They say you shouldn’t talk with your mouth full, but Eric Silbermann risks the wrath of Mrs Manners by having breakfast with a pot-pourri of paddock people.
If you Google anyone in F1 you can normally find a fairly detailed biography, however when it comes to Force India’s outspoken deputy team principal, there’s very little info available. I even found a line that said Robert Fernley - or Bob as he is more frequently known - was born in Calcutta, India, which came as a surprise to the man himself when I caught up with him at Silverstone yesterday, as he is in fact a native of the slightly less exotic Stockport in England.
Even the stuff I’ve read about you is wrong. Do you cultivate an air of secrecy?
Not at all, I started off in the 70s and we established a company called Amco Motor Racing which was a partnership between a gentleman called Bobby Howlings and myself and Bobby at the time was quite a high-profile racer and wheeler-dealer and we were the first people really to understand that Formula 1 cars might have a historic value and we bought Formula 1 cars from all of the teams. We set up a place in Alderley Edge in Cheshire. We had our showrooms and everything there selling Formula 1 cars. They became then obviously collectors pieces. We started the business of making Formula 1 cars collectable.
We would buy Williams cars, we’d buy Tyrrells, McLarens because nobody knew what to do with them. From that, we developed a very close relationship with Ensign and Mo Nunn and by now, this was in the early Eighties, we got involved in a British Formula 1 championship, the Aurora Series. It featured Formula 1 cars and some Formula 2 machines as well.
I had a driver called Jim Crawford and Jim drove for me for many years. We won the series in ‘82 with Ensign and then we looked at where we could go because obviously having won that, you want to move on and I couldn’t see how we could viably go into international Formula 1, so I decided to go and do Can-Am. We actually made the first Ensign Can-Am car using a Formula 1 base and competed in the Can-Am series.
That was a fantastic series. The cars had the same appeal then as the current WEC series seems to be building up now. The cars just looked like monsters.
They were monsters. It was a time when four of us had gone across to the States. There was Barry Green who obviously went on to do what’s now Andretti Racing, Steve Horn, there was a wonderful guy called Count Van Der Straten and his VDS team and myself. The four of us started in America more or less at the same time, all doing Can-Am. Then I did the last 847 March Can-Am car in ’84.
I think we still hold the record today for the highest place finish for a rookie driver racing for a rookie team
From there I did the Ensign Indy car, which we debuted with Tom Sneva’s team. We redesigned it for ‘84 and I think we still hold the record today for the highest place finish for a rookie driver racing for a rookie team. Later Nigel (Mansell) took the rookie driver bit away from us of course from Jim but the combination of rookie driver and rookie team I think still exists. We continued on with Indy cars until 1989-90. At that point I stopped racing for a while and came back to the UK.
There’s one key part of the story I’m forgetting which is that, back in the Eighties, Vijay and I had met and he bought one of our cars from Alderley Edge and I took a team over to run it for him in India. We did the Indian Series for five years.
The connection between you and Vijay is decades old, then.
Yeah, we've been pals for 34 years. So when Vijay later on bought… Spyker…
You had to think then. The team’s had so many names!
He said “I’ve bought Spyker and we’d like you to come back on.” I felt at the time he needed somebody younger and more current, but I did come on as a board member and we looked at it from a restructuring point of view and then put the restructuring in place at the back end of 2008. I think that’s why you can’t find out much about me, because when I was first involved in motor sport there really was no social media for me to be on.
That’s the mystery solved. You weren’t in Pentonville Prison doing a long stretch then?
A few may wish I was.
And what sparked your original interest in motor sport?
I did some driving myself, taking part in my first rally when I was 17. I’ve always been interested in motor sport. And then I raced Chevrons, as I came from the north of England (where Chevron cars were based.) I realised I kept running out of talent and it was time to move on and run a team. In that respect it was bit like what Eddie (Jordan) did as we had the infrastructure in place to do that. In the end though, it wasn’t difficult for me to work out whether I preferred Formula 1 or rallying, because one’s done at night in the wet and the other one is done in the daytime with champagne and pretty girls.
