The End Of The Road

In the end, it was no surprise when the announcement was made that Super Aguri F1 are no more. It had been clear for some months that the team existed only thanks to the willingness of the Honda Motor Company to provide a line of credit to Aguri Suzuki's men, and that the Japanese manufacturer were becoming disillusioned with the idea of running two F1 teams. When Honda made clear they would not provide the financial support needed to keep the team afloat, their demise was inevitable. And so Super Aguri join a long list of teams - Arrows, Prost, Lola, Forti, Simtek, Pacific, and Lotus, who have fallen victim to the financial realities of F1. It would be easy to write off the disappearance of Super Aguri as largely irrelevant. They were, in their last days especially, tail end stragglers who had no realistic expectation of doing anything more than making up the numbers.

Me? I'll miss them. For one thing, they provided drives for two exciting, if not perhaps truly first-rate drivers in Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson. More than that, though, they appeared to be a very down-to-earth squad of real racers - made up of people determined to do the best with what they could, and not simply there to cruise around at the back. As an F1 fan, though, what was most interesting about the Super Aguri story was what it told us about what is, and is not, important in determining the overall competitiveness of an F1 team.

When the team first emerged, rather hurriedly, at the beginning of the 2006 season, as part of a Honda PR-effort to find employment for Japanese driver Takuma Sato, whom they had recently fired from the works team, they seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. The news that they would be running a modified 2002 Arrows chassis, hastily adapted to take the 2.4 litre Honda V8 engine (it had been built around a 3.0 litre V10 Cosworth block) and further modified to bring it into line with 2006 aerodynamic regulations and crash-test rules did little to inspire confidence. What hope did a new team have running a modified 3 year old chassis which, even at the time it had been built, rarely made it out of the bottom third of the grid? I, for one, wondered if we had another disaster of Andrea Moda or Life Racing Engines proportions on our hands.

At the opening race, in Bahrain, Takuma Sato was six seconds away from Michael Schumacher's pole time. It was hardly encouraging, but given they were using an almost untested and hastily constructed car, built around a 3 year old monocoque, it could have been a lot worse. Sato was around 1.5s off the pace of Tiago Monteiro's Midland-Toyota, which was not much worse than Minardi had been doing the year before. Sato's team mate, Yuji Ide, it quickly became apparent, had no business being in F1, and was a further 3 seconds back. He did not last long, and was dropped in favour of Toyota tester Franck Montagny who himself was eventually moved aside for Sakon Yamamoto.

Faced with such an apparently impossibly task, it would have been easy for the new team to sink into a mire, and slip further and further back as the season went on. It quickly became clear, though, that the team were determined to do what they could with the tools they had to hand. The team produced several updates to the basic Arrows package through the year, and by the time of the season-closing Brazilian Grand Prix, they had come a long way from the inauspicious debut at Bahrain. They may still have made up the back row at Interlagos, but this time Takuma Sato and team mate Sakon Yamamoto were both within 3 seconds of Felipe Massa's pole time - a dramatic leap from the 6+ seconds the team were giving away at the beginning of the season. Aided by the fact that Bridgestone had very much the better tyres in race conditions, Sato ended up finishing ahead of both Toro Rossos, both Midlands and a Red Bull on race day, too.

One statistic which proves particularly telling is that Sato's qualifying lap in 2006 was just 0.3s
slower than Montoya's pole lap in 2002. That, despite the fact that in 2002, the cars had larger wings, 3 litre V10 engines and, to be blunt, Montoya's Williams was a good deal quicker than the Arrows driven by Verstappen and Frentzen. What this demonstrates, firstly, is that the Super Aguri team did a very good job of adapting and improving the basic Arrows design. More than that, though, it shows just how important factors other than the basic chassis design are in determining the performance of an F1 car. In particular, 2006 was the zenith of the very hard-fought tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin (before the FIA called time on that by insisting on a single tyre supplier and control rubber for 2007). The Honda V8 and the gearbox, which the team also appropriated from the works team, were undoubtedly very well-engineered pieces of kit, but one can't help feeling that tyre development alone was probably responsible for as much as 2-3 seconds performance improvement a lap between 2002 and 2006.

