The shareholder Prost, 2000–2002

On 30 November 2000 Pedro Diniz gave his first interview as a shareholder in a Formula One team by telephone, from the Prost Grand Prix factory at Guyancourt, outside Paris. He promised to be at every race and to take part in every decision.

Less than six weeks earlier he had started his last Grand Prix, the Malaysian, from 20th on the grid, and gone no further than the second corner. Now he was a director of the team, with a seat on its board, and he described the change as a crossing to the other side of a wall:

Vou me concentrar para aprender tudo sobre o outro lado da F-⁠1 … Já estava negociando há algum tempo. A decisão de passar para o outro lado do muro foi difícil.

I’m going to concentrate on learning everything about the other side of F1. … I’d been negotiating for some time. The decision to cross to the other side of the wall was difficult.

He could have had both sides. He had been offered a race seat for 2001 by Alain Prost, alongside Jean Alesi, and declined it. Driving and managing at once, he told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, would have been too much responsibility, and he admitted that a season in which every race had been won by Ferrari or McLaren had weighed on a driver in a midfield team. And he made a promise: “It’s a big challenge, but I’m here to make the team grow.”

From a seat to a share

The idea began as a driver’s move. During the Belgian Grand Prix weekend in August 2000, while he was complaining in public that Sauber had set him against its test driver, Enrique Bernoldi, at Mugello, the paddock first linked him with a seat at Prost beside Alesi. grandprix.com expected him to bring his Parmalat money to help pay for the team’s Ferrari engines, believed to cost about US$60 million over two years.

Prost needed it. The team, the former Ligier, which Alain Prost had bought in February 1997, had scored no points in 2000. Peugeot was leaving at the end of the year, and so were the sponsors Gauloises, PlayStation, Yahoo and Agfa, while a customer engine deal with Ferrari still had to be paid for.

Through the autumn the talk turned from a seat to a share. crash.net reported that his father, Abílio Diniz, might take a stake on condition that Pedro drove for the team, and Alesi, who had collided with him at Hockenheim in July, was reported to doubt that he belonged in Formula One. On 9 October grandprix.com wrote that a deal of some kind had been struck. At the Malaysian Grand Prix 11 days later Pedro confirmed very close contact with Prost, and kept the family out of it: “I know nothing about my father buying the team.”

On 29 November grandprix.com reported that Abílio had bought a minority share, believed to be 30 per cent. The next day Prost Grand Prix announced that Pedro Diniz had become a significant shareholder and would not race in 2001. Prost’s statement named the father as a partner; Grupo Pão de Açúcar, the family’s supermarket group, denied that Abílio was involved.

What the family had bought, and for how much, was not made public at the time. Pedro told Folha only this: “That’s confidential. All I can say is that I’ll have a good part of it.” Prost, in Le Temps, drew the line more exactly: “The Diniz family’s company becomes a major shareholder, which does not mean a majority one.” The figure that stuck, 40 per cent, was confirmed a year later, when a court disclosed the shareholdings.¹ The price has never been confirmed. Paddock observers put it close to US$10 million on the day; Folha later estimated the family’s whole investment at US$25 million; grandprix.com and The Guardian wrote that the money paid for the Ferrari engine lease, US$18 million by one account and about £15 million by the other.

In public the two sides spoke warmly. Prost said:

I have found in Pedro Diniz and his family not only a solid business partner for my team but also a great group of people and friends.

Folha’s columnist José Henrique Mariante read the deal in the light of Diniz’s whole career: “In truth, he saved Alain Prost, as he has done for other team owners before.” The paper counted his as the third Brazilian attempt to run a Formula One team, after Emerson Fittipaldi’s Copersucar and Carlo Gancia’s part-ownership of Forti, the team with which Diniz had made his debut in 1995. Diniz said his case was different from Fittipaldi’s, who had created his own team: “I’m buying a team that is already up and running, and that works in Europe, not in Brazil.”

The 2001 season

The Diniz money bought customer Ferrari V10s of the 2000 specification, badged Acer, with Ferrari gearboxes, for the Prost AP04. The car ran on Michelin tyres; Henri Durand was the technical director and Joan Villadelprat the managing director. Beyond the engine lease, grandprix.com reckoned, the budget came to little more than another US$20 million.

