Friday March 1st, 2002

By Timothy Collings

Minardi boss Paul Stoddart has claimed that Tom Walkinshaw's involvement with the Prost Grand Prix team goes against Formula One's Concorde Agreement.

Arrows boss Walkinshaw announced earlier on Friday that his company Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) was involved in the purchase of the Prost team, who were declared bankrupt this year after failing to find the necessary investors to pay debts of around $28 million.

Walkinshaw himself denied rumours suggesting that he had bought the Prost assets himself, saying that TWR would only offer engineering support to the buyers.

The French court which was in charge of Prost's case has offered the Prost 2001 cars and their intellectual property rights to the 2002 car for a fraction of what the French team's liquidator had been offered before the team were declared bankrupt.

Also, the deal guaranteed that the new owners won't have to pay Prost's debts, something that Stoddart believes goes against the Concorde Agreement.

"I think what he has done is outside of the governing document of Formula One, the Concorde Agreement," said Stoddart today. "As far as I'm concerned, liquidation is a virtue of its word, it's the final state, and there is only one way you can pull something out of liquidation under any law, and that is to simply pay all the creditors.

"I am told... that the receiver, or administrator, liquidator, judge - call him whatever you want - was offered between $30 and $60 million US for this team only some weeks ago, to take it over as a going concern. For whatever reason, he rejected those offers and, as we all know, the rest is history; it was placed into liquidation.

"It's wrong for Formula One, it's wrong for the creditors, it's wrong for the teams. Formula One has been through enough, there's a lot of sponsors that were here last year, they're not here this year, we needed a period of stability, common sense and unity."

Australian Stoddart, who took over from the Minardi team at the start of last season, has threatened to take legal action against Walkinshaw before the next Grand Prix in Malaysia if the FIA, the sport's ruling body, don't do something about it.

"I will be taking it to court, probably before Malaysia, and I will be seeking an injunction to stop, if someone else doesn't do it, this from happening," he added. "I think it's time that the team principals united to stop stupidity like this. This isn't Paul Stoddart with sour grapes, this is someone who cares passionately that we don't tear Formula One apart.

"We have had enough close calls lately; it's bad enough Prost went down and we don't need this rubbish."

Published at 07:20:40 GMT