The other thing that Super Aguri's performance in 2006 demonstrated is something which would already be apparent to anyone who has followed serious one-make formulae (like GP2, Champ Car, IRL) is that the basic chassis itself is only one factor among many in determining the outright competitiveness of a team. BCN Competicion and ART both work with the same basic Dallara-Renault chassis in GP2 and yet there is a very noticeable performance difference between the two teams which cannot be entirely accounted for by the relative merits of their drivers. Comparing, for instance, Dale Coyne Racing and Newman Haas in last year's Champ Car series leads one towards the same conclusion. Knowing how to engineer a car, how to dial it in to each track, can be every bit as important as having an outright quick car in the first place. To my mind, what the Super Aguri squad demonstrated in 2006, was that they got the very most out of a very basic (in F1 terms) underlying design. Enough to occasionally frighten teams with vastly greater resources and much more modern cars.

2007 was meant to be very different for the tiny Anglo-Japanese team. The team took advantage of the FIA's warming towards the concept of 'customer' chassis in F1 to run Honda's race-winning 2006 chassis, complete with minor aerodynamic updates and other modifications required to get it through the more stringent crash-test requirements. And so we were left with the question: Could the team who worked small wonders with an ancient Arrows in 2006 really frighten the big boys with access to a much more modern design and a serious driver line up?

In the end, the answer was inconclusive. The modified 2006 Honda was enough to ensure that the Super Aguri team no longer routinely propped up the rear of the grid. At the first race in Australia, both Sato and Davidson made it through into the second round of the knock-out qualifying system (something Super Aguri never threatened to do in 2006) and through the first half of the season, the team regularly ran in the midfield. In doing so, they more often that not outpaced the works Honda team, and conclusively demonstrated that sometimes, a team can take a step backwards in absolute, rather than merely relative, terms. Undoubtedly the highlight of the team's brief existence, though, was the Canadian Grand Prix of 2007, where Takuma Sato overtook reigning World Champion Fernando Alonso's Mclaren on the track going into the final chicane to snatch 5th place. OK, so he was only within striking range of Alonso because of a safety car, and he was only quicker because he was on the better tyre compound, and Alonso was nursing damage to his car from an earlier trip across the dirt. But still, a Super Aguri passing a Mclaren in a straight fight for a points position! Who would have predicted that when the team made its shambolic debut at Bahrain just 15 months before?

In retrospect, though, the nails were already being hammered into Aguri's coffin as the 2007 season went on. The team's new title sponsor, SS Oil and Gas, reneged on their deal and left
the team having to go to Honda for a bail-out, which is unlikely to have helped relations between the satellite team and the parent company. Cynics have suggested that the Honda team bosses were far from happy that a small team using their old car were outpacing the works squad (until a late season run of form for Jenson Button, Super Aguri led Honda in the constructors championship) and that perversely, their very competitiveness harmed their long-term future.

Myself, I rather doubt that explanation. I expect that Honda were simply relieved that something with a Honda engine and Honda stickers on the side, was running in the points from time to time. No, the real reason for Honda's change of heart about the support they were providing to Super Aguri was the FIA's volte-face over the legality of customer cars. It became quite clear that, in the long term, Super Aguri would have to develop their own chassis to remain in the sport. For as long as Honda had open the option of running two teams with the same chassis, the Super Aguri team was a sensible investment. Having access to four cars and the testing-mileage allowance for 2 teams instead of one could buy significant advantage. A similar logic lay behind Red Bull's decision to buy out Minardi and create Scuderia Toro Rosso, and the Prodrive/Mclaren link up that never happened.

When the FIA decided that it was not in the long-term interest of the sport to open up the possibility of customer F1 teams, with no car design or manufacturing facilities of their own (or, if you prefer, when the FIA were cornered by the smaller independent teams like Williams and Force India) these satellite teams no longer made sense. And so it is that Prodrive's F1 effort ended up stillborn, Toro Rosso is for sale, and Super Aguri have, this week, reached the end of the road.

Customer Service

Every other year, it seems, come the first race, there is a dispute over some aspect of the season's new rules that threatens to derail the Grand Prix circus and leave the sport in a quagmire of court battles.

A while back, there was the threat of arbitration over the 2.4 litre engine rules that hovered over 2005. For those who can't recall the tedious details of this dispute, a couple of the manufacturers who had produced the best 3 litre V10s questioned whether the FIA had the power to change the engine regulations before the end of 2007 under the rules stability agreement signed by the teams. The FIA more or less claimed that they had the power to do anything that was deemed necessary on the grounds of safety - which rather leaves one wondering what the point of rules stability agreements are in the first place.

