22 replies to this topic

[Huw Jenjin]

Something that always used to fascinate me, and could never happen now, is the advent of an the offbeat F1 car creeping on to the back of the grid to do a few poor races never to be heard of again.
What do we know about Silvio Moser's Bugatti, Tim Schenken's Trojan, Clemente Biondetti's ferrari-Jaguar, Migault's Connew, or David Purleys LEC.
How many other F1 non entities can we dream up and edescribe?

[Huw Jenjin]

Does this thing have a spell check, im sure I said Belassi! Sorry folks!

[BRG]

I share this fascination for the odd and memorably unmemorable. Let’s see, where to start? Without cheating and looking it up, I can come up with Maki, Kauhsen, Amon, Token, Tecno, Monteverdi (neé Onyx), Politoys, Iso-Rivolta, not to forget Life and Andrea Moda, probably the two all time champions, and the reasons why it won’t happen again!a



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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[Ray Bell]

You chaps should do better than this. Come on, off your Hondas and show some Spirit!

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Dave Ware]

There's the Connew which I think was born out of the Techno. Actually saw photos of it on a website. Lance Reventlow's Scarabs, which I think raced in '60 or '61. Front engined cars just a year too late. They DNQ at Monaco, don't remember if they appeared elsewhere. Did anyone mentioned Ricky Von Opel's Ensign?

Here's the Connew link:
http://retro2.vsni.net/connew.htm

[Racer.Demon]

This should be our member Kuwashima's speciality: he runs a site called F1 Rejects...
http://www.crosswinds.net/~f1rejects/

BTW, 8W also enjoys dwelling on the F1 no-hopers, as they will be hard to guess on our game. Our archive is full of them: all the cars mentioned above are featured, plus some other design nightmares like the ATS, the Derrington-Francis, the JBW, the Stebro (my favourite: the only F1 car to come from Canada, and it finished 21 laps down on the winner in its single World Championship appearance...), all the De Tomaso's, the Bellasi, the Kojima, the Merzario, the Martini and the Modena-Lamborghini. Dave: we also have a BIG background story on the Connew.

Especially, the seventies kit-car age was famous for its charming amateurism - one of the reasons it's my favourite F1 decade...

Cheers,
R.D

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[Darren Galpin]

And there is always the GLAS team, although I can't remember them actually producing a car. There was also the 4WD Ferguson.

[Darren Galpin]

And there is always the GLAS team, although I can't remember them actually producing a car. There was also the 4WD Ferguson (of tractor fame).

[BRG]

Driven by Ray Bell’s hectoring, here are a few more real rejects:

Eifelland, Lyncar, McGuire, Merzario, RAM, Shannon, Rebaque, Parnelli, the Alpha Special, and the LDS ( driven by the splendidly named Sam Tingle of South Africa)

The F1 Rejects site is good but only goes back a few years, at least so far, although they are working on Trojan at the moment. There is obviously lots of scope for them yet a while!!

In the "should have tried harder" corner you can find the likes of Theodore, Ensign, Osella and Copersucar but they at least achieved something.


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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[Paul Hartshorne]

Sam Tingle was actually Rhodesian, though I agree that it's a splended name!

I love the real obscurities, in fact I was over-the-moon when I purchased a copy of the 1995 Pacific GP programme. It has a great photo of Tony Trimmer in action (if you'll excuse the oxymoron!) in the Maki 102 during practice for the 1976 Japanese GP. I'd never seen a good colour photo of this car before! It was very different looking to the Maki 101C that preceded it.

Anyone remember the Ekstroem that Mauro Baldi was to have raced in 1986? Cecilia Ekstroem wanted to be F1's first female team owner. In the one-and-only photo that I ever saw it looked like a modified 1985 Ram. Was it ever completed?

Best

[Roger Clark]

I m surprised to see the Ferguson P99 mentioned in this thread. Moss won a very competitive non-championship race at Oulton Park with it. Denis Jenkinson ratedit alongside the 158, W196 and Vanwall for quality of design and manufacture.

