The tale of the rise and fall of the Caterham F1 Team is a story that still confounds motorsport enthusiasts today.
A promising team, its ambitious ownership and burning desire to enter the upper sphere of the sport, vanished without a trace.
But what triggered the dramatic collapse of this Malaysian-owned F1 squad? Here’s the full story of Caterham F1, a team whose promising debut ultimately ended in almost total failure, leaving no mark on F1 history.
The Birth of Caterham F1
Caterham’s Formula 1 story began in 2010, when the Malaysian businessman Tony Fernandes entered the sport using the name Lotus Racing.
This was part of a broader “1Malaysia” initiative to raise the profile of the country’s growing participation in global sports and technology. Initially supported by Malaysian state-owned enterprises, the team aimed to take on F1’s heavyweights.
Fernandes took full control of the team by 2011 when the Lotus name got tied up in legal wrangling.
Rather than give up, Fernandes opted to give it a fresh look under a new name — Caterham F1, after the British sportscar firm he’d purchased. The team’s name as we know it now debuted in his first full Formula 1 season in 2012.
The Struggles: A Slow Climb
A key turning point was the 2012 season. Track success was sporadic against much stronger competitors, though both Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov regularly found themselves higher on the grid than their small-team competitors, helping to secure Caterham as the 10th-placed constructors throughout its brief life. But here, under the hood, things were beginning to break down.
It was not just technical or competitive challenges that faced Caterham. The financial underpinning to support the squad had always been tenuous, and by 2013, the struggles were becoming harder to ignore. The team struggled and finished the 2013 Belgian Grand Prix with a decent qualifying run but at the bottom of the constructors’ standings without scoring points, coming in at 11th.
A New Beginning: The End Begins in 2014
Things worsened in 2014. Tony Fernandes sold the team to a group of Swiss and Middle Eastern investors, marking the arrival of a chain of events that rocked the team to its foundations. This included the appointment of ex-F1 racer Christijan Albers to run the day-to-day operation. But these changes didn’t improve performance on the track.
The nadir didn’t come until Caterham became F1’s first-ever no-show, missing an entire race weekend. It suffered financial difficulties so dire that it missed the United States Grand Prix in October 2014 and then the Brazilian Grand Prix. It is explicitly stated in the regulations of Formula 1 that, absent a legitimate reason, any team that misses a race will incur penalties — but the FIA made an exception in this case due to their financial situation.
Crowdfunding: A Move Never Tried Before
The most bizarre chapter in the history of Caterham was undoubtedly its decision to crowd-fund its way back into Formula 1. In what would become a first in F1 history, Caterham turned to the fans in a bid to raise sufficient funds to allow them to compete in the final race of the 2014 season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The team found the cash it needed, much to the dismay of some people who wanted to see more competitive teams on the F1 grid, and made it back for the end of the season.
In a rather bizarre turn, even the team’s car had the little logo of a local pub, the Windmill Inn, in West Sussex, whom the team managed to convince to sponsor their crowdfunding campaign. But while the gesture was symbolic, it reflected desperation behind the scenes, as the team had been struggling to secure solid sponsors.
This Is The End: An Inviable Team
Caterham, despite a brief return for the season finale in 2014, was gone for good. In March 2015, an auction to sell off the team’s assets finalized the team’s fate. Caterham F1 was finally expunged from the FIA entry list in February 2015, and was henceforth just a footnote in the history of F1.
What followed was just as tragic. In October, it laid off 230 employees, many of whom have since been engaged in legal battles over claims of wrongful dismissal. Some workers hadn’t even received their redundancy payments until 2019, more than four years after the team had locked its doors behind them.
The reasons for Caterham’s struggles in technical terms — shoddy performance, lack of development — are clear, but the team’s fate was primarily governed by a series of financial mismanagements and an inability to find a consistent funding source. No matter how earnest Tony Fernandes was about making Caterham a credible F1 force, the team was at least a rung short on the resources ladder, which is always bad news in the sport’s present-day environment of astronomical financial pressures.
The world of Formula 1 is one of the most cutthroat you can find, where even the smallest mistake can lead to financial ruin, and Caterham found itself in a perfect storm. Ownership wasn’t the problem, and the team’s participation in the sport became more of a means of survival than of competitiveness.
The Legacy: The Team That Could Have Been
Though its time in F1 was short, Caterham F1’s presence had a lasting impact. Despite being the perennial underdog, the team always found a way to keep fighting against the odds with whatever resources it had, which gained it a following, if there were enough fans of underdog motorsport teams. Is Caterham’s story a cautionary tale in the fickle world that is Formula 1, where the gulf between success and failure lies squarely at the feet of finance rather than talent?
Given only a few years in F1, the team also had breakthrough success with Kovalainen, in particular, alluding to the potential the team had. In the end, however, it was the failure of Caterham to secure stable financial backing that proved its undoing, bringing one of Formula 1’s most dramatic stories to an end.
End of the Line: The Cost of Ambition
The story of Caterham is more than just a team that seemed to have disappeared overnight; it’s a cautionary tale about the brutality of Formula 1 itself — a sport in which the planets must align to seek success, even if only for a short period of time. Caterham F1 was a team ahead of its time with too little funding to succeed despite a fervent fan base and audacious business decisions. Forgotten by many, but its brief time on the F1 grid is a cautionary tale, serving as a reminder of just how fleeting success in motorsport can be.