The same went with the rather more vexed question of the special dispensation to Squadro Toro Rosso to run rev-restricted V10s last year. All the more so because the right to run such engines was being decided on a case-by-case basis - i.e. the rules were not the same for all teams. In the event, the cars wee so uncompetitive that all bar Midland, who were rather preoccupied with their own survival, didn't really care. Going back a bit, there were the rows over Mclaren's trick braking systems, the detailed workings of the whole-race tyre rule and the question of what to do about the deliberate retiring of healthy cars to get around the two race engine rules. Back in 1982, there was even a strike over new driver contracts, led by none other than Niki Lauda. Not a natural comrade of Arthur Scargill, one wouldn't have thought.

These things tend rapidly to blow over, but this year, the arguments are over something rather more fundamental - the question of whether teams are required to run cars that they themselves have designed. And because of the implications it has for the survival of some of the lesse teams, it may all take a rather longer to sort out.

On the face of it, there is little to dispute. The rules state that teams cannot run a car bought from any other team. They must own the Intellectual Property rights to their own car - end of debate. This, of course, the two teams around whom the debate is centred - Super Aguri and Toro Rosso, claim to do. Nonetheless, few expect the Toro Rosso to look radically different from the new Red Bull RB3, or the Super Aguri to depart significantly from last year's Honda. Understandably, this is something which pleases Spyker, in particular, not one bit. Without a similarly close relationship with any of the major teams, they are going to struggle to produce anything which can outpace a late-model Honda or a rebadged Red Bull, especially with guys like Sato and Liuzzi at the wheel.

If, in their view, the new Super Aguris and Toro Rossos (which are being kept carefully under wraps at present) are 'customer cars', they intend to take the matter to court. What, realistically, though, are their chances of success? The actual Concorde Agreement rules are confidential, but reports suggest that the key question is over who owns the Intellectual Property rights to the car. It may be that there are provisions to prevent one team selling IP rights to a previous year's car to another team, but even if that is the case, then it may well be that only the most minor modifications to the old car would be needed to make the case that it is, in fact, a new car altogether.

After all, there have been a number of cars that have looked rather, how shall we say, similar down the years, and the FIA has declared each of them legal. Who honestly believes that the previous Toro Rosso was anything more than a 2005 Red Bull RB1? And what of Sauber's 2004 'Blue Ferrari'? Going back a few years, the similarities between the Briatore-owned 1995 Benetton and the Briatore-owned 1995 Ligier are rather striking. To my knowledge, the only entries that have ever been refused under the 'no customer cars' rules were the 1992 Andrea Moda (a reworked Coloni - they quickly reappeared with a Simtek/BMW cast-off) and Middlebridge Racing's attempt to run a rather striking looking year-old Benetton for Emmanuele Pirro in 1987.

If the FIA are inclined to accept a car's entry, then there is clearly little that any other team can do, short of going to arbitration against the FIA itself - something which risks leaving the team with a very powerful enemy, even if they are successful. And given the FIA's stated position on the legality of customer cars in 2008, it is pretty clear what Max Mosley's attitude towards the matter is.

So if it is going to happen anyway, does it matter? I'm agnostic on the point. After all, customer cars would not represent some absolute break with previous tradition. Such efforts were common enough until the major teams, under Bernie Ecclestone's FOCA umbrella, got them outlawed in the early 1980s. At that time, they were little missed. Customer cars were usually run at selected races by bit-part players, running rent-a-drivers in old Marches, etc. In earlier times, though, there had been some pretty serious non-works efforts in Formula One. Lotus, for instance, took their first win not with the factory team, but with the rather better prepared Rob Walker Racing team, who ran a Lotus 18 for Stirling Moss. For a year or two at the end of the 1960s, Frank Williams ran a pretty effective operation with a customer Brabham, and all kinds of people ran non-works Coopers through that decade. The aforementioned Walker even had plans to run a customer Ferrari for Moss in 1962, before his career-ending shunt at Goodwood put a stop to that plan.

