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RA168E · Objavljeno: 10 Feb 2017 18:56 Naslov sporočila: Lola

Lola's brief Formula 1 foray

Established Lola name tried and failed in Formula 1, after producing a woeful car and entering into a dubious financial agreement with MasterCard.

After years of supplying chassis to teams, the last being Scuderia Italia in 1993, Lola owner Eric Broadley decided to go his own way and set up a fully-fledged Formula 1 outfit.

Over the following years, the brand designed and produced several prototype F1 cars, with Allan McNish often racking up miles, before its big break came in the late 1990s.

Step forward, MasterCard Lola.

Lola's rich history in motor racing, a headline backer in the MasterCard group and plans to produce a V10 engine – the project was full of ambition and promise.

Italian Sospiri, aged 30, a test driver at Benetton, and Brazilian Rosset, in his late 20s, with one season at Footwork Arrows behind him, landed the two race seats.

"I had several meetings with Eric; they showed me everything," Sospiri tells GPUpdate.net, recalling initial tours around the team's factory in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

"They said that we would struggle in the first season, for sure, because it was like a four- to five-year project in Formula 1, which involved having our own engine in the future.

"Everything looked quite promising, and that's why I signed a contract for four years!

"Basically, in the first year I had to bring some sponsors to the team, a deal for one million pounds, in the second year I had to pay half a million, then in the third year I was getting paid two or three million, then in the fourth year I was getting paid like 12 million or something.

"Knowing Lola, it was always the number one… it was the number one or one of the best manufacturers involved in motorsport categories for so many years."

Rosset, who had hit a dead end at Arrows, which signed World Champion Damon Hill and another Brazilian in Pedro Diniz for 1997, was excited by a reunion with Sospiri.

Sospiri and Rosset raced together in Formula 3000, at SuperNova Racing, securing first and second place respectively in the 1995 championship.

"We did a very good job in Formula 3000," Rosset comments.

"That was what motivated us to do the same thing at Lola, as we were good friends, we got on very well, and we had the same kind of taste for setting up the car.

"We worked well together as team-mates during that season to develop the package, so we thought that the partnership was going to work again at Lola in Formula 1."

But running at all, let alone set-up work, proved troublesome when the T97/30, inspired by Lola's IndyCar technology, and without any wind tunnel time, hit the track.

Following a snazzy launch at the London Hilton hotel, the car underwent initial straight line testing, before being taken on to Silverstone for the first planned laps in anger.

"We started by going up and down in a straight line, just taking it gently, gently, and it was not too bad, to be fair," Sospiri remembers of Lola's pre-season period.

"But then we went to Silverstone to do the two-day test before Australia…

"When my car went out on the first day, after around two hundred metres it caught fire. I had to park the car and the fire burned a lot of it, so I didn't run at all that day.

"On the second day, I think I did six laps – in/out, in/out only.

"The car was quite difficult to drive, even in a straight line it was shaking a little bit, as there were some areas where there was a lot of air coming through the car."

Lola was also lacking in the engine department with a stop-gap deal to run an old Ford V8, after only settling on a 1997 entry in the winter months, amid pressure from MasterCard.

"Just to save the money, they decided to go for the Ford engine, which was two years old, and much cheaper than the recent one, or the one before the recent one," adds Sospiri.

"They made us aware of the situation, saying that they were not going to throw money in the bin just to run with the best engine, because they were not at the same level with the car.

"They tried to save as much as they could and make their own engine later on."

Rosset, who also had limited pre-season running amid the rush to prepare both cars, knew that Lola would be heading to the season-opening Australian Grand Prix with a woeful package.

"Lola's car simply wasn't ready to go that year," Rosset explains.

"It was very late when they decided to go ahead, around December or January.

"They didn't get the chance to build a good car. It wasn't a Formula 1 car, it was just something they could put together, and much worse than a Formula 3000 car.

"If they had more time they would have a car that worked and could test."

But after two eye-opening days at Silverstone, Lola, Sospiri and Rosset had to pack their bags and prepare to share a circuit with the likes of Ferrari, McLaren, Williams and Benetton.

Australia loomed and Lola was about to be embarrassingly exposed on the big stage, with a car that could barely string a couple of laps together, more than 10 seconds off the pace of the frontrunners when it did, and a sponsorship deal with MasterCard that was not all as it seemed…

Lola arrived in Australia, for the 1997 season-opener, with the hope of dipping under the 107 per cent mark and performing respectably against Formula 1's established teams.

