Pacific Racing was a
Formula One team from Great Britain
. The team took part in two full seasons,
1994 and 1995, entering 33 Grands Prix.
Origins and success in lower formulae
The team was founded by former mechanic
Keith Wiggins in 1984, to race in the European
Formula Ford Championship, with
Norwegian driver
Harald Huysman and
Marlboro backing. Huysman won
both the European and Benelux titles. On Huysman's advice, Pacific
entered
Bertrand Gachot in British
Formula Ford with a
Reynard in
1985. The following year, Gachot, also part of the Marlboro World
Championship team, won the Formula Ford 2000 crown for Pacific.
Marlboro stayed with Wiggins' team in FF2000 in 1987, winning the
British title with
JJ Lehto.
In 1988, Pacific entered the
British F3 Championship with Lehto and
a Reynard car, and won the title on their first attempt. Wiggins
did not want to stay in F3 and moved up to
Formula 3000, once more in
association with Reynard and Marlboro. However, Lehto and
Eddie Irvine's season was disappointing and the
tobacco company's support moved to rival
DAMS
in 1990. The team returned to form in 1991, taking
Christian Fittipaldi to the F3000
crown.
Formula One
Having won in every junior category it had participated in, by 1992
Wiggins was determined that Pacific Racing would make the step up
to F1 for the 1993 season, in the process renaming the team as
Pacific Grand Prix. Lacking an in-house
engineering staff and conscious of how limited his timescale was,
Wiggins contacted F3000 constructor Reynard Racing to design and
build the new PR01 chassis, hoping to benefit from several years of
research and development that Reynard had invested in their
recently scrapped in-house F1 project. Unfortunately for Pacific,
the Rory Byrne-led design team had gone to
Benetton at the end of 1991 and Reynard had
sold the design (still in form of paper drawings) to
Ligier. The small PR01 design team, working at
Reynard but nominally employed by Pacific to conform to FIA
Regulations, were forced to start a new design based on what little
of the Reynard F1 research remained and utilizing a number of minor
components from Reynard's F3000 chassis in an attempt to constrain
costs. With their roots in the same project, the resulting Benetton
B193, Liger JS37 and Pacific PR01 shared the same slab-sided,
raised-nose profile that later became standard in Formula
One.
They instead postponed their entry in January 1993 because of a
recession and resulting failure of investors to pay up .
They were unable to enter F1 until 1994. The year was a disaster.
Paul Belmondo and former Pacific
driver
Bertrand Gachot started the
season as drivers, with
Oliver Gavin
testing. The PR01, designed for the 1993 season, had undergone none
of the vital wind tunnel testing required to refine the car's
aerodynamics, had seen only a few dozen miles of track testing and
its
Ilmor 3.5 L
V10
engine was underpowered by 1994 standards. That season the team
did not finish a single race and from the
French Grand Prix onwards, neither
car qualified. They scored a total of zero points that
season.
By 1995, having merged with the dying
Team
Lotus, things looked up. The obsolete Ilmor engines had been
replaced by
Ford ED V8s and a whole host of
new sponsors were brought in. Good news also came when the PR02 was
guaranteed a start each race, with
Larrousse and Lotus disappearing from the entry
lists and only
Forti coming in. Belmondo had
been replaced with
Andrea
Montermini. Having had no luck in the first half of the season,
team partner Gachot vacated his seat in mid-1995, making way for
two pay-drivers,
Giovanni Lavaggi
and, later,
Jean-Denis
Délétraz. Gachot later returned after the money of the two
pay-drivers dried up, with Pacific's best finishes that season
being 8th in the
German and
Australian Grands
Prix.
Withdrawal and aftermath
At the end of the 1995 season, the team withdrew from Formula One
and Wiggins went back to Formula 3000, resurrecting Pacific Racing
with
Oliver Tichy and
Marc Gené as drivers. Gené left the team
after his accident at Pau, and Tichy continued alone until the team
quit in mid-season.
In 1997 Wiggins also attempted to enter
sportscar racing and the 24 Hours of Le Mans
with a heavily modified BRM chassis known as the P301 and using Nissan
engines. Following a series of failures for the project into
1998, Wiggins closed the team.
Wiggins joined
Lola and helped the
constructor reclaim ground in the
Champ Car World Series. With a
foothold in the United States, the mechanic-turned-team manager
joined up with the
Herdez brewery and in 2000
acquired
Bettenhausen
Motorsports, renaming it
HVM Racing,
which he still runs today. In 2006,
Paul
Stoddart, former owner of the
Minardi
Formula 1 team, bought an interest in the team and re-christened it
Minardi Team USA.
Racing record
Results summary
* Including points scored for other teams.
Complete International Formula 3000 results
(
key)
Complete Formula One results
(
key)
References
- http://www.teamdan.com/archive/1993/janfeb93.html
- http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns00008.html
External links
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