Fast Failures: A Formula 3 oddity in Britain

Looking down to the Old Hairpin from the Craner Curves at Donington Park, the cars go left to right across your field of vision. You get used to a rhythm, a general similarity in the progress of the competing cars. When one machine breaks that rhythm, you get a shock. Did you really just see that?

Such a phenomenon happened back in April 1991, as qualifying for the circuit's British Formula 3 round highlighted the extraordinary cornering speed of the TOM'S 031F driven by Rickard Rydell, looking like it was in a sped-up film.

A beautiful, low-line projectile in sinister black, it had carried the Swede into an early championship lead. Surely it should dominate...

Well, it did... in Japan. Paulo Carcasci, who had undertaken the initial development work on the car, cruised to the 1991 title in the TOM'S organisation's homeland, and the 031F's descendants would be the cars to have in the east for a few seasons yet.

But in Britain, the Glenn Waters-run, Norfolk-based TOM'S GB operation - which designed and constructed all the F3 chassis for shipping to Japan - saw its early advantage eradicated. After five races, Rydell was still ahead in the points, in front of drivers of the calibre of Rubens Barrichello, David Coulthard and Gil de Ferran. By the end of the season he was a distant sixth.

How did it come to this? There was no question that the car lacked straight-line speed in the UK, but the reasons for this - and the car's very existence - like all good motorsport stories, are rooted in ambition, chance encounters, tenuous connections sprawling from one side of the world to another and good-old last-minute decisions.

Waters had worked at Formula 2/F3 constructor GRD in the early 1970s, and got to know one of the company's leading customers, the talented Tetsu Ikuzawa, as well as some of the Japanese mechanics who had ventured to the UK with him. He then went on to work for the Lotus F1 team, before leaving in 1981 to set up his own F3 squad, Intersport Racing, initially with Dave Scott driving.

Intersport carried out, in Waters's words, "quite a lot of tyre testing for Bridgestone" and Scott "turned out to be a very good driver" who ultimately went to Japan to race in F2 - for Ikuzawa, who was now a team owner.

Then, says Waters, "I got a call completely out of the blue from TOM'S. They said, 'We're developing a new F3 engine based on Toyota 16-valve architecture', but it was the considered wisdom that 16-valve engines didn't offer much advantage. We got the opportunity to test the TOM'S engine at the end of 1985."

Jan Lammers and John Nielsen tested Intersport's Ralt with the new powerplant, at the same time as mobile-phone company Cellnet was getting involved in motorsport sponsorship via F3 racer David Hunt.

Rydell grabbed an early pole position at Donington © LAT

With the car-phone market about to explode, Waters was uniquely able to offer not only a relationship with Toyota through the new engine, but also with Volkswagen, whose power units Intersport was already using. He claims that this is why he won the Cellnet deal, with Keith Fine racing the new Toyota powerplant and Hunt sticking with the trusted VW.

"That was the start of our four-year relationship with Cellnet," says Waters, "and we began a programme developing the Toyota engine here in the UK. For 1987 we put all our eggs in Toyota's basket, we had Damon Hill and Martin Donnelly, and the programme took off then."

TOM'S boss Nobuhide Tachi now wanted a TOM'S GB offshoot, but Waters says that "had the beginnings of a conflict of interest with Intersport", so ex-Spirit F1 (and future Audi Sport UK) man John Wickham was entrusted with establishing the 'sister' team, which ran Mark Blundell in 1987 in an F3 Reynard and Phil Dowsett in the British Touring Car Championship in a Corolla.

TOM'S GB would go on to run Toyota's Le Mans 24 Hours - and subsequently World Sportscar - programmes, and these too heavily influence the F3 story.

"By the end of 1988 it was decided we needed a new facility, so we built a brand-new factory at Hingham," says Waters, "and one of the things we did was we installed quite a lot of race car manufacturing capability. Enough to build anything you wanted, with a state-of-the-art composites facility and dyno facility.

"It was one thing having these facilities, another having something to do. At that time the Group C car was designed and assembled at TRD [Toyota Racing Development] in Japan, so we instigated a design project to prove the facility."

