As car launch season picks up speed throughout the rest of the week, confident words will be flung around by everyone as they big up their chances for 2012. But as Patty explains, pity the team that is too confident at their launch.
1) British American Racing 1999
If there is a specific prize for hubris in F1, then it would take some considerable effort to beat Craig Pollock and BAR on the eve of their debut season in the sport. The launch of the BAR 01 was less of a polite wave and smile at having been welcomed to the F1 party, and more a brash and confident naked swagger through the gym changing rooms, an approach crystallised in the team's initial unveiling of their unique (and completely illegal) split liveries, designed to sell a different flavour of cancer stick depending on whether your eyes were drawn to Jacques Villeneuve or Ricardo Zonta.
But, as with so many steroid-addled gym swaggerers, when push actually came to shove BAR would prove to be somewhat lacking where it really matters. Villeneuve would go on to retire from the first eleven races of the season in a row, and the team would fail to score a single point all season in a campaign so wretched that it even eclipsed the sort of horrorshow the team had been enduring in its last few sad years running under the Tyrrell name. Even 1999's full-time backmarkers Arrows and Minardi managed a single point apiece.
And the failings of their season made the launch all the more comical. From the brand new team's odd decision to unveil a motto that proclaimed "A Tradition of Excellence" - one that was aching to be revisited when BAR's lack of tradition was backed up by a lack of excellence - through to Pollock's own proud media-parping after the sheets were off his new 001s, the full hilarity of BAR's brash debut is best enjoyed in hindsight.
"Our style is definitely going to be open and up-front, while still having a fierce commitment to excel," he bellowed at the press, adding that his first thoughts on seeing his new car were "pride and a sense of accomplishment". And while suggestions that the team had boasted they would win their first race in the sport are actually something of an urban myth, Pollock only just shied away from that sort of comment. "We believe that we have a very good car; we believe that the car can do very good things," he grinned, "If Jacques thinks he has a chance to win, we should go for it. We should go out and try to win races as soon as possible." BAR's name would eventually vanish from F1 seven years later. Total wins: zero.
2) Mastercard Lola 1997
There's nothing wrong with showing some ambition in life and aiming as high as you possibly can. Even here at Patty we one day strive to increase our readership to double figures. But if the cautionary tale of the hubris of Icarus and his insufficient investment in wing-building material teaches us anything, it is that sometimes it is best not to aim too high too quickly. Especially when you are at such a significant technological disadvantage.
And while Mastercard Lola may not have built their engines out of wax and aimed them squarely at the sun, they did launch their first-ever Formula One car against the background of a winter of technical inadequacies and strife. In the end, rather than their 1997 launch being of a lean, mean racer that justified the development work the team had been putting in to their new F1 pitch since 1995, they pulled the covers of the T97-30, a design that infamously never saw the inside of a wind tunnel, and ended up being rolled out with a chronic Ford V8 from the defunct Forti programme bolted in the back, rather than Lola's own planned V10.
All of which, you might expect, served to put a bit of a downer on the team's first-ever (and, erm, last-ever) F1 car launch. But not for this team, who beat the usual launch day drum without a hint of concern over their chances. "We are completely ready for this venture," said the team's boss Eric Broadley, less than three months before the Lola company went into receivership, "Like all projects the eventual aim is to win the championship and, after four years, I am expecting us to do that."
He added: "I have no fears at the moment. We should get within the 107 percent qualifying minimum and if we don't do that then we should not be in the sport." And his enthusiasm was infectious, with driver Vincenzo Sospiri, a man destined to end up with the most rotten of all F1 career records (one race, one DNQ), adding: "I am looking forward to it. I hope we can just get points before the end of the year and I am sure we will have no problems qualifying throughout the season." Sospiri would end qualifying at Lola's only GP weekend nearly 12 seconds off the pace.
Not that over-optimism had ever been something Broadley had been lacking in. Famously he responded to a question before the team's launch as to whether Lola could beat fellow 1997 newbies Stewart-Ford in their debut season, he replied: "If we don't beat them, then we deserve to be given a good kick up the backside. With our experience and back-up, it should be no problem." Two weeks before Lola dropped into receivership in May 1997, Rubens Barrichello finished second at Monaco in a Stewart Ford.
3) Williams BMW 2004
Those F1 fans still recovering from their first glimpse of Caterham's CT01 last week will likely remember the last time that the look of a new car caused people to physically recoil in horror, back in 2004 when Williams unveiled their disastrous FW26 machine. As with the Caterham, the focus of everyone's 'WTF?' faces was the nose of the beast, which on the Williams featured a stub-nosed approach, with accompanying walrus tusks to connect the front wing onto the end. And while some of us happened to think that it was actually pretty damn pretty actually, the general reaction at the launch was one of bafflement, horror and nausea.
But while the looks were not exactly winning plaudits, the team were still pretty smug about the whole situation. "It will be immediately evident to onlookers that a high degree of innovative design has gone into the FW26," the car's designer Gavin Fisher announced gleefully, against the backdrop of a hundred huddled reporters clutching at sick bags, "It has challenged us throughout its development and there is certainly a sense that today is a more significant launch day than in previous years."
And, like a man seemingly desperate to line himself up for a fall, team owner Frank Williams was particularly forthright with what he felt the team's main aims for the coming season should be. "Our ambition can be nothing other than winning every race, steal Ferrari's crown and add another Championship title to the record," he bellowed defiantly, "Having any less ambition at the start of the year would be wrong."
Of course, none of the above happened. The walrus nose didn't last the season, replaced by something slightly less divisive and slightly less slow by the middle of the year, and the team only picked up a token race win in the final race of the year, several months after Ferrari and Michael Schumacher had wrapped up the title (and what is, at time of writing, the last GP win for a Williams car). Given all that, it barely seemed worth making so many reporters ill in the first place, really. Heed this cautionary tale, Caterham.
