We spoke a bit more, and much of what he said concerned plans that, even then, I felt fairly sure would never come to pass: stuff like “It would be great if a Russian driver might one day become Formula 1 world champion in a Midland car” and the like. But if you ask some of the Midland F1 Racing old boys who still work at Aston Martin F1 Team what they thought of Shnaider at the time, as I did when I was the team’s comms/PR chief in 2021 and 2022, they tend to speak positively about him, which is not always the attitude of rank-and-file F1 people when you quiz them about their wealthy team owners.
What is Shnaider doing these days? Now 56, he is still in business, and Canadian ‘rich lists’ always rank him as a billionaire, but he keeps a low profile, although he attracted a flurry of media attention in 2013 when he paid a small fortune to Justin Bieber – then 19 and already a megastar – to perform at the 16th birthday party of his daughter Erica, a passionate Belieber, for which swanky shindig he had hired Toronto’s famously enormous Art Gallery of Ontario.
Anyway, for our final flashback, let me take you back to February 25, 2005, for I was with Shnaider again, this time in Moscow, for the launch on a snow-covered Red Square of the ‘new’ Jordan EJ15 (actually an updated EJ14 from the previous year). Eddie Jordan was there, as was Bernie Ecclestone, and perhaps more surprisingly Renault’s F1 team principal Flavio Briatore. So, too, were the team’s race drivers, Tiago Monteiro and Narain Karthikeyan, as well as its test drivers Robert Doornbos and Roman Rusinov. Shnaider’s smile was slightly less thin than it had been in Shanghai five months before, and he was apparently unconcerned by the extraordinarily aggressive behaviour of the ever-present security guards. Perhaps he was used to that kind of thing, but we western Europeans were not, for any photographers who pointed their lenses at anything other than the F1 car in front of them – the Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin’s Mausoleum, or St Basil’s Cathedral for example – were yelled at and sometimes even manhandled. After a while the team’s comms/PR chief, the excellent Helen Temple, announced: “The federal police are about to arrive, so it’s probably a good idea for us to leave now.” We did as bidden.
Narain Karthikeyan (left) and Tiago Monteiro at Jordan’s 2005 Red Square launch
Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty Images
That evening Shnaider threw a lavish party, held at a big and gaudy Moscow nightclub whose name I forget, on which the city’s A-listers and big businessmen descended en masse. A Ukrainian girl band called Via Gra (yes, really) sang a few numbers. As the Champagne flowed, most of the guests got pretty merry, including Jordan, who abandoned his previously stated vow not to play a significant role in the proceedings and began to give impromptu interviews.
Shnaider, immaculately dressed in an obviously expensive black suit, white shirt, and dark grey tie, merely looked on, sipped water all night, and therefore remained stone-cold sober. I said a few words to him, and he pretended to remember me, but in truth I think he did not. He had been semi-detached in Shanghai in 2004, and he was semi-detached again, here, in Moscow, now, in 2005.
The launch messaging had been all about the Midland Group exploiting the power of F1’s huge marketing reach over the next decades as a lever via which its global expansion could be accelerated. But perhaps Shnaider had always privately known that he was going to sell sooner rather than later. He did just that, very soon in fact, quietly trousering a profit of $47 million. A smart cookie, is Alexander Yevseyevich Shnaider, albeit a singularly inscrutable one.