Nonetheless, I'm far from sure that the experience with customer chassis elsewhere in top-line single seater racing has been entirely positive. Take Champ Car, for example. They have always allowed customer chassis, and back in the early 1980s, there was a wealth of different manufacturers, and plenty variety on the grid. Gradually, though, the biggest players - namely Reynard and Lola, became so dominant as to wipe the smaller players off the grid entirely. They made clearly better cars than any other manufacturer, and economies of scale were such that they were able to build them ever more cheaply than their competitors to boot. When Reynard's 2001 chassis proved less than entirely wonderful, everyone migrated over to the Lola chassis, and the series became a de-facto one-make championship. In the end, it didn't even do Lola any favours, as, faced with a de-facto one-make series, series bosses introduced a de-jure spec-formula, and gave the contract to make the cars to Panoz, as exchange rates meant they could do the job more cheaply.

A similar process led to a one-make series emerging in F3000 (Lola, before Dallara won the GP2 contract, there's nothing new under the sun) and IRL is already heading in the same direction, with everyone running Dallaras. Formula 3 isn't quite so clear cut, but its been a long time since anything other than a Dallara won a championship of any standing.

Could it happen in Formula 1? It might seem far-fetched, but given enough time, I think it could. Imagine that Mclaren, for example, make a couple of their cars available to a satellite team. Those customer cars don't win anything, but they do enough to wipe out any real opportunities for say, Red Bull and WIlliams to score points. A couple of years later, Red Bull find themselves wondering why they are spending so much money on designing their cars when they could spend considerably less on getting hold of some customer Mclarens. For Williams, pride is at stake, but in the end, in the face of extinction, Frank swallows his pride and buys some Mclarens too. The money coming in from Williams, Red Bull and the original satellite team enables Mclaren to invest still more in their design for the following season, and up their production facilities. Increasingly, the workds Renault, Toyota and BMW teams, or rather the shareholders in the parent companies, wonder why they are spending so much money finishing 10th behind a pack of Mclarens every other weekend. Uninterested in running Mclarens, they sell their factories to the leading GP2 teams, who are more than happy to buy customer cars - its what they've done all their lives, after all. A decade down the line from the rule change, F1 has become a spec-formula (and Ron Dennis richer than Croesus).

Would it really happen that way? Maybe not. Maybe F1 is different, maybe the sheer level of technical know-how involved would get in the way of the kind of volume-car manufacture undertaken by Lola or Dallara. But that does rather tend to be the way it works out (although the F1 engine market provides an intriguing counter-example).

So what reason could there be for allowing customer cars? Well, there was a reason. Jaguar pulled out of F1 a couple of years ago, and other manufacturer teams could follow (watch Toyota....) There won't be a soft-drinks billionaire around to buy all of them. The cost of establishing a Formula 1 team from scratch. In the last 10 years, only Toyota and BAR have done so, and only then with the resources of the world's second largest car manufacturer and a tobacco conglomerate, respectively. And look how wrong they got it, initially!

If new teams are to come in, there's a strong argument that it will only be possible by allowing them to run cars bought from other teams. Could Super Aguri have come into being in 100 days if they hadn't owned the rights to the old Arrows A23s? What chance would Prodrive have of building its own cars in time for 2008?

So what is the compromise solution? A championship for drivers, open to everyone, and a manufacturers championship open only to those who design and build their own cars? Perhaps, but as Joe Saward pointed out recently, the risk is that Mclaren, Ferrari and Toyota (who probably have the resources to do it) would run satellite teams, purely to take points off their rivals, and soon half the grid would be made up of teams running under orders not to race the 'A teams'.

No, to me, the best solution is simpler. New teams should be allowed to purchase year-old cars from rival operations (To my mind, though, they should not be able to buy from any team which finished in the top 5 in the constructors championship - this would provide a useful revenue stream to a team like Williams, for example, and prevent the big teams running strategic satellite teams). They should be allowed to continue doing this for up to 3 years, while they build up their operation. At the end of the 3 year period, though, they should be required either to enter their own car, or continue running with a 2 year old design (perhaps modified by the new team itself). The three year period coincides neatly with the period that any new team is required to be in existence for before becoming entitled to any FOM money - neatly solving two problems at once. That way, there is a route for equipes wishing to move up from GP2 or suchlike, but at the same time, no risk is run of heading down the Champ Car/IRL road. A perfect solution? Well, has anyone got any better ideas?