4) Jaguar Racing 2000
If there is a theme of this piece, aside from the obvious theme of it being about infamous F1 car launches, then it is the idea that the bigger an F1 team's ambitions come, the harder they fall. And so that continues with Jaguar, whose bold and decisive move into Formula One with the keys to Stewart Grand Prix and half a dozen tins of green paint started with pompous waffle, almost guaranteeing that it would end with ignominious failure.
"For over 50 years we have been consistent winners in motor sport. Our entry into F1, though, clearly signals Jaguar's direction for the future," babbled Jaguar chairman Wolfgang Reitzle at the 2000 launch of their R1 car, "There is an excitement and passion about F1 racing that closely matches the emotional appeal of Jaguar. Emotional engineering sums up our philosophy of the future." And 'emotional engineering' would end up going down with BAR's excellent traditions when it came to the weakest of F1's empty team mottos.
The car itself drew plenty of eager coos from watching fans and reporters, as the new green-y lines of the car attempted to hark back to the glory days of the Jaguar brand, even while the huge HSBC logos affixed to the wings reminded everyone of the pragmatic days the brand was now in. But the livery itself wasn't even right, the team doing what Rosso Corsa fans would term 'pulling a Ferrari' in opting for a shade of paint known as 'Jaguar Racing Green' instead of the deeper British Racing Green. All the better to pick our cars out on TV with.
Still, it was enough to fool most people. "The new car looks fantastic," lead driver Eddie Irvine gushed, "It's going to do us proud." After seventeen races, four measly points and a ninth place finish in the constructors championship, it is unlikely that Irvine still felt the same way about his green machine. And maybe it wasn't such a good idea to opt for the shade of paint that made the cars more noticeable on television after all.
5) McLaren Mercedes 1995
As we have seen, the purpose of a car launch is two-fold. Firstly, to pull a sheet off your new car and allow some people to take photos of it, and secondly to project your ambition for the coming season in as ostentatious and confident a manner possible. Only for some smartarse on the internet to go back through the archives, dig up all those confident comments you made ten years ago, and assemble them into a sneering 'Six of the Best' article.
McLaren have established themselves as being the market leaders in ostentatious confidence. All the way back to the 'big reveal' of their new Silver Arrows livery in 1997, in a cash-burning $2 million display of fireworks, West cigarette logos, Spice Girls and Mika Hakkinen, through to 2011's bizarre Berlin demonstration which saw their new car assembled from its constituent parts via a series of ringers carrying pieces of bodywork across the city on public transport, they have set the bar high.
For 1995, their big reveal was the portly frame of former world champion Nigel Mansell, and also of the gawky design of their new MP4/10, complete with a dubious-looking mid-wing mounted to their airbox in an effort to gain extra downforce. A crowd gathered to witness the new machine at the Science Museum in London, and while the design was not to everyone's tastes, it seemed to gel well with their new lead driver. "You look at it from the front and you think [wow], you look at it from the side and it's even more impressive," Mansell gushed, "I won't tell you what the back looks like, hopefully a lot of people will be watching that."
Alas, very few people ended up watching the back of the MP4/10, apart from when the leaders caught up to lap it and casually wondered "Why is that ugly McLaren going so slowly?". The mid-wing didn't really work, Mansell lasted two races in a specially-widened chassis before he lugged himself away from the sport, and the MP4/10 would go down as the McLaren that was so slow, it was overtaken by both Pacifics during the European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. "It was so pathetic that I just sat there driving along laughing out loud beneath my helmet," Mark Blundell cringed regarding watching the mighty duo of Andrea Montermini and Jean-Denis Délétraz tearing past him. So not quite as impressive as Mansell thought, then.
6) Virgin Racing 2010
Fans of F1 car launches didn't know where to look in 2010, as the emergence of all manner of new F1 teams onto the grid promised to swell the number of times people could giddily watch a sheet being pulled off a car. That promise never really delivered actual results, though. USF1 never got as far as a launch, HRT (née Campos Meta) ended up hastily showing off their new car to around seven people in a Spanish warehouse, and Virgin Racing became victims of attempting to be a little bit too flashy.
Their first-ever F1 car, the soon-to-be-appearing-on-an-eleventh-row-near-you VR-01, was to be debuted in a swanky online video presentation on the team's website, adding a swish web 2.0 (no, not that one) feel to the team's polished efforts to prove to F1 that they meant business. Alas, it ended up being an early cue to the fact that they very much didn't.
On the morning of February 3rd 2010, a small pocket of F1 fans eagerly gathered in front of their computers to mash F5 in front of Virgin's website. Predictably, the effect of that fevered button-pushing was enough to crash their website, as the video stream failed to emerge onto the internet, leaving fans wandering around the world wide web in confusion, wondering if Virgin even had a car at all. It all got too much for Lucas di Grassi, who messaged his fans in exasperation to say: "Calm down people. I'll ask if I can put a picture on Twitter." And eventually, the VR-01 was born.
If anyone at the team saw the worrying parallel with their moment of computer-knack that morning, and their decision to design their car exclusively on Nick Wirth's old 486, nobody was saying anything like that at the time. "I have absolute belief in the digital design process and the opportunity to demonstrate that this could be the way for the future of F1 is very, very exciting," Wirth grinned, either referring to the car, or his company's plans to launch their own version of YouTube. Once the car hit the track though, random crashing would, alas, be the high points of di Grassi and Glock's season in the VR-01.
Trackback(0)
TrackBack URI for this entryComments (0)
Subscribe to this comment's feedWrite comment
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
