• Caterham

The makings of a mess

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When a Formula One team has a financial crisis the results are never pretty. At the time of writing, Caterham is being run by administrators, making it increasingly unlikely its cars will be transported to Austin on Saturday to take part in the US Grand Prix.

Engavest - the Swiss-based investors that have been running the team for past three months - stepped back from the outfit after claiming Tony Fernandes was still the rightful owner because shares were not transferred following their attempt to buy the team in June. Fernandes countered that, saying the shares were not released because key conditions of the deal, including the payment of creditors, were not met by Engavest.

The individuals behind Engavest still remain shrouded in mystery, but up until the end of this week their plans were being put in to action by Colin Kolles, a Romanian dentist with a successful record of turning around failing F1 teams. In 2010 Kolles turned three bare monocoques and some suspension parts into an F1 team in the space of two weeks in order to allow HRT to take part in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix. In the past few months at Caterham, Kolles' job was to do the opposite and turn a flabby, failing F1 team into a lean outfit capable of seeing out the season. His plans beyond the end of 2014 were less clear, but we know a 2015 chassis exists in Germany and has been developed in Toyota's windtunnel in Cologne. Kolles, along with his right-hand man Manfredi Ravetto, had said the team was planning to leave its Leafield premises, most likely for the base of Kolles' LMP1 team in Germany which HRT also operated out of for part of its existence.

What Engavest and Kolles were after was Caterham's valuable entry to the Formula One World Championship, which is held by 1Malaysia Racing Team and was finally handed over to administrators on Thursday night. The debts are stacked against separate company known as Caterham Sports Limited (CSL), which manufactured the cars, dealt with suppliers and employed staff. On October 8, Mr Constantin Cojocar was appointed as the sole director of CSL according to records at Companies House. The appointment was something as a surprise as Cojocar - an ex-centre forward for Steaua Bucarest in the 1980s - had been employed as a cleaner up until that point. According to the administrators, Cojocar indicated in court papers that his associates intended to provide funding of £2m per week to pay the company's creditors, but that the money promised by his backers did not arrive.

Without a satisfactory deal to meet the creditors' demands, Engavest had little choice but to hand over control of the team to the administrators. A statement said it was done "in the higher interest of allowing the team to continue operating and preparing for the next events", but it's no secret that the administrator exists to find a way to pay creditors and not to find a way to go racing. However, the most valuable asset owned by the team is still its entry to the championship and that risks becoming void if the team fails to appear at the final three rounds of 2014. The perfect answer would be to find an investor willing to take on the team's debts and continue racing, but with time limited and a complex web of ownership to untangle it is unlikely to be so simple.

Laurence Edmondson is deputy editor of ESPNF1

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