F1's most expensive failures: The list Aston Martin wants to stay off

Fernando Alonso missed the entire opening practice session without turning a wheel.

Newey, one of the most celebrated designers in the championship’s history and now also team principal, admitted to feeling “powerless” as Aston Martin faces months of struggle before a real solution is implemented.

The irony is almost too perfect: Honda had already subjected this precise driver to this precise misery once before. The ghosts of Suzuka 2015 were stirring again.

Aston Martin’s plight is extreme, but it is not without precedent. These are the teams that fell farthest.

BAR (1999-2002)

There has rarely been a more magnificently ill-judged entrance in Formula 1 history than that of British American Racing (BAR).

Funded by the tobacco billions of British American Tobacco and conceived by Craig Pollock – manager of then reigning world champion Jacques Villeneuve – BAR arrived for its 1999 debut with the kind of promotional fanfare usually reserved for moon landings.

At the launch of the BAR 001, Pollock and his associates spoke openly about winning in its maiden season.

The reality was catastrophic.

Villeneuve began the year with 11 consecutive retirements

The BAR 001 proved to be a car of near-historic unreliability. Villeneuve began the year with 11 consecutive retirements, a streak of mechanical ignominy that lasted until the Belgian Grand Prix in August.

The team did not score a single point all season, a result that seemed almost impossible given the resources deployed.

Off track, things were scarcely better.

Internal reports later suggested that BAR’s considerable budget had been spent at a rate that left little for the car’s actual development.

The team’s behaviour over its controversial dual-livery scheme — two cars painted in different colours to satisfy two tobacco brands — had already irritated the governing body and the paddock alike. BAR took the dispute to international arbitration, lost, and was ordered to pay the FIA’s legal costs.

BAR’s fortunes improved in 2000, scoring 20 points on its way to fifth in the standings, then dropping to sixth with 17 points in 2001. By 2002, after a revolving door of technical staff, BAR had sunk to eighth in the constructors’ standings, managing just seven points across the season.

Pollock had already stepped down at the end of 2001, and it fell to his replacement David Richards to rebuild the technical operation from scratch.

The turnaround eventually came. Honda, which had supplied BAR’s engines, bought a 45% stake in the team in January 2005 and completed a full buyout later that year. For the 2006 season, the team was rebranded as Honda Racing F1, competing as a full manufacturer constructor.

BAR’s story was a perfect illustration of the gap between marketing confidence and engineering reality.

Jaguar (2000–2004)

When Ford bought Jackie Stewart‘s respected little team at the end of 1999, the corporate ambitions could scarcely have been stated more boldly.

At Jaguar Racing’s official launch, Ford executive Wolfgang Reitzle spoke of winning races in 2000 and challenging for the championship two years later.

The F1 paddock absorbed this with the weary scepticism of those who have seen manufacturers arrive before.

The paddock, as it turned out, was right.

Jaguar’s five seasons in Formula 1 produced two podium finishes — Eddie Irvine finishing third at Monaco in 2001, and third again at Monza later that year — and a best constructors’ position of seventh, achieved three times. Estimates of Ford’s total expenditure on the exercise vary widely, ranging from $300 million to over $1 billion.

F1 got in return a team that cycled through at least five different team principals in five years, a level of management instability that left it perpetually unable to build the continuity that competitiveness demands. At various points, Neil Ressler, Bobby Rahal, Niki Lauda, and others were brought in to arrest the decline, each departure more chaotic than the last.

Those who worked inside the team described an operation strangled by Ford’s corporate bureaucracy – unable to criticise the Cosworth engines it was forced to run because Ford owned that company too, prevented from taking the risks that F1 engineering demands, hamstrung by executives in Detroit who thought they understood a sport they manifestly did not.

The most fitting epilogue to the whole sorry enterprise came in 2004, when Ford sold the team to Red Bull for £1.

Red Bull, given proper autonomy and clear direction, would go on to dominate F1 for much of the following two decades.

The foundations Jaguar had laid were entirely adequate. The only thing missing had been the freedom to use them.

Toyota (2002–2009)

The Toyota F1 project stands as one of the most expensive failures in F1’s history – a monument to the proposition that corporate scale, applied to the anarchic world of grand prix racing, can produce precisely nothing.

The problems were structural from the outset. Toyota chose to base its operation not in England’s Motorsport Valley, where the vast majority of F1 knowledge and personnel were concentrated, but in Cologne, Germany. This made recruiting experienced F1 staff considerably harder.

The team was never quite given the autonomy that success in F1 demands. Senior management in Japan exercised oversight in ways that frustrated racing people at every level.

