Tiago Monteiro: Looking back to front.

Saturday, 24th March 2007

Everything was already agreed [with Spyker], but my sponsors wanted more too so we agreed to look elsewhere - I wasn’t motivated to continue struggling with a team where I couldn’t see any evolution in the short-term.

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Welcome to my latest column for CRash.net - and congratulations for finding it as you will notice I have 'moved house' since last year.

A new season is upon me and I am busy getting ready for my debut in the World Touring Car Championship for SEAT but, while I am looking forward to hitting the track, different circumstances could have seen me preparing for Formula One, Champ Cars, the Le Mans Series or even the DTM at this very moment.

Indeed, I was quite in demand at the end of the 2006 Formula One season, and I must admit I could have signed a contract with Spyker back at the final round of the season in Brazil and that would have been my 2007 sorted.

However, it would have been my third season in Formula One and I needed to know how the team were planning on moving forward because I could not afford to spend another year in a similar position at the back of the grid, either for myself as a professional driver or for my sponsors.

Obviously, I know that these things take time and it’s impossible for a team to guarantee that the car is going to be quicker by half a second, a second, two seconds, but what I wanted really was to find out about the short-term future of the team. It became more and more clear, especially with some insider information, that the team was still going to struggle for a while.

Don’t get me wrong, the Spyker project is very good. It’s got a great business plan and I really do believe that it’s going to be good in the mid-term - in the next two, three, four years maybe you will see a big improvement in Spyker if things go as planned. However, in the meantime, in the short-term, I couldn’t see any real evolution plans and I didn’t want my career to suffer as a result.

Everything was actually already agreed, but my sponsors wanted more too so we agreed to look elsewhere. Indeed, I wasn’t motivated to continue struggling with a team where I couldn’t see any evolution in the short-term, so we told them that we were not going to sign their contract as it was.

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