The Hingham base would eventually produce the early-1990s Group C cars for Toyota and then, after a return for TOM'S GB in British F3 in the mid-'90s, would later house the Bentley Le Mans project and latterly the Lotus/Caterham F1 team. But the first car to evolve from concept to reality within its doors would be the TOM'S 031F.

Andy Thorby, who was working at TOM'S GB as chief engineer on the Group C project, designed the full-carbon-composite F3 machine.

"I started the F3 as a hobby," says Thorby. "I was waiting for the Group C to come over so started to sketch. I basically wanted a clean diffuser and wanted the mass further forward, so I wanted a longer wheelbase, and it seemed sensible to put the [TOM'S-made] gearbox ahead of the final drive."

The F3 project kept engineers busy before Toyota's early-90s Le Mans tilt © LAT

This, says Waters, was "as you'd find in F1 today", while the blown-diffuser technology, believes Thorby, had never been tried before in F3. Furthermore, with the engine not a stressed part of the chassis, and mounted within a spaceframe, this allowed room for the gearbox layout without compromising torsional stiffness.

Carcasci did the initial development work on the car at Snetterton. After work on the dampers, the car was flying, and now came the crunch. Initially, there had been no intention to race it.

"All of a sudden the car came alive, it was driveable, I could feel what was going on," says Carcasci. "It was almost instant that we set very good laptimes. Then we went on and tested again and the car became very fast. So we thought, 'Why not race it?'"

With a TOM'S contract, Carcasci was recruited for the Japanese F3 attack, beginning with the post-Macau Fuji international race at the end of 1990 - on the 031F's race debut, Carcasci was shoved off in an accident at the beginning of his heat.

In the meantime, Rydell had also pocketed a TOM'S deal, and had contested some late-season races in Japan with the team's Ralt on the back of a British Formula 3000 season that had been disrupted when he broke his leg in a crash.

"Our primary intent was to send the cars to Japan," says Waters, who would run the TOM'S GB race team as his Intersport squad was not at the time competing in F3.

"The decision to race in the UK was not taken until quite a late point, I think after Christmas. So we put together the programme late, and it was very much secondary to the sportscar project - it suffered largely as a consequence of how much effort was getting sucked into that.

"There was never any intention to run it in the following year [1992] because Group C was changing to naturally aspirated engines and that was going to take up enormous resource."

So this was a racing programme that was almost reluctantly undertaken, but the car was a goalpost-mover. It was finished in sinister black, Waters claiming this to be a lesson learned from his JPS Lotus days, whereby a black object looks smaller than it actually is; all the better to outpsyche the opposition...

The team's only Japanese-spec engine was delivered just before the final official pre-season test, and suddenly the TOM'S became a car to be feared by the F3 establishment of West Surrey Racing (running Barrichello), Paul Stewart Racing (Coulthard) and Bowman Racing (Steve Robertson).

Silverstone was where the 031F claimed its only win, and its downturn began © LAT

Rydell qualified it second for the opener at Silverstone and, when poleman Barrichello flunked the start, the Swede propelled himself to an untroubled win. And that was it...

There's a theory that the TOM'S Toyota engine couldn't be made to work as effectively on the British F3-spec fuel as the new-benchmark Mugen Honda and still-going-strong VW Spiess, but that on the Japanese F3 brew it was fine. But both Rydell and Waters believe it was more down to the differences between the engines coming from Japan and those that TOM'S GB produced itself.

Furthermore, the car's prodigious downforce won't have helped in a racing situation; Rydell took early-season poles at Donington and Brands Hatch, but soon lost the lead in both races. The drag will have contributed to a lack of straight-line speed that made the TOM'S harder to race than the main opposition from Ralt and Reynard.

"I could see, and everybody could see, that it was hard to race," says Rydell. "I could qualify well with it but you couldn't pass anyone at the end of the straight. The reason for the straight-line speed was partly aero."

There was one more almost-pole, in qualifying for the British Grand Prix support round in July. But the crank broke exiting the final corner, leading to engine failure - Rydell still coasted over the line to post second on the grid... This, says Waters, was the point at which the rot really set in.

