One more. Schumy offering a ride to Giancarlo Fisichella. German GP 1997. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Happy Birthday to 1979 world champion Jody Scheckter! (1979 Italian GP, his 10th and final F1 race win) Image Unavailable, Please Login Scheckter competed in nine seasons and claimed 10 wins from 113 grands prix. In 1979, his first season with Ferrari, he won the drivers' championship even though he only won three races. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
The only South African World Champion, and the only Jewish World Champion! (And later, a resident for a while of Atlanta, GA.)
It's interesting to note that every era of F1 has its "has-been" teams, outfits that were once dominant which have fallen on hard times and may be headed to oblivion. Consider the current plight of McLaren and Williams. In the early to mid-'90s, not that long ago, they were the top 2 teams in F1 for quite a few years. Now they are at the bottom of the barrel, and who knows if they'll be around a decade from now. I just received the book "Formula 1 Cars 1980-89", the third in a series, and it's interesting to note three "has-been" teams at the end of the decade, teams that had all won championships previously - one even won a couple during the '80s - but all destined to disappear in the following decade. Tyrrell's best years were, of course, with Jackie Stewart, but they even won a couple of races in 1982-83 with Michele Alboreto; Detroit 1983 was the first win for a Benetton-sponsored car, and the last for the Cosworth V-8 engine that dated back to 1967. (Later Cosworth V-8s were considered new engines.) But they fell from grace, including a year where they were stripped of all their points for cheating. They would actually enjoy a bit of a renaissance in the early '90s, thanks to Harvey Postlethwaite's development of the high-nose/low-wing configuration which would eventually become standard practice in F1 and remains so today. But Tyrrell couldn't sustain that and eventually disappeared, though from its ashes rose (eventually) today's dominant Mercedes team. Image Unavailable, Please Login Lotus, of course, had had several dominant periods, the last being 1978's ground-effects revolution, but by 1980 they had fallen back to mid-pack. They did have some good years mid-decade, thanks to the design talent of Gerard Ducarouge and the forceful driving of a young Brazilian named Ayrton Senna. However, when I saw him win in a yellow Camel Lotus at Detroit in 1987, little did I (or anyone else who was there) know that we had witnessed the last-ever victory for this proud team. After both Senna and Honda left for greener pastures, the team began a slow slide to oblivion in the mid-'90s. (All later teams that used the Lotus name cannot realistically trace their ancestry back to this equipe.) Image Unavailable, Please Login Brabham was owned by Bernie Ecclestone in the '80s, and with Nelson Piquet at the wheel, were one of the dominant teams early in the decade, winning driver's titles in 1981 & 1983 (though, ironically, not the constructor's title in either year). While they lost a bit of their edge in the next few years, they were still relevant until 1986, when Gordon Murray's concept of a "low-line" car was an utter failure. (Ironically, Murray's all-conquering 1988 McLaren is considered a descendant of that car.) After BMW left at the end of the '87 season, the team actually took a year off, but after they returned in 1989, they never finished higher than 9th in the standings and were gone within three years. Image Unavailable, Please Login Oh, how the mighty had fallen! When will it happen again?
