For every F1 rookie sensation, there are a dozen other drivers who never quite make it. So from British F3's greatest unrewarded talent to Germany's DNPQ sensation, Patronise F1 looks at six drivers never really given a fair bite at F1's cake.
1 Marc Hynes
Formula One can sometimes feel as difficult to crack as the casting auditions for a particularly nepotistic primary school play, with talent alone only getting you part of the way up the motorsport ladder, before it becomes more a case of wallet-size instead of talent-size. Marc Hynes discovered this to his cost at the end of the 1990s. Hynes arrived in the 1999 British F3 championship with upstart newbie team Manor Motorsport (way before they started running Virgin-emblazoned F1 cars), and against the might of British F3 mainstays Stewart Racing, Promatecme and Carlin Motorsport, he romped to the title in a field packed with future F1 talent (ok, the words 'packed' and 'talent' might be pushing it a bit, but the grid featured Luciano Burti, Jenson Button, Narain Karthikeyan and Alex Yoong). Hynes secured the crown in his Nestle-emblazoned car in a final round showdown with Burti, and seemed set to be the latest hyped-up UK motorsport star.
And then, erm, well, nothing. Hynes's career stalled as cataclysmically as a badly-flown Boeing. While Burti quickly secured a test drive with the Jaguar F1 team and Button was plunged straight into the top tier with Williams, following a showdown winter test with F3000 driver and Williams tester Bruno Junqueira, the man that had beaten both of them to the title glory in 1999 started the next year as an unemployed nowhere man, entirely bereft of sponsorship. A couple of fleeting mid-season appearances for F3000 backmarkers WRT Racing hardly helped his credibility, and although he secured a one-off test with the BAR team at Barcelona in December 2000, a year on the sidelines had left him rusty, and he failed to impress. Thus died the Hynes F1 dream, and he has since found work as a driver coach with Manor, helping a whole new series of talented youngsters queuing up to have their aspirations shattered at some point on the motorsport ladder.
2 Vincenzo Sospiri
Last year's mutterings from Lola regarding potentially putting together a new Formula One entry for the 2010 season (the team even going as far as to make a tiny, tiny model of their car) brought knowing chuckles from a lot of F1 fans. But for Vincenzo Sospiri the news probably re-opened all sorts of repressed memories that all the counselling in the world would struggle to fully cure. In 1997, Sospiri landed himself a drive with the MasterCard Lola team for the new season, an effort that proved to be so short-lived, it is virtually impossible to find any actual footage of them in action. Sospiri's DNQ at the season-opening Australian GP was his first and last Grand Prix weekend, as the team folded before the second race of the season, and once tarnished by the fact that he lapped the Melbourne track a full ten and a half seconds slower than poleman Jacques Villeneuve, Sospiri unsurprisingly failed to get picked up by any of the other teams.
But was he really that bad? He won the F3000 championship in 1995, qualified on the front row for the Indy 500 later on in 1997, in his first ever oval race, and found time to pick up back-to-back sportscar titles before he finally called it a day. If you're picking holes in that CV, you'd say that the F3000 field he beat consisted of the likes of Tarso Marques and Ricardo Rosset, the 1997 Indy 500 field was the typically weak fare that the early days of the IRL threw up, and sportscar racing is, well, sportscar racing. But still, Sospiri surely deserved a bit longer of an F1 career than a single, humiliating qualifying session.
3 Bernd Schneider
On the face of it, a racing record of 34 GP entries, 9 starts, 11 DNQs and 14 DNPQs is a sign of someone that had a decent opportunity in F1 and blew it in spectacular style, rather than a driver who didn't get a chance to impress. But back in the rose-tinted era of the late 1980s, complete with dizzying entry lists approaching 40 cars per weekend and more hapless backmarkers than you could shake a HRT-logoed stick at, failure on such a grand scale was par for the course for an awful lot of drivers. Bernd Schneider, a man who a more careless Google search may lead you to believe is actually a footballer, struggled through a pair of seasons with the Zakspeed team, an F1 outfit that had never looked like getting competitive, and who by the time the German joined them were close to giving up on F1 altogether.
