Gene Haas has won the right to field a Formula One team and perhaps he will become the first successful American F1 team owner. I know John Watson won the 1976 Austrian GP in a car called a Penske, but actually that was a modified March.
The guy has built up an impressive business manufacturing CNC machine tools and he feels that a presence in Formula One will help his core business to expand into new markets and he is probably right.
The one thing that gives me pause is that Haas has commissioned a car from Dallara. Dallara has become the world's number one maker of customer racing cars many of which are for one-make 'spec' formulae. To achieve that position, it had to compete against outfits like Lola, Ralt and Reynard who once seemed to have the customer market tied up.
The fact is that Dallara has never designed a front-line F1 car and I do not think that Dallara ever can. It is all a matter of culture.
Between 1988 and 1992 there was a Dallara F1 team and it was not a complete flop. It won 15 points, when points were awarded only down to sixth, and it scored two third places. It did much better than most new teams in that era, some of whom never even qualified for a race.
Brun Motorsport won the 1986 World Sportscar Championship (with Porsche) and was runner-up in 1987. That is impressive, but between 1988 and 1990 the EuroBrun F1 team qualified only 14 times and its highest finish was 11th.
When you consider details like that, you have to concede that Dallara did pretty well in F1 for a minor team. It gave up F1 at the end of 1992 and produced a stunning F3 car for 1993. A couple were sold to a British team and Adrian Reynard took one look at them and knew he was in trouble.
The British Formula Three Championship was the most prestigious. Reynards won the first five races, but team owners bought Dallaras as fast as they could be built. As soon as they were delivered, they won and kept on winning. At the end of the season Reynard withdrew from Formula Three having lost its customer base.
Note the dates: Dallara came good as a customer car maker after it quit F1. The company had made F3000 cars which were not competitive. Its spell in Formula One raised its game in all areas. The last time F1 teams also did well in the customer car market was in the early 1970s.
Wind on about 15 years and Dallara was commissioned to build F1 cars for HRT (remember them?) There were money problems involved, sure, but the culture of Formula One had changed. I believe that HRT was doomed to failure because it out-sourced its design to an outfit used to making customer cars.
To service a modern one-make 'spec' formula, the successful bidder has to make a competent design the point of which is to guarantee that all customers receive identical kit. By contrast, a new F1 car is the basis for continuous development and the car that runs in the last race of the season is not the same as the car which ran in the first race.
Outfits like Brabham, Lotus, McLaren and Surtees stopped making customer cars around 1973/4 - at the same time as Ferrari dropped its very successful sports car programme - to concentrate on Formula One. March alone continued in F1 and also the customer car market and March was not a star team in Formula One.
In 1987, March re-entered F1 on the back of some hugely successful years in F3000, IMSA and Indycar. The F1 team recruited from March Engineering and put a promising young designer in charge of its programme. This designer had been at London University with Robin Herd's son, Mark, who suggested to his Dad that he should offer his pal work during the summer vacation. The name of the pal from uni was Adrian Newey. By such chances is history made.
Adrian's F1 cars for March marked him as an extraordinary talent and he was joined by Nick Wirth whom Robin rated even more highly. Meanwhile, the March customer side went down the tubes. There was a slew of reasons, but to give some idea how great was the fall, at Indianapolis in 1984, 29 of the 33 starters were March cars.
Just along the road at Bicester, Reynard eventually took over March's mantle in F3000 and Indycar. The proximity of the two companies meant their histories were intertwined. When one was having a hard time, craftsmen like fabricators simply moved from one to another. At one bleak point in the Reynard story, its main income came from storing unsold March racing cars.
Adrian Reynard knew that Formula One was dangerous, an attempt to enter F1 in 1990/91 had come close to bankrupting the company, but Reynard was saved by a deal with Benetton, Benetton became Renault became Lotus and some refer to the 'Enstone Team.' The factory at Enstone was built by Reynard.
The company recovered and built an Indycar which won first time in the hands of Michael Andretti. In 1995, rookie Jacques Villeneuve not only won the series, he won the Indianapolis 500, before it became devalued by IRL.
Adrian and Jacques became close and guess what happened when Jacques set up his own team, BAR. The Reynard factory in Bicester, from whence came nearly 2,000 single-seater racing cars, is now home to 'House of Pine'.
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