Virgin Buying Honda?

After several different rumours Honda has confirmed Richard Branson’s Virgin Group have made a bid to purchase its Formula One team at the 11th hour. With the clock ticking down to the start of the season in little over 5 weeks time it will be nip and tuck if the deal can be done before the lights go green in Australia.

It’s believed the team is up for £1 but the new owner would need to come up with something in the region of £40 million to run the team for a year.

The Honda spokesman said “We are negotiating with several buyers and one of these parties is the Virgin Group,” It was always been rumoured to be a planned management buyout led by the team’s current chief executive Nick Fry, principal Ross Brawn and three other senior Honda Racing executives. Also previous talks with other groups were not considered as serious and were suspected of not fully funding a season. Using the team to effectively be broken up and bits of it sold off or for it to be used as a ‘shell’ for another team to step in. Thus avoiding the huge start up costs required by the FIA. Just as BMW side stepped this with buying Sauber.

In a minor way Branson has been involved with F1 before with Virgin Mobile company sponsoring the Jordan team. Virgin Atlantic Japan also sponsored Takuma Sato for a few years.

Let’s hope the Virgin group can sort something out. As it would be good to see the famous no nonsense brand of Virgin shake up the world of Formula One. Not to mention how healthy it would be to have a team which was ‘independent’. But all this is nothing compared to the sigh of relief Jenson Button would make if he miraculously found himself with a drive for 2009.