The new teams that weren’t
Looking over the little-known stories of the entries that didn’t make the cut
Formula 1’s decision to agree on a $145million budget cap from 2021 comes more than a decade after a mooted £40m cap attracted several prospective entrants. Here’s the little-known story of the politicking that prevented credible entries from joining the grid
Thanks to the financial broadside levelled on Formula 1 by the coronavirus pandemic, the current cast of teams could be forgiven for getting a little hot under the collar when it comes to perusing balance sheets. Luckily, the latest Concorde Agreement and cost cap show that F1 has learned from the mistakes of the past.
Last time, the global financial crisis almost changed the face of F1 altogether.
Manufacturers Honda, Toyota and BMW all withdrew, while the Honda-backed Super Aguri squad had also hit the wall mid-2008 as money proved scarce. To fill the gaping void, then-fia president Max Mosley unveiled a new tender process to welcome teams into F1 for 2010 with a Resource Restriction Agreement – a promise of a £40million budget cap – to sweeten the pot.
Many teams submitted serious entries, from which the FIA selected three:
Virgin Racing, Campos Meta 1 and
US F1. After Toyota elected to end its fruitless F1 tenure, Tony Fernandes’s Lotus Racing team got the call-up as late as September 2009, meaning it had just six months to get an entire squad together before the start of the following season.
This came amid a genuine threat of a split between the manufacturer entities that made up FOTA – the Formula One
Teams’ Association – and the Fiaaligned NON-FOTA teams, consisting of Williams, Force India and any new teams added to the field. Thankfully, the FIA and FOTA resolved their differences, but the Resource Restriction Agreement became collateral in ending the prospective breakaway, leaving the new teams in a precarious place before the 2010 season even began.
Although the presence of new entrants tinged the upcoming season with a modicum of excitement, the
FIA’S picks to fill the grid disappointed, as a selection of big names were left on the cutting-room floor.
A decade on, it’s perhaps fitting to reflect on the 2010 entry process and investigate the circumstances in which the bigger names failed to make the cut – and why some of those who did also struggled to put a fully-functioning entry on the table.
POWERTRAIN POLITICS
Choosing the wrong engine ended up costing two teams a potential spot at the F1 table. With the F1-FOTA split a very real prospect, Mosley and F1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone were all too aware of the manufacturer power of Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault. To alleviate this, the two hatched a plan to bring Cosworth back into the fold, investing resources into the company to
develop a V8 engine ready for 2010.
“They needed about three customer teams to make the Cosworth economics work,” explains Prodrive CEO David Richards. The powerhouse behind Subaru’s World Rally Championship exploits and Ford’s British Touring Car Championship monopoly of 2000, Prodrive was one of the many teams angling for an F1 entry for 2010, having previously been granted a spot in F1 for the 2008 season before its plan to run a customer Mclarenbe
Mercedes package was dashed by opposition among the existing teams on the grid.
After rules on buying customer parts were lifted, Prodrive sought to base its entry on a Mclaren tie-up once more, putting together a proposal in which the team would join the fray with Mercedes engines. Richards and Prodrive, in the process of proving to the FIA that their submission was viable, were met with resistance. Suggestions that there would
no entry unless Prodrive played the game and opted for Cosworths rather poured cold water on the plan as the Mercedes deal was already in place.
“The entries went in,” Richards recalls, “but it was no great surprise to us that we didn’t get one of them because it was clearly the underlying motive; increasing the entries and bringing new teams to the party was to try and get another engine manufacturer on board to break the deadlock of the manufacturers.”
“It was no great surprise that we didn’t get an entry”
Epsilon Euskadi was another entry hit by the unwritten rule on engine supply. The junior single-seater squad based in Vitoria-gasteiz in Spain’s Basque Country, and run by veteran F1 team manager Joan Villadelprat – a former colleague of Richards at Benetton in the late 1990s – had become a manufacturer when it built the ee1 LMP1 sportscar for the 2008 Le Mans Series, and had ambitious plans that extended beyond selling them to customers, which involved aerodynamicist Henri Durand.
“We didn’t talk about Formula 1 at the start, we were effectively talking about having a company in Spain that would be more like Dallara,” recalls Durand, who had worked with Villadelprat at Ferrari, Mclaren and Prost. “I was tasked with setting up a group which would effectively provide engineering services in the field of aerodynamics, and not necessarily to the motor racing industry.”
The mooted budget cap meant Villadelprat’s ideas snowballed to involve F1 and, after bringing on board former Brabham, Scuderia Italia and Sauber designer Sergio Rinland to work on the ee1, it began work on an F1 project using its on-site windtunnel.
“We wanted to have the Renault engine,” Rinland explains, “and Joan was very good friends with Flavio Briatore. He had a handshake with Renault but, when he went to present the entry to the FIA, he was told before entering the presentation room he had to use a Cosworth. With a Renault, we’d have been a lot more competitive than the other new teams.”
Epsilon was placed on a reserve shortlist, but that effectively meant the end of its F1 dream.
PIE-IN-THE-SKY OVER PRAGMATISM
Lola’s omission from the 2010 entry list was one of the biggest surprises, and to this day its former staff members still speculate over the true reason why the Huntingdon company was denied a return to F1.
Pending some refurbishment, Lola had the infrastructure in place. Owner Martin Birrane, owing to the wealth he