The season opened at Melbourne on 4 March. Alesi’s first team-mate was Gastón Mazzacane, who brought the backing of the sports network PSN. After four races he was dropped, and Luciano Burti drove from the Spanish Grand Prix onwards. Diniz said he had pushed for him: “When we realised that replacing Mazzacane was inevitable, I interceded on Burti’s behalf, to underline the Brazilian touch I’m giving the team.”

For a while the partnership looked settled. Diniz held an option to raise the family’s stake before the end of the year, and Folha’s gossip column pictured him taking control and fielding two Brazilians, perhaps Rubens Barrichello among them. In June Mariante wrote that the partnership was going very well; Diniz said the Ferrari engines were very good and very expensive.

On the track the season was thin. Alesi scored all 4 of the team’s points, 6th at Monaco, 5th in Canada and 6th in Germany, and in August left for Jordan; Heinz-Harald Frentzen took his seat. Burti was injured at Spa, and Tomáš Enge drove the last three races. Five drivers raced for Prost that year, and the team finished 9th of 11.

The falling-out

By August the money was running short. grandprix.com reported that the banks had given Prost a week, and passed on paddock talk that Diniz might bid US$75 million for the rest of the team. At Spa at the end of the month Folha found neither man at the circuit, and reported that Prost was close to selling to an unnamed investor from the Gulf. Diniz, whose family’s stake the paper put at 38 per cent, had hoped to raise it and to run the team himself in 2002.

In September the financial director, Jean-Luc Gripond, left, and rumours went round that Diniz had resigned and that his father had offered Prost one dollar for the company and its debts. The attacks of 11 September in the United States ended Prost’s talks with Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, as Prost later told the Financial Times.

The break was over money and strategy. Diniz wanted a modest 2002, beginning with free engines from Asiatech, the former Peugeot units that Arrows raced in 2001, in place of Ferrari’s, reported to cost US$25 million a year. Prost would not have it, and Folha called the veto the last straw. Mariante read the episode as the story of a man who saw the boat sinking, proposed something realistic, was turned down, and got off.

Diniz went to few races in the second half of the year. By late October he had given up his option to buy more of the team, and he had not been seen at the factory for at least two months; Prost himself did not travel to the last race, at Suzuka. On 26 October Diniz’s press office sent Folha a statement:

Sou sócio minoritário. O Prost é que deve procurar uma solução para a equipe. … Inclusive, eu já me afastei do board.

I’m a minority partner. It’s Prost who has to find a solution for the team. … In fact, I have already stepped down from the board.

A week later he told the news agency Agência Estado that he had disagreed with the technical and financial strategy the team had adopted, and had left, and that only a miracle would save it now. And he said where the responsibility now lay:

Alain Prost is the majority shareholder and the responsibility is his.

The end of the team

On 22 November 2001 the commercial court at Versailles put Prost Grand Prix into receivership, redressement judiciaire, under the administrator Franck Michel, with debts of about US$30 million. The court disclosed the shareholdings for the first time: Prost 51 per cent, the Diniz family 40, a Louis Vuitton consortium 5.8 and Yahoo 2.9. Folha reported that Diniz already counted his money as lost.

The court gave Prost until 15 January to find a rescue, and in mid-January grandprix.com could not say what would become of the family’s 40 per cent. On Monday 28 January 2002 the same court ordered the team’s liquidation. The Guardian put the debts at £25 million and doubted that what was left, three AP04s, a nearly finished AP05 and the premises at Guyancourt, would fetch even £500,000.

No record shows that the family ever sold its shares. What he gave up in 2001 was his part in running the team; the stake itself ended with the liquidation.²

In February 2002 Prost gave his side, in interviews with the French magazine AutoHebdo and the German Motorsport Aktuell. grandprix.com reported his verdict on his partner in English, together with his claim that Diniz had missed a meeting about buying the team because he was on his boat:

not very serious, immature and Daddy decided everything … on his boat in St. Tropez

To Motorsport Aktuell he said, as Folha reported it, that he did not know why Abílio had not taken the business on himself. Both remarks are known only in translation, and there is no record of Diniz answering them in public.³

His own account came 10 years later, in the long interview he gave the magazine Trip in May 2012. They had been two difficult years, he said. It was the first business of his life; his father had encouraged him, and they had studied it together. But it was frustrating: “Prost is very difficult, he didn’t listen to anyone. That’s how I left Formula One.”