Rupert Manwaring's face may not be known to many outside the Formula One paddock, but Minardi's commercial director has now racked up 27 years of F1 career, which saw him work with some of the most famous teams on the grid and with no less than four World Champions. Today, he is the employee with arguably the biggest challenge in F1 - to find the money that will ensure Minardi's long term survival and success. Roger Horton sat down with this shy charming Englishman for a candid talk about his past, present and future experience

Even the most dedicated Anorak could probably walk past Minardi's commercial director Rupert Manwaring in the street and not recognise him, and yet the 46-year old Englishman has spent his entire working life in motor racing and during that time he has been on the payroll of some of the most famous teams on the grid and worked closely with no less than four World Champions during his 27 years in the sport.

"Yes, It's been 27 years," he muses as we talk during a brief lull in his hectic schedule in the Minardi hospitality area. "I know it's been 27 years because every so often I stop and think about it, and I think I thought about it recently!" he says as we talk about his life in racing; a life totally consumed by a passion for racing that was kicked started by a paperboy's mistake.

"I was at home, in Bromley, Kent, and accidentally the local newsagent delivered a copy of MotorSport magazine to my house. I read it before I delivered it to the house next door where it should have gone, and that's what got me interested. Then my dad took me to Brands Hatch and I watched a few races, and I think I was just turned on to cars generally."

Now he has one of the toughest jobs in Formula One. As Commercial Director at Minardi his job is to secure the funds that not only pay the wages, but all the other myriad of bills that come with running a Grand Prix team, and also hopefully secures the future of an outfit that is enjoying something of a renaissance after escaping liquidation just over a year ago.

"I am now only the Commercial Director - last year I was the Sporting Director as well, which meant I was a little bit busy," he says with a wry smile and a soft chuckle that never seems to be far away. "This year, John Walton is Sporting Director and so now I can spend all my time on commercial matters."

With his interest in racing cars fired up by the errant paperboy, he couldn't help but notice the Surtees F1 works in Edenbridge as he drove back and forth between his home and Sussex University, where he obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering. One day he plucked up courage to front them for a holiday job and was duly employed as a van driver and general gofer. This was 1973 and the motor racing bug was biting hard.

"When I left University I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I joined Surtees as a draughtsman. I thought at the time, 'well at least it was a job' sort of thing. Then after three months a job came up looking after parts which meant travelling with the race team, I think I was only twenty one, and it seemed like a good thing to do just for one year. I mean, obviously you wouldn't consider doing it as a career, would you?" He says with that smile and soft chuckle again.

"So I started doing it for one year, enjoyed it, slipped into it, and at that time the business was becoming more and more commercial, so it was possible to earn a reasonable living working in Formula One. So basically that's how I started."

After two years at Surtees, holding a last position of team manager, Manwaring left for Brabham, where he worked as the team's assistant manager for seven years - being promoted to team manager in his last year there. He then moved on to work with Haas Lola team, Lotus and Tyrrell.

"At Tyrrell, when I was the team manager, I often got involved with drivers, employing drivers, liasing with drivers, often they had a sponsor in tow, so I would start negotiating with sponsors and then hand it over to someone else," he says. "I found that a little frustrating, and also at Tyrrell we never ever had enough money, so I thought, well I will do that instead, I'll follow the money, so about six years ago, that's what I did."

His decision to 'follow the money' changed his career forever and was born out of the realization that no matter how talented and hard working a team was, only a properly funded outfit was ever going to survive, let alone move towards the sharp end of the grid. He had no marketing experience, but following the ethos that everything can be learned provided you have the aptitude and are prepared to work hard enough, he pitched in and left behind his days on the pit wall forever.

He now has no involvement in the operational side of Minardi during the races, but he still finds it impossible to just relax and enjoy the race with any sort of dispassionate interest.

"Fifteen minutes before the start of a race I get very nervous and for the first five laps I still am, that's just old habits dying hard I guess," he says. "In Australia, I had 57 laps of absolute hell, because the opportunity had been given to us right at the start and all we could do was to mess it up. So I was very tense, I didn't enjoy the race at all, because it meant so much to us.

"So if I remember correctly I just ate my way through half a jar of wine gums and hoped for the best. But when I get home this week I am going to sit down and watch the race right through and I am sure I will enjoy it then."

Manwaring, perhaps more than most of the team, was aware just what the Australian success could mean for the future of the Anglo-Italian outfit. Only those who witnessed the huge reaction to Mark Webber's Melbourne result can understand just what a milestone it could be for Minardi.

The Australians love a battler, and especially an Australian battler, and just for a moment the combination of a down-to-earth-multi-millionaire with a common touch, and a rookie driver making his debut in Formula One, captured the imagination of the country in a way that has certainly not happened in recent times. So it was stirring stuff, but just what does it mean for Minardi?

"Well, there are several aspects of it," Manwaring explains. "If we finish tenth in the Championship this year, and those two points are a pretty good start, then sure it is going to be worth at least several millions to us. But, more importantly, it may have flagged us up to a major corporation, and it may have given them the confidence to take a long-term view and invest in Minardi, and obviously that's something I am working on very hard right now."

Once you start following the money, the journey, it seems, is never ending.

Some paddock estimates put the current Minardi budget at around $80 million, which is less than half the amount that most of the their rivals have at their disposal. Manwaring refuses to discuss his company's finances, but does allow that he sees an awful lot of money being wasted by some mid field outfits, money that - as a dedicated 'racer' himself - he obviously feels he could put to better use.

Ask him what was the highlight of his team management days, and the two Championship years with Brabham are top of his list. He found Nelson Piquet an interesting driver to work with, he says, and also has fond memories of working with Ayrton Senna during his last year at Lotus in 1987 as the team worked to perfect the complicated active suspension system.

