F1 2010's lost teams: Campos Meta 1

Out of the FIA's highly contested entry process for the 2010 Formula 1 season, three teams eventually filtered through to the grid in Bahrain to begin the year in earnest - the Manor-owned Virgin Racing, Tony Fernandes' Lotus Racing and the late-arriving Hispania Racing Team.

As much as the FIA sought to invite sustainable teams to the field, all three eventual entrants were hamstrung by flaws: Manor sold up its title sponsorship to Virgin for a pittance and persisted with a car that never saw the inside of a windtunnel, Lotus had to scrape an entry together in six months, and Hispania was the product of a last-minute buyout of the Campos team. Purchased by shareholder Jose Ramon Carabante and his Grupo Hispania investment firm, the team somehow managed to make its way to the Bahrain season opener at short notice, having had no chance to test its Dallara-designed cars before the medium-haul flight to the Middle East.

• F1 2010's lost teams
• Prodrive
• Epsilon Euskadi
• Lola
• US F1

Regardless, getting the two cars built in time (just!) was a Herculean effort, especially as the Campos entry looked dead and buried just a few weeks prior to the first race of the year.

Like the Epsilon Euskadi entry attempt, Campos also had designs on being Spain's first fully-fledged F1 team. Back in 1993, the little-known Bravo team had attempted to become the first Spanish outfit to traverse the path to the championship, and ironically had links to the new crop of teams - the S931 chassis it aimed to use was penned by Nick Wirth, installed as Virgin's chief designer for 2010, but never made it to the grid.

Bravo was also part-owned by ex-F1 driver Adrian Campos, who raced with Minardi for a season-and-a-bit in the late 1980s before embarking on a career as a successful team owner of his self-titled racing outfit. Campos Motorsport was formed ahead of the first season of the Open Fortuna by Nissan series - which later became Formula Renault 3.5 - and surged to the first three titles in the series thanks to the efforts of Marc Gene, Fernando Alonso and Antonio Garcia. Later plying its trade in front of a more mainstream audience in the GP2 Series, Campos continued its race-winning form there.

Ahead of a tilt at the big time, Campos ceded control of his GP2 team to Alejandro Agag at the end of 2008 to focus on F1. Joining forces with Enrique Rodriguez of the sports marketing company Meta Image, the newly titled Campos Meta 1 team lodged its entry to the FIA with a seemingly solid footing. It toed the party line and agreed a deal for Cosworth engines, and had also contracted Italian design firm Dallara to put together its cars for 2010. With an already-functioning race team, Campos' entry was selected to represent Spain on motorsport's biggest global stage.

Throughout the 2009 season, the noises from the Campos Meta camp were promising. The team had secured government backing to put together new facilities in the Fuente Alamo technology park in Murcia, creating 200 jobs in the technology industry and also linking up with two local universities to put together motorsport engineering courses. A deal was also agreed with Bruno Senna to join the team, infusing the 2010 grid with the return of the evocative Senna name.

Campos toed the FIA party line and agreed a deal for Cosworth engines, and had also contracted Dallara to put together its cars for 2010

But, by the new year, things were less encouraging. Reports that Campos Meta couldn't pay Dallara meant that the prospective F110 car faced stunted development and, with no other capital available to it, the team effectively went into hibernation. With Campos and US F1 fighting the tide, the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone were left with a predicament - and had to act to bring another team into the mix at short notice.

Ecclestone, with more contacts than a well-stocked optician, pulled a few strings to bring another of 2010's hopefuls into the fold, by name of Stefan Grand Prix - run by Serbian industrialist Zoran Stefanovic.

Karun Chandhok, who had been in talks with numerous teams in the lead-up to 2010, takes up the story.

"I knew Adrian Campos from my time in GP2," Chandhok recalls. "I tested with him, didn't race for him, but I knew him and around the middle of 2009, Bernie came to me because obviously the Indian Grand Prix was coming in for 2011 and Bernie was quite keen to help out. And so, we went and met Adrian initially - but it all fell apart.

"[By November] the Campos thing had fully died a death and gone quiet. And then in late January, Bernie called and said that Zoran Stefanovic is going to do the Stefan GP thing. And he said '[Colin] Kolles is going to run it. So give Colin a call and you need to get to Germany to go meet them tomorrow, because if it happens I think there's a deal there for you to drive'.

