Why F1 must bring back 'bad' minnow teams

Bad Formula 1 teams don't exist anymore. Somebody will always be at the back, but everything is relative and even the weakest performer these days is, at worst, a credible and effective grand prix team.

This is one of the side effects of how enormous and complicated teams have become. They are now substantial edifices; even the smallest employ hundreds of people and spend vast sums of money to design, build and operate some of the most elaborate and specialised machines on the planet. Even to build a car and get on the grid requires formidable infrastructure and able personnel.

In many ways, that's a good thing. It gives grand prix racing stability thanks to 10 serious teams doing, at worst, a decent job. But F1 is not a purely scientific endeavour - it's a sport that thrives on emotion. So, the absence of the bad teams, the true minnows who either lack the resources or the knowhow to thrive, means there's also something missing. If nothing else, they would act as a barometer of how effective the rest of the grid is.

Williams was the worst team of the 2018 season by all measures, finishing last in the constructors' championship and slowest in terms of outright pace over the season. That equates to an average deficit of 3.606%. That means that on a typical F1 circuit, the gap to pole position was 2.869 seconds.

We get so used to dealing in tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a second that this is rightly perceived as a chasm. But to put it into real-world perspective, just pause and count out three seconds. Now spread that time loss out over a track comprising however many corners and a bunch of straights, and in any particular instant the difference is negligible. That's what separates the 'great' from the 'terrible' in contemporary F1.

Everything is relative. Had Williams delivered that level of performance relative to the front in 2017, it would have been well ahead of slowest team Sauber. In 1950, that would put a team third fastest overall, and in '52 that would even have been good enough for second place given the dominance of Ferrari in the world championship's brief spell running to Formula 2 regulations.

Evaluating the seasonal performance of every single constructor in the history of the world championship ranks Williams just inside the best two-thirds - at around the 62% mark. So not even among the worst third in a given year.

None of this is to defend Williams, which had a bad season that must not be repeated. Elite sport is all about excellence, and Williams has fallen short. But it hasn't fallen short because it's done a difficult task terribly, it's merely done a difficult task decently at a level where 'OK' simply isn't good enough.

In recent years, HRT is perhaps the most clear example of a 'bad' team. Yet in terms of the trackside operation, by and large, it was a decent squad. The problem was a lack of funding but, despite what was often a peripatetic existence and sometimes very tired machinery, the team at the track did a decent job to extract the best from a limited package.

Before that, the hastily assembled Super Aguri team (pictured above) joined the 2006 grid with an uncompetitive car built around the four-year-old Arrows A23 chassis. But again, that was a serious race team that showed just how good it could be the following season before the funding dried up early in '08. Hardly an operation lacking in credibility.

It's not a question of aspiring to a time when anyone with a bit of cash could join the grid, but it should at least be possible for a serious, decently-funded racing operation to aspire to come into F1

So, you have to go back further for the truly bad teams. Minardi tends to be a byword for a back-of-the-grid F1 team but, even when Luca Badoer was sitting by his car after losing what would have been a sensational fourth place at the Nurburgring in 1999, he was in a machine that was only slightly further off the pace than this year's Williams. Again, not bad and a team with a long history of small budgets and a lack of engine power with capable trackside personnel that made the best of it.

But Minardi wasn't a team with the track record of Williams, and that fourth place nearly 20 years ago would have been a truly heroic result. Perhaps that's what we're talking about - the true minnows achieving something amazing. Even if you go back to one of the heydays of the bad F1 teams, the late 1980s and early '90s, there were some famous examples of heroics.

Roberto Moreno's lap to qualify the dreadful 1992 Andrea Moda (pictured above) for the Monaco Grand Prix was surely one of the greatest in world championship history. As for the gold standard for bad teams - Life, in '90 - the car struggled even to complete a slow lap, let alone qualify.

Those two teams were below the level of what is acceptable in F1. But there is a romanticism to the true minnow doing something magical, and even the smallest team today can't truly count as one of those. While there's no desire for F1 to attract absurdly small operations capable of turning up to the first race of the season without even owning a tyre pressure gauge (this apparently did happen to one outfit), Liberty Media at least needs to ensure grand prix racing is accessible.

This is important because you always need fresh blood, and F1 can't rely on the existing teams effectively operating as franchises in perpetuity. The chances of an F1 team establishing itself on the grid are not good these days, to the point where of the last dozen to appear only four are still operating.

Haas has thrived since its debut in 2016, BAR evolved into Mercedes via Honda and Brawn, Sauber has now bounced back after coming close to the precipice and Stewart, via Jaguar, has become a top team as Red Bull.

But the other eight are no more. Excluding failed megabucks manufacturer team Toyota, the rest managed a grand total of six points between them.

Virgin (later Marussia and Manor), Lotus Racing (later Caterham), Super Aguri, HRT, Lola, Forti Corse, Simtek and Pacific were unable to gain enough of a foothold to establish themselves. And that's a concern. For another thing minnows offer is the chance to grow into something big.

Williams Grand Prix Engineering started running a singleton customer March for Patrick Neve in 1977 (pictured below) and, by mid-1979, was a race winning team. Such a rapid rise is unthinkable now, precisely because the levels of engineering are sky high and the rules restrictive. Resources do not guarantee success, but they are a pre-requisite of it.

The path Haas has taken is a wise one, creating a partnership with Ferrari and using as many off-the-shelf 'non-listed' parts as possible. But it also means it's an entity reliant on another team to be on the grid and is very unlikely to become a championship-winning team unless the F1 landscape changes dramatically in the coming years.

This is something for Liberty Media to consider. It's not a question of aspiring to a time when all F1 teams had 20 staff members and anyone with a bit of cash to spare was joining the grid, but it should at least be possible for a serious, decently-funded racing operation to aspire to come into F1 with at least a fighting chance of one day getting to the front.

Having such aspirants on the grid would have many other benefits. While public interest drops off the further you go down the grid, it does make a difference to have a full and colourful grid of cars. Having 26 cars rather than 20 is something worth aspiring to, and while you don't want to go to the lengths of 1989 (when as many as 39 drivers were attempting to qualify), it shouldn't be out of the question.

It would also create more opportunities for drivers to race in F1. Let's say there were another half-a-dozen teams, drivers like Esteban Ocon, Stoffel Vandoorne, Sergey Sirotkin, Pascal Wehrlein - all worthy either of their places or another chance - might all be in F1.

The odd truly terrible team would at least be a reminder of just how good the current F1 teams are

How this can be achieved is a far bigger question. The current teams can't simply be shrunk to a fifth of their size, and it would be irresponsible to do so given the number of staff they employ.

But over time there is an ambition to keep costs under control and that might mean that, in the long term, there is on organic reduction in size. Still a way must be found to make it possible for a serious aspirant at least to get a foothold on the grid.

The return of the genuine minnow, which would require a transformation in the way F1 operates and the costs involved, would raise the risk of a properly bad team appearing.

But it would also enrich F1 and give far greater depth beyond the 10 organisations currently capable of competing, not to mention acting as a useful yardstick to show just how good even the worst of the current teams is.

And if you do get the odd truly terrible team, it will at least be a reminder of just how good the current F1 teams are. What's more, they'll provide an entertaining sideshow. It's probably a minority view, but F1 needs its bad teams just as much as it needs its good ones.

But as we've seen, 'bad' is always a relative term.