1990s
March encountered financial trouble and in June 1989, Japanese real estate entrepreneur Akira Akagi purchased the March F1 and F3000 teams. March concentrated on high-value partnership deals, such as Porsche and Alfa Romeo Indycar (the Porsche deal led to some success; the Alfa project was unsuccessful), consultancy work on the Panther Solo supercar, composites, and wind tunnel businesses. The wind tunnel was a disaster, with the insulation being far too efficient - it was effectively a pressure cooker that generated useless results and this destroyed the competitiveness of various teams that used it, including Lotus. The economic downturn of the late 80s affected March's market severely and the management recognised that they were producing poor customer cars; the logical move was to merge with Ralt, with March becoming the brand for industry partnership deals, leaving Ralt to look after the production categories. This duly took place, although the businesses were never efficiently integrated.
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