11 March 2005
	A1 GP AN INNOVATIVE INITIATIVE By Ferdi de Vos

Soccer has one, cricket has one, and so does rugby. So why not a World Cup for motor sport? That was the idea that His Highness Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates was toying with. He mentioned the idea to his business acquaintances from SA, Tony Texeira and Brian Menell, and together they started a new and innovative motor sport initiative now known as A1 Grand Prix (A1 GP). Texeira is a leading SA entrepreneur with interests in diamonds, oil, gas and logistics and Menell is a former De Beers mining executive. They appointed Richard Dorfman as broadcast director, and former F3000 and Formula One test driver Stephen Watson as general manager and to the board of A1 GP. They then started to establish the series. Says Texeira: "We see A1 GP as complementary to Formula One and not as competition. We are not after Formula One's sponsors and our series takes place during the European winter months, the traditional off-season from September to April. " Formula One now has 19 races a year and we will have 10-12 races in year one, so there will obviously be some overlap, but we want to create a different type of audience. "With 25 countries already signed up, the participating teams represent more 80% of the world's population, and as the drivers and team sponsors are of the same nationality as the franchise country they represent, people will get behind their country's team." According to Watson, the A1 GP cars are now about 9-10 seconds a lap slower than a Formula One car, "but when all the cars are basically the same, no-one really notices that". The cars all weigh the same, have identical power output and identical technical specifications, so the technical expertise of the drivers will be crucial to make a car competitive, he says. Affordability was an important issue. "With manufacturer involvement in Formula One, the teams have astronomical budgets and billions of dollars are spent on technology. The team that spends the most wins. "But with these kinds of budgets, how would we get smaller countries to participate? We designed a system dividing the world into four categories in terms of countries - A, B, C, D. The rich guys are the As, the poorer guys the Cs or Ds, keeping in mind factors such as GDP and level of income." The response to the new world series has been overwhelming, and already there is a waiting list of countries wanting to come on board.