In 2006, Toyota switched from Michelin to Bridgestone tyres – a move that became moot the following year when Michelin withdrew from F1 entirely, leaving Bridgestone as the mandatory sole supplier for every team on the grid.

The transition nonetheless coincided with a sharp decline in competitiveness: from 35 points and sixth in the constructors’ standings in 2006, the team fell to just 13 points in 2007, retaining sixth place but effectively going backwards while rivals improved.

The tragedy is that by 2009, Toyota was genuinely competitive – its TF109 one of only three cars, alongside Brawn GP and Williams, running the double-diffuser loophole that transformed that season.

Jarno Trulli took pole in Bahrain, only for a strategic miscalculation to relegate him to third behind Jenson Button and Sebastian Vettel, denying him the win that would have changed the entire narrative of the project.

Three weeks later, Toyota announced its withdrawal.

The following year’s car – the TF110, widely believed to be the best Toyota had designed – never raced.

Honda (2006-2008)

The Honda works team story has a shape unlike any of the others on this list, because it ends not in humiliation but in one of F1’s most extraordinary escapes – just not one Honda could claim full credit for.

Having bought out BAR entirely in 2005, Honda set about building a fully integrated works operation for the 2006 season.

The signs were initially encouraging: Jenson Button won in Hungary in 2006, a genuinely joyful result and the team’s only race victory. Then things fell apart in spectacular and rather baffling fashion.

The 2007 car, designed with the benefit of a new wind tunnel at Brackley, proved to be slower than the previous year’s machine. The wind tunnel, as it eventually emerged, had not been properly calibrated. The chassis and engine departments had failed to communicate adequately, each pulling in a different direction.

Super Aguri, running the previous year’s Honda chassis as a customer team, was consistently faster than the works cars. Honda had spent a lot of money to field the slowest competitive car on the grid. The team finished eighth in the constructors’ championship in 2007 with just 6 points.

By 2008, with development increasingly focused on the following year’s regulations, the situation had improved only marginally in points terms — Honda scored 14 points — but the increased competitiveness of the midfield meant they finished ninth, one place lower than the year before.

Then, on December 5, 2008, Honda announced its immediate withdrawal from Formula 1, citing the global financial crisis. The factory, a staff of around 800, the half-built cars – all left in limbo overnight.

Ross Brawn led a management buyout, acquiring the team for a nominal £1. Honda provided substantial financial support to cover transition costs, with figures cited at the time in the region of $90 million.

Brawn’s team, freed from corporate oversight and running on Mercedes engines, won the drivers’ and constructors’ championships in its single season of existence.

The 2009 car had been developed under Brawn’s technical leadership using Honda’s resources – a product of both, and a world-beater either way.

McLaren-Honda (2015-2017)

There are failures in Formula 1, and then there are spectacular, slow-motion, played-out-in-front-of-the-world failures. The second coming of McLaren-Honda belongs in the latter category.

When the partnership was announced, the nostalgic logic was appealing: the two names that had dominated F1 between 1988 and 1991, reunited for the hybrid era.

Honda, it was assumed, had spent decades preparing for this moment. In pre-season testing in Jerez in 2015, Fernando Alonso completed just seven laps across the first two days, a figure that came to symbolise the whole misadventure, even if the team’s total across all four days reached 79.

The root of the disaster was a fundamental architectural miscalculation within the Honda power unit – the turbocharger had been designed too small to sit within the engine’s vee, a layout choice that placed a permanent ceiling on performance and would take over half the season merely to diagnose, let alone remedy.

During that time, the car was running somewhere in the region of 200bhp down on the leading Mercedes-engined cars at certain points of a lap.

At the Japanese Grand Prix, Honda’s home race, Alonso’s frustration finally boiled over publicly. Passed on the start/finish straight, he told his engineer: “This is embarrassing, very embarrassing.” Seconds later came the line that defined the era: “GP2 engine, GP2.”

The clip became one of the defining moments of modern F1.

By 2017, the third and final season of the partnership, virtually nothing had improved. McLaren was severely restricted throughout pre-season testing – while Mercedes completed over 1,000 laps across eight days, McLaren managed a fraction of that. Honda was reportedly running more engines during testing than it was permitted to use across an entire season.

The team suffered double retirements in China, Monaco and Italy. The relationship, already poisoned, collapsed entirely in Singapore when McLaren announced it would switch to Renault power.

Honda would go on to supply Red Bull and win championships.

The cruellest detail for Aston Martin’s current predicament: Alonso was the driver destroyed once before, and Honda is the supplier doing the damage once again.