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When a peculiar but charismatic businessman dubbed the 'Original Fake Sheikh', a Formula 1 team on its uppers (Tyrrell) and a genuine Hollywood A-list musical diva came into the same orbit during the mid-1990s, interesting things happened.
Stranger than fiction it may be. But the tale played out to be one of F1's greatest ever forgotten farces and most of its detail has remained untold for almost 30 years. It is a ripping yarn centred around something resembling a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels-style caper.
Most of the story was eventually put to bed, in a fashion, via the sanctity of the UK's legal system, including a trial of fraud against the chief protagonist, an individual of Saudi nationality called Sulaiman Al Kehaimi. It concluded, to the astonishment of many of those involved, with him being found innocent.
Al Kehaimi is the type of character that even now is hard to properly pin down in any tangible way. He was accused of hoodwinking the rich and famous into believing he was of astronomical wealth, when in fact he was really someone of much more modest means.
Remarkably, one of F1's most heady absurdities also involves Cher, the Grammy-winning singer, who Al Kehaimi clearly had a personal fondness for.
Her involvement, like most in this farce, is quite peripheral to the shadowy protagonist himself, but it does feature her being chaperoned by a respected F1 personality, who to this day often asks himself whether the whole bizarre affair really happened or not.
Satisfyingly for you, the reader, it very much did.
Playing the game
In 1996, racing professional Rupert Manwaring was in his fifth year at Tyrrell. He'd filled most roles in a distinguished F1 career since he began working at the Surtees team in 1977.
The glory years had come at Brabham between 1979 and 1984 when along with colleagues such as Charlie Whiting, Herbie Blash and Nigel de Strayter he had formed one of F1's most skilful and creative units that helped bring Nelson Piquet two titles in 1981 and 1983.
Brief spells at Galles/Kraco in IndyCar and the Beatrice Haas team followed before he took on team management roles at Lotus and Tyrrell. It was at the latter in the early 1990s that he found himself wanting to expand his horizons.
So, a transfer from team management to a more commercial-orientated scope kicked in and by 1995 Manwaring was the commercial manager, with a brief to find more sponsors for founder Ken Tyrrell and co.
Tyrrell, once the best team in F1, was in a constant fight for survival at this stage in its history. Drivers Ukyo Katayama and Mika Salo could only offer up occasional spikes of heroic performance in a generally under-resourced team and with, at best, moderately capable cars.
In the spring of 1995 Manwaring, through an acquaintance in the automotive industry, was introduced to a Saudi national. His name was Sulaiman Al Kehaimi.
In Monaco that year Manwaring gave Al Kehaimi "the full monty: everything you can imagine, the best of everything" in terms of access and hospitality. A month later, Manwaring's phone rang.
"He started to ask whether Ken would sell the team to him," recalls Manwaring.
"So needless to say, I had a chat with the Tyrrells and we thought 'let's pursue it' At this stage it sounded a bit unlikely, but who knows.
"I started going out with him a lot in London. We used to go karting, would you believe? I sort of latched on to him and before I knew it he flew the whole team out to Budapest for the grand prix in this amazing private plane.
"It was bespoke with lounges, bedrooms, all that sort of thing. A house in the sky. He was making all the right noises."
Shortly after that, Manwaring got a call to meet Al Kehaimi at Manston airport in Kent. He drove down there and was astonished to be greeted on to the private plane with a smiling Al Kehaimi proudly welcoming him.
"The steps were down, and there were 10 staff standing there in uniform bowing and curtsying," remembers Manwaring.
"I was invited into the lounge area and that's when he told me that he had interest in buying into Tyrrell.
"As we finished he goes, 'Would you like to go to Paris now, Rupert?'
"I said, 'That sounds lovely but I'm actually a bit busy, so it's all right, thanks anyway'."
As 1995 became 1996, Manwaring and Tyrrell had a "sort of framework of a deal where he was a sponsor for five years and would then become the majority owner with 51%" for Al Kehaimi.
But apart from the occasional dinner, flying the team out and being flashy with the occasional deft displays of "large amounts of cash in suitcases", according to Manwaring, no actual sponsorship money was seen.
By the time the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix came around, Manwaring was still in contact but was at a stage where things were "going on and on and on" and the Tyrrells, as well as Manwaring, were losing patience with Al Kehaimi.
"I was really struggling to pin him down and get any money out of him," says Manwaring.
