Formula One news
Wurz confident for Superfund selection
01 June 2009Alex Wurz believes that the new Team Superfund stands with a real chance of being selected to compete in next year's championship. The Austrian, who raced for spells between 1997 and 2007, is team principal of the outfit which has revealed its submission of entry for the 2010 season.
With Campos, USF1, Lola and Prodrive Aston Martin already down for selection, Team Superfund - funded by founder Christian Baha, owner of the Austrian investment company - has become the fifth new candidate for entry to next year's World Championship.
"The team is starting from a very solid platform," Wurz, 35, told Autosport. "It is also different from the other entries; they are all either returning constructors or existing teams from other formulae - what I like to call petrolheads - who are possibly keen to go F1 racing because it's the pinnacle of motor racing.
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| Superfund owner, Austrian Christian Baha, will be providing his own funds for the outfit |
"Superfund, on the other hand, is a multi-billion dollar business that - over the past years - has grown stronger and Christian Baha sees F1 as an extremely powerful promotional tool for a company that has returned very good profits for its investors in such difficult market situations as these - we are taking this project extremely seriously."
Having first hit the F1 scene in explosive fashion with a series of strong drives mid-1997, Wurz admitted his early interest of working on the other side of the pit wall. "I was always interested in going into team management, even when I was racing in F1," he said. "Christian and I have talked about doing this for many years. When we saw that, through budget caps and natural market conditions, the cost of running a team was going to come down, we saw it as an opportunity and said, 'Let's go for it!'.
"Christian is a very tough but fair businessman who only gave the green light once he knew we could create an efficient business model; it is important to point out that he is backing the team personally rather than with Superfund's funds.
"It's a win-win situation for the business," he continued of the FIA and FOTA's cost-cutting ideas, "but also for lots of staff which otherwise would have to be made redundant. In Christian's view, and I agree with him totally, the current change in F1 should make it a much better business model, because involved parties can look to operate profitably in the future and profitable business is sustainable and will survive much longer than business models which are based on growth only."
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