Categories
Cars/Teams

Minardi F1

Watching the Maurissa’s and Caterham’s currently toil around at the back of the field engaged in their own private race within a race without even the slightest glimmer of hope of scoring a single world championship point, I often get nostalgic for my personal favorite backmarkers, Minardi.  For 20 years I kept those lovable Italian cars close to my heart.  There was just something romantic about a team of jovial Italian craftsmen engaging in a labor of love while seemingly oblivious to the multinational super teams with 400 employees and $400 million dollar/year budgets occupying the garages just a few feet away.  Perhaps it was their longevity that won fans the world over, but Minardi were clearly “The Peoples Backmarker.”  An underdog in the the truest sense, their quest often made me think of the legendary video game, Super Mario Brothers, where the ordinary Mario and his cousin Luigi embarked on an amazing journey against impossible odds to rescue Princess Toadstool.

Minardi arrived at every single race around the globe and unpacked their cars with the same purpose as their counterparts at McLaren and Ferrari.  They were in the business of extracting every fraction of a second out of the car that they constructed with their relatively meager resources, only their stopwatch had different standards than the rest.  Their passion was evident, their optimism infectious, and I always found myself trying to will on those lagging cars from the grandstand as their drivers fought valiantly to overcome their shortcomings in horsepower, traction and aero efficiency.

In a sense the Minardi was more fun to watch live than a Schumacher Ferrari because while Michael made it look easy, the Minardi driver had to publicly display every bit of his God given talent just to keep the car off the walls and pointed in the right direction.  You could listen to the Minardi driver fighting for traction as the revs jumped all over the place and see his hands flailing like a prizefighter to control the nervous chassis.  Lapping a Minardi within 2-3 seconds of a Ferrari was a serious accomplishment that made the rest of the pitlane sit up and take notice.  GP winners Nannini, Alonso, Fisichella, Trulli and Webber all served their F1 apprenticeship with the small Faenza based team and their ability to push the car to the limit marked them as stars of the future.

I can recall sitting in the turn 1-3 complex at the Circuit de Hermanos Rodrigues in Mexico City in 1986 and grabbing my program to get more information on this Nannini character who was hustling the Minardi with panache only rivaled by Senna in the Lotus.  It was obvious that anyone who could make a Minardi dance was a bit special.

 While the drivers from Minardi would progress up the grid to the likes of McLaren, Renault and Ferrari, the teams themselves remained in stark contrast of each other.  The great pit reporter John Bisignano used to refer to McLaren as “the perfect boys from McLaren” and he was spot on with that moniker.  Whether I was in Mexico City, Phoenix, Budapest or Montreal, every time I spotted the McLaren brigade marching through a hotel lobby, regardless of the time of day, they always looked immaculate and totally focused.  Meanwhile the imperfect boys of Minardi would be down at the breakfast buffet disheveled, smoking and pounding the espresso before piling into their rented minivan like a team of kids off to a soccer game.

 And if you ever found yourself walking the garages on the Thursday before a race whether legally or by way of subterfuge, Minardi was the place to be.  The mechanics had nothing to hide and would take the time to answer the odd question.  Conversely the big budget teams usually employed an off duty SAS officer to shoo away the casual observers and kept their cars shrouded in secrecy until it was time to get down to business on Friday.

At the ’96 Hungarian GP Minardi left their spare car sitting in the pit lane unattended and didn’t seem fazed when buzzards off the street started climbing into the cockpit for a photo op.

For the inaugural F1 race held at The Brickyard in 2000 we found ourselves facing a predicament that buzzards the world over have faced countless times.  In our quest to hit the pit lane, we casually slipped through a catering entrance and successfully evaded the elderly guard of volunteer Hoosiers in yellow windbreakers roaming around looking for shady characters, but found ourselves stymied in Bernie’s Billion Dollar Paddock Club located behind the garages.  As we strolled up and down with a false air of dignity looking for entry, suddenly a door to the back of the Minardi garage opened.  If it were any other team we may have felt the fear, but armed with years of studying the behavior of the Minardi mechanics, we quickly pounced.  It felt like entering a house party uninvited. We received a few strange looks and had to step over a few guys on the ground working under the car, but seconds later our efforts were rewarded handsomely by getting to eavesdrop on a conversation between Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen.  Seriously.  Two champs and 3 buzzards taking in the row of bricks together.

For F1 to survive it will need to retain the colorful independent teams that humanize the sport.  Here’s a raise of a glass of Fernet Branca to Giancarlo Minardi, his long time workhorse driver Pier Luigi Martini, and all of the men and women who made up the proud Minardi team for two decades!  Grazie Mille!

