Hispania Racing Team (HRT)
Hispania Racing Team started out in 2009 as Campos Meta 1,a merger of the Campos Racing F3 team and Meta Image, a sports agency helping them break into F1 and managed to do so for the 2010 F1 season, but only due to a buyout of the team by José Ramón Carabante, a move which also saw Colin Kolles become team principal... which is always a reassuring sign.
2010 was met with financial strain, and an underdeveloped and untested car in the form of the F110 which would be piloted by Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok (although Karun was replaced with 9 races to go. Sakon Yamamoto and Christian Klien would stand in for him). To be fair to the Dallara designed and Cosworth powered F110, it actually beat Richard Branson's F1 effort by earning 1 more 14th place than the Virgin cars.
What the team needed was money to develop a much better car for the next season, and that was a problem seeing as they hadn't attracted a new major sponsor for the team. During this difficult time, the team were eying up a Ferrari engine deal, and were in talks with Toyota in order to improve their chances of scoring better results, and thus more sponsorship. These talks led to Toyota giving them the unraced TF110 as the basis of their 2011 car, and access to their technical resources. Huzzah! All is well!
Or not, the deal was signed in the summer of 2010 but by November 2010 Toyota cancelled the deal because HRT couldn't pay them. December didn't look too rosy for the team either, they were kicked out of FOTA for not paying their 2010 membership fee... erm, I mean they left FOTA because of FOTA's bias against smaller teams, yes that's definitely it.
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Anyway, 2011's car. One of the engineers had claimed he'd had access to Toyota's technical plans of the TF110 for long enough to incorporate them into the F111. Great, right? Nope. New driver Narain Karthikeyan confirmed it was an evolution of the F110, this is most likely due to lack of funds which was so bad the F111 featured a livery littered with many adverts begging for sponsorship.
The delayed launch of the new car meant a lack of testing before the 1st race, which the car didn't qualify for due to being too slow in the hands of Antonio Liuzzi and Karthikeyan. A new nose (which was intended for the first race but failed crash tests) helped find pace in the car, which actually qualified for the Malaysian Grand Prix! Sadly, the cars didn't finish. The season heralded many similar results of either failing to finish or being so far down the order and so many laps behind nobody really cared. Canada was a stand-out performance with a remarkable 13th place from Liuzzi, Karthikeyan would have scored a solid 14th place if he wasn't penalised and regulated to 17th. Still, if that livery worked then sponsors would be ringing the phone off the hook!
There were some big changes underway at HRT, Colin Kolles had abandoned ship, Liuzzi was replaced with Pedro De La Rossa and the team was moving to a new facility in Madrid. The team had also scored a few sponsors! Unfortunately, it didn't help. A heavy sense of deja vu came as the team once again failed crash tests, once again missed tests and once again failed to qualify for the 1st race. The rest of the season was a drab one with no real standout performances from either driver, then came the inevitable.
The team was up for sale, and it needed to find a buyer before the 2013 entry fees needed payed. Nobody bought the team before the deadline, and the company was liquidated before 2013 was out. Attempts from a group of Canadian and American investors to buy their 2013 grid slot for their team known as Scorpion Racing failed due to the team's liquidation meaning the FIA closed their entry spot off and they were told to try for 2014 as they missed the 2013 deadline anyway. Nothing has came of that.
So, so long HRT. Although you didn't learn from your mistakes, you did provide the grid with some very pretty chicanes and provided me with a fun drinking game as well.
