The Caterham F1 team said that "it raised enough money from a crowd-funding website to compete at the Nov. 23 season-ending race in Abu Dhabi," according to Alex Duff of BLOOMBERG.
The team was seeking to raise £2.35M ($3.7M) on Crowdcube Ltd.’s website.
The team had raised £1.87M ($2.9M) -- 79% of its target -- from 4,874 backers as of 2:55pm U.K. time on Thursday (BLOOMBERG, 11/14). REUTERS' Alan Baldwin reported Caterham has "made 230 staff redundant while still planning to race in next weekend's Abu Dhabi season-ender." Administrator
Finbarr O'Connell said that the team, which went into administration last month, "would take 40 people to the Yas Marina circuit with their expenses paid with money raised through a crowd-funding initiative." O'Connell said "the redundancies had come at the request of a majority of the staff who had wanted to start a formal claims process that takes at least a month before any payments are made, if the team is not sold" (REUTERS, 11/17). O'Connell: "I'm not sure this is the bad news. This is what the employees as a group have been asking me to do" (BBC, 11/16).
