four people: me, Mike, chief operating officer Keith Saunt and general manager Paul Craig. Sylvie, Mike’s partner, volunteered to go on to reception and became HR, PR and Marketing.

  As 2009 progressed, we contracted two experienced drivers in Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen for the 2010 season. It was looking good; expensive, but good.

  One afternoon in October 2009 I was at home in Kuala Lumpur when my phone rang. I looked at the number and recognized the team centre at Hingham in Norfolk. I picked up and all I could hear was the roar of the team testing our car’s engine. That marked the moment when things started to get real.

  The unveiling came fast. On 12 February 2010 we gathered the press to present our Lotus Cosworth T127 to the racing world in London’s Royal Horticultural Halls. The Halls are spectacular – a glass roof allows sunlight to shine on to the light wooden floors and bounce off the brilliant white walls. The car, painted in the traditional Lotus green and yellow, looked amazing, sitting in front of us on a ramp before the world’s press. When I stood up to make a short speech, alongside Clive Chapman, Stirling Moss, Mike and the drivers, I was still pinching myself:

  ‘I am extremely proud to be here today and to be able to show the world the fruits of the team’s hard work over the last five months. We’ve achieved two major milestones – confirming our entry and unveiling our car – but now the real work starts. Next we move on to testing and the season ahead and I’m confident that the team will exceed expectations wherever we go, and will do so on a wave of support around the world that has been growing daily since we first unleashed Lotus Racing back in September ’09.’

  Despite a frantic year of headaches and the biggest cash drain I can remember, stepping out on to the starting grid in Bahrain with the Lotus Racing team was a moment I’ll never forget. We were proud to be bringing the Lotus brand back to Formula One – it had been absent since 1994. Both drivers finished the race, which was achievement enough. To produce a car on that time scale that made it through a whole Grand Prix was a success.

  Most of the things in my life that I love are noisy – live music, aeroplanes, football matches – but few get anywhere close to the decibel level when you’re in a Formula One pit lane: the ground shudders with the power and noise of the engines; there’s the fumes, the mechanics swarming around, an armoury of tools and tyres; and whenever there’s a lull in the engine cacophony, the background buzzes with the fans. It’s an attack on every sense – overwhelming and exhausting. In a TV interview after the Bahrain Grand Prix I looked elated but absolutely wrung out, my eyes shining in that bewildered way that you get when you have been through the most intense experience.

  The season threw up some incredible highs. Walking on to the starting grid in Malaysia a month later was surreal. I’d felt pretty emotional when the first Grand Prix was put on there in 1999, but to be a team owner in my home town was something for which I really have no words. If I hadn’t taken the chance, if I’d hung up on Déj thinking the idea was ridiculous, I’d never have watched my own F1 team compete in Malaysia. Take your chances, I remind myself.

  As the season unfolded, it wasn’t catastrophic, but neither was it great. We didn’t register a point but we did pull off a massive publicity stunt. I was having dinner with Nico Rosberg after the Monaco Grand Prix when Richard Branson walked over with his Virgin Racing CEO Alex Tai. They sat down and we had some banter about our doomed rivalry in the F1 season. Virgin had a team, and like us they weren’t doing well. We saw a chance to make the season interesting, so we came up with The Bet. It was simple. The owner of whichever team finished lower in the championship would have to dress up and work as (female) cabin crew on a flight of the winner’s airline. That really did liven things up. The prospect of putting on the Virgin uniform made me bring extra pressure to bear on the team for the rest of the season.

  When we got to the last race, in Abu Dhabi, we were pretty much neck and neck. Lotus edged it because Heikki had finished twelfth in Japan, which nudged us above Virgin. But it was close – had one of the Virgin drivers taken a higher spot than twelfth in Abu Dhabi I’d be wearing the Virgin cabin crew skirt and blouse.

  As it was, Richard would be wearing the red of AirAsia. I’d taken the uniform with me to the race and when Richard walked past me in the pit, I shoved it into his hands and pinned an AirAsia badge on his shirt. Branson branded. I laughed and, to his credit, he did too.

  ‘See you on board!’

  We had three false starts where he had to postpone. All of them reasonable excuses: he needed an operation on his leg because of a skiing accident; then he was invited to the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton; and finally, when it all looked set, one tragic night, his house on Necker Island burned down. Like I say, he couldn’t be blamed for any of that.

  Finally, in Perth, Australia, on 13 May 2013, our diaries coincided. We arrived the day before the flight on which Richard was to crew because we were going to a Starlight Children’s Foundation fundraiser before the stunt kicked off the next morning. The charity does fantastic work for children who are hospitalized or seriously ill and their families and we announced that AirAsia X would donate $100 AUD for each ticket sold.

  Beer in one hand and razor in the other, I beamed first at the audience and then at Richard, and said, ‘Now take your trousers off, Branson.’

