The changing face of Formula 1

Wikipedia's dictionary definition of 'Doing a Rip van Winkle' is 'to awake suddenly to profound changes in one's surroundings. This may be due to physical absence or to absence of mind.'

One day, after drinking a strange liquid with a bunch of strangers, Rip van Winkle went into a slumber, waking up two decades years later to an entirely different regulatory, political and social landscape, one which bore virtually no resemblance to the one he knew prior to nodding off. Yes, the geography remained largely unchanged, albeit with updated landmarks, but, for the rest, all was new for him.

John Wickham © sutton-images.com

In John Wickham, Formula 1 too has a Rip van Winkle, for Renault's recently-appointed team manager departed the sport in 1991 to pursue other (motorsport) interests, returning to grand prix racing at the start of this season after an absence of 20 years.

On January 3, his first day with the team, the man who co-founded the Spirit F1 outfit in the early eighties after gaining international F2 experience with March, was led into the machine shop of the team's Enstone base on account of it being early morning, with the main entrance still locked.

He was greeted by the sight of 25 CNC machines and 35 heads in the machine shop, at a stroke realising how much the sport had changed during his absence; at Spirit the entire team numbered just 25!

"The fact that there were 25 machines and 35 people in the machine shop wasn't such a surprise, though, because there's 510 people in the team, but what surprised me most was the complexity of the parts and the amount of effort that's obviously been put into the thought, design, and manufacture of so many parts. Just exquisite, compared to anything that I'd seen before, close up," he recalls.

Given that after shutting Spirit in 1985 Wickham held high-powered positions with Arrows (six years), and TOM's (on Toyota's initial Le Mans project), Audi (Le Mans and touring cars) and Bentley (Le Mans), plus both A1GP's designs as operation's chief of the ill-fated series, it certainly bears testimony to the workmanship not only within latter-day F1, but also Renault.

We're sitting in the team's hospitality unit during the Monza grand prix weekend, and Kent-born Wickham grins at the irony, for without Spirit, the black and gold team would probably not exist, nor have won world titles with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso as Benetton and Renault respectively.

Briefly: Spirit held a Pirelli tyre supply contract, while Toleman teetered on the brink of extinction through having no rubber deal in those multi-supplier days. When the former folded, the latter, which later mutated into Benetton and Renault, acquired the contract.

"We sold the Pirelli contract to Alex Hawkridge at Toleman; I don't think they'd done the first three races [in 1985] because they didn't have tyres...which is why I'm here," laughs Wickham. "Because if we hadn't [sold the contract] we [Renault] might have folded. For [the first] six races we (Spirit) had Goodyears, because obviously Goodyear and Honda were interested in each other's marketing departments' efforts. When we lost Honda we lost Goodyear, so we went to Pirelli and paid for Pirellis through '84 [into 1985]."

Stefan Johansson (Spirit 201 Honda) during the 1983 season © LAT

Prior to that, Honda had facilitated Spirit's entry into F2 and then F1 with its first 1500cc turbo engine being (very) basically a (rather unreliable) downsized forced-induction version of its 2-litre F2 unit and bolted into the back of an adapted F2 chassis.

So did Spirit increase its headcount when it hit the big league? "No, we kept basically the same number (25). We just put the two [F2] cars' groups together. The six were the two threes who'd run our F2 cars, and then a couple of truckies that were involved at the time."

However, Spirit had the luxury of a spare chassis despite running only one car: "We did, because we had a spare Formula 2 chassis," laughs the former team boss.

In these times of eight engines for an entire season it is sobering to note that during the 1983 Italian Grand Prix, Spirit burned through four engines via singleton entry, dealing a bitter blow. Such unreliability cost the team - which had placed third an the extremely-competitive F2 championship in its sole (1982) season - any chance of properly engineering its in-house chassis.

Thus Honda switched to Williams - a winning team in 1983 - but agreed to pay for a supply of Hart turbo units for a season. When Brian Hart temporarily ran out of (mono) blocks, Spirit simply bolted Cosworth DFVs into the back!

"[Frank] Williams came in and offered what he could and we couldn't," remembers Wickham. "His was a two-car team, it was successful, had won championships... effectively we had nothing to go against him."

Wickham admits to at the time being sore at being muscled aside by Williams, but now realises it was simply a commercial decision taken by a shrewd businessman who at the time was behind the turbo curve.

As we chat Wickham glances about Renault's hospitality unit - one of F1's less ostentatious facilities - then across the paddock, sparking another comparison.

"At Spirit it was one car, it was much more laissez-faire. It [F1] was still structured, a very strong structure had been in place for some years, but you could miss races, you could run one car, and the regular motorhomes you see on the streets of America sufficed for most teams.

"You could duplicate one of those for next to nothing, which we did. Race trucks were second-hand or built from 10-year-old chassis that previously had [a supermarket chain] written across the back. It was just a box with benches, perhaps a machine shop. We had one truck and one motorhome; that was it.

Huub Rothengatter drives the Spirit during the 1984 British GP © LAT

"Now you still have to have three guys on the car, basically one front, two rear. You (still) have a gearbox guy. The growth is electronics, KERS, control systems. There was less of that at Arrows, although we ran the TAG active suspension. So we had a few more guys onboard for that. That was a small group, but the number of truckies has grown, but so has the number of trucks. At Spirit we had one, at Arrows we had two - here they've got five coming to races: two in the paddock."