But as soon as Sospiri and Rosset hit the streets of Albert Park, it became clear that doing so would take a miracle, amid handling issues that required alarming set-up changes.

"Between free practice sessions, we changed all the geometry of the suspension," says Sospiri.

"We changed the angle of the car, set the wings differently, stuff like that, which made the diffuser work less. It was lighter than normal, but at least it was going in a straight line!

"With all of these set-up changes, it made the top of the bodywork work less, and that way the car was less efficient, so it was moving left or right less along the straights."

There were also chronic gearbox woes to deal with, particularly on Rosset's side.

"Firstly, the gearbox didn't work, it wasn't changing gears properly," says Rosset.

"Sometimes it would go [through] all of the gears, sometimes it wouldn't go down, sometimes it wouldn't go up, so for the first couple of laps the gearbox just wasn't working.

"But as soon as we could get the gearbox working, I knew the car wasn't very good.

"I remember talking to Vincenzo; I said that it was going to be very hard to get some quick laps out of the car; we were concentrating to make the car work, but it never did.

"I remember between the practices on Friday and Saturday, we were even thinking of going back to a manual transmission, a gear shift, because the automatic box wouldn't work.

"But that was not possible, and when we went into the qualifying, I had to lap in fourth gear, because the gearbox was stuck, it wouldn't go up and wouldn't go down."

In qualifying, Lola's poor reliability and pace were revealed in full as Sospiri finished 11.603 seconds down on the pole-sitting Williams of Jacques Villeneuve, with Rosset over a second further back.

Even though a stunning late lap from Villeneuve put the young Canadian almost two seconds clear of the pack, the Lolas would have been nowhere near to beating the 107 per cent mark.

After all, Sospiri ended the session a full five seconds adrift of the car in front.

Lola's weekend was over and, just a few weeks later, so would its Formula 1 journey, the outfit reportedly incurring £6 million in debt during its late push to make the grid for 1997.

Lola's arrival and demise came amid MasterCard's 'F1 Club' plan.

"We realised after all the mess that MasterCard didn't actually bring any money to the team," explains Sospiri, highlighting a commission agreement, as opposed to 'hard cash'.

"As part of the deal, MasterCard would have made a credit; one kind of credit card was working for Europe, and one kind of credit card was working for the rest of the world.

"So basically Europe would have been covered with my card, with my name on it and stuff like that, and then for South America it would have been a Ricardo Rosset credit card.

"Every single client that MasterCard submitted to this credit card, 0.001 per cent or whatever, whatever they spent with this credit card would have gone back to the Formula 1 team.

"At that time, it was calculated that there were around 340 million people or something connected with Mastercard, so 0.1 was like a lot of millions coming in for the future.

"But unfortunately, the MasterCard/Lola project started very late, and the source of the money didn't actually arrive, so that's why the team went bankrupt at the second race."

Rosset was one of the first Lola members to arrive in the Interlagos paddock for the second round of the season, and ended up being the bearer of bad news to Sospiri.

"We were at home, with the press, fans and family, all the expectations," he says.

"I went to the track as I usually would for a normal racing day, but when I got there to say hello to everybody and to start the day of work, the doors were shut.

"I can't remember who told me from the team, but they said that the team had been closed down and we are out of the championship, we're not going to race.

"Apparently Lola were owing a lot of money, and some judge closed the team.

"There were people from the team flying to Brazil, so it was something that maybe they didn't know. I called Vincenzo to tell him, I think he didn't know about it either!"

Sospiri and Rosset were thus left scrapping to prolong their careers, Sospiri getting a chance in IndyCar, and Rosset striking a deal to stay in Formula 1 with Tyrrell – which had been taken over by British American Tobacco – through his connection with F3000 chassis supplier Reynard.

Sospiri's third-place start at the 1997 Indianapolis 500 and second-place finish at New Hampshire proved to be the highlights of a brief stint stateside, before he returned to Europe.

Rosset, meanwhile, endured a tough 1998 season, failing to qualify for five out of 16 races, after which he quit racing and focused on his growing sportswear business, Track & Field.

Despite the Lola disaster, Sospiri sampled team management in F3000, and now runs his own outfit, Vincenzo Sospiri Racing, which competes in GT classes.

Robert Kubica, Vitaly Petrov and Jérôme d'Ambrosio were just some of the drivers aided by Sospiri over the years, providing a happy ending of sorts to his F1 links.