  The whole place erupted as Richard reluctantly stripped down to his boxer shorts and allowed my crew to shave his legs. We went off to continue the party while Richard went back to the hotel to prepare for his five-and-a-half-hour stint of cabin crew work experience. I’ve never been quite so pleased to have won a bet in my life. So much so that I partied all night, and met Richard leaving the hotel at 4.00 a.m. as I was coming back. I got him to hang on while I showered and changed, and we went to the airport together where my day got just a little bit better as my crew added false eyelashes, rouge and a hefty slap of lipstick to his face.

  Richard then went and changed into the AirAsia X uniform. The uniform is a bright-red skirt and blazer, with a white blouse. He went the extra mile and produced a pair of red high-heels to match. We did a brief press conference, he planted a lipstick kiss on my cheek and I picked him up, draping him across my arms horizontally in the way that he would do with his own female cabin crew. The hangover was bad enough but to have to lift his weight was pushing my limits.

  When it came to the in-flight safety demonstration, Richard was a shambles. For someone who flies so much, he didn’t have a clue about the seat buckle, couldn’t get the life vest over his tied-back hair and held the oxygen mask upside down. I was having a ball.

  To be fair, Richard threw himself into the role, walking the aisles serving drinks, flirting with passengers and making announcements. Then he decided to get a little bit of his own back by approaching me with a tray stacked with glasses of juice. Egged on by the passengers, he shouted, ‘Will I or won’t I?’

  I pretend begged him not to before he upended the tray into my lap. Changing my clothes was a small price to pay; besides, I’d had a T-shirt printed that read ‘Coffee, tea or him’ printed on the front and ‘Richard served me T&CO’ on the back (T&CO is my in-flight coffee brand).

  At the press conference in Kuala Lumpur, I summarily sacked him and said, ‘He is an entrepreneur, visionary, knight and adventurer; Sir Richard can now also add Air
Asia flight attendant to his long list of credentials,’ before we ended the whole stunt in true F1 style with a champagne shake-up which we sprayed at each other.

  People still remember it. In 2017, I was waiting for a lift in the Beverly Wilshire hotel, Los Angeles. A guy came up to me and asked, ‘Are you Tony Fernandes?’

  I said I was.

  ‘Won any bets with Richard Branson recently?’

  Both Richard and I have been damn good at building brands. That one stunt was worth billions in PR and it came from Formula One. It came from grabbing an opportunity that at first looked like it was just a drain on funds but, with the connections and possibilities it opened up, it’s perhaps done more for the AirAsia brand than nearly anything else; and, in relative terms, it cost nothing.

  There were many good spin-offs from the whole F1 adventure. And it goes to prove the unbelievable power of networking. Just chance encounters with people can lead to such interesting things. It’s like I say about the airline business: why rely on ten heads (on the company board) when you can use the brainpower of 20,000 employees? Or as I say to the cabin crew: why rely on surveys when you can ask 250 million passengers directly? Networking and communicating are essential to drive innovation and development. Our success has been through effective branding but also through the power of networking and my ability to meet and get along with people. I always push myself to establish a rapport with as many people as I can – it’s too easy to look inwards and focus exclusively on your own business, but relationships and friendships with people outside your industry will always bring unexpected openings.

  At the end of our first F1 season, we had to have a rethink. Although we’d beaten Virgin, we nonetheless hadn’t won any points. The biggest mistake we made was probably trying to start the team from scratch, and the promise of a lower-cost Grand Prix never really materialized. Max Mosley’s estimate of $40 million was under-powered – I reckon it cost more like $80 million per year to run the team – and that’s without building the car. Money was a big issue.

  And then we hit a whole wall of problems with the Lotus brand. Our licence to use Lotus Racing was challenged in the courts. The dispute went all the way to the British High Court – I was on the stand for twelve hours on one occasion. At the heart of the conflict was who had the right to licence the Lotus brand name. The Chapman family – the son and widow of Lotus’s founder Colin Chapman – were involved, as were David Hunt and Proton, who had originally granted us the licence.

  The problem started with David Hunt disputing that we could use the Lotus licence that Proton had granted us. He claimed he owned the Team Lotus brand, while Proton owned Group Lotus, which made Lotus sports cars. The dispute ran through many twists and turns over the course of two years before it was finally resolved – and we knew we’d have to find a new team name.

  In the meantime, a knock at the door – and it really was someone knocking on my door because I was in my pyjamas at the time – opened up a new opportunity. When I answered, two men asked me if I wanted to buy Caterham Cars. It’s an iconic English sports car brand that still makes high-quality cars. Din and I bought the company in early 2011; as well as believing in the business, we realized it offered us a way out of the Lotus branding dispute. Ironically, Caterham also happens to have a strong connection to Lotus – in the 1970s Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, sold Caterham the licence to make one of his most famous cars, ‘The Seven’ (in fact, that car still has a global reputation and we have forward orders that will take us over a year to fulfil).

