How new Mastercard backed F1 team collapsed after just ONE race

McLaren and Mastercard doesn't sound like a Formula 1 deal anyone should be concerned about, even factoring the numbers and terms behind it.

Granted $100m is a cool sum, and McLaren do have to officially be called 'McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team' from next year. But this is all par for the course and has been part of F1 for decades now.

But there are a generation of fans who will recall what happened the last time Mastercard were the title sponsor of an F1 team. Spoiler alert, it didn't go well... or it was a very bad ending... ok, it was a catastrophic failure of unimaginable proportions.

The Mastercard Lola team

So long before we had 'McLaren Mastercard' in 2026, we had 'Mastercard Lola' in 1997. On the shop front everything looked great to the naked eye. A reliable sponsor with strong financial backing, a well respected name inside motor racing and even once the car was produced, it was an attractive and colourful looking machine (some awesome pictures here) that was set to start what was hopefully a memorable journey towards a world championship in four years (not my words, the words of Lola chief Eric Broadley.)

The trouble with the Lola car was while it looked competitive, it was anything but. Think today. If you are around 1.5 seconds behind pole position there is a good chance you will line up last on the grid.

So imagine how slow Vincenzo Sospiri was when on Mastercard Lola's debut at the 1997 Australian Grand Prix, his fastest lap in qualifying was 1:40.972...11.6 seconds off Jacques Villeneuve's pole time. Now pick your jaw up off the floor and consider he was the quickest Lola. His team-mate Ricardo Rosset was even slower at 12.7 seconds behind.

To add some more context, Pedro Diniz in the Arrows was the next slowest car but he was still five seconds quicker around Melbourne than Sospiri was.

Sospiri and Rosset's times were so bad that they fell foul of the 107 per cent rule, meaning they were too far behind Villeneuve's pole lap to be allowed to race on Sunday.

In summary, Lola were so bad in their debut race that they were considered too slow to even be allowed to compete. Their weekend was over on Saturday. The team itself followed soon after.

The team tested at Silverstone (still around nine seconds off the pace) before the team's staff flew out to the Brazilian Grand Prix for the second race at Interlagos. But on the Wednesday days before the event, Lola announced it was withdrawing from the race based on 'financial and technical problems' before the inevitable happened and the team ceased to exist. An existence of one race weekend, one qualifying session and no grand prix appearances. It doesn't get more shambolic than that.

Why did Mastercard Lola fail so badly?

Sadly, nothing was ever going to save Lola from the moment the deal was signed. Their deal with Mastercard didn't allow for the finances to come quick enough into the team, and then they were rushed into racing in 1997 when the initial idea was to go in 1998.

That only accelerated the downfall. The 1997 shift in focus caused an immediate rush job with inevitable consequences. The otherwise in-house Lola V10 engine had to be ditched to make way for a V8 that was even too slow for the Sauber team two years earlier.

The Lola chassis was based on the now defunct CART racing series in the United States. It had hardly any track testing and saw as much time in a wind tunnel as it did a chequered flag.

Sospiri and Rosset were never the quickest of drivers (the former never got to start an F1 race, the latter never scored an F1 point in 33 entries) but you could have stuck Max Verstappen or a prime Michael Schumacher in the car and it still wouldn't have been able to qualify for an F1 race in a month of Sundays. Mastercard Lola was simply a doomed operation from the very start and especially after it rushed towards a 1997 entry.

When did Mastercard return to F1?

Mastercard have of course been in the sport since. They sponsored Jordan shortly after the Lola collapse (10 internet points if you guessed that's where the image at the very top of this article was from) and of course have already been part of the McLaren group for some time now.

Now just because McLaren have now associated themselves with Mastercard as a title sponsor doesn't mean we should expect to see Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri without a drive after the season opener at Melbourne next year.

But it has helped prove to myself that when I think of Mastercard I think of that fateful Lola project and no $100million deal is going to stop that anytime soon.

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