F1 Fanatic

Maybe if there were more formula that allowed competetive design,

there just aren’t any lower formula that have teams making their own cars any more.

you have to look in a different direction than lower formula to get race engineering experience of making cars. You have to look at endurance racing to find the only real comparable, of teams making purpose built racing cars.

Sauber came from endurance racing back in the day.

Force India came from Spyker, who came from Midland, who came from Jordan. Super Aguri were a start up operation, but with backing from Honda and ready made Arrows’ chassis (and later on, pretty much Honda customer chassis).

Toyota were all new, but they had near unlimited funds to progress – and even then they only had two points finishes in their first season (and in their third season, only four points finishes).

The sensational reliability of the current cars is largely down to the rules. That means any leaps up the grid have to be done with exceptional technical brilliance and experience – something that takes a while to build up.

Don’t forget that neither of the ‘new’ teams are running KERS this year either. Lotus have been right on the back on the midfield a few times this year and had they had KERS, I feel they’d be more regular midfield runners and may even have nabbed a point or two. Lotus will make a good go of it, I’m sure. HRT appear to have settled down much more in the last 6 months so expect steady progress from them in the future. Virgin I’m not sure about, they have Glock and now they’ve ditched the all CFD design route their fortunes could change. Next year will be the crux for Lotus, whilst I think we may have to wait until 2013 to see what Virgin and HRT could achieve.

I think it just underlines what a mountain the new teams have to climb. Back in the day it was possible to arrive in F1 and be competitive in your first season – provided you did enough preparation, which Stewart and Toyota did. People seem to have forgotten BAR as well, had a dismal first year but 5 years later were regularly on the podium.

Reliability is definitely a major factor, when most of the cars are finishing every race, there’s no hope of the slower cars getting anywhere near the front.

The challenge of putting everything in place from scratch and securing the funding to keep it all going is also massive.

They’ve done well to get to where they are, but next year they all need to be closer to the front, even if they’re still at the back (if that makes sense), or they may struggle to survive for much longer. Lotus will get there I think, not so sure about the other two.

@Joey-Poey Stewart were brand new when they joined, although they had a successful F3 team and customer backing from Ford. They were bought outright by Ford and became Jaguar who then became Red Bull. So Red Bull have been around since 1997.

Tyrrell near enough morphed into BAR, then becoming Honda/Brawn/Mercedes.

The last proper new new team before this year’s I guess would have been Toyota, discounting Super Aguri as they used older chassis. But before Toyota there was Stewart, and before them the multiple failures of Forti, Pacific, Simtek and Lola in the mid-’90s None of whom scored points.

Before them it was Jordan and Sauber, who I guess were the most recent teams to have had a decent life-expectantcy, with Sauber still going and Jordan winning races and almost a championship before nosediving. Although they’re still with us today in the form of Force India.