What’s it like working with Vijay? He seems such an extrovert character and speaks with such authority.
We have known one another for such a long time that for me it’s easy working with him. It’s a pleasure and a privilege. Vijay travels a lot with his other business commitments and the arrangement we established was that one or both of us would do every race and that’s worked.
The media takes great delight in having you in the official FIA press conferences, because you’re the thorn in the side of the bigger teams, because you are in this fabled Strategy Group and you are not afraid of putting your views across.
I think we have a responsibility to the independent teams and we are the only ones representing them. All the others (in the Strategy Group) are privileged in so much as they are benefiting financially. I take it very seriously and look at it from the point of view not only of what Force India needs, but what do the other independent teams need and what does Formula 1 as a whole need. Yes, I like to think we are there to keep them honest, although we fail most of the time!
But it’s almost an impossible situation, as self interest will always take over. Even the bosses of some of the bigger teams are suggesting the teams have too much power in controlling the sport. Do you believe power should be taken away from the teams?
I think the system we had previously, where the concepts coming from the FIA or the commercial rights holder were fed through the Technical Working Group and the Sporting Working Group has stood us in good stead over many years. I would agree that possibly the voting system meant the system could be held to ransom by one or two teams, so you just needed to change the voting system, because it wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. It just needed tweaking. I think we made a mistake bringing in the Strategy Group. I don't believe it has any part to play in Formula 1 at all.
For us to put on this show here, I don’t care whether you are Marussia or Ferrari, the costs are similar. Therefore everybody should have a say in what’s going on and I believe in that very strongly.
And there is no show without the smaller teams…
Yes and we need to have regulations that allow teams to be competitive so the racing is competitive. It is achievable but it needs the will to do it. I think unfortunately the big teams have got so powerful, it’s now impossible to break them.
Without going into the specifics of the current power units, as a general rule, especially as we now actually have something called Formula E for electric-powered cars, was it wrong to even consider having a “green” Formula 1?
It’s a very difficult topic. I come from an era where I would like to think that Formula 1 should be a celebration of excess. So we’ve got the most powerful cars, the most technically advanced cars, the best parties, the prettiest girls, all of the things that one aspired to when I was younger. But we live in a different world now and we need to understand what that world is. I don't think people like me can do that and we need to engage with the younger people to see what they want. Maybe noise for example is not top of the list for the next generation of fans and we need to find out things like this.
The days of the ground shaking and the hairs on the back of your arms standing up are all part of an era I remember and love dearly, but things have changed
For a while I was of a mind that noise doesn’t matter, but having seen the demonstration runs by old F1 cars in Austria, or if you watch the Red Arrows here at Silverstone, I think noise has a physiological and psychological effect on people and really should be a part of the sport.
But it’s not what the car manufacturers wanted at the time. The FIA was of a same mind, Bernie accepted it and we are where we are and we have to accept it for now. It’s not an easy thing to change, although we can make it better, even if we will never get back to the V8 or V10 programmes. Saying that, I did Indy for many years when it was a turbo series without much noise and it didn’t affect the crowds. I can remember a time when we had a hundred and ten entrants and half a million people in the stadiums. The days of the ground shaking and the hairs on the back of your arms standing up are all part of an era I remember and love dearly, but things have changed. It was a raw emotion and people with a greater depth of knowledge than me need to work out where the future lies. I’m not necessarily politically correct nor technically savvy in that area.
And where do you see Force India in five years time? Or does that depend on where Formula 1 is in five years time?
When Vijay first came into F1, there was a certain amount of scepticism as to how long he’d stay, but as always with him he’s been fully committed and we’re now eight years into the programme. I’d like to think we can continue to build on it. Every year we are holding our own or improving. That’s a remarkable achievement for a team that was tripping over itself for last place when we took it over.
