Szafnauer forced into disaster management
Szafnauer had always had to work with a much smaller budget compared to that available to other teams around them on the grid. The Force India name - a matter of personal pride for the patriotic Mallya - made it hard for the team to attract global advertising and sponsorship. Then in 2018 Mallya's own financial and legal situation suffered a precipitous collapse and Force India was left running virtually on fumes, Szafnauer having to pull out all the stops just to physically get the race team to the track every week.
This state of affairs couldn't go on. A winding-up petition filed by an unpaid supplier forced the team to take drastic action simply to buy time and avoid insolvency, "which was going to happen within weeks" Szafnauer later confirmed. "The three choices were insolvency, administration or sell, and the sell option - which I know the shareholders were working on - was just taking too long. We were going to hit a road block of insolvency, and then the whole thing stops.”
The alternative was by no means a straightforward process. "The team can’t put the thing into administration, a creditor has to," Szafnauer explained. In the end this fell to the team's lead driver Sergio Perez, who by that time was himself owed a substantial amount by the squad. "Somebody had to do it. Checo had been between a rock and a hard place. He didn’t want to do this, but imagine you’re in Checo’s shoes if in three weeks’ time it’s insolvency."
As frantic negotiations with would-be buyers took place over the summer break, Szafnauer's role was to keep the team running and to sustain morale, and prevent key staff from leaving to take up jobs elsewhere that could affect the squad's viability as a going concern. These dramatic behind-the-scenes efforts were recorded for posterity in the first season of Netflix's Drive to Survive documentary. Even when terms were reached with a consortium led by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, there were significant hurdles to overcome - such as setting up a whole new company to take over the old Force India's formal F1 entry (itself worth millions of dollars) in order not to get sucked into Mallya's rapidly deteriorating business situation, while also ensuring the team's own debts (and unpaid wages) were honoured.
It was an unprecedented solution to the problem, but it worked. When racing resumed after the summer break, a phoenix was already rising from the ashes of the original Force India.
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