It is early morning and the sun is rising over the Suzuka racing circuit as Steve Ridgway, the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic, walks up the pit lane towards the Brawn garage.
The crowds are yet to arrive and the lane is eerily quiet ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix. In the Brawn garage, the cars of Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello sit side by side, looking small and fragile with their wheels off and engines silenced.
On the side of both vehicles is the Virgin Atlantic logo, and Mr Ridgway is clearly proud to have his airline’s name on cars that could, in a few hours’ time, clinch the Formula One constructors’ title.
In a typically opportunistic move, Sir Richard Branson stepped in at the start of the season to sponsor the Brawn F1 team and, since that first race in Australia, the various Virgin brands have taken turns to put their names on the cars.
Sir Richard is thought to have paid less than £5 million to sponsor the Brawn team this year, but figures from Margaux Matrix, a media monitoring group, estimated yesterday that Virgin had gained more than £50 million of television coverage.
At the Japanese Grand Prix, it is Virgin Atlantic’s turn to go on the side of the Brawn cars and Mr Ridgway has taken the opportunity to come to watch a sport he has been involved with for years.
This included two years as a nonexecutive director of British American Racing (BAR), the team co-founded by Adrian Reynard, an old college friend of the Virgin boss. He left the team in 2004 when it was sold to Honda, which in turn sold out last year to Ross Brawn, the motorsport engineer and now team owner.
“It is a funny coincidence that Virgin has ended up sponsoring the team I was involved with five years ago,” Mr Ridgway said. “I know the set-up at Brackley [the team’s headquarters in Northamptonshire] and I have a huge affection for it.”
Speed is a recurring theme in Mr Ridgway’s life and it was responsible for bringing him together with Sir Richard for the first time in 1984.
“I was working for the Toleman Group, which made auto parts for all the big carmakers. But it also had a F1 team and brought Ayrton Senna into the sport,” Mr Ridgway said later, as we waited for the lights to go out at the start of the Japanese Grand Prix.
“When Toleman bought Cougar Marine [the powerboat manufacturer] in Miami, I was sent over to help run the place. I lived on a boat on a canal and went to work by speedboat. It was a great life.”
Cougar Marine wanted to break into the military market and build offshore patrol vessels. Realising that to do so, it would need a prototype, the company started designing a large powerboat that would eventually become the Virgin Atlantic Challenger.
“Richard Branson had started his airline in 1984 and he could not afford advertising, so he decided to raise publicity by doing something different. He wanted to capture the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and we provided the boat.”
Mr Ridgway was the head of the Challenger project and he was also Sir Richard’s throttle man on the boat. The pair made their first attempt to seize the Blue Riband in 1985 but sank 100 miles from the Scilly Isles, but a second attempt in 1986 was successful.
“After we were fished out of the sea on the first attempt, we pledged do it again. The next year we got across, and Richard became a real household name. He and I have been very good friends ever since.”
Mr Ridgway joined Virgin Atlantic in 1989 and became managing director in 1998 and chief executive in 2001.
Virgin’s sponsorship of the Brawn F1 team has given him a chance to get involved in motorsport again and the relationship is set to develop further next year when Virgin sponsors a new team, Manor Racing.
“I’ve always been interested in motorsport,” Mr Ridgway said, as we sat in the stand overlooking the home straight at Suzuka. “At college we set up a rally club and we used to race around the country lanes in Oxfordshire. I suppose my interest comes from my dad, who was quite a speed freak and always had fast cars.
“I grew up on a farm and had my first car at age 11. I paid £8 for a Morris 8 post van that had tyres so bald they looked like the slicks on a racing car. We had a long driveway and I’d take the other kids on the farm down to meet the bus for school.
“I couldn’t afford petrol for the van so when my parents had friends over for dinner, I used to siphon petrol out of their cars. The next day they would call my parents saying thanks for a great dinner but we ran out of petrol on the way home.”
Such cunning might have come in useful for the Brawn team during the Japanese Grand Prix, as both drivers struggled in the middle of the field, finishing seventh and eighth. Their low placings meant that Brawn missed clinching the constructors’ championship by half a point and Jenson Button’s agonising crawl to the driver’s title would have to wait another couple of weeks at least.
With the champagne left on ice, we travelled to Tokyo by bullet train and reconvened in the bar on the 38th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel. With the red lights on top of Tokyo’s skyscrapers blinking around us, Mr Ridgway’s thoughts turned to a subject that has occupied all airline bosses in the past year: survival.
The global economic downturn has hit the aviation sector hard and IATA, a trade body that represents airlines, has predicted that the industry will lose $11 billion (£6.7 billion) this year and a further $3.8 billion next year.
Virgin has cut costs by reducing its headcount from 9,000 to 7,500, with about 75 per cent of the jobs going voluntarily. “In my view we are living in a world that is 20 per cent smaller than it was 18 months ago,” Mr Ridgway said. “The froth has gone and markets have contracted. The only way the airline industry can survive is to cut its cloth to meet capacity, and there is more of that to come from some carriers. We are being very cautious about next year and we will keep the hatches battened down.”
Like most airlines, Virgin has cut costs and capacity and is pricing aggressively to keep its aircraft full. However, it is more exposed to the economic headwinds than many of its competitors because it does not have a protected domestic market to fall back on.
Air France, Lufthansa and the other national flag carriers have a built-in consumer base at their home airports. Virgin, by comparison, has had to carve out a niche in an occasionally dirty fight with it main rival, British Airways.
“There is no other airline in the world like Virgin because the flag carriers are so dominant at their hubs. With Air France in Paris or Lufthansa at Frankfurt, there is no room for anyone else,” Mr Ridgway said.
“Virgin does not have a right to exist but it has been successful by being different. We can only buy the same planes and use the same awful airports as everyone else, but people know we are different. What makes Virgin special is in our culture and in our brand and we always recruit people who buy into that.”
Like the Brawn team, which should, barring disaster, wrap up the F1 constructors’ title this weekend, Virgin Atlantic is the underdog made good. Under Mr Ridgway’s leadership, the airline continues to challenge the industry’s Ferraris and McLarens in a race where the refuelling bills are considerably larger.
CV
Born September 29, 1951
Education Torquay Grammar School and Oxford Polytechnic
Career 1981 Joined Cougar Marine, Miami 1985-86 Project head, Virgin Atlantic Challenger 1989 Joined Virgin Atlantic and became managing director in 1998 and chief executive in 2001 2003-04 Non-executive director, British American Racing (BAR).
Also owns the £13.5m St Moritz Hotel in Cornwall with his brother, Hugh
Family: Lives in Hampshire; married with three children
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