Life Racing
| Surname | Life Racing |
|---|---|
| Companies | Life Racing SpA |
| Company headquarters | Formigine , ( I ) |
| Team boss | Ernesto Vita |
| statistics | |
| First Grand Prix | USA 1990 |
| Last Grand Prix | Spain 1990 |
| Race driven | 14 (0 starts) |
| Constructors' championship | 0 |
| Drivers World Championship | 0 |
| Race wins | 0 |
| Pole positions | 0 |
| Fastest laps | 0 |
| Points | 0 |
Life Racing SpA was an Italian Formula 1 racing team that competed in the 1990 Formula 1 season . He gained notoriety beyond the season due to the particular degree of his unsuccessfulness.
The founder of the team was the Italian businessman Ernesto Vita , who had not previously appeared in motorsport. In his team, which was founded in 1989, he combined two projects that had not been successful in themselves: on the one hand an unusual engine in W-12 configuration, on the other hand a chassis that had been manufactured by another team but not yet used. Another special feature was that former Ferrari engineers had worked independently on both components . The combination of engine and chassis did not result in a successful overall package, making Life Racing one of the most unsuccessful teams in Formula 1 history.
The motor
The specialty of the team was an unusual Formula 1 engine, which had its intellectual origin in the late 1970s. The Italian engineer Franco Rocchi worked for Ferrari until 1980, where he had developed a number of successful street engines. This included in particular the 3.0-liter eight-cylinder (sometimes also called "Rocchi V8"), which debuted in 1973 in the Ferrari Dino 308 GT 4 (with Bertone body) and was later used for many years in the Ferrari 308 and Ferrari Mondial . In 1980 Franco Rocchi left Ferrari and worked privately on several engine ideas in the following years. This included a W motor for motorsport, i. H. a multi-cylinder engine with three cylinder banks. The theoretical advantage of the concept was the shortness of the engine block, which made a particularly compact car possible. The disadvantages included a disproportionate overall height and the particular complexity of the overall concept. Franco Rocchi claimed in 1990 that he had already worked on such a W engine on behalf of Ferrari in the early 1970s, but that in the end it was not followed up there. Ferrari officially denied this claim.
Rocchi's work was well advanced in the late 1980s. It was the time in which Formula 1 was in a state of upheaval: For the first time, no turbocharged engines were to be approved for the 1989 season. This rule change was generally expected to significantly reduce the cost of running a Formula 1 racing team. On the one hand, this led to a whole series of new Formula 1 teams being founded in the late 1980s. On the other hand, around 1989 there was a certain amount of uncertainty as to which engine concept would prove to be the most promising. Therefore, in addition to a large number of engine manufacturers, there were also numerous very different conceptual approaches to the 3.5-liter naturally aspirated engine formula: In addition to the classic eight-cylinders from Cosworth , Judd or Yamaha , ten-cylinder ( Renault ) and twelve-cylinder ( Ferrari , Honda , Lamborghini Engineering ) were used , all designed differently, for example with considerable differences in the cylinder bank angle. There were also some more unusual concepts. For example, Motori Moderni developed a twelve-cylinder engine with a 180 degree cylinder bank angle for Subaru , which was used briefly at Coloni in 1990 . In addition, a V12 engine with central output was developed at Neotech in Austria, which was supposed to run at EuroBrun Racing in 1990 , but could not be used there due to a lack of financial capacities. Finally, the W engine was also implemented. On the one hand, Guy Nègre worked on such an engine in France , which of course did not go beyond private tests in an old AGS car, on the other hand, it was Franco Rocchi who spread his ideas in 1988 and presented a prototype of his engine. Apart from the alignment of the cylinders, the two engines differed considerably and had nothing to do with each other.
At the end of 1988 Rocchi managed to find a buyer for his engine: The Italian businessman Ernesto Vita saw himself first as the financier of the project, with the help of which the engine could be made operational, and then as an intermediary, because it was initially his declared intention to to resell the engine to an existing Formula 1 team. These ambitions could not be realized in the course of 1989. Although there were some discussions with Coloni at the end of 1988 or beginning of 1989, no agreement was reached. When no other team showed any serious interest in the following months, Ernesto Vita decided in the summer of 1989 to bring the engine to Formula 1 with its own team. Vita did not pursue any direct sporting ambition with his idea; In the matter, it was avowedly only about arousing the interest of other teams through your own practical application.
That is why the racing team Life Racing SpA was founded in late summer 1989. The team's name was a play on words; Life was the English word for Vita, the team founder's last name. The team was based in Formigine near Modena . According to Bruno Giacomelli, the plant essentially consisted of two adjacent garages.
