Forgotten F1 Teams - Life
- Length: 3:26
- Size: 3.2 MB
- File: forgotten6.mp3
- Transcript: forgotten6.pdf
- Torrent: forgotten6.torrent
Welcome to Forgotten F1 Teams, a mini series from Sidepodcast that takes a closer look at those teams who have gone down in history without a trace. So far we’ve discussed Simtek, Arrows, and Onyx but today we’re going to look at Life Racing Engines.
The story of the Life F1 team is a short one. They were only in the sport for one year, and came out with nothing to show for it. The team boss was Ernesto Vita, who came from Modena in Italy. In 1989, he saw the potential of making a quick profit by selling engines to F1 teams. He snapped up the designs for an unusual engine, built by an ex-Ferrari engineer Franco Rocchi. Their W12 was quite special as it was designed with three rows of four cylinders instead of two rows of six. The theory was that the engine could be as small as a V8 but kick out enough power to match a V12. The high concept engine was ready to be sold but now Vita had to get the technology out there. He couldn’t find a partner within the sport, so decided to go it alone. Thus, the Life entry to Formula 1 was born, specifically engineered to attract a buyer for the engines.
This brings us on to the 1990 F1 season. Vita wanted to enter his engines in the competition, so he picked up the old FIRST team chassis for his debut season. The small problem of that chassis having actually failed the FIA crash test, and been refused entry to the 1989 season didn’t faze Vita, and some modifications saw the Life entry complete. Vita had signed up Gary Brabham, bolted on some Goodyear tyres, and fitted his new engine design into the car. The new chassis featured some strange designs, including additional airboxes, and very low cockpit sides. Despite being just as bad, if not worse, than the original FIRST chassis, the FIA approved entry to Life, and their season began.
At the first race, Brabham failed to qualify pretty spectacularly. The engine misfired, and the eventual laptime was 38 seconds off pole position. At the second event in Brazil, Brabham barely got out of the pitlane before the car ground to a halt. He branded the entire organisation of the team as a joke, and left. Life managed to persuade Italian driver Bruno Giacomelli to step in, taking him from his duties as test driver for Leyton House. The next few races saw Giacomelli continue the tradition of not being able to qualify, with one race seeing him over 7 minutes off the eventual pole position time.
After 12 disastrous attempts at pre-qualifying, the team got rid of their W12 engine and brought in a standard Judd V8 instead. Unfortunately, the modifications made to allow for the original unusual design meant the engine cover wouldn’t fit over their new equipment. The car couldn’t even take part in the Portugese pre-qualifying, and the team moved on to Spain. By this time, the engine hassles were sorted out, but they were still 20 woeful seconds off the pace.and it was obvious that they weren’t going to be able to pull things together, so they decided to ditch their F1 efforts two races before the end of the season.
Vita managed to find a buyer for a majority shareholding, but within months, the team had completely disappeared.
That’s it for this Forgotten F1 Team. Don’t forget to visit Sidepodcast.com to leave your comments on the disaster that was Life Racing Engines, and I will be back tomorrow with the final forgotten team.
Theme music: Bloc Party, I Still Remember.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:30 pmSteven Roy said:
It’s Life Jim but not as we know it.
Every time you hear about this team it gets worse. It’s not that there is anything new here because I remember watching or not watching Life because they never got a lot of TV coverage. I saw the whole saga unfold and it was unbelievably bad but time fades the memory of how awful it was. Then you get a reminder that they were 7 minutes off pole. How can anything with an engine and wheels ever be that slow. An FFord wouldn’t be 7 minutes away from pole.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:36 pmme said:
if they put the damn thing on the back of a recovery truck and drove the lap that way, they would’ve fared better.
my question… who the heck bothered to time them?
August 12th, 2008 at 10:05 pmScott Woodwiss said:
That’s one comedy F1 team down, only Andrea Moda to go
August 12th, 2008 at 10:14 pmR.G (I hate mod queues) said:
Someone who probably aged dramatically during their lap.
Thats the big series finale, like Warrick being shot in CSI or the closing ceremony at Beijing
August 12th, 2008 at 10:23 pmScott Woodwiss said:
off topic, anyone spot this?
http://en.f1-live.com/f1/en/headlines/news/detail/080811103717.shtml
August 12th, 2008 at 10:27 pmR.G (I hate mod queues) said:
If Toro Rosso don’t get kicked out for being a customer team, they’ll end up bankrupt through repair to cars
August 12th, 2008 at 10:28 pmR.G (I'm losing the plot and may resource to spamming) said:
Is their some box which says spammer or something?
August 12th, 2008 at 10:44 pmme said:
we use a wordpress plugin called akismet, am looking for alternatives. failing that, i’ll hack wordpress to pieces until it lets you through.
give me until thursday, if that’s ok?
August 12th, 2008 at 10:49 pmR.G (I'm losing the plot and may resource to spamming) said:
Since I’ll be away on Thursday, I’ll let you until Friday.
Did this post work first time?
August 12th, 2008 at 10:51 pmme said:
yes… it’s FIXED
that makes no sense at all
August 12th, 2008 at 10:53 pmR.G (I'm back baby) said:
Yipee, it makes no sense at all either, but hey.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:54 pmme said:
good to have you back sir.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:56 pmme said:
oh btw, if you keep changing your name, you’ll have no hope of making the top commentators list (it goes by name + email).
you may not be bothered, but i figure i ought to give you a heads-up just in case. i love the subliminal messages though
August 12th, 2008 at 11:02 pmR.G (I'm back baby) said:
Do I care, hmm, no. Its not quanitity, its quality and so on so on
August 12th, 2008 at 11:05 pmme said:
i hear ya.
me likes to let you know how these things doth work though.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:05 pmJoe said:
Woo, glad my team’s been done now : D
August 12th, 2008 at 11:06 pmme said:
you wanna take a pitch at tomorrow’s?