"At that time, Colin and Bernie were trying to lobby the FIA; they didn't have the entry, obviously, but actually Bernie seemed open to the idea to try and help them out because they had obviously got this whole Toyota deal. [After] Bernie called, my dad and I went online, bought some tickets and jumped on the plane that night to fly to Cologne. We went to the Toyota TMG facility and met Kolles, and there was Zoran Stefanovic and his father too!"

Stefanovic was no stranger to bothering the FIA entry queue, having done so twice in the late '90s. Attempting to get a F1 team together for 1997, Stefanovic was reported to have signed ex-Ferrari and Forti technical director George Ryton for an unsuccessful entry bid, and then in the following season tried to base another attempt around the lacklustre Lola T97/30 cars, left abandoned after the first race of '97 in which they'd failed to qualify.

Stefan GP held fire for the best part of a decade before launching its next entry, and although his team was cast aside by the initial entry process, Stefanovic continued with his quixotic attempts to secure a place on the 2010 grid. US F1's demise offered another shot at an entry, and with Campos also threatening to go the way of the dodo, Stefan's plans began to draw attention.

Where Chandhok spoke of the team's Toyota deal, Stefanovic had managed something of a coup. Toyota had, prior to the Japanese marque's hasty withdrawal from F1, designed and built a pair of TF110 chassis for 2010, which the Stefan team had agreed a deal to race with. This came with a supply of the Japanese marque's RVX-10 V8 engines, to be rebadged as Stefans, for the new season - pending its acceptance into F1. Toyota, one of the first teams to explore the world of double-diffusers, was said to have a particularly advanced exhaust-blown version on the new car - and then-technical director Pascal Vasselon estimated that the new car had "20 to 30 more points of downforce" compared to the previous TF109.

Stefan had even secured ex-McLaren engineer Mike Coughlan to head up the technical side, having been disgraced in 2007's Spygate scandal in which McLaren was found to have classified Ferrari documents. At Toyota's behest, one driver was expected to be Williams refugee Kazuki Nakajima. The Japanese driver even conducted a shakedown of the TF110 in a car park, albeit with show tyres as the planned test at the Algarve circuit was canned, after Bridgestone declined to supply F1 tyres to a team without an entry.

The second driver was expected to be 1997 champion Jacques Villeneuve, who hadn't tried his luck in F1 since BMW Sauber released him midway through 2006 in favour of reserve Robert Kubica. Villeneuve, who had attempted a music career after his F1 tenure had ended, was not predisposed to merely living from his album's royalties - in fact, having managed fewer than 700 album sales in North America, those wouldn't have even paid for the plane ticket to Belgrade.

Not that Stefan ever got as far as confirming the Canadian's return to F1. Just as quickly as the (non-Bridgestone) wheels had made their way onto the Serbian squad's wagon, they began to fall off.

Coughlan (above, second left) departed the team not long after joining and was subsequently photoshopped out of a Stefan press release, and it became apparent an entry was not looking particularly forthcoming as the agreement to get the Toyota cars and engines expired. BMW had sold Sauber back to founder Peter Sauber and the team earned a reprieve to the grid, while Stefan's hopes of snatching US F1's now-vacant entry were nixed by the FIA at the start of March.

PLUS: How Sauber twice saved itself from the brink of extinction

Besides, behind-the-scenes, life at Campos had suddenly kicked into life after Carabante agreed a deal to buy the team outright.

"For Spain, they showed me the update they had in CFD. It was going to be worth two-and-a-half, three seconds, which would have put us in Toro Rosso territory" Karun Chandhok

"Bernie called up again," Chandhok remembers, "and said 'OK, Campos is out. However, there's this company Hispania Group, they're gonna take it over, and they're putting up the money for it and Colin is going to be team principal'. Adrian Campos had signed the contract with Bruno already so he was already in, so I signed the contract with Colin about a week before we did the launch, when I went to Dallara and did the seat fit."

With Kolles installed as team principal, the dynamic changed along with the team's new Hispania name; instead of being run from the planned Campos facilities in Spain, Kolles had his own race team based in Germany, which would prepare and run the cars. Having run for several years in Formula 3, DTM and endurance racing, the Kolles team put those programmes on pause to focus on preparing the Dallara F1 chassis for Bahrain at short notice.

But, as Chandhok explains after his pre-season visit to Dallara, the eventual Hispania F110 that took to the grid in Bahrain was only ever meant to be an initial launch-spec car. The car was painted a gunmetal grey for its initial launch in a hotel in Murcia, but it was supposed to receive a comprehensive update ahead of the first race - at least, had its development not suffered so many delays.