"It came to Monaco again and I'd sort of decided that this would be the last time I took him anywhere. I thought if it doesn't come to anything now, that's it and we'll forget him."
Just prior to Monaco there was one peculiar incident that Manwaring recalls, which in hindsight was both amusing and worrying.
"I used to go around to 'his house' in Henley for Sunday lunches and he had this butler guy," says Manwaring.
"One weekend I was having a dinner party with some friends and I think I must have mentioned it to Sulaiman in passing.
"As it's starting there is this knock on the door and the butler is standing there in a black suit, clicking his heels.
"He's driven all the way to our house and he just says very formally, 'Good evening, Mr Manwaring, Sulaiman has sent me to assist you this evening'.
"All of a sudden I have this butler at my house that I didn't ask for, or really need. Honestly, I can't explain to you what a pantomime this all was."
But it was about to get even more surreal in Monaco as a new starring character was added to the cast list.
The Cher chateau
Al Kehaimi had said he had a chateau in Grasse and invited Manwaring there in a helicopter that Manwaring recalls being "dangerous as hell because we were hitting tree branches and all sorts coming in to land".
Manwaring noted when entering the chateau that the dogs "went for us, which afterwards I thought was a bit strange".
Then Manwaring was asked to go down to the wine cellar with the 'master' of the chateau to select wines, although it was clear to Manwaring that Al Kehaimi "hadn't a clue about wine at all".
"I knew there were some guests that were arriving - and sure enough the VIP one turned up," says Manwaring.
"It was Cher.
"We were introduced and she started calling me 'Rupey', it was memorable.
"It was quite something and in all honesty it was hard to process everything that was happening at that stage."
But what was occurring was that Tyrrell's commercial manager was sitting in a luxury chateau sipping drinks with a two-time Oscar-winning musical and acting legend, while the person who had invited them both down there was working the room and revelling in what has to be deemed as the high life.
A lap of Monaco with Cher!
Manwaring's key job during the grand prix was very much a new one to him: chaperoning Cher around the track during the race itself.
"It was an incredible weekend," he recalls. "I got passes from Bernie [Ecclestone] and we got those special vests when the race started.
"She [Cher] said she wanted to walk around the track during the race. And we did it, just me and Cher, just behind the Armco, through the tunnel, a whole lap.
"She was blown away, loved it, and she was really into it."
While Cher studied tyre strategies in the damp-then-drying race, Salo lost a nailed-on fourth place when he struck the back of Eddie Irvine's spun Ferrari almost within sight of the chequered flag. Like the events off the track, the 1996 race, won in unlikely fashion by Olivier Panis's Ligier, was one of the more unusual in F1 history.
On the evening of the race, which coincidentally was Cher's 50th birthday, Al Kehaimi fired up the chopper again and flew Cher, Manwaring and other guests back to 'his' chateau.
"Dinner was really flash as you can imagine," says Manwaring.
"Then outside of the chateau this yellow Lamborghini Diablo appeared.
"During the course of the dinner, he does this speech, wishes Cher a happy birthday and hands her the keys of the Diablo. So, we're all outside the chateau, and there's the yellow Diablo, apparently now Cher's."
Suspicion triggered
While mingling with other guests, Manwaring couldn't help but notice that several threads of conversation revolved around both who Al Kehaimi actually was, and what a collection of individuals, most of great wealth, were doing all in one place in an opulent Provencal chateau.
The morning after the race, guests were mingling in the expansive gardens when Manwaring struck up conversation with several of the others.
'So, what's he [Sulaiman] doing for you?' the conversations started to echo through the plush surroundings.
"Between you and me, I'm pursuing him for investment in Tyrrell," would come Manwaring's reply.
"Then one guy I spoke to, well, his face sort of dropped instantly," says Manwaring.
"Turns out this guy paid for a half-share in the jet that we were flying around in. Then he goes to me, 'So, he doesn't own Tyrrell?'"
The penny started to drop that something wasn't right. And it dropped pretty quickly - almost spreading as lunch was taken that Monday.
"There were two other guys," Manwaring recalls. "One was a famous nightclub owner in London. The same thing: his face dropped when we spoke. There were probably six people I spoke to that were putting money into various 'projects' of Sulaiman's."
What drove a final nail into Manwaring and Tyrrell's interest in Al Kehaimi came when he was asked to prepare a sponsorship presentation for the early internet pioneer, Netscape.