 

Minardi logo

Categories
Cars/Teams

Life L190

While the 1988 McLaren, ‘92 Williams and ‘04 Ferrari will go down in the record books as some of the finest racing cars ever engineered, we often overlook all of the cars produced by the little guys that were bad to just downright terrible and barely made a ripple on the sport.  Before the days of Bernie capping the grid size and demanding a sum the size of the GDP of Belize just to enter the series, there were teams of all shapes and sizes providing amusement and bewilderment at the back of grid.

Without a doubt the worst F1 car that I’ve ever seen live was the 1990 Life-L190.  Back in those days I used to look at new teams with youthful optimism and in the process of thumbing through the Autosport season preview, I managed to get myself lathered up over the prospects of Gary Brabham, the youngest of the Aussie racing dynasty, driving a bright red car with a radical W12 engine developed by a former employee of Ferrari.

I was still under this illusion when the track went green at 8:00am for pre-qualifying through the not so scenic streets of Phoenix, Az.   It was immediately evident that Roberto Moreno in the Euro Brun-Judd and the Lola-Lamborghini’s of Bernard and Suzuki were the class of the field.   It was also evident that the local residents in the Valley of the Sun had no interest whatsoever in F1 and were actually attempting to sit in their offices and work while F1 cars were buzzing their building!

I waited patiently for 20 minutes into the session until a red car appeared in the concrete jungle that had yet to turn a lap.   When it was clearly visible my first thought

Roll out the Barrell
Roll out the Barrel

was it looked like somebody had taken a barrel, painted it red and stuck four tires on it.  This was more soap box derby than F1.  As Brabham went to the brakes the car twitched and moved around like a spooked horse.  He looked more like a guy returning home at 4:30am from an all night Scottsdale hot tub party than the reigning British F3000 champion.  When he went to the power the engine sounded like a sick dog.  Just one corner on an out lap was all the data necessary to proclaim the Life L190 an unmitigated disaster.  Mercifully for Brabham, the car only lasted 3 laps before the ignition box failed but the damage was done.  In those three laps Brabham managed to clock a time a cool 35 seconds slower than Moreno and 20 seconds slower than the Trans-Am pole time.  He would have only been marginally quicker than a confused commuter that somehow wandered onto the track while trying to get to the office that morning.

The next time I had the pleasure of seeing the Life in action Gary Brabham had wisely fired himself after the car only rolled 400 feet in Brazil due to the

Gary's Glorious 400ft
Gary’s Glorious 400ft

mechanics failing to put oil in the car on purpose (sounds like a whole new story to research) and Bruno Giaccomelli had for some bizarre reason come out of retirement to pilot this machine.  The team was run by Italian businessman Ernesto Vita, so maybe Bruno was family or had some unpaid debts?  Regardless, as pre-qualifying for the ’90 Canadian GP got underway, Bruno was hustling the car around at speeds slower than the Formula Atlantic cars and that W12 engine still sounded pathetically under powered.  The rumor was that the engine was only making 375bhp which sounds nice for your trip to the grocery store but not when the goal is to compete with Senna in a McLaren.  In fact Giacomelli was actually nervous that somebody, most likely his Friday am compatriot Claudio Langes, would misjudge his pedestrian speed and run up the back of the car.  For all their hard work of crating and shipping the car, team members and parts across the Atlantic for 1 hour of track time on a Friday morning, the reward was a lap time of 1:50.25, only 21 seconds behind session leader Roberto Moreno in the that not so mighty Euro Brun-Judd.

At Silverstone, Bruno must have been all hopped up on Espresso because he was able to get the car around only 15 seconds off the pre-qualifying pace of Eric Bernard in the Lola-Lamborghini.  By Estroil the team had abandoned the W12

Bruno sans cover
Bruno sans cover

and managed to bolt a Judd-V8 to the chassis only to have the engine cover fly off the car on the first lap of the day.  After posting a time 20 seconds off the pre-qualifying pace for round 14 at Jerez, the team finally called time on the project.

The fact that the Life team actually hauled this hunk of junk to 14 rounds of the 1990 FIA F1 World Championship is a mind boggler.  In fact what Ernesto Vita was attempting to do fits in nicely with Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  What were they thinking?  I guess we will never know but contemplating their attempt brings to mind a famous Ron Dennis moment when he bitterly scolded a member of the media in a press conference by saying, “We make history, you just write about it.”  In a way this can also apply to the Life L190.  They made history and I’m sitting here on my duff 23 years later still fascinated by it.

Tall driver at Goodwood
Tall driver at Goodwood