"We had only one engine that was produced in Japan and that was the engine we started the year with," he says, "and he broke the crankshaft of that engine at Silverstone."

Rydell says that the engines used from then on, produced in Hingham, were an attempt by Waters "to prove to TOM'S Japan they could do the whole programme with the car, engine, everything. They were pushing for F1 at that stage."

Rydell can't remember at what point the British-built engine replaced the Japanese: "It seemed like we went backwards and the others went forwards. They wouldn't tell me but we might have had the Japanese engine in the beginning, and they changed it for the English engine - that was quite an important project for him."

In Waters' view, it was a simple question of resources: "His observation [about the differences in the engines] is absolutely correct but you want to view that in combination with everything else that was going on in that facility at the time.

"If we'd had more capability and could focus on the F3 engine, we'd have had better success, but that wasn't the case. People should understand that."

Rydell enjoyed plenty of grip through corners, but drag made life tough in the races © LAT

The team even drafted in Kelvin Burt, who had just claimed the Vauxhall Lotus title, to make an often-forgotten F3 debut in a late-season Silverstone race in a second car, in a preview of the works Volvo BTCC line-up of 1996/97...

Burt qualified 12th in the wet, eight places behind Rydell, but the car got stuck in second gear off the grid and his race was over.

"There must have been a weakness in the gear linkage," says the man who would go on to win the 1993 BF3 title, "and Rydell must have been softer on the gearbox.

"It was a brilliant-looking car, but I just needed more time in it - with no testing I wasn't quick enough through the quick stuff."

Paul Jackson, who engineered the car for Rydell, remembers "a lovely, lovely car. A beautiful design by Andy Thorby - a very nice, innovative design with intricate detail. However, it was very tightly packaged and we had niggles trying to make it work, but fundamentally there was nothing wrong with it."

Of the downforce-versus-drag equation, Jackson says: "We didn't have the kind of data we have these days, but the downforce may have played a part in using the tyre better in the cold conditions" - hence Rydell's form dipping in the late spring, after the first few races.

What also won't have helped is that Thorby was recruited by March, the new owner of Ralt, early in the 1991 season to start work on the company's '92 challenger, the Ralt RT36. So the man who conceived the car wasn't there to see it grow up.

Rydell feels his theory that the Hingham-built engine was the root cause of the problems was vindicated by what happened in November's Macau Grand Prix. "In the end I got the Japanese engine for Macau, and that was quite nice to show that I could do it," he says.

Sure enough, Rydell planted the TOM'S GB 031F on pole position on the high-speed Guia circuit, just a month after his British season had whimpered out with 10th on the grid and sixth in the race at the similarly high-speed Thruxton.

Rydell would race TOM'S F3 cars for two more years, in Japan in 1992/93, and famously claim Macau victory in '92, but these subsequent models were with the gearset now behind the differential as the FIA had outlawed Thorby's innovative concept.

Subsequently, Rydell would become one of the world's most celebrated touring car drivers, Jackson is most recently boss of GP2 team iSport (which ran Russian Time in 2014), Carcasci, after retiring from the cockpit, manages Brazilian drivers, while Waters works for McLaren's aerospace division and Thorby has also latterly been at McLaren as GT designer.

They all have in their DNA a project whose promise was famously unfulfilled in Britain, but what is less recognised is that it was almost by accident that the car turned a wheel in competition in the UK at all.

"The programme was all about winning the Japanese F3 series for TOM'S," argues Waters. "Whatever we did in Britain was tertiary at best."

The final Autosport magazine of 2015 focuses on the great cars that failed to win what they should have done in our cover story - Fast Failures.

Among the cars we take an in-depth look at are the McLaren-Mercedes MP4-20 (which returns the cover of Autosport for the first time in a decade), the Toyota GT-One, the first-generation Subaru Impreza WRC and the STP-Paxton Turbocar that so nearly won the Indy 500.

We've also got a look back at the GP2 season with Edd Straw and the GP3 season with Aaron Rook, as well as Lawrence Barretto's analysis of the implications of the UK's F1 TV coverage moving to Channel 4.

Out Thursday December 31 in all good newsagents, via the Apple Newsstand or as a digital magazine.