'Our F1 bid's better than Andretti's. I'm pissed off' - why Rodin won't go away

“I do want to make it clear that I haven’t got any kind of beef with the FIA in terms of anything,” Dicker says. “I’ve got a few opinions about the way it was structured, but I haven’t got any negative problems with them. I’m not irritated, even though it cost me half a million dollars…”

Whether you believe him is another matter that I’ll let you make up your own minds about, but Dicker provides a view into the rigorous process that the FIA has been undertaking over the past few months. Even if that’s a process he was prepared to be unsuccessful within.

“To be honest, I always thought I would be rejected, and Andretti would be the only guy to get across the line, and that proved to be correct. But the problem is that when the opportunities come up, you’ve just got to take them regardless, because that’s just the way things are.

“That’s how the world works. So we had to do it, even though I thought we wouldn’t get it across the line. I still believe we’ve got a better bid than Andretti, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s all very disappointing. I’ll be honest.”

After what Dicker describes as a “Herculean effort” to get the application submitted within a week after initially missing what he thought was the deadline, there were in-person meetings and discussions as well. But where Rodin differed from the other projects was Dicker’s intention to base the team in New Zealand, as he feels Andretti is likely to follow a similar model to what already exists.

“I flew to the FIA, and we presented with them and they were fine and they heard us out. I think they gave us a fair hearing as far as it goes, but what they thought about the whole thing only they know the answers to that.

“But I guess the real problem I have with it is that there’s a lot of talk about wanting diversity and there’s a lot of talk by the F1 guys — [Stefano] Domenicali, etc — about ‘Oh we only want another team if they’re going to add something to F1’. And I don’t see how Andretti is going to add anything to F1, because it’s just going to be another team based in the UK, like all the other teams except for Ferrari, and Sauber and Toro (AlphaTauri). And so where’s the real addition?

“GM’s got a pretty awful record of just pulling out of things if they feel like it, so you wouldn’t want to feel like that was a great basis for running it. And they’re not actually doing anything that’s different to what the other teams do. Like what’s the difference between what they’re doing and what Haas does, for instance? I don’t see it.

“You want to call it a world championship, but they don’t have a single team in the southern hemisphere. And really, all they’ve actually got is almost all the teams are in the UK and a couple of teams in Western Europe. Is that really a world championship?”

Location wasn’t something Dicker named as a sticking point, however, stating that Rodin’s main downfall was a lack of pre-existing facilities or infrastructure, something that the likes of Andretti and Hitech could boast as both have already been running designs in wind tunnels for a number of months.

“They [the FIA] did send us some very detailed metrics with red and green sort of squares on it for where you were good and where you weren’t. And if I summarise it, I would say that their expectation was that we’d already built up pretty much a complete F1 team infrastructure in-house and we were just ready to go on the off chance that they’d let us in. Which obviously, as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a crazy idea.

“But that’s how I summarise why they rejected it, because we obviously don’t have that, because that wouldn’t make any sense.”

So while Andretti continues to pursue the eleventh team slot, Dicker’s most obvious entry point is to invest in an existing team — like he already has in junior categories through Rodin Carlin – but he says asking prices are currently unrealistic on that front.

“Well, I did have some talks about buying AlphaTauri, but the price is commercially unviable as far as I could understand it. You’ve still got to look at these things in commercial terms. And the F1 guys are experts on the motor sport side, but on the business side, I’m not so sure.

“I’ve had a few people talk about this and that but nothing tremendously concrete. I do have a couple of things that I might get a bit more info in the next week or two about some possibilities there. But the value proposition is weak.”

But as you might have guessed from the desire to explore the opportunity even when he felt he was on a hiding to nothing, the FIA’s decision is unlikely to be the last we hear of Dicker’s F1 ambitions.

“I do have a project that I’m working on. It’s interesting and exciting, but I can’t talk about it quite yet, because I haven’t quite got it. But let me put it this way: I’m pretty pissed off about not getting into Formula 1, so I’m not just going to go away and sulk.

“That’s just the way that the way I am. I mean, you want to do things, and that’s what life’s about. You just try to do them. And if you can’t do it one way, then look for another way, or other ways of doing things.”