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# Mining bosses have hired Rothschild to build South Africa a R6.7 billion motorsport complex north of Cape Town
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/froneman-consortium-rothschild-swartland-formula-one-bid/
- Published: 2026-09-24T03:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T03:14:59.000Z
- Description: Neal Froneman's consortium wants a grand prix on Swartland farmland, and Toby Venter already owns the circuit that held the last one.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News, #trending

Wheat farmland north of Cape Town is where a group of South African mining names wants to put a Formula One circuit. A consortium fronted by Neal Froneman, the former Sibanye-Stillwater chief executive, has hired Rothschild & Co to advise on a R6.7 billion motorsport complex in the Swartland, as part of a bid to bring grand prix racing back to the African continent. Bloomberg reported it on 22 September, working from a member of the consortium and proposal documents it says it has seen.

Froneman is not in it alone. The group takes in the mining executive Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan and Robert Appelbaum of the law firm Webber Wentzel, and trades as Blue Mountain Racing Grand Prix, which is the entity working up the business and financing structure.

## What R6.7 billion actually buys

Most of the money is not going on a racetrack. The Formula One-compliant circuit itself accounts for about R2 billion of the budget, according to the proposal Bloomberg saw. The rest goes on conferencing and exhibition facilities, hospitality infrastructure and residential property, on a site meant to hold 125,000 spectators. Rothschild's job is to line up corporate partners big enough to underpin the licence fee, with support being drawn from some of Africa's largest companies, because the government's condition is that the race draws no taxpayer money.

## The other bid already has a track

Kyalami is the complication. Toby Venter, who also runs Porsche South Africa, owns the Johannesburg circuit that held grands prix intermittently between 1967 and 1993, and he wants to rent it out to a winning bidder rather than run a bid of his own. He said last year that upgrades were under way to get the venue accredited by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile, the sport's governing body. So one South African bid is a building project and the other is a landlord's offer, and there is one grand prix between them.

Neither of them decides it. The consortium has submitted its response to Formula One's initial technical and commercial requirements, and the evaluation that follows is expected to run twelve to fifteen months. Africa has been off the calendar since 1993, and the thing being bid for has changed shape in the meantime. Formula One is worth more than $23 billion today, against the $4.4 billion Liberty Media paid for the business in 2017, a climb the sport puts down in part to the Netflix series Drive to Survive.