The car
In line with the ambitions, Ernesto Vita did not consider developing his own car. Instead, he decided to take an existing vehicle made by another company and rebuild it for his engine. The choice fell on a chassis from the Formula 3000 racing team First Racing , which wanted to enter Formula 1 itself in 1989, but dropped out at short notice, although a vehicle had already been fully developed and built.
The vehicle called First F189 was problematic. Contrary to press reports to the contrary, it was not developed primarily by Riccardo Divila, but largely by Gianni Marelli , a former Ferrari engineer who had had his own office in Milan since 1984 and worked closely with Zakspeed from 1984 to 1987 . The car was based largely on components from the March 88B, a car for the Formula 3000 that First Racing had used in 1988 for Pierluigi Martini and Marco Apicella in the Formula 3000. So it was actually too small for Formula 1. In addition, the F189 had failed the FISA crash test in February 1989 and was rejected as unsafe. This fact was one of the main reasons why First Racing withdrew from its Formula 1 project at short notice.
Ernesto Vita took over the vehicle anyway. He hired Gianni Marelli once more, who on the one hand made the necessary reinforcements on the car so that it could pass the crash test, and on the other hand coordinated the work relating to the installation of the Rocchi engine. Because the wide engine protruded over the driver's seat, a new, wide engine cover was required. The result was reminiscent of the design of the Benetton B187 from 1987.
The car was completed in February 1990. It was painted dark red and was now called Life L190 , the engine was called Rocchi F35 .
The 1990 season
The team
The team registered for the Formula 1 World Championship under the name Life Racing Engines . In addition to a few mechanics, the technical staff mainly included Gianni Marelli, who initially worked as technical director for Life Racing. However, he should leave the team early.
Ernesto Vita first tried to win Roberto Moreno or Gianni Morbidelli as drivers. Both were given the opportunity to participate in races in other teams (Moreno at EuroBrun , Morbidelli at Dallara / Scuderia Italia). In the end, Vita signed the Australian newcomer Gary Brabham , son of three-time Formula 1 world champion Sir Jack Brabham and brother of David Brabham . It was Brabham who carried out a functional test with the Life Rocchi vehicle on the Vallelunga circuit at the end of February 1990 and drove a few test laps a little later in Monza . Nothing is known about the lap times; What is certain, however, is that the Monza tests had to be terminated early due to electrical defects.
Gary Brabham took part in the first two races of the year for Life.
The individual races
At the season opener in Phoenix , Brabham drove four laps in the pre-qualification; in the fifth attempt the electronics failed and the car broke down. Brabham's best time was 2:02 minutes for a lap. Gerhard Berger's later pole time in the McLaren was 1:28, for the pre-qualification a time of 1:34 should have been achieved. The fact that Brabham was not last in the pre-qualification with these values was solely due to the fact that Bertrand Gachot had not made a complete lap in the Subaru Coloni and was rated with a lap time of over five minutes. In the following race in Interlagos , Gary Brabham couldn't even complete a full lap. The engine exploded when leaving the pit lane. It later emerged that the team's mechanics had failed to charge the car's battery or topped up enough oil and brake fluid. Gary Brabham attributed this to the mechanics' deliberate misconduct; other sources report that the team did not have a meter that they could use to check the battery level. After this failure, Gary Brabham resigned from Life Racing.
As a replacement, Ernesto Vita tried the following week to sign the German Bernd Schneider , who had driven for Zakspeed the year before and had not been given a place in Formula 1 after the German team withdrew. Schneider canceled, however. The second choice was the Italian Formula 2 and Formula 3000 driver Franco Scapini, who should have made his Formula 1 debut for Coloni in 1987. Scapini actually did a functional test for Life Racing at Misano the week before the third race of the season at Imola . A commitment as a regular driver failed, however, because Scapini did not receive a super license. Also in discussion was Antonio Tamburini, who had done a few test laps in the Coloni a few weeks earlier.
In the end, Ernesto Vita succeeded in hiring the experienced Italian racing driver Bruno Giacomelli , who drove a number of high-profile races for Alfa Romeo in the late 1970s , but whose last Formula 1 race had already taken place at Toleman in 1983 . Giacomelli's only reference to the current Formula 1 was the fact that he had completed a few test drives for March and Leyton House in 1989 . According to some observers, Giacomelli's ambitions were limited; it was primarily about spending another year “on the slopes”.
Giacomelli did not succeed in any race to bring the Life successfully through the pre-qualification. At the French Grand Prix he did not manage a single timed lap due to technical defects and in the pre-qualification for the Mexican Grand Prix he could only complete the introductory lap . When Giaccomelli was about to tackle a timed lap, the engine collapsed while accelerating. At the other events Giacomelli managed to complete at least one timed lap in the pre-qualification. However, he was regularly and by far the slowest. The deficit on the later pole time was regularly between 18 and 32 seconds (at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza); Usually 13 to 20, sometimes 26 seconds were missing from the last of the pre-qualification.