Along with the "has-been" teams are the "never-was" teams, which typically never come remotely close to winning a race and often even have trouble scoring points. These are typically (but not necessarily) low-budget independent efforts with few resources, usually a lack of talent, and relatively short lives. In my opinion, we don't have any of those now; even today's mid-field teams like Force India/Racing Point, Sauber/Alfa Romeo, Haas and Toro Rosso have enough talent and resources that they could conceivably win a race if everything fell in their favor; in fact, Sauber and Toro Rosso do have race wins, though Sauber's came when they were the de facto BMW works team. But other mid-field teams like Jordan and Prost have scored surprise wins in the past. The last true "never-was" teams were the trio that joined the tour in 2010 at the behest of Bernie Ecclestone; in their histories, they were never more than field-fillers and rolling roadblocks. The 2 points scored by Bianchi at Monaco for Marussia are the only points any of the three teams ever scored, and even that would not have happened with the old point-scoring system used in the '80s. I don't think that any race fans were sad to seem them go away. But according to the new book, there were many "never-was" teams back in the 1980s. Amazingly, a couple were not "low-budget independent efforts", but rather teams with plenty of budget (most of the time) and talent that still somehow failed to win. Probably the biggest was Alfa Romeo, which spent 7 seasons trying to recapture the glory of 1950-51. In those years, 1979-85, the best they could do was a couple of pole positions (neither of which led to points) and a couple of second places (by de Cesaris in 1983), with a best ranking of 6th in the Constructors' championship. They had good sponsorship from Marlboro and Benetton, and some good drivers, including Mario Andretti one year, but it never worked. In fact, in their final year, 1985, they failed to score a single point! Image Unavailable, Please Login An even longer-suffering team was Arrows, which broke off from Shadow in 1978 and tried until 2002, failing to win in 362 races, with 5 second-places the best they could do, one of which I witnessed (Patrese at Long Beach in 1980). In a way, their legacy is still with us; after they folded, Minardi got a hold of one of their last cars and determined that it was faster than his own. Rather than simply rebadging the car, he had some of its technology used in the next Minardi, and within a year had sold the team, which became Toro Rosso. So, in a way, today's Toro Rossos could be considered descendants of the failed Arrows team. Image Unavailable, Please Login Later, I'll discuss some of the "true" "Never-Was" teams of the '80s that are shown in the new book.
It's interesting that two F1 constructors both came up with names made up of the initials of their founders. It's even more interesting that one man's initials appear in BOTH names: March = Max Mosley, Alan Rees, Graham Coaker, Robin Herd Arrows = Franco Ambrosio, Alan Rees, Jackie Oliver, Dave Wass, Tony Southgate
Another team that I should have included in my "Has-Been" reply #1011 is Ligier. Actually, their history, time-wise, is similar to Tyrrell. One-time F1 privateer Guy Ligier started building sports cars in 1970; all his model numbers were preceded by "JS", the initials of his close friend Jo Schlesser, who had been killed at Rouen in 1968. In 1976, Ligier acquired some of the assets of the defunct Matra F1 effort and went Grand Prix racing. The team won its first race in 1977 and had three glorious years in 1979-1981, winning multiple races all three years and finishing 2nd in the championship in 1980. But eventually engine-supply problems got the best of them and they became mid-field runners (or worse) for the rest of their history. As early as 1983, they failed to score any points, and that was repeated in 1988, 1990 and 1991; in other years were never higher than 5th in the standings. Olivier Panis scored a shock win at Monaco in 1996, but by that time Ligier had decided to sell his team to Alain Prost. As Prost, the results were no better, and Prost folded his team after 2002, and another once-mighty team quietly disappeared. But Ligier's bookend wins were both historic; the 1977 was the first for an all-French team (car, engine & driver) since the start of F1 in 1950; the one in 1996 was the first for a French car & driver at Monaco since 1930! And the gap of 15 years between victories was the longest for a continually-active constructor in the F1 era. Image Unavailable, Please Login
It could be argued that the first generation of the Renault F1 effort was also an '80s "Also-Ran". After introducing turbos to F1 in 1977, they achieved their first win in 1979, arguably the race that got everyone else thinking turbo for the future, and in 1981-83 finished 3rd, 3rd and 2nd in the Constructor's race. But after Prost left for McLaren, things went downhill, and after finishing 5th and 7th the following two years, Renault pulled the plug on the team after 1985. Of course, they were definitely not an "Also-Ran" in the engine department. In 1986, the only year that everyone ran a turbo engine, the last holdout, Tyrrell, ran with the Renault turbo engine for the one an only year. When F1 went back to normal aspiration, the Renault V-10 was arguably the engine of the '90s, and in this decade, Renault powered Red Bull to four straight titles. Eventually they went racing with a full team on two later occasions; when they acquired Benetton in 2002, they were eventually able to score the elusive championship, not once but twice, with Fernando Alonso driving. And after another gap, they are back actively racing in the present day, hoping to improve their standing as the "best of the rest". Image Unavailable, Please Login
