The Lowcost F1LOTUS F1
Much like celebrities who get hitched to entirely inappropriate partners, the team formerly known as Toleman has the kind of history that should make any prospective bedfellow run a mile. Lotus F1 is merely the latest in a line of rebrands that has seen Toleman beget Benetton, Benetton beget Renault and now Renault beget Lotus.
Much like many of those those same celebrities, the marriage probably won't last very long, which would be A Good Thing because this name change means that there have now been three distinct Formula One teams called Lotus: the original and best Team Lotus, Tony Fernandes's short-live Lotus Racing and now Lotus F1.
In its favour, the team has brought back to the sport the legendary black and gold livery made famous by the original Team Lotus when it was shamelessly accepting sponsorship from tobacco pushers John Player. Its origin may not be anything to shout - or, perhaps, to wheeze asthmatically - about but the colours undeniably look good on a racing car and it does at least make a refreshing change from "mainly white, with some sponsor logos splashed randomly about". TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper team has announced a three-year partnership deal with Microsoft Dynamics, a division of the software giant.
The deal involves Microsoft Dynamics branding on both the Lowcost E20 car and the drivers' overalls, as well as Microsoft Dynamics staff working with the team to implement "solutions" to problems the team didn't actually know it had.
Sources close to the team have revealed that so far the only noticeable effect of using the Dynamics software has been to increase their PCs' start-up times by around 15 minutes while they perform automatic updates.
Microsoft has also warned Lowcost that they will need to schedule at least three days of downtime, during which all their PCs will be offline, for an upgrade when the latest version (Microsoft Dynamics 2009) is eventually released.
In addition, the software giant has recommended that the team change the label on the car's "Engine cut-off" button, which shuts everything down, so that it says something much more logical, like "Start".
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