How F1 has lost its heroic failures

Everyone loves great racing cars. But race and championship victories are just one metric for a fascinating machine. There's another type of racing car that has eternal appeal for diametrically opposed reasons. Namely, the bad one.

This is not just the mediocre car, the gentle underachiever, but the genuinely dire. Such cars are the curiosities, the heroic failures, the oddities, the misguided, the fatally flawed, the risible. They all have their own fascinating stories that make them, in their own way, every bit as big a part of the fabric of the history of the sport as the winners.

For anyone with a love of such lack-of-success stories, there are plenty of cars that have a special place in the heart. A personal favourite from grand prix racing is the Eifelland 21, a Cosworth-engined machine that contested eight world championship races in 1972.

The Eifelland ticks several boxes in my good-for-bad-reasons car checklist. Firstly, it shares its name with a caravan brand. Actually, scrub that, it effectively is a caravan brand, for the team was created by bank-holiday-rolling-roadblock manufacturer Gunther Hennerici.

Secondly, it is at heart another car, as it was built around the monocoque of a March 721, a design that was (let's be generous) moderately successful in the hands of Ronnie Peterson (although this was a chassis - number four, for the record - that did not race before it was transformed into the Eifelland).

The concept to improve on these foundations was to get a designer - Luigi Colani, who had plenty of road-car experience and an eye for the outlandish - to come up with the bodywork.

There remains debate about whether the Eifelland should even be considered a car in its own right, as some consider it nothing more than a March. That's the kind of contentious detail that just adds to the fun.

Thirdly, it looked ridiculous. It was that rarest of things - a grand prix car with a rear-view mirror rather than wing mirrors. To achieve this, a centrally mounted pillar, aero-profiled, of course, elevated it to the height that likely gave little more than an excellent view of the rear wing. But the most obvious modification to the original March was the addition of a tank-turret-style section shrouding the driver.

Fourthly, its performance was poor and it was no fun to drive. That the unfortunate Rolf Stommelen, a handy pilot, lapped 8.1 seconds off the pace in qualifying in Monaco tells you everything you need to know.

It was quicker at other tracks, but it was not by any definition fast. The closest it ever qualified to the front was at the much-hated Nivelles circuit, hosting that year's Belgian Grand Prix, when Stommelen lapped a respectable two seconds off pole. The car had a decent enough finishing record, but was never higher than 10th in its world championship appearances.

But, for all those faults, it's a car that has always been a favourite, simply for its oddness. Were I ever to own and race a historic F1 car (unlikely on cost grounds, even more unlikely on the basis of cockpit capacity), then it wouldn't be something successful; it would be something like the Eifelland.

Asking around the Autosport office throws up plenty of similar beloved cars. The Toleman TG181, which qualified for a grand total of two races in 1981 in the hands of Brian Henton and Derek Warwick; the Offenhauser-powered Scarab of 1960; the Osella FA1 of 1980; the Andrea Moda S921 that Roberto Moreno somehow dragged onto the Monaco grid in 1992; and the various Makis of the mid-'70s all got mentions. And there are countless others, even before looking beyond grand prix cars (in sportscars, for example, the BRM P351 always fascinates).

Such bad cars could produce moments of true magic, and can live long in the memory. Take the dreadful Life F1 car of 1990, which never pre-qualified and never managed to get closer to the pre-qualifying pace than 14.053s off, in Monaco, in the hands of the unfortunate Bruno Giacomelli.

It should barely be a footnote in grand prix history, a shambolic, dreadful attempt that got nowhere, notable mainly for its bizarre, and hugely underpowered, W12 engine.

Yet when it reappeared at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2009, the restored car attracted more attention than many far more successful cars, even running only with the more conventional Judd V8 engine trim that it was running when it last appeared in F1.

The last genuinely dreadful F1 attempt was the Lola that managed just one appearance in 1997. The project was rushed, the car was desperately undercooked and 13s off the pace in qualifying the Australian Grand Prix before disappearing.

This, however, was an uncomfortable failure given Lola was hardly a fly-by-night operation but had a desperately short lead time owing to sponsor Mastercard's eagerness to launch the 'F1 Club' for card holders that was supposed to fund the team. Lola deserves better than to be remembered for this effort.

The peak for terrible F1 teams was probably the late 1980s. In 1989, for example, the grid peaked at 39 entries with as many as nine drivers not making it past the Friday morning pre-qualifying sessions. That was bad news for those driving Zakspeeds, Colonis, Eurobruns and Osellas, among others, but the very presence of these true minnows enriched F1.

They also allowed the very existence of pre-qualifying, which was a brutal way to start the weekend. The last time it was held was the Hungarian GP in 1992 (when Perry McCarthy didn't make the cut in an Andrea Moda that barely moved), but when the session was a little more hotly contested it gave drivers just half an hour on a Friday morning to set a time. If you were fast enough, you were given the chance to qualify (still with no guarantee of making the grid); if you weren't, you went home there and then.

Drivers did sometimes make it through pre-qualifying and go on to score points and there are even a few cases of a driver escaping what could be a lottery of a session and going on to finish on the podium - most recently JJ Lehto in the 1991 San Marino GP in the Scuderia Italia Dallara.

Poor old Gabriele Tarquini manage to fail to pre-qualify a grand total of 25 times - a record - while there is a select group of drivers who did not progress beyond that stage in their F1 career. For example, Joachim Winkelhock, a serious driver, failed to qualify on his seven attempts for AGS in 1989. What a sideshow pre-qualifying was for the lover of a bad car!

But these days are in the past. Today, the grid is capped at 26 cars for 26 grid slots and drivers very rarely fail to qualify even with the 107% rule in place. Thanks to a (justified) rule that allows those not posting a time to fall back on free practice pace, the only times in recent years drivers have failed to qualify have been in the season-opening Australian GP. In 2015, the non-running Manor cars didn't make the cut, while in both '11 and '12 the late-starting HRT entries didn't lap fast enough to get in.

But such stories are rare today and even in its most troubled times the HRT team of 2010-12, comfortably the most shambolic team on the grid of the recent past, looks like McLaren at its peak compared to some of the ridiculous attempts at F1 over the years.

There are good reasons behind F1 shutting the door to chancers these days, by putting clear financial constraints on entering grand prix racing to show that any operation has the economic clout at least to have a chance of surviving. Yes by modern standards, HRT could be called shambolic. But while it got nowhere and was run on a relative shoestring, it still started 56 races and lasted three seasons.

But F1 has lost something with the passing of the 'heroic-failure' teams. Their stories hold a timeless fascination. They are testimony to the ambition and vision - and sometimes the ineptitude - of those who thought they could conquer grand prix racing on a wing and a prayer. They also serve as a counterpoint to remind us all of the excellence even of what may be termed the 'bad' F1 teams of today.

The grid's current smallest operation, Manor, had a 2016 budget in the region of £85million and has well over 200 employees. It's a hugely professional, well-run operation and it says a lot about the astonishing growth in spending in F1 that an organisation at that level is considered a struggling minnow.

F1 is far beyond the aspirations of the optimistic hopeful today. For even a well-appointed junior single-seater team to make the step up would effectively require the mentality of a start-up.

Running a one-make car in GP2 is a far cry from designing and producing your own hugely complex grand prix machine, which is why even well-run and hugely successful teams at that level can't harbour serious aspirations of making the leap.