While Tamoil became the Turmoil and Lysys was just fooling around with it’s own clients. You may ask yourself where there no other investors or companies interested to invest in the team. A good example is the Arrows team in 2002 while they filed for bankruptcy there were a bunch of serious candidates. Sure, 1993 was a very unstable year economical wise, though there are always people with too much money. It’s time to take a deep dive in the pool of forgotten and rumoured attempts for team take overs. Let’s see if there were more serious candidates. Candidates that could have saved the team, and would have March raced in Kyalami 1993.
Matt Aitken
Matt Aitken is a musician who was part of the group Stock, Aitken and Waterman. A group that produced music in the 1980s and 1990s. After the group split in 1991 Aitken went into retirement to persuade his hobby Autosport. In 1991 he started racing in the Jaguar Sport International Challenge while he already owned his own team in the Formula Ford. He later would appear in the Pro Sport 3000.
It seems that Matt Aitken got involved in 1991 with March somehow and was interested to either invest in the March team or to buy himself in the management of the team. The rumours went that he would join Henny Vollenberg and Ken Marrable. However, it seems that in the end this didn’t happen due to the amount of money he had to bring in.
Henny Vollenberg – Dutch March F1 Team
This is more a speculation from Jan Lammers himself during an interview. The 12th of March 1993 Lammers was interviewed in a hotel in Johannesburg after it was clear that March would not race that weekend. During that interview Lammers states that he never saw someone like Henny Vollenberg in the autosport before. He never took no for an answer and was looking for ways to achieve his goals. Lammers stated that there was an opportunity that March would end up in Dutch hands. Henny Vollenberg would be part of the team’s management. With all those Dutch companies, it should be possible isn’t it? It wouldn’t be a surprise that at some point in the winter of 1992/1993 they were looking for such a solution to keep the team afloat.
Franz Konrad
Franz Konrad is a successful driver and team owner. He had his team in the early 1990s competing in Rally racing, Touring Cars and the DTM. An interesting fact about Franz Konrad is that he came close to race during the 1984 German Grand Prix for the Tyrrell team. As the team was looking for a replacement for the injured Stefan Beloff. He declined however, and Mike Thackwell replaced Beloff. At the time March was struggling to stay afloat Franz Konrad came in contact with the management of the team. The reason, to see if it was possible to buy the team.
It could be a good fit, at that time Konrad was working on their own Group C car the KM011. This car would be fitted with an Lamborghini engine. The infrastructure was there and the knowhow to setup a team. Weeks prior the Hungarian Grand Prix the first negotiations between Franz and Henny had happened. It is the Hungarian Grand Prix when the news arrived that Heinz-Harald Frentzen had signed a deal with the March team for 1993. It seemed that Konrad in late August was to purchase the shares from Ken Marrable. Eventually it seemed that the deal went bust in September as the money was not enough that Konrad could offer.
Interesting is that if he would have purchased the March team he would have had two design for 1993. As Gustav Brunner seemed to have designed a car for March during the season. While Franz Konrad already had a design ready that Johannes Gruber from the University at Graz had penned.