At the British Grand Prix , Bruno Giacomelli managed to limit the gap to pole time to 18 seconds. It should be the team's best result. The second best performance came from Bruno Giacomelli at the Monaco Grand Prix , where he was 19 seconds short of pole time. The gap to Bertrand Gachot's Subaru-Coloni was only 2 seconds. However, these successes were relative; Measured against the performance of the competition, Life Racing did not work at the level of Formula 1. The lap time in Monte Carlo of 1:41 minutes corresponded to the level that the best Formula 3 drivers regularly achieved.
On the occasion of the Monaco Grand Prix, Ernesto Vita presented a new sponsor: the Soviet armaments company PIC. According to a press release, an essential part of the deal was that Life Racing should pass on know-how in racing car construction to a Soviet company based in Leningrad and receive technology from space travel in return. In fact, the word PIC appeared repeatedly on the engine cover of the Life. Like the other team members, Bruno Giacomelli had to wear the hammer and sickle symbol sewn onto his clothing in the pit lane . This brought problems for Giacomelli, since ten years earlier he had been politically brought into the vicinity of communism in a broad Italian press campaign, from which he had repeatedly distanced himself.
At the subsequent Canadian Grand Prix there was another piece of news: Gianni Marelli had left the team. The Swiss Peter Wyss, who had worked for March, Rial and Coloni as technical director for several years, was now active in his place . However, this showed no effect. Giacomelli's lap times deteriorated significantly compared to the previous race.
In the summer of 1990, Ernesto Vita sold the majority of the shares in his racing team to Daniele Battaglino, a businessman from Verona, whose financial contributions enabled the team to take part in the last European races of the year.
At that time, Vita realized that the project was unsuccessful. He repeatedly tried to get an alternative engine. Despite several announcements, he did not succeed in this over the summer of 1990. It was not until the Grand Prix of Portugal that Rocchi's W12 engine was replaced by a conventional EV generation eight-cylinder from Judd. Giacomelli had obtained the engine through personal contacts from March; he had been a test driver there last season. The engine that was used and sorted out at March was first installed in the car in the Estoril pit system. When assembling the individual parts, the mechanics discovered that the engine cover did not fit over the engine. As a result, the team had to skip the pre-qualification. The team's last outing was the Spanish Grand Prix. The car drove there, but despite the new engine it was not much faster than in the previous version with the Rocchi engine. Life Racing skipped the overseas races.
In the fall of 1990, Ernesto Vita announced that Life Racing was not closed. They are working on a new car for the 1991 season with a conventional engine. We were talking about an eight-cylinder from Judd or a twelve-cylinder from Lamborghini Engineering. Nothing came of it. Ultimately, Vita stopped Formula 1 operations at the end of the season.
No other customer was interested in the Rocchi engine. Bruno Giacomelli reported that he never received the agreed salary from Ernesto Vita. Instead, he was offered an engine block from the Rocchi engine. He refused, which he openly regretted a few years later.
Bruno Giacomelli's analysis
Years later, Bruno Giacomelli analyzed the team's problems in an interview. The main weak point was the engine: the engine was overweight - the talk was of a total weight in the range of more than 200 kilograms - and much too weak. Giaccomelli: “Ayrton Senna had 750 HP available in his McLaren- Honda , I only had 375 HP. This power output was below the level of Formula 3000 engines that delivered around 450 hp. In addition, the engine was unstable and tended to collapse at speeds above 9,000 rpm. The connecting rods were the biggest problem; they literally pounded us in the face when we accelerated. ”As a result, Giacomelli mostly couldn't even call up the maximum power of the engine, since he preferred to drive at low speeds in the interests of the durability of the engine. After all, he observed that the team was poorly funded and poorly organized. There was a lack of equipment and spare parts. There was no replacement car or accessories: “The car was constantly being repaired. Repairs made it heavier and more unwieldy. ”Overall, the team only had three engine blocks for the Rocchi engine; mostly only one was available at the races. At the same time, Honda brought seven engine blocks for each McLaren driver to the races. Regarding the organization of the team, Giacomelli said: “I had to drive to the race tracks in my private car; we had no money for air travel. I regularly had to pick up team members from the factory and take them to the race track. (...) Once, coming from Silverstone, I drove an F1 engine in the trunk of my car to Italy. "
literature
- David Hodges: Racing cars from AZ after 1945 . 1st edition, Stuttgart 1993.
- Adriano Cimarosti: The Century of Racing . 1st edition, Stuttgart 1997.
- motorsport aktuell : weekly Swiss trade magazine with various articles and notes on the subject of "Life Racing" in the 1990 editions.
- “A lump of iron”, Bruno Giacomelli on the life project in “auto sport” 10/1998.