And when Zakspeed left, so did Schneider (save for a brief cameo for Arrows). But rather than mope about and be remembered as an F1 failure, Schneider got himself together and reinvented himself as a touring car king, winning his first title in 1995 and then following it up with more titles in 2000, 2001 and 2003 when the German series reformed, even running the series-dominating Audi of Laurent Aiello close for the 2002 crown with scraps like this one. In between, he found time to win a sportscar title for Mercedes (in their staggeringly good-looking CLK-GTR). All things considered, he proved that he probably would have been half-decent in Formula One after all, if only he had got a car to prove it. Some people even loved him so much, they wrote a song about him. Or actually, maybe that was the footballer again.
4 Perry McCarthy
The iconic F1 nearlyman, and thanks to the success of his charmingly entertaining book, something of a cult hero among Formula One fans. After impressing in a one-off test with the Footwork team in 1991, McCarthy made his debut in the sport with the maligned Andrea Moda team, in a season that would be dominated by failing to pre-qualify a lot before the hapless Italian team finally gave up midway through the season. During that period, McCarthy failed to qualify for a single race, the team failed to attend quite a few of them, and he had to suffer the likes of being sent onto a drying Silverstone track on full-on monsoon tyres and his steering seizing up when he was halfway through Eau Rouge at Spa. His brief and cataclysmic F1 career was so sensationally filled with failure that it was the original inspiration for the F1 Rejects website.
After Andrea Moda vanished, McCarthy had neither the cash or the cachet to find himself another, better F1 drive, leaving him with little more to show for his time in F1 than the premise for his book. It was a fundamentally unfair way for "the world's unluckiest racing driver" to see his F1 dreams end, particularly having had to work harder than most to put together the funds for his early career. His luck wouldn't even hold after F1 either. McCarthy found gainful employment as the original Stig on the machiavellian environmentalist show Top Gear, only to be 'killed off' after he blabbed about his identity in his book.
5 Gary Brabham
Given that there were three of them, and given that they all possessed the evocative nickname of an F1 great, the Brabham brothers all made a bit of a hash of trying to emulate their famous father. David managed the longest career in the sport, albeit two hapless seasons with his father's old eponymous Brabham team and the cataclysmically bad Simtek, Geoff never made F1 and instead looked to Indycar and sportscars for his fix of preferential treatment, but Gary arguably got the worst of the hands that were being doled out from the motorsport gods, given that for all his efforts, his F1 career amounted to a mere pair of DNPQs for the endlessly awful Life team (in a car so bad that it struggles to get round the corner out of parc ferme).
The experience of failing to even qualify for the chance to fail to qualify was clearly not one that Gary particularly enjoyed, and he walked away after his W12 Life engine had expired on his first outlap of pre-qualifying. He admitted afterwards that rushing into the Life drive rather than taking another season in the lower formulas proved to be the ruining of his F1 career, though he did go on to carve out a halfway-decent career in Indycar and various sportscar events. Which is sort of something to be proud of.
6 Ivan Capelli
For any driver, a Ferrari drive is arguably the golden prize in Formula One. For an Italian driver, it is a shining platter of purest ambrosia. And I don't mean the sickly custard. But following in the footsteps of the likes of Alberto Ascari, Lorenzo Bandini and Giuseppe Farina can often be more of a poisoned chalice than food from the gods. Having spent seven formative years in and out of backmarking F1 drives, the great Italian hope Ivan Capelli moved to the Scuderia for 1992 with the hopes of a nation pressing down on his shoulders. Unfortunately for Capelli, his move coincided with Ferrari producing one of their worst cars since this utter dog. It was a year that completely ruined Capelli's developing talent from his years with Leyton House as the effort of forcing a result out of the F92A ground his personality down and spat him out a fraught and ruined man. Oh, and this happened.
Dumped by the team before the end of the season, having secured a paltry three points and racked up no end of retirements along the way, the experience broke the spirit of the man once vaunted as a future champion. He signed for Jordan for 1993, but the ignominy of failing to qualify for the second round of the season in Brazil was the last straw, and he walked away from the sport, only recently returning to the paddock as Italy's answer to Martin Brundle.
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