[Hot Rod Otis]

Wasn't the GLAS team resurrected as the LAMBO team in 1991 with Van de Poele & Larini after the Spaniard who was supposed to be bankrolling them skipped out?

[Ray Bell]

Ah, the 1962 De Tomaso F1 car with Alessandro's fabulous CAST MAGNESIUM monocoque chassis... what a lovely toy!
And the Ferguson won a race here, too, Graham Hill taking the Lakeside International 99 in the rain in 1963 in 2.5 litre form.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Kuwashima]

Thank you Racer.Demon for the link - indeed we do love the uncompetitive and the one-off cars at F1 Rejects!

Just at the moment we have full profiles of many of the dud teams already mentioned: Lambo/Modena from 1991, Kauhsen, the Monteverdi shambles, and both the execrable Life and the legendary Andrea Moda affair.

We also have biographies of a hellava lot of shonky drivers, including the already mentioned Rikky von Opel and Clemente Biondetti with his Jag/Ferrari hybrid.

And BRG - Biondetti is from 1950, so we do go back a fair way! Although you are right in saying we've focused on more recent failures. That's something we're working on. We do indeed have a lot of history left to cover!! We can't wait to get stuck into the Japanese teams!

And if you're talking about shocking driver/car combinations - nothing beats Canadian Al Pease's Eagle/Climax, entered thrice in the late 1960's. He finished 43 laps down in one GP (no that's not a misprint ) and was black-flagged for being to slow in another.

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Formula One Rejects
www.crosswinds.net/~f1rejects
Profiles of the WORST drivers and teams in Grand Prix history

[Don Capps]

The Connew had zip to do with the Tecno. It was an amazing episode straight out the Boys True Adventures series, where upon some folks literally built an F1 car in the garage and got it onto the grid.... Amazing stuff!

Geez, is the Aston Martin in there? What a disappointment it was. Just imagine if they had held a certain James Clark from Scotland to his contract for the 1960 season....

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Don Capps]

Oh, yeah, the 'McGuire' was a actually a Williams in disguise...

And how could we ever forget Paul Emery and his fabulous Emeryson cars????

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…

[Racer.Demon]

Argentina's F1 project by Oreste Berta should also be mentioned here. With driver Nestor Garcia Veiga it never made the grid to the 1975 Argentine GP it was entered for, but it was a real F1 car!

And so was the Dywa, which was tested and driven by Piercarlo Ghinzani and Maurizio Flammini and only took part in the Monza Lotteria Aurora event of 1980, won by Villota in a Williams.

Talking of F1 designs which never even raced: remember the DAMS, the Dome, the FIRST (which, granted, effectively was turned into the Life - but that never *raced* as well!).

Cheers,
R.D

[Huw Jenjin]

Thanks guys, thats given me plenty to munch on. Did the Token also come out under a different name? Was it a Rondel or something, and in which case would it have been Ron Dennis's first foray into F1?
memory is fading on that.
Has anybody got any good pictures of a Life (is this what they mean by "Get a life?"), and the Kauhsen and Rebaque, what did they look like, were they a Surtees and a Lotus with revised paintwork or genuine new racing cars? What was the story behind the maguire?
I remember Von Opels Ensign, MNO1 I think at the 73 John player GP, as i remember it looked extremely smart, but lost body work over the season, and ended up being driven by Vern Schuppan, and then became a Boro driven by Roelef Wunderink if my memory serves me right. It was designed by Mo Nunn who was largely responsible for Zanardi and Montoyas Indy success, so it couldn't have been that bad.

[BRG]

Rondel was Ron Dennis's first team which built a F2 car designed I think by Ron Tauranac - I don't think they did a F1 project. I can't find a reference but I have a sort of feeling that Ron Dennis may have had some invovlement with Token.

