The worst F1 car ever? That's Life

Formula 1. Supposedly the jewel in the crown and the pinnacle of international motorsport, but quite honestly something that no longer interests me at all. With entry fees alone costing many millions and an extremely complicated and restrictive rule book, only the largest and wealthiest teams can afford to compete and the racing has become very clinical and boring as a result. It wasn't always like that though: in the late eighties and early nineties, the fees were much lower and the rules more favourable to smaller independent teams, resulting in entry lists so large that many races had to feature a pre-qualifying session to weed out a few of the weaker cars before the qualifying proper. All sorts of small and now forgotten outfits came and went during this period, usually trundling around at the tail end of the field and rarely even managing to start a race, yet alone finish. The strange stories behind them provide far more interest than the mundanity of today's top teams, none more so than the ill-equipped and ill-fated Life Racing Engines. The very reason for this team even existing is hard to fathom...

Life begins...

Life entered this teeming fray and against strong competition soon went down in history as the team who ran the worst F1 car ever, whose only reason for existence was to promote an engine so hopeless that no other team would ever consider buying it. Turbochargers had been banned in 1989 and engine manufacturers were busy coming up with innovative naturally-aspirated alternatives. Renault and Honda developed successful V10 units, Subaru appeared with an unusual flat-12, and then there was the even stranger Life W12, which supposedly combined the power of a V12 with the compact size of a V8. Unlike the W-formation engines used successfully in road cars by Volkswagen in more recent times, the 3.5-litre Life engine was not a true W but a V8 with an extra bank of cylinders placed horizontally in the V, maybe a good idea in theory but one that didn't work too well on the track.

The infamous Life W12. Interesting but completely useless.
(By Saveferris888 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

This engine had been developed throughout the 1980s by former Ferrari engineer Franco Rocchi. Seeing an opportunity to make money following the rule changes despite having no motorsport experience, an Italian businessman called Ernesto Vita bought the rights to Rocchi's design in 1989 and initially had no intention of being any more than an engine supplier, but he spent the entire season pitching his unique powerplant to the existing teams without success. Not one to give up, Vita eventually made the drastic decision to form his own team for the following season, which would run the engine and prove its worth to the other teams, but as events would show their lack of interest was not surprising. One can imagine things going something like this:

Vita: Wanna buy my engine?
Everyone else: No way, it's shit.
Vita: Oh yeah? Well I'm gonna start my own team and then we'll see whose engine is shit!

A new Life and a new start?

Even before it was burdened with this hopeless engine, the Life car wasn't very promising, having originated the previous year as a design by Richard Divlia for another sad case, the FIRST Formula 3000 team's aborted venture into F1. It failed the crash test badly, FIRST abandoned their F1 plans and that should have been the end of it had Vita not come along. He bought the one existing car, which was badly built and had never raced in anger, shoehorned in his W12 with some difficulty and rechristened it the Life L190, the name 'Life' being the English translation of his surname. Divlia was horrified: he denied all connection with the car and considered it so unsafe that he went as far as warning potential drivers not to go near this deathtrap. In spite of this background, Life's entry was nevertheless accepted by the FIA for the 1990 season, to be driven by Jack Brabham's youngest son Gary.

The L190 looked a lot like a Ferrari at first glance: it was painted bright red with sponsorship from Agip and a logo that was remarkably similar to the famous prancing horse. Apart from Ferrari, Life were the only other team competing that year with an engine of their own manufacture, but the similarities to the bigger Italian outfit ended there. The W12 allegedly produced around half the power of the front-running McLarens and was mounted in one of the heaviest cars, being some 40mph slower than everyone else on the flat-out straights at Hockenheim. It was unreliable, no quicker than a Formula 3 car and even its drivers deemed it dangerous, so Vita's hopes of selling the engine to another team were forlorn and it was of no interest whatsoever except as a laughing stock.

It may look like a Ferrari but it certainly didn't drive anything like one.
(from http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk)

Life arrived at the 1990 season's first race in the USA with just one car, one engine and very few spare parts, so when it inevitably broke down early in pre-qualifying they couldn't fix it and their debut ended there and then. An inauspicious start, but things never got much better. The recalcitrant W12 was coaxed back into life for the next meeting in Brazil, but the team mechanics had gone on strike and not filled it with oil, so it quickly expired again. Brabham decided he'd had enough and walked away, having only ever driven three laps of pre-qualifying, and Italian Bruno Giacomelli foolishly stepped in to take over his seat.

Life and death

Giacomelli had a little more success with the car, sometimes even managing to set a pre-qualifying time before it failed, but it was still hideously under-developed and uncompetitive. At Silverstone he achieved the team's best ever result, but this was nothing to celebrate, being almost 20 seconds off the pre-qualifying pace! That would be their finest moment though as they were never once able to keep the car running throughout a whole session, and even on the rare occasions it was on form it was still glacially slow and Giacomelli was terrified of being rear-ended by other cars. The Life team realistically didn't stand a chance of making it to a race and one has to wonder if Vita was deluding himself that despite its abysmal performance, in a moment of madness another team might show some interest in buying the engine.

The Judd V8 clearly visible after the engine cover had made its bid for freedom.
(from http://bulseyeview.com/category/carsteams/)

By the time the season reached Portugal, Life had finally given up on the hopeless W12 and somehow scraped together enough money to buy in a conventional V8 from Judd - given that the team had been formed in the first place purely to promote Life's own engine, this rendered its existence even more pointless. Grafting in yet another engine that the car hadn't been designed for was no easy task and the bodywork modifications were not entirely successful, as on its very first lap of Estoril the bodged engine cover flew off into oblivion! That was the final nail in the coffin, and the embarrassment came to an end as the team withdrew from the championship before the last two rounds of the season, having entered just 14 races and never even made it to the start line. Ernesto Vita, Life Racing Engines and their W12 were never heard of again, but their brief appearance was enough to earn a permanent place in the hall of shame.

Brought back to Life

By anyone's standards, Life's performance was truly woeful, failing to even complete a full season and never getting anywhere near the grid; the whole team was built around a flawed premise and must have spent a fortune to achieve nothing. Given its uniquely hopeless record, the one and only Life L190 car should by rights have disappeared long ago, but by some miracle it has somehow survived and is now in the hands of a private collector. It was fully restored in 2009 with an original W12 refitted (there must ultimately have been more than one as a second was displayed with the car), and is now said to be more reliable as a museum piece than it ever was as a competition machine! 

So that's Life, an amusingly brief and pathetic interlude in the normally extremely serious world of Formula 1. In a way, it's a shame teams like this are no longer able to compete as their incompetent shenanigans would certainly liven up what has become a very dull sport without troubling the front-runners.

Life's business plan in a nutshell - it was never going to work!

1. Buy crap engine for quick profit
2. Fail to sell crap engine
3. Change plans and form own team
4. Buy crap car
5. Put crap engine in crap car
6. Enter championship and hope for the best
7. Fail dismally at everything