"I made the presentation, gave it to Sulaiman, and he said, 'We're getting about £2million from them'.
"This was just before we went to Monaco. But at the Chateau I got talking to this guy who turned out to be the CEO of Netscape, and I said, 'We're really looking forward to the partnership'.
"He looked at me blankly and said, 'What? I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about'.
"I explained and his face went pale."
A giant deck of cards was falling and none of them were a good hand.
The only consolation for Manwaring was that Tyrrell had spent nothing - only a good chunk of time on this odyssey - while clearly others at the Chateau had. In the general scheme of things, Manwaring had appeared to come out of it all remarkably unscathed.
He "dusted himself down and generally got on with life", but behind the scenes Al Kehaimi was being pursued by several parties.
Not guilty!
Al Kehaimi was extraordinarily difficult to pin down. For example, the mansion in Henley was only an 'on approval' letting.
After a long, drawn out investigation and subsequent trial at Oxford Crown Court in 1999, which Manwaring was a witness at, it took a three-week trial to reach a verdict 'on a charge of procuring the execution of a cheque for £187,500' and he was acquitted on the judge's direction.
Al Kehaimi was widely described at the time as "a prince amongst confidence tricksters" who had duped several rich business partners into believing he was fabulously wealthy - but nailing him to any significant fraud proved difficult.
The plane which had been a major factor in swaying Manwaring of his wealth had been grounded at Stansted Airport over unpaid wages and fuel bills.
While the yarns and wealth showmanship could not be accurately proven to have come via nefarious means, it was an incident with a neighbour in Henley, Mehrangiz Charnell, that actually brought him to trial.
Al Kehaimi told the court the "money given to him by his Persian neighbour, in three separate sums, was for legitimate business transactions and to help free her brother from a prison sentence in Dubai" and that "he had every intention of paying back his creditors", according to the trial's official documents.
Cher got a mention in the trial - with Simon Brown, prosecuting, telling Oxford Crown Court that "Cher features in this as a completely innocent person. This well-known personality did not have the faintest idea she was dealing with a conman who was so good he took everyone in".
So who was he?
In the spirit of Cher herself, if Manwaring could 'turn back time' he most certainly would to 1995 and his much preferred option of not ever having met Al Kehaimi.
Who on earth was Sulaiman Al Kehaimi anyway? And where is he now?
Prosecutor Brown had said at his trial in 1999 that Al Kehaimi was "distantly related to the Saudi royal family and went into business in 1992 with Prince Khalid".
"They bought a Boeing 707 to fly people round the world, including singer Rod Stewart and the Sultan of Brunei. Al Kehaimi talked his way into occupying a $50m chateau, helicoptering his guests around Monaco."
Manwaring also concurred with the official court documents, which detail that "cracks began to appear with some guests at the [Chateau] party smelling a rat and beginning to ask questions".
Subsequently it has also been proved that the reason why Cher had been at the Monaco GP was that Al Kehaimi had met her at a restaurant a year before, approached her and offered to invest in her then-new clothing company.
Adding more wild pizazz to the whole shambles was colourful Paul Mitchell hair care magnate John Paul DeJoria and his then-wife, film star Eloise Broady.
In a world where they all spent a weekend at the Monaco GP with passes granted by Bernie Ecclestone, it is of delicious irony that Broady's career is best remembered for her part as the sultry Tawny in 1989 screwball black comedy Weekend at Bernie's!
Manwaring went on to be one of the key figures in the eventually aborted Honda F1 project in 1999, before rounding out his F1 career with Minardi. He then went on to be a managing director of Lola Cars International and other senior positions at RML, Lotus and Classic Team Lotus, where he still works to this day.
Plenty of questions on this madcap world still persists to this day. Why? Why did one man create a fantasy realm in which F1, Cher and a yellow Lamborghini outside a chateau sucked so many in?
His whereabouts are largely unknown as of 2024.
The most likely story is that he was a middleman tasked by someone of great wealth to convert private jets in the 1990s into homes in the sky, and that he allegedly got creative with that investment to build his own fantasy life.
He is believed to have laid low in the UK for several more years after his trial and settled with an English girlfriend but no one has heard from him or about him for almost a quarter of a decade.
Like of Al Kehaimi himself, there are more questions than answers from one of F1's most bizarre and little-known capers.
