THE BUYOUT THAT MADE IT

Like US F1, the Campos Meta 1 team was also perilously close to the abyss. Owned by Adrian Campos, who had enjoyed lots of junior category success with Campos Racing, the Spanish team joined forces with Enrique Rodriguez’s marketing company Meta Image. It toed the party line and agreed a deal for Cosworth engines, and had also contracted Italian design firm Dallara to put together its cars for 2010. With an already-functioning race team, Campos’s entry was selected to represent Spain on motorsport’s biggest stage.

Throughout the 2009 season, the noises from the Campos

Meta camp were promising. The team had secured government backing to build new facilities in the Fuente Alamo technology park in Murcia, creating 200 jobs and linking up with two local universities to put together motorsport engineering courses. A deal was also agreed with Bruno Senna to join the team.

But then the team ran out of money and could not guarantee payments to Dallara, which stunted the car’s development. Around February 2010, Jose Ramon Carabante’s Hispania Group saved the team and managed to get it to the grid, drafting in Colin Kolles’s racing operation to run the cars.

Karun Chandhok, who signed for the team late on, explains that the F110 chassis run throughout 2010 was only supposed to be a launch-spec car. “That car on its own is really a case of ‘what if?’” he recalls. “For Spain, they showed me the update they had in CFD. It was going to be worth two and a half/ three seconds, which would have put us in Toro Rosso territory.”

But the Spain upgrade never came, and HRT spent its life consigned to the back of the grid, where it stayed until its demise at the end of 2012.