The moment that led to Caterham's demise

Formula 1's history is littered with the rise and fall of teams. In fact, whenever backmarkers struggle, it's often pointed out that only six per cent of the outfits that have existed are still racing today.

While emotions surrounding Caterham owe much to the fact that it's the most recent outfit to join the defunct tally, there's something extra that makes the team's demise much harder to accept. And it only hits home when you speak to those who put their heart and soul into it.

While few could ever have imagined teams like Andrea Moda, Life, Lola or HRT ever seriously establishing themselves in F1, Caterham's failure hurts more to those involved because it came so close to actually becoming something.

Two of F1's three newest teams are now gone © LAT

This was not a bunch of fantasists who got together and fooled themselves into thinking they could turn up and win. Instead, it was a well-thought-out, well-funded operation that made use of some of the best brains in the business. The ingredients were there, they just didn't come together well.

Like any team that collapses, in the end the main reason is that the money runs out. When bills don't get paid, then F1's all-consuming need for cash catches up - and it's a slippery slope to the end.

That proved true for the end of Caterham too, but digging into the history of the team you quickly realise that the demise was not as straightforward as Tony Fernandes simply deciding the time had come to close his chequebook.

Speaking to those who were at the heart of things, their reflection is that it was long before the troubled start to 2014 when the key decisions that would wreck the team were made.

In fact, several staff pointed to the fact that the key moment could be plotted on a graph.

So, here it is...

The blue line plots the percentage gap of the quickest Lotus/Caterham car compared with the fastest time overall in Q1. The closer the line gets to the bottom of the graph, the nearer the team is to the front.

There's a clear gap when the team first entered F1, and you can see how it took two years for the team to really steady things up and start making consistent progress towards the front.

But it's the spell from early 2012 that's really fascinating, because this is viewed by many as the team's golden period.

As the chart shows, the team was not only consistently closer to the front than it had managed at any point before or after (we've removed the anomaly of the wet/dry qualifying session at Spa in 2013 when being on the right tyres helped Giedo van der Garde get within 0.31 per cent of the top), but there is clear evidence of steady progress.

Silverstone 2012 is viewed as the turning point in Caterham's history © LAT

No graph like this is ever going to show a straight line, but the trend is one of improvement - with a lowest deficit of 1.1s in Bahrain 2012 - until after that year's European Grand Prix in Valencia.

Then, the tide turns.

As this week's 10-page, in-depth Caterham feature in AUTOSPORT magazine explains, the start of the end can be attributed to the team's decision to abandon a standard aerodynamics development programme and instead opt to pursue the blown-floor route at that time.

That blown floor appeared at the British Grand Prix but alarm bells about its performance were drowned out by a downpour that weekend that disguised its real pace.

Although there were theoretical big gains to be had - and Caterham's new performance director John Iley knew the potential benefits having witnessed them at McLaren - it was not a concept that Caterham had the capability of mastering.

Only the big-budget teams like Red Bull and McLaren ever got a proper handle on it, and they had vastly better technical resources than Caterham had at its disposal.

This is the moment that ultimately defined Caterham's future, for it was the continued pushing and expense directed at the blown floor, in terms of both technical resources and actual money, that contributed to the end.

Fernandes (left) eventually ran out of patience and money after Iley's idea flopped © LAT

The budget got out of control in trying to get the blown-floor concept to work - which meant that money was tight for the following season. Furthermore, because so much had been put into 2012, and mindful of the opportunities offered for '14, there was little resource available for the '13 car.

The narrative from then on become clear. Despite assurances that doing the minimum for 2013 would be OK, panic set in when it was clear that what Caterham had was not good enough against Marussia.

That decision to revamp the 2013 car, against the backdrop of a tighter rein on resources, further compromised the '14 effort - with the nail in the coffin being the underperforming Renault engine of last year.

Of course, while it's easy to plot events now, when the team was locked in the middle of its blown floor pursuit and making decisions at the time, it had no idea how big the implications could be further down the road.

Ultimately, what the story of Caterham shows is that there are no miracles in F1; it lives and dies by the quality of engineering. No magic potion was ever going to deliver a miracle laptime leap that some there perhaps dreamed of.

Mike Gascoyne, who played an instrumental part in setting up the team (including an amusing incident involving Silverstone's traffic-management team that you can read in the magazine), was the kind of man to give Caterham's management a reality check in the early days.

After a promising start to the 2012 season, Caterham gradually slipped back and endured a miserable 2013 © XPB

"You have to build it up," said Gascoyne, who had moved on during that crunch 2012 phase. "You have to do boring engineering.

"I kept saying that, but people wanted to believe those who were saying, 'I can do this instantly.' It doesn't work like that in F1."

Reflecting on the bid to catch up with the midfield teams, Gascoyne added: "How do you catch up with these boys? They have these long-standing teams, and they have hundreds of people. We had done it as well as it could be done.

"I don't think it was possible for a new team to do better than that. Every other team has been there for 10-15 years. That period, those first races of 2012, was probably as good as we were."

Ambition perhaps overtook reality. Fernandes was a man with dreams of getting near the top, but with the way F1 was going - with no budget cap, complicated blown-floor rules and costs out of control - that was never realistic.

This week's AUTOSPORT tells the full Caterham story

Heikki Kovalainen lived through most of the Lotus/Caterham years and is adamant that while the team was never going to be a rival for the manufacturer outfits, it could have carved a permanent place for itself.

"I think the team was a pretty good racing team," he reflects now. "It was a small team but it was a pretty good racing team.

"It was just that it wasn't able to compete against even the mid-sized F1 teams, let alone the top teams. The people in the engineering and design team, they were pretty good.

"We had some hard-working and very motivated people and the team was functioning very well as a race team. You had all the departments and it was a professional race team.

"It is just that it wasn't enough in F1 unfortunately. The competition in F1 is such that you need even more."

And sadly, when more was really needed, it just wasn't there. Now, it's too late.

For the full in-depth featuring charting the creation, rise and death of Caterham see this week's AUTOSPORT magazine.