In 1988, the successful F3000 team, FIRST, decided that the time
had come for them to graduate to motorsport's premier league,
Formula One. Talented Italian Gabriele Tarquini was signed up to
drive for the team, and Brazilian designer Richard Divila was
commissioned to design the car. The result was actually quite elegant and purposeful enough. Undoubtedly, as a new team they
would be limited by the fact that they would be running customer
engines, but that aside they looked like the most promising
newcomers there had been in some time. Sadly, the money was never really there to do the job properly, and the project
was quietly canned. The cars themselves were sold off to a little
known Italian engineering concern, Ernesto Vita's Life Racing
Engines, who needed a chassis to act as a testbed with which to
develop their rather unusual W12 engine.
That engine had been designed by Franco Rocchi. Rocchi had been a
prominent engineer in the Ferrari team during the sixties and
seventies, fostering the talent of a young Mauro Forghieri, among
others. Now in his late sixties, the W12 engine was all but
certain to be his final project. A W12 engine has three banks of
four cylinders, as opposed to the more conventional V12 layout in
which the engine has two banks of six cylinders. In theory, a W12
has the advantage of producing as much power as a V12, whilst
being as compact and easy to package as a V8. It was considered a
sufficiently promising concept that fellow engine builder Guy
Negre went down the same route. His W12 was tried out in an AGS
'hack' chassis, and eventually found its' way into the Norma MGN
sports car which ran briefly at Le Mans in 1990. However, the
major disadvantage of the W12 engine is that any engine with
three separate banks of cylinders is necessarily incredibly
complex.
Having failed to persuade any other team to make use of its
engines, Life decided to enter their own team in 1990. Gary
Brabham, son of the double world champion Jack Brabham, was hired
to drive the car, and they duly turned up for the opening race of
the season in Phoenix, Arizona with minimal fanfare. The car was
recognisable as that which Richard Divila had built for FIRST,
although the elegant lines of the original had been
comprehensively butchered in order to accommodate the W12 power
unit. Right from the first race it was all too clear just how
hopelessly out of their depth Ernesto Vita's outfit were. They
even had to borrow a tyre temperature gauge from another team as
they did not have one of their own. As it turned out, there was
precious little need to measure the temperature of the car's
tyres anyway. The car lasted just three laps in pre-qualifying
before the engine gave up. Gary Brabham ended up 43 seconds off
the pace of Gerhard Berger's pole position time.
The team managed to go one worse at the second round in Brazil
when a connecting rod in the W12 engine broke before it had run a
complete lap in pre-qualifying. Sensing that a season with Life
was no way to further his career, Gary Brabham wisely bailed out
at this point.
He was replaced by veteran Italian Bruno Giacomelli, for whom
career prospects had long ceased to be of any great import, and
to whom the idea of spending a summer on the road (if on the
whole, not actually on the track) with the Life team sounded like
a reasonable enough way to kill time. Like Brabham, he was quite
unable to get the car past the prequalifying hurdle, though to be
fair, that was almost certainly a task beyond even Ayrton Senna.
Giacomelli would later recall that the greatest problem with the
car was the engine. The team had no money and almost no spares,
so the engine would become increasingly badly patched up over the
course of the season. They only had one spare engine block
.an
absurd situation in an era when Honda took seven engines to each
race for McLaren. Aside from the total lack of reliability, the
engine was quite hopelessly down on power. On the rare occasions
when it fired on all twelve cylinders, the Life W12 produced
around 375 BHP. To put that into perspective, Honda's V10 was
producing around 700-750BHP in 1990, nearly double that of the
Life. More sobering still, the 1967 Cosworth DFV, which was
actually 500cc smaller, was generally reckoned to have around 450-500
BHP on tap. Whatever the actual figures, the end result was that
Giacomelli's Life was some 40mph slower through the speed traps
at Hockenheim than anyone else. His best pre-qualifying
performance came at Silverstone, when he was a mere 19 seconds
off the pace, around three or four seconds faster than the
Formula 3 boys managed that same weekend.
As it became blindingly obvious that their W12 simply didn't
work, Life swapped their own engine for a rather old Judd V8 unit
for the Portuguese Grand Prix. Unfortunately they couldn't get
the engine cover to fit back onto the car, and once again they
failed to record a time at all in pre-qualifying. They took the
car to Spain where they did succeed in getting a few laps out of
it with the Judd V8, but it was scarcely any quicker than it had
been with the Life W12. Whether it was because the chassis was
awful in itself, or simply because the car was appallingly put
together is unclear, but merely ridding of themselves of the W12
did little to help matters.
The team disappeared completely at the end of the European
season, unable to afford the cost of the trip to the flyaway
races in Japan and Australia. The team was sold to a Viennese
concern with an interest in building racing cars in Leningrad.
What became of the car and its unusual engine is unknown.
Giacomelli remembers how the team, unable to pay him, offered
instead to give him one of their W12 engines. Giacomelli had
since gone on record as saying he regretted turning down their
offer. Such an odd piece of racing history would probably be
worth something by now.
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