F1

Yep, it's an excellent article. There were a number of teams at the time who competed on the strength of having an up and coming driver, or an engine of note or by having a well designed and well engineered cars. I guess every privateer's dream is to one day emulate the success of McClaren or Williams or emulate the success of Eddie Jordan's team. What they don't want to do is to be as unsuccesful as another Italian Privateer, Forti Corse, who had neither a good car, a good engine or a good driver. Poor Forti drivers Roberto Moreno and Pedro Diniz (who clocked up 99 Grand Prix just by bringing sponsorship money to the table) used to get lapped several times a race. Pedro Diniz's rich father also funded a decent proportion of the Team's Operations and negociated the purchase Ford V8 Engines made under licence in Brazil. The real Ford V8 at the time tuned by Cosworth was thought to have been worth an extra 100-150hp.

For every Williams and McClaren success story there's a whole graveyard of teams who tried to compete but failed.

Team names like Fondmetal (Italy) , Onyx (GB), Colini (Italy), Minardi (who live on with the Red Bull B team), Ligier (a fallen french giant), Zakspeed (Germany). To succeed now you need a big budget (Red Bull), a big engine manufacturer and a very good driver. Most of teams above left formula 1 and returned to F3000, Formula 3 and various GT and Touring Car classes. Zakspeed in their final year in Formula one in 1989 actually rivalled Ferrari as being the only other team to produce their own chassis and engines. But they'll be most famous in my mind for producing insane Ford Capri's that looked like this..


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kl81-01.jpg

In the current economic climate it's going to be harder than ever for privateer teams to attract enough money to compete properly or turn their teams into competetive outfits that might be taken over by big car manufacturers or by big corporations who want the glamour of Formula 1 to boost their brand image. But with the withdrawal of Honda and BMW and Peter Sauber's reaquisition of the team he sold to BMW in the first place, you can see from the current Sauber car's minimalist sponsorship decals, you can see that money isn't out there. Let's not forget that the Brawn GP cars last season despite being up near the front of the pack all year struggled to attract huge sponsporship apart from Richard Branson coming along for the ride. Whether or not Brawn needed the sponsorship money is debatable!