"Ayrton was one of the easiest people to work with, no fuss," he recalls today. "Of course he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was what we all wanted - to make the car go faster. The really good drivers are the easiest to work with in my experience. He was bloody quick and a pleasure to work with."

Asked if he can define what was that extra something that Senna had, Manwaring shrugs and makes an obvious comparison. "Whatever it was I think he got it from the same shop as Michael [Schumacher] gets it from... I just don't know where that shop is, not many people do!"

Only once during our entire conversation does the Minardi man sound at all downbeat, and that is when the subject of the stillborn Honda Racing Development project comes up. As the Tyrrell team was being wound down after the BAR buyout, the nucleus of the old team got together with the late Harvey Postlethwaite to spearhead the Japanese company's push into F1 as a complete package, preceding by a number of years just what their sometime bitter rival Toyota are doing now.

"I think that would have been my glory project," Manwaring recalls now with the hint of deep regret still in his voice. "I mean, there we had all the resources in the world, some fantastic people and we built four very fast prototype cars and if that project had continued I believe I could have been a major part of a very successful team. The project was stopped for whatever reason, so I had to dust myself off and attack again."

Q: If the project had so much promise, just why did Honda pull the plug? And did Postlethwaite's untimely death play a part in the decision?

Manwaring: "I think it was a lot to do with big company politics; there was a change in the management structure at Honda about five months after the project started, and for whatever reason they changed their minds. It was always a bit of a mystery to me why they did that, and I am sure if they were honest they probably regret it now. And of course when you have Honda behind you it's very easy to attract people from all teams and that was what we were doing. A group of highly motivated people, most of whom had just been snubbed by BAR, so it was a super situation which unfortunately Honda chose to throw away.

"But it was all cancelled about a month before Harvey died, so no that was not a factor in their decision."

Although Manwaring doesn't say so directly, he gives a clear impression that a huge opportunity was lost when Tyrrell was bought out by BAT and purely commercial considerations took precedent over racing and technical priorities as the new BAR team evolved. With the current lack of performance by the two Honda powered teams on the grid, and with newcomers Toyota making a promising start to their own F1 venture, it seems more and more evident just what an opportunity Honda let slip.

When the Honda project was cancelled Manwaring ended up not having a regular job in F1 for eighteen months, but found that he didn't miss F1 as much as he thought he would. "I love fishing, I love walking the dog, that sort of thing. I loved every minute of being at home, it was brilliant, I was trading on the stock market from home, and I found I could take or leave it," he says.

That, of course, was the story until Paul Stoddart called him up to help him run Minardi. The Australian had stepped in at the last moment to save Minardi becoming another statistic in the F1 history books and he needed a guy with Manwaring's background and experience to help pull his new venture together.

Can the Englishman pull off perhaps his biggest ever challenge and find the money to make Minardi a serious player at a time when so many corporations are shy about making multi million dollar commitments to fund a sport so conspicuously capital intensive as modern Grand Prix racing? As usual, Manwaring's answer is full of the pragmatism that comes with having so much experience in what is a tough game.

"Well of course it is possible, whether it happens or not is another matter. It depends whether we are clever enough to find the right partners, make the right decisions and only time will tell. We are dealing now with several big possible partners and if only one of them comes off, it would make a big difference to Minardi. But it is a game and it's a gamble, so maybe we will pull it off, maybe we won't. We need a solid three to five year financial partner, so we can do what we want when we want, and not go around grovelling to people like we do now.

"Our current backing from Malaysia is exactly what we want," he adds firmly, "we just need to find more of it. We have a terrific relationship with Malaysia, and I don't know where we would be without it, but we need more."

Going into the Malaysian Grand Prix, Minardi's stats were 272 starts, no wins, no fastest laps, no podium finishes, and when Mark Webber collected his two points for his fifth placed finish in Melbourne he became the third most successful Minardi driver ever behind the sixteen points scored by Pieruigi Martini and the six scored by Christian Fittipaldi.

So is it hard pitching for money on behalf of a team that has, let's say, a rather less than impressive F1 record? Manwaring has clearly heard this question before and his reply is swift and firm.

"First of all we are presenting the future, I don't mean we are presenting a dream. We are presenting what we are going to be doing next year with the people that we have. I never oversell, I pitch what we can deliver, how we can deliver it, so you either do a deal or you don't. Fortunately, from time to time we do a deal.

"The success rate of approaches is around one in two hundred proposals, and it took me a few years to accept rejection. It's the classic Swan story - I may appear laid back, but there's a hell of a lot going on under the surface," he jokes, and once again the smile and laugh combination that perhaps has charmed many a sponsor to part with his cheque is much in evidence.

Indeed, there is a lot going on beneath this big man's quiet exterior, and it is clear from the brief time we spend together just why Manwaring has not only survived so long in such a tough environment, but also prospered. He is clearly in love with his job and with the whole show that is Formula One, and his commitment to the Minardi cause is total. He has seen many changes over the years and has had an insider's view of much of the politics and intrigue that fuels the paddock's energy and keeps all those in the business on their toes. But he has no time for those who hanker after the past and who can only look back through rose tinted viewfinders.

"I still love Formula One a lot, I still think the racing's good," he says. "Yes, it's changed. The manufacturers' involvement has changed things, the amount of money has changed things, but at the end of the day I still think it's a great sport, and whichever way you look at it when the flag drops there is nowhere to hide. So whatever the rules are, whatever your commercial circumstances are, you just have to make the best of it. I don't want to whine, I don't want to complain, the racing today is different, that's all there is to say."

And then he was off into the paddock again, no doubt still following the money.