"I didn't have the same pleasure or feelings of when you are in Formula 1 or close by Formula 1," explains Sospiri, of his decision to turn to management/ownership.

"I said to myself that I had to build something to help the young kids and drivers through their motorsport careers, from zero to Formula 1 – that was my goal at the start.

"I helped them grow up and achieve their targets as drivers, and it was a good pleasure to see that some of them made it to Formula 1, with some of my help as well."[/b]

RA168E · Objavljeno: 01 Apr 2017 14:31 Naslov sporočila:

“You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past,” wrote Bob Dylan in his 1970 novel Tarantula. No, I haven’t ploughed through that infamously impenetrable tome, I just borrowed the line from a Dictionary of Modern Quotations!

I thought it might be fun to use this blog not just to gossip about what’s going on now, but to take a look at history, via retro features and snippets of stories and features as they appeared at the time. So let’s go back to the days of Windows 3.1 and floppy discs – and yes, I did have to use one to dig the original interview below out of an ancient PC – and see what we can learn from the incredible past of the sport we all love.

And there was rarely a less credible attempt at starting an F1 team than the unfortunate MasterCard Lola effort of 1997. The return of a great name from the sport’s history, a Cosworth engine, a programme rushed through in a matter of months, lots of stickers on the car, and a flashy launch at a major London venue – who says history doesn’t repeat itself? I don’t wish to imply that the current Lotus team has not been built on sturdy foundations, but certainly Campos Meta and US F1 have yet to convince us that they can back up the bold promises of a few months ago.

As you may recall, Lola boss Eric Broadley had grown tired of supplying other teams, most recently Scuderia Italia, and at 68 he thought it was time to go it alone. He even had plans to build a Lola-branded V10 engine. The great coup was to attract a massive blue chip name in the form of MasterCard. However, there was less to the deal that met the eye. It wasn’t about hard cash – the theory was that the team would eventually get a percentage of revenue raised from card holders who joined an ‘F1 Club.’

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the sums didn’t add up. After just one outing in Australia – where the hapless Vincenzo Sospiri and Ricardo Rosset were miles away from qualifying – the whole thing collapsed like, well, a house of MasterCards, as Broadley wisely decided to cut his losses. The title sponsor later resurfaced at Jordan.

The aborted F1 project nearly finished off Lola, but the company was saved by Martin Birrane, and it is thriving today. Last summer it was ’97 all over again as Lola launched an F1 project, but its pitch didn’t impress the FIA sufficiently (it didn’t help that one of the two key speakers was stuck in traffic), and no entry was granted. Whether that rejection was ultimately a lucky escape or not for Birrane and co, we’ll never know.

Meanwhile back on the day of the MasterCard team launch, held in a ballroom at the London Hilton hotel, Broadley was full of optimism…

Eric Broadley Interview – February 1997

Q: Are you looking forward to the challenge of this season?

“Personally I enjoy a challenge. If not motor racing, I enjoy sailing, but I don’t get the time!”

Q: What do you think you can achieve this year?

“A lot of people have asked me that, and I have great difficulty in answering. We’re coming in with a strong attempt to win the World Championship. Not this year though, and not next. There’s a lot of learning to do this year, but I hope we’ll win a few points. We’ll be very happy if we do. After that, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait and see.”

Q: Is it true that you’ve only had since November to get things running?

“Yes. The finance is so huge in F1, you can’t get on with it until you have the whole thing in place. But we manufactured the transmission a couple of years ago, and we’ve done a lot of detail work on it since then, rig-testing and electronic development. We didn’t start with nothing in November. Which we wouldn’t have done anyway, since we’re just bringing in a whole lot of knowledge from Indy and everything else we’ve done. There’s actually a lot of carryover from Indy. There are a lot of differences, because of differences in rules, engines, and types of tracks. But in a way, F1 is simpler. CART runs from street circuits to 200mph speedways. You have a broad range of departments, that the car has to answer with some changes. It’s very complicated. In F1 the circuits are much more similar. But the actual competitiveness is just that little bit extra in F1.”

Q: Are you happy with the driver line-up?

“I think it’s good. We all get on very well, and they’re both bright young guys with a lot of potential. It’s going to work very nicely. One of the things that has become pretty obvious is that a good driver in a good chassis will do a very good job. There’s a whole load of drivers across the board who are very good. It takes someone like Schumacher to take a chassis which isn’t very good and make it look good, But there are very, very few of those guys. The rest are good guys with good talent, with the right attitude, and with enough experience, they’ll do a very good job for you.”