August 13th, 2008 at 12:01 amJoe said:
Andrea Moda, but just because it’s been mentioned a bit this series and still has to appear.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:30 amDom said:
Ah, the butt of all jokes.
Not sure about having Arrows and Life in the same series though
August 13th, 2008 at 1:18 amJordan Allen said:
Wow! Today I learnt that the people at Life at both smarter and dumb than I thought….
Smarter, in the sense that I was convinced they tried to hook up two V6 engines line abreast and have each engine running each drive wheel independentaly. Everyone can logically see what would happen when a cyclinder went. The outside wheel would have more power than the inside wheel and one more DNF. One engine with three banks is way safer than that idea.
And dumber in the sence that I am now left wondering if the designer consider that where the pistons connect to the crankshaft now needs to be offset by 120 degrees instead of the 180 degrees that all 2 cylinder bank engines are set to so that at least one piston is Top Dead center, and about to begin its power stroke to keep the car moving.
Just a couple of thoughts that could help explain the mystery that is Life.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:57 amAlex Andronov said:
May I just say that I really like Me’s singing on this series.
Rock on!
August 13th, 2008 at 10:20 amStuart C said:
I’m late to the party again, as usual, but the GMM/Capsis credit at the bottom of the story tells you all you need to know…
By the way, Scott, your letter is in the new issue of F1R.
August 13th, 2008 at 11:35 amme said:
harsh but fair.
wonder if the espn acquisition will improve things on that front?
August 13th, 2008 at 12:08 pmStuart C said:
Probably not – so long as you don’t have poeple out in the field, or with contacts, you’re always going to be following up on stories from elsewhere – and in this case, following up on a story that is blatant cobblers.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:16 pmme said:
espn must have the ability to obtain fia credentials though?
mind you, a quick scan of their site returns a bunch of AP stories.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:52 pmStuart C said:
I’m not sure what the accreditation criteria are for digital media. The FIA have quite strict standards relating to quality and circulation and previous F1 coverage.
There are also practical considerations, chiefly: where will they all sit? There’s a limit to how many people can fit in the media centres. Letting more people in will just make the scrums bigger.
But I think the clincher is this: if you can pull in a fair amount of ad revenue based on content that’s been generated by staff or freelancers sitting at home, why go to the expense of sending them to races? I don’t know how much we spend on travel, but I know a couple of freelancers who have to spend upwards of £20K a year – and that’s based on arriving late and leaving early, blagging lifts rather than hiring cars, staying in the yuckiest hotels and living on team hospitality (and/or dining in the GP2 paddock)
August 13th, 2008 at 12:59 pmSteven Roy said:
Shouldn’t that end ‘why go to the expense of sending them to the races so that they can play at being Darren Heath?
August 13th, 2008 at 1:51 pmme said:
mr. joe saward has accreditation though doesn’t he? or is grindprix.com just a sideline?
i hear ya, but this is espn we’re talking about isn’t it? that’s like disney and stuff.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:00 pmme said:
http://drop.io/sidepodcast/asset/f1-live-traffic
i’m guessing the deal is all about traffic.
gotta love that off-season fallout
August 13th, 2008 at 2:23 pmedgar soto said:
Yo guys,listen to my podcast,EngineRev podcast,it has 10 trivia questions about autos and now we’re doing a British Classics vs Italians car review without any of the questions,the downloads are available at edgarsoto1subaru22B’s podcast@podomatic.com. The cast ain’t bad
August 13th, 2008 at 2:26 pmme said:
cheers edgar, i can’t find it on itunes though?
August 13th, 2008 at 2:35 pmme said:
no worries, i think the link got messed up in your comment. have fixed.
http://edgarsoto1subaru22b.podomatic.com/
will try and give you a plug on the next show.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:44 pmStuart C said:
Indeed, but all big businesses run to the music of ROI (Return On Investment) these days.
BTW Steven, you are a meanie…
He did/does have some sidelines, but has been trying to migrate readers to their subscription product (GP+).
The traffic thing is interesting. You can see why sites end up printing noise just to keep people coming back – if they don’t update regularly, punters will just go to the sites that do (even if those updates are the aforementioned cobblers).
August 13th, 2008 at 4:03 pmedgar soto said:
About the cast,spread the word and tell everyone else to subscribe,I want increase the viewcount and viewers,and I want it more popular
August 13th, 2008 at 4:42 pmme said:
i was quite amazed to see how far ahead the site is in terms of numbers. i rarely, if ever visit.
i guess we can expect a bunch of other f1 sites to pick up on the business model now. yay, more noise
August 13th, 2008 at 4:42 pmme said:
you auditioning for big brother edgar?
you need to be on itunes sir.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:32 pmedgar soto said:
News flash I don’t have a mac or ipod
August 13th, 2008 at 5:47 pmme said:
you don’t need either squire. itunes is a free download for windows:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
August 14th, 2008 at 2:15 pmAlianora La Canta said:
i was quite amazed to see how far ahead the site is in terms of numbers. i rarely, if ever visit.
I don’t visit F1-Live directly, but it is one of several sites that Yahoo!’s F1 portal picks up (and I check the portal every day). Do portal redistributions count for the purposes of Google Trend’s page-counting system?
Mind you, I don’t check ITV or PlanetF1 very often either.
August 14th, 2008 at 2:41 pmme said:
don’t know to be honest. google only released their trending application a couple of months ago and i haven’t looked into it in much detail. i would imagine that it does though as that would certainly explain the numbers.