  In November 2011 we agreed with Proton that we would rebrand our team as Caterham F1, while they would use Lotus F1. We were proud to have brought a much-loved brand back to Formula One and could now press on with Caterham. The legal issues weren’t over yet, though – when we tried to use green as our team colours, Lotus claimed we were trying to pass ourselves off as them. But we persevered through the 2011 season and were more consistent on the circuit. Though we still didn’t register any points, we finished tenth, which at least gave us a share of the pay-out from Formula One. We had proved that we could compete at the top level.

  Progress was so tough to make. When we got to the end of the third season, we were in exactly the same spot and I felt the development of the car itself had actually gone backwards. The next season we finished eleventh and completely out of the money. That was the final straw for me.

  In the end, the Formula One venture was just too exhausting to pursue any further. We sold Caterham F1 (but not Caterham Cars) in 2014. The issues continued for the new owners and just four months later they dissolved the team. A great shame.

  Despite all that, I still think that one day we’ll be back on the starting grid. When I tell people this, they laugh and think I’m mad. That just reminds me of the reaction when I first said I was starting an airline – it makes me want to do it all the more. As a sport, now that Bernie Ecclestone has sold up and moved on, Formula One is going through some fundamental changes. I think those changes are long overdue because the racing just hasn’t been as exciting as it should be for years.

  In football – for all its sins – you never know who is going to win. No one in their right mind would have put money on Leicester to take the Premier League title in the 2015–16 season. But in Formula One, Caterham would never win a race. The sport has become too much of a procession, with the teams with the deepest pockets pretty much guaranteed to share the podium places between them. It’s also become too technical; the engineers are the most important factor, whereas I think it should all be about the skill of the drivers. If you look at the greatest sports stars of the past, Bjorn Borg didn’t win all those titles because his racket was better than Ilie Năstase’s racket or because his team were bigger than Jimmy Connors’ team; he did it because he was superior, player versus player. The same applies in cricket: Viv Richards and Sunil Gavaskar weren’t brilliant batsmen because of the bat they used, it was because their timing, eye and stroke play were second to none.

  Throughout my life, I’ve tried to make things simpler, and that’s what they should do in F1. The cars are so complex, and the rules ridiculously so, it obscures the competition between the drivers, which is what racing fans go to see. Not so long ago, Eddie Jordan started a team and won a Grand Prix but that would never happen now. So there should be much more emphasis on the actual racing, and the cars should be far more standardized.

  The complexity and the money involved is also restricting the sport’s appeal. My sense is that the number of young people watching is going down, which doesn’t bode well for its future popularity. My sense also is that it isn’t as global as it should be. Only four of the twenty-four current (2017) starting-grid drivers are non-European, and none are from the Far East or South East Asia. The likelihood of there being a Chinese or Malaysian winner is non-existent. Some of that has to do with the money involved if you want to become a driver. How does a poor kid from Vietnam or India get to be an F1 driver when it costs millions of dollars to get there?

  Still, so much came from the F1 experience. Not only did we give the AirAsia brand the global prominence I felt it deserved, it opened up doors for me personally and also for our companies. Without F1, I wouldn’t be involved at QPR, and we also acquired two pretty exciting companies along the way.

  Caterham Cars hasn’t really been touched as a company since the seventies, so there is so much potential to expand through the use of new technologies – I feel a bit like I did at the birth of AirAsia. I’ve owned a Smart car for years and have always felt they are the future, so at Caterham I want to develop electric cars and get them to a wider audience. I also believe that we’ll start to produce 3D-printed cars. By developing these technologies we’ll be able to take car manufacturing to a much greener, more sustainable place that fits with my beliefs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we built something really special at Caterham in the coming years.

  Mirus, the other company we have set up, is a lightweight aeroplane-sea
t manufacturer. It uses the principles learned in constructing Formula One seats to create aircraft seats that are greener and lighter than any currently on the market. Reducing the weight of a single seat, even by a fraction, brings huge efficiencies in fuel usage on all flights. I think there’s great potential here too.

  Formula One was a blast. I don’t regret it for a second. I learned so much about best practice and technology, much of which has been fed back into AirAsia. And then there was the global exposure for AirAsia – the association with the circuit and some of the most famous brands in the world rubbed off on us. You can’t go from having two planes to 200 without stepping up your brand building: sponsoring Man United and F1 cars are part and parcel of that.

  I personally gained a lot of confidence from Formula One. Suddenly I wasn’t a little Asian businessman tinkering around with a low-cost airline, I was actually on the global stage, a team principal of Lotus Racing, and appearing every other week at some of the biggest sporting events in the world. It’s important because people then look at you and treat you differently. Petronas once told me that our cost of borrowing was lower because of F1 – it gave us a recognizable, valuable name.

  I met a lot of top people in the F1 world. Bernie Ecclestone is an incredible guy: he gets good and bad press but to me he is brilliant. His advice to me was always to grab opportunities whenever I saw them. Ron Dennis is a powerhouse too. I learned so much from him – the determination, energy and precision he brings to his work is inspiring.