Formula 1 blog - Linksheaven

Part One 

Bruce McLaren:  Ultimately of course, McLaren are the most successful of all of the driver founded teams.  Bruce McLaren Motor Racing was established in 1963 by Bruce McLaren along with Teddy Mayer. 
Before starting as a constructor in their own right, they raced Coopers in the Tasman series before turning their attention to manufacturing sports racing cars.   The first single seat McLaren was produced for testing in 1965 and the first F1 McLaren to race, the M2B, was ready for 1966.  McLaren’s development in F1 over the next couple of years was largely hindered by the lack of a competitive engine.  All of that changed once McLaren got his hands on the Cosworth DFV for his team.  The competitive engine established McLaren as a front of the grid team, with McLaren and Denis Hulme as drivers.  Tragically, McLaren was killed in 1970 at Goodwood while testing a McLaren sports car.  McLaren’s wife and associates continued to run the team through the late 1970’s, prior to the amalgamation with Ron Dennis’ Project Four team.  The team went on to win bunches of races and championships, but this was a completely different McLaren team than that founded by Bruce McLaren.

Arturo Mezario:  A somewhat highly rated sports car driver, the Italian drove in F1 from 1972 through 1979 for such teams as Ferrari, Wolf-Williams, Williams and Shadow.  For 1977, struck out on his own with a March while awaiting a car of his own manufacture.  This car, the A1, carried many March 751 components and was not very competitive.  A derivative of the A1, the A1B was no more successful nor were the following A2 and A4 models.  The team quietly slipped away following the 1979 season.

Jackie Oliver:  In 1968, Jackie Oliver was driving for Lotus in F2 when Jim Clark was tragically killed and the team promoted him to the F1 team.  For 1969 however, Colin Chapman had signed Jochen Rindt
and so Oliver left Lotus.  From there he drove for a few teams including BRM and few drives with McLaren.  For 1973, Don Nicholls’ Shadow team entered F1 with Oliver as its lead driver.  During 1974 and 1975, Oliver competed for Shadow in other forms of racing (CanAm and F5000) and took an increasing managerial role in the team.  He also drove for the team in F1 again in 1977.   At the end of 1977 he left Shadow along with financer Franco Ambrosio, designers Tony Southgate and Alan Rees, and engineer Dave Wass to form the Arrows Grand Prix team.

The team would have varying success throughout the years but ultimately Arrows would become famous for having for having its first car declared illegal by a judge and the longest losing streak in Formula One history: 382 races with no wins. 

Oliver sold much of his stake to the Japanese Footwork Corporation in 1990 but remained on with Arrows as director. The team failed to move forward and Footwork pulled out at the end of 1993 due to financial trouble. In 1996 he sold most of his shares in the team to Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR group. Oliver remained on the board until 1999, when he sold his remaining shares. Tom Walkinshaw ran Arrows into the ground financially in 2002.

Alain Prost:  Perhaps no former-driver-come-team-owner came with more impeccable credentials than four time world champion Alain Prost.  Prost bought the French Ligier team in late 1996 and renamed the team after himself.  His team began 1997 on something of a roll, his cars scoring well during the opening races until his lead driver, Olivier Panis, had a horrific accident in the Canadian round.  Panis sustained breaks in both of his legs.  Jarno Trulli stood in admirably for Panis, leading the Austrian Grand Prix convincingly before retiring with a mechanical fault.  For 1998, Prost changed engine supplier from Mugen-Honda to the French Peugeot engine.  Great things were expected for this all French "super team" (ignoring the Japanese Bridgestone tires), but in fact little was delivered.  However Prost was unable to duplicate his on track successes.  The team went into a rapid free fall, struggling on until 2002.  The team went bankrupt just before that season started.  It was a sad ending to what had initially began with such promise.

Alan Rees:  Alan Rees’ F1 driving career was a very brief one:  One race and one finish: 9th in the 1967 British Grand Prix.  However Rees would go on to be involved with the creation of not only one but two F1 teams.

March Engineering was founded in 1969 by four founders: Max Mosley (Commercial), Alan Rees (Team Manager), Graham Coaker (Factory Manager) and Robin Herd (Designer). 1970 saw March enter F1.  The company was unique in F1 in that, along with other series such as F3, March’s goal was to build simple and reliable cars for customers in order to make a profit.  March would also run a factory team, when finance
would allow, in addition to providing customer cars.  Between 1970 and 1977, March did win three races:  Two by the works team (one in a rain shortened event) and one by the Ken Tyrrell entered and Jackie Stewart driven March 701 in 1970.  In 1977 the team and its FOCA membership were sold to ATS.  The March name would return to F1 on a couple of more occasions.  For 1981, March made a ill financed return with the RAM team with very poor results (The 1984 RAM-March was a separate entity from March Engineering proper; The only link was designer Robin Herd)  March made a final return to F1 in 1987 with Leyton House.  In 1987 and 1988, the team was a usually a threat for points and the occasional podium in the Adrian Newey designed cars.  By 1989 the other March business units were not doing well financially and the team was sold to Leyton House.