Go to the F1 Rejects site (see earlier post from Racer.Demon) for Life photos. I think the Kauhsen was entirely original, but the Rebaque may have been based on Lotus parts, although Hector Rebaque also drove Brabhams. Anyone know?

I didn't think that Ensign belong in this thread - although the first effort with Rikki von Opel was a bit poor, they became quite a creditable team later - as you say Mo Nunn was the team principal and he does a decent job - I think lack of money was thier real problem, Mo probably wasn't very good at the sponsorship chasing. Their saddest lagacy was the accident that crippled poor Clay Reggazoni.

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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[Racer.Demon]

Huw: pictures and stories on (almost) all of the F1 one-offs mentioned are linked to this page: http://www.racer.dem...8w/8windex.html - from JBW to Kauhsen, from Connew to Life. And then there's always Forix to check out: http://www.forix.com.

The Kauhsen was a typical seventies Cosworth kit car design trying to make sometime F2 team owner Willi Kauhsen's F1 dream come true. (Kauhsen had taken over the 1977 championship-winning Elf-Renaults for 1978, renamed them Kauhsen-Renault and put talented Michel Leclère to waste in them.) The F1 car was an original design by Klaus Kapitza (although with a lot of Lotus 79 influences, but hardly as good looking). Since the aerodynamics broadly overlooked pitch and dive effects under accelerating and breaking the WK, as it was called, was a disaster at the hands of later European Touring Car champion Gianfranco Brancatelli - not that Branca could help it. After three events the entire outfit was bought lock, stock and barrel by Arturo Merzario, who put Branca in his car - the equally horrible A2 - for Monaco, after Little Art had broken his arm in a practice crash at Zolder. Needless to say Brancatelli didn't prequalify, but what was he to do in such an unwieldy device? Later in the year, Merzario returned with the A4, which was largely based on the defunct Kauhsen tub. Unsurprisingly, results didn't become any better! The Kauhsen take-over by Merzario is probably the strangest financial transaction F1 has ever seen: one deadbeat buying another one! And to what effect...

The Rebaque is often said to be a Lotus 79 with a new paint job, but to be fair to Hector, that's quite untrue. The privateer 79 (with a striking brown paint job) was his mount before he launched his own car, the HR100. The design of the car was actually supervised by none other than John Barnard and built by Penske! Of course it did borrow heavily from the 79 (but which car didn't back in 1979?) but it also copied the FW07 sidepod arrangement. It actually wasn't a bad car - at least it was well built! - but then the team ran into trouble with the stricter entry rules posed by the FIA at the start of 1980.

And yes, the Token used to be Ron Dennis' love baby, called the Rondel. It then became a project of Tony Vlassopoulo and Ken Grob, from whose first names the name is derived. The 1974 International Trophy saw the international debut of the strangely shaped Token RJ02; it proved no exception to the popular rule that bad looking cars are bad cars to drive. Even for the talented Tom Pryce it proved a handful and after crashing the car on its Championship debut at Nivelles he decided to take his lot to the Shadow team. At the hands of erstwhile and future LEC driver David Purley, the RJ02 reappeared at Silverstone for the British GP but Purley failed to qualify. For Germany and Austria Ian Ashley was drafted in and although he just scraped in on both events he finished quite a large number of laps down. The project was subsequently dismantled. The car later reappeared as a Safir.

Incidentally, great to see Darren Galpin joining this Forum.

Cheers,
R.D


[This message has been edited by Racer.Demon (edited 04-13-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Racer.Demon (edited 04-13-2000).]

[Darren Galpin]

Thanks R.D.

Although I must admit to stumbling over this while waiting for a simulation to compile at work....

[John Cross]

I can definitely vouch for the fact that 8W teaches you more about the most obscure cars and drivers than you would believe possible!

By the way, any truth in the rumour that Don is starting a Berta fan club? Only joking ...

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I'll be back...

[Marco94]

Interesting to hear the great John Barnard designed the HB100. Did Barnard have any influence on the Penske Indycars of that time? His Chaparell design was fairly succesfull.

Marco.