Q: What are the important factors in finding success?

“There’s a lot of factors. You can put them into a list of priorities of you like; the aerodynamics and the engine are evenly matched, then there’s team organisation and attitude, and the engineering attitude. Don’t forget that we have a situation now where the downforce on the cars is pretty drastically reduced. It won’t mask problems in the car any more. You used to have so much downforce that it didn’t matter what you did. You still have to have the best aerodynamics that you can, but it’s not enough in itself. The mechanical aspect of the car is much more important than it was.”

Q: Is there a scenario where if MasterCard does not get enough club members, you won’t get the funding you’ve been promised? Is there a risk involved?

“There is a risk. But I think the deal is self-generating. If we show potential, that will be good for the club, and the club will grow, the finance will increase. There’s no guarantee.”

Q: Have you got back-up plans if you don’t get enough money?

“Yes. We have back-up plans. If we get more than we planned for, we’ll do more testing and development, and we’ll throw it into the engine programme. We’ll just get there quicker.”

Q: Are you worried that another team might try to steal MasterCard from you?

“Well of course they get approached all the time, like everybody else. We have a four year deal with MasterCard. They’re attitude to this thing is that it’s a long term deal. They know what they’re after, world markets, and they see the potential of F1. They are saying quite specifically that if they can’t make it work with us, they will pull out and do something else. They will not shuffle around (to other teams). They want a fresh team, and they don’t want to come in as a secondary sponsor. It worked in very well with us. It’s basically an American company, and Lola is very well known in America.”

Q: Are you officially the chief designer?

“I did lay out the design of this car. In Lola we try and avoid the sort of ‘chief designer’ title. The problem with that, is that because you’ve got a really good guy, it can work really well. But only to the point of his specialties. In motor racing there’s a great deal of ‘Not invented here’ syndrome. We try to avoid that. Years of experience have indicated that we must use a group of experts. So what we tend to do is have specialists in various area, like transmissions, aerodynamics, chassis dynamics, carbon technology. We have all these experts and they all work together. The first thing is you have to do is lay out the car, you define all the areas, and then you get all the guys going. That’s how we do all the projects. Now, my input in this case was on the initial layout and the initial direction that the project should go. Then, everybody else took off from there.”

Q: What are the plans for the Lola engine?

“We really need that, as soon as we can, but there’s a lot of work to do yet. The first engine is almost complete. We don’t know how long the testing will take, and we’re not going to run it (in a car) until it’s reliable. We’re not fixing a date on that yet. We would like to run it this season. Everyone else says ‘How you can you build your own engine?’ Everybody says its costs $100m to design and build one. I don’t think that’s true. If you find the right people, the technology is available, and you can make anything on modern machinery with a bit of organisation.”

Q: How big is your engine building team?

“It’s Al Melling and three or four designers, and we’re manufacturing the engine.”

Q: Do your Indy engineers work on both projects?

“That’s right. We think of it as a machine at Lola which produces race cars. We can do it in three months, regularly. So we use the same machine, the same people. The Indy project was completed, and we took those people and people off everything else and put them on F1.”

Q: Do you think that you’re too gentlemanly in the way you do business? People like Reynard are very pushy.

“They are very aggressive. I don’t know why, but I guess we just do business in the way we do. It’s difficult to change the animal. We’ve been in business longer than anyone else, and we always survive. These things happen from time to time, but we always overcome it.”

Q: Are you looking forward to living out of a suitcase, travelling to all the races?

“Well, I’m quite looking forward to the challenge. I’m not looking forward to the travelling, and all the wasted time at race meetings. It takes three days, and another couple of days for travelling.”

Q: What was the highlight of your years supplying other F1 teams?

“Well I suppose the first one we did with John Surtees in 1962 was amazingly good, and the thing we did with Honda in 1967 was amazing too. We did a pretty good job for Larrousse really, but that was very frustrating, because we were very isolated and we weren’t able to advance and consolidate that programme. That was the start of the realisation that it wasn’t the way to go. We got led into the Scuderia Italia deal, which was a mistake, a big mistake.”

Q: Do you regret not starting your own team 20 years ago?

“I suppose so, yes. We probably should have done it, I guess. We could have grabbed a Cosworth DFV and been in the same ballpark as everyone else. But we’ve done a lot of other things instead, and here we are, still in business, unlike most other people. That can’t be bad!”

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