Bob Fernley dies after a career spent keeping Force India fighting

Bob Fernley died on 30 June 2023 at the age of 70. He was not the owner whose name sat above the door, nor the technical chief whose car drawings could be turned into myth. His Formula 1 career sat in the harder-to-summarise middle: management, politics, race-team operations and the daily work of keeping an underfunded team competitive.

Fernley became best known as deputy team principal of Force India after Vijay Mallya bought the former Spyker team. Mallya supplied the ownership story and the public ambition, but Fernley often acted as the senior trackside figure, handling practical operations and paddock politics while the team tried to turn modest resources into points.

Force India’s useful stubbornness

Force India was one of Formula 1’s better examples of a team that made a limited budget look less limiting than it was. Based at Silverstone, it developed from backmarker beginnings into a regular midfield threat, scoring podiums and finishing fourth in the constructors’ championship in 2016 and 2017. Those results belonged to many people: drivers, engineers, strategists, Mercedes power, and a technical group that learned how to spend carefully. Fernley was part of the management structure that gave that work enough stability to matter.

The team also lived through financial and legal pressure around Mallya, then administration in 2018 before its assets were bought by the Lawrence Stroll-led consortium that created Racing Point and later Aston Martin. Fernley left after that transition, closing the Force India chapter just as the Silverstone operation entered another identity.

His later roles kept him close to high-level motorsport. He was involved with McLaren’s troubled 2019 Indianapolis 500 project and later chaired the FIA Single-Seater Commission. Those chapters were less successful or less visible than Force India, but they showed how much of his career sat in the administrative machinery behind racing categories.

Fernley’s death was marked by tributes from former colleagues and drivers who had worked with him. His legacy in Formula 1 is not a trophy count or a signature car. It is the memory of a team that punched above its accounts, and of one of the people who helped make that possible without needing to be the loudest figure in the room.