"That car on its own is really a case of 'what if?'" says Chandhok. "After my seat fit I had a meeting with [Dallara engineers] Walter Biasatti and Ben Agathangelou. They said to me, 'look, the plan [for the car spec] is that this went to the hotel in Murcia to do the launch; it is literally just launch-spec to be photographed in livery for the full thing. But now because the whole thing's been delayed, it looks like you'll have to race the car for the first four flyways'.

"For Spain, they showed me the update they had in CFD. They had the side pods in the tunnel I think at that time already, but on the CFD [the update] was something like 60 points of downforce, it was going to be worth two-and-a-half, three seconds, which would have put us in Toro Rosso territory.

"Dallara built the GP2 car, OK, it's got tunnels and skirts and it's a little bit different. But fundamentally, the car in GP2 is a hundred kilos heavier. So even if you just logically look at their knowledge in that and, and take away some of the lap time for the skirt, but then you got the gain from the weight, we should be able to make the Formula 1 car three, four seconds faster.

"And then you've got the engine difference. The power of an engine of Formula 1 over a GP2 car is an extra 200 horsepower. So he said, you know, just looking at it simplistically, he said we should be in Toro Rosso territory. And actually, when you look at where Haas arrived [with a Dallara-designed chassis] - OK, there's a Ferrari link - but when Haas got to F1, that's where they were."

But that Spain upgrade never came, and the only upgrade that the F110 received was a change to the rear-view mirrors after the outboard-mounted designs were outlawed mid-season. The driving staff faced more changes as the Hispania Group sought to offset its investment with a rotating cast of paydrivers. Senna was swapped for ex-Super Aguri driver Sakon Yamamoto for the British Grand Prix, before the Japanese driver then replaced Chandhok for the next four races.

Yamamoto then shared the seat with Christian Klien, who took over for Singapore after Yamamoto was declared "ill", and the Austrian then took the wheel for the final two races of the season.

But, although Carabante had rescued Campos and turned it into a fully-fledged(ish) F1 team, he lasted just a year-and-a-bit before selling up to Thesan Capital, which owned the team until it hit the wall at the end of 2012. Campos, meanwhile, took back control of his GP2 team in 2014 and it has remained in the second-tier category since.

Although he had been recently linked with another tilt at an F1 entry, Campos would be forgiven for having become twice-shy - having been bitten particularly hard a decade ago.

The rest of the applicants...

A profusion of other concerns attempted to stake a claim to an F1 entry for 2010 and, although some died before even handing in an application, those teams have their own curious tales - as we'll explain, in brief.

Austrian investment group Superfund attempted to enter its own Team Superfund outfit for 2010, spearheaded by CEO Christian Baha while ex-F1 driver Alex Wurz would be team principal. The team announced in a press release that it would use the Cosworth engine but, after the FIA declined to provide Superfund with an entry, Baha's men let the dogs out and would not attempt to enter F1 again.

GP2 stalwart iSport also attempted to throw its lot in with F1, having sounded out an entry with the potential budget cap on the horizon, but Paul Jackson's team decided not to once the FIA reneged on plans to minimise costs for the new teams. At the beginning of 2012, iSport pulled out of GP2 and ended its tenure in motorsport, and a group of its former personnel now currently work for the Virtuosi team in F2.

Italian touring car outfit N.Technology was also in the frame, but team owners Mauro Sipsz and Angelo Condignoni were incensed by the FIA's lack of transparency. Sipsz complained that the new entrants were treated as "pawns" in the fight between the FIA and the Teams' Association, as N.Technology failed to receive an entry. Then-British Touring Car Championship front-running squad RML also attempted to do the same, but team owner Ray Mallock also became disinterested by FIA and FOTA politicking.

Both Brabham and March names sought to return to the F1 grid; Brabham was the nom de plume of engineering company Formtech, run by Franz Hilmer who had bought up Super Aguri's race equipment after its liquidation. Hilmer later put the equipment to use to run short-lived GP2 squad Hilmer Motorsport. March was put forward by Swindon Town FC chairman Andrew Fitton, who made his money in telecoms. Fitton had bought the original March team out at the end of 1992, wound it down but held the rights to the name.

Years before Caterham's 2014 Abu Dhabi appearance was enabled thanks to crowdfunding, the Myf1dream.com project also attempted to source its backing from a multitude of fans all looking to own a slice of an F1 team. Perhaps inspired by MyFootballClub's fan-ownership of non-league Ebbsfleet United, the ownership was untied by its inability to keep fans invested. Myf1dream.com failed to make the grade too, unable to muster the deposit needed to submit an entry.