Rees was also involved in the formation of the Arrows team.

Hector Rebaque:  Mexican Hector Rebaque drove for five seasons in F1, from 1977 to 1981 and started 58 races.  He raced with Team Hesketh in 1977 but formed Team Rebaque for 1978.  During that year and the following year, the team ran a Lotus 78 and a Lotus 79.  However Rebaque was not happy with the support that he was getting and the spare parts supply was somewhat in question.  He had Geoff Ferris design a car for the team that was a equal parts Louts 79 and Williams.  The cars were assembled at the Penske facility in Poole, England.  The resulting car, the HR 100 was entered for the final three races of 1979 starting three times and finishing once.  The car was not a success.  Rebaque moved on to Brabham (and with much better results) for 1980 and 1981.

Jackie Stewart:  It is somewhat surprising that Stewart had not been involved with a F1 team earlier than 1997.  Stewart Grand Prix was an offshoot of his son Paul’s team, Paul Stewart Racing.  The three time world champion and his son, with substantial backing from Ford, took to the F1 grids as a team owners with Stewart Grand Prix.  Jackie was mainly the finance man and his son running the daily operation of the team.  The idea started around the time of the Canadian GP in 1996.  At the time Sauber was the Ford works team and Ford did not see Sauber as a long term partner.  They inquired of Jackie Stewart whether he might be interested in starting a team.  The discussions were held, the contracts signed and the SF1 duly lined up for the first race of 1997.  That season culminated in a memorable second place at the rain soaked Monaco Grand Prix.  1998 saw a slight performance regression but the team rebounded exceptionally in 1999.  The team were fast (but somewhat fragile), usually a threat for points and the season highlight was a victory by Johnny Herbert in the European GP at the new Nurburgring (As a bonus, his teammate Rubens Barrichello was third).  In 1999 it was announced that Ford had purchased the team from Stewart and would rename the team Jaguar for 2000.  After several seasons of poor results, Ford sold the team to Red Bull to form the basis of the current Red Bull Racing Team. 

John Surtees:  John Surtees is another of the former world champions who went on to form his own team.  The Surtees Racing Organization was formed in 1966 for the CanAm series.  The team diversified in 1969 by moving into the F5000 category.  Surtees tackled  F1 in 1970 with John Surtees driving (although the first four races saw him in a McLaren as the team’s own car was not ready).  The Surtees make competed in F1 until the 1978 Canadian Grand Prix both via factory team and private entries.  During that time the factory team is credited with 119 starts.  In qualifying, the cars usually made the field (approximately 97.34% of the time in 256 combined factory / private attempts).  For the races, the cars had two podiums, three fastest laps and 23 points scoring finishes.  The team’s best season was in 197 with 18 points.

Note: As mentioned in the discussion forums, there was one significant omission in the first section (Thanks Don!) and I will attempt to correct that error here:

Bernie Ecclestone:  Bernie Ecclestone is best known for, and most wealthy from, the administration of F1’s commercial matters.  As a team owner, Ecclestone’s success came with the Brabham team which he acquired in 1971 from Ron Tauranac. Together with ace designer Gordon Murray, Brabham achieved moderate success until the early 1980’s and the arrival of Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet made Brabham a world championship winning team again. Piquet won world championships in 1981 and 1983 with Brabham.  As time went on, Ecclestone spent more and more time in the administration of the sport and sold his interests in the team in 1989.

On the driving front Ecclestone entered two races during the 1958 GP season: Monaco and Great Britain in a Connaught car.  Ecclestone bought two Connaughts in 1957 but the cars were obsolete). In Great Britain, he was about 30 seconds off of the pace on the grid and Jack Fairman actually drove in the race, completing 7 laps before retiring with ignition problems. In Monaco  - no time, DNQ (during the period between Connaught and Brabham, Ecclestone focused on Driver representation)

Analysis

Of course this list is far from all inclusive but is a representative sample from the annals of F1 history.  So what conclusions can we draw from our research?  

Triumph in F1 is a black art and often very fleeting for even the best managed and financed teams.

It does however seem fairly obvious that success on the race track usually does not translate to success from the pit lane.  The six former world champions mentioned in this article (Brabham, Fittipaldi Hill, Prost, Stewart and Surtees) together achieved 15 world championships yet only Brabham was really successful as a constructor / owner - in fact none save Stewart even won a race.

Neither Suzuki nor Berger were world champions, so neither will need to worry about continuing that awful trend.

What about the drivers who were not world champions?  The most successful is of course McLaren but in fact much of that success was in the Ron Dennis era, far after Bruce McLaren’s death.  Following McLaren in this list is Ligier (9), March (3) and Eagle (1), clearly slim pickings.

(obvious) Conclusion

Both Berger and Suzuki will find it tough to succeed in F1, even with the backing of large companies such as Red Bull and Honda.  It is maintaining that success over time that is the hardest part.  Such is life in formula one.

Thank you for reading these articles and I hope that you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.  

Patrick

Patrick is an idiot who thinks he knows stuff about F1.  His credentials include watching it on TV.  For a while.  You can e-mail Patrick
here.