Spirit's 25 heads did the works: Design the car, build it, test it, race it and repair it, with the team's marketing department being a well-connected Italian stringer called Nicolo San Germano, who owned a host of "wonderful properties to which he would invite all these people, and that helped us."

The design office was headed by Wickham's partner in the venture, Gordon Coppuck - father of McLaren's 1974/6 championship-winning M23 - plus "three-and-a half people, including the [late] John Baldwin and a guy called Paul Crookes, who I hadn't seen again until I walked into Nick Wirth's place about six months ago."

Spirit operated out of a facility in Slough, Buckinghamshire, measuring of 200 square metres "in the Honda motorbike factory in Slough, where they ran the motorbike team from. It was just big enough to run two F2 cars, then the one F1 car in those days."

To put that in perspective, the floor area of Toyota's Cologne factory extends to 150 times that, with mezzanines and upper floors adding further to its 30,000 square meters. Yes, this former F1 facility encompasses two wind tunnels and in-house engine/gearbox area; yet it failed to win a grand prix, too. Consider: Spirit was then Honda's original eighties works team...

"I suppose we managed to find about $750,000 to $1million," says Wickham of the commercial side. "That was the big difference in those days, the money. You could just struggle by, but you could do 16 races on about $1-$1.5million, which we did." That was for the single entry Spirit ran during its three years in F1, although it was "with engines and tyres supplied."

Interestingly, the financial ratio between haves (then as now Ferrari and McLaren) and have-nots (the backmarking minnows) appears to have remained static at around 10:1. Wickham estimates those at the sharp end spent around $10million per season versus the $1million or so Spirit was burning through.

Today, Ferrari and McLaren blow an estimated $400m all in, whereas Virgin vows it is geared around a $40m cap. Yes, teams now run two cars to Spirit's one, but F1's Resource Restriction Agreement puts a cap on spending. Despite the one car, Spirit entered two drivers in 1984: "There were 16 races and Mauro [Baldi] did eight and Huub [Rothengatter] did eight, both bringing personal sponsors.

"We changed the colour of the car three times that year - that's another thing you can't do now. We started out white, then went red and then orange for Rothengatter because of the Dutch orange, and then back to red - so four times."

Wickham during his stint at Bentley in 2003 © LAT

Teams could pick and choose races in those days. Thus Spirit dipped in and out as resources and finances allowed, contesting six of 15 races in 1983, all 16 in 1984 and three in its final season.

"There was a season entry," explains Wickham, "going to FOCA or whatever it was called, and the fees went to the FIA, or part of the fees..." A penalty for non-arrival? "No. We let them know beforehand, and it wasn't a problem."

Despite its interrupted programme, Spirit scored a seventh and four eighth places - equal to 22 points under the current structure - out of a field at times numbering over 30 cars. Saliently F1's current 'newbies' have failed to score a point between them in three years despite 24-car grids.

Of course, the political landscape changed, too, for Max Mosley, then a heavy-hitter as legal adviser to the Bernie Ecclestone-dominated FOCA after departing the financially struggling March team he helped found in 1969, went on to bigger things within the FIA before standing down as president two years ago.

Ecclestone, though, remains Mr F1, albeit now as CEO of the commercial rights leasing entity (CVC Capital Partners) rather than part-time chairman of FOCA and owner of Brabham, which won titles at the time. Wickham clearly remembers his (few) dealings with the F1 supremo.

"We stayed with Bernie's side," says 61-year-old Wickham of the FISA/FOCA war which threatened to rent the sport apart, "although I don't think he was particularly worried about support from teams at our level.

"Obviously there was a group of constructors at the time who were very important to him, and he knew, and still does, that the weak ones will disappear after a year or so, and they're not important to the overall package. We were in that position. I think if we'd moved forward with Honda, we would've been in a better position..."

Likely, Spirit would also have been in a better position had Wickham, who co-drove rallies in his youth ("earning a couple of trophies and a car into a gatepost after a 45° left that wasn't!"), heeded Bernie's advice on drivers.

"We were talking about drivers one day. It was bloody tricky - Mauro had run out of money, so we went with Huub - and I was telling [Ecclestone] what was happening. He said: 'try this up-and-coming F3 driver Gerhard Berger, put him in the car'. My naivetey at the time, it was like 'okay, Berger, but no money...no, I think we'll go with Huub for a while and see'. I'm sure the money would've been there to back Gerhard..."

After selling the tyre contract and settling with sponsor hunter San Germano ("We paid back some of what he was owed, a rather odd thing to do," he says with a chuckle), the team went into liquidation ("for very little money") Wickham set up Footwork's F3000 team before joining Jackie Oliver when the Japanese concern acquired Arrows and renamed it.

"So, I've seen the small, private team, the Arrows group, which had maybe 15 or 20 in the design office, and this (Renault) has 50 or 60.

Wickham has returned to F1 after 20 years of absence © LAT

"There's three (F1) eras, I suppose. There's the Spirit era, the Arrows era, then this," he says when asked about F1's evolution since first joining in 1982 for a ten-year stint. "This, I think, is harder work, because the cars are much more complex.

"Although we did do very late nights occasionally, the whole thing seemed a little more relaxed in terms of how you ran the car, and what you did to the car, especially in the '80s. That era the car wasn't very complicated. There were no electronics on the car, there were no driver aids...in the Spirit days it was just a simple place, quite like GP3 is now."

All of which proves how much F1 has changed in the 20 years 'van Wickham' was asleep. But, as his understanding of the two completely eras 20 years apart proves, Wickham's absence was purely physical, and certainly not due to any absence of mind.