HRT

Hispania

FIA Entry: HRT F1 Team
Car 22: Narain Karthikeyan
Car 23: Vitantonio Liuzzi
Engin:e Cosworth V8
Team Principal: Colin Kolles
Technical Director: Geoff Willis
Race Engineer Car 22: Angel Baena
Race Engineer Car 23 Richard Connell

Stats as of end 2010

First Entered 2010
Races Entered 19
Race Wins 0
Pole Positions 0
Fastest Laps 0
Driver World Championships 0
Constructor World Championships 0

Campos Racing

Having run cars in lower formulae former F1 driver Adrian Campos secured one of the 3 places for new teams in F1 for 2010. He commissioned Dallara to build a chassis and signed a deal to use Cosworth engines and Xtrac gearboxes. They also announced that Bruno Senna, nephew of Ayrton, would drive for them.

Struggling for funds, especially to pay for the Dallara Chassis, Campos was bought out by major shareholder in Campos Racing Jose Ramon Carabante and the team renamed Hispania Racing Team

HRT

The team’s financial problems meant they were unable to take part in any pre-season testing and arrived at the first race with Karun Chandhok partnering Senna in completely untried cars. Unsurprisingly both cars were somewhat off the pace and retired early on. By Malaysia reliability had improved, if not speed, and both cars finished.

Continuing financial problems meant both Senna and Chandhok were substituted for Sakon Yamamoto, at various races and at the end of the season Christian Klien was drafted in to try and move the team further up the grid. Despite their poor pace the team finished 11th out of 12 in the Constructors Championship on count back of minor placing’s.

2011

Financial problems continue to dog the team into 2011 and they again missed pre-season testing as the new F111 car wasn’t built in time. Jordan driver from 2005 Narain Karthikeyan is partnered by Force India refugee Vitantonio Liuzzi and the team continue with Cosworth engines.

 

[The Pits]

Does that mean that hopefully HRT will get Wurz?

 

[gethinceri]

Yeah, and Jos Verstappen. They'll really make the difference.

 

[RickD]

Well, if they got Jos, they'd probably go with a paint scheme you could see from the moon..

 

[The Pits]

Sorry, I was making a very poor joke.

 

[F1Yorkshire]

Can't be any worse than being the biggest joke on the grid, hopefully this could be the turn around they need.

 

[Olivier]

Talking about jokes, bild.de calls HRT "scrap metal" and warns Vettel and Redbull to be wary of them being used as a weapon against the German to help Alonso win the title. The Spanish media is not flattered though.

http://www.bild.de/sport/motorsport/hrt-f1/gefahr-durch-spanische-schrottkarren-27243310.bild.html

 

[Brogan]

Ahh, good old Bild.
Or Bilge as I like to call it

 

[Senna's_right_foot]

They should have been banned the second they admitted sending the cars out to race in Montreal knowing full well that their brakes would fail sooner rather than later. If I remember rightly, karthikeyan's brakes failed after less than 20 laps.

 

[Jen]

So the brakes lasted longer than Karthikeyan's ability - surely an improvement.

 

[Fenderman]

It's 1:30 am and for some reason I have finally visited this thread for the first time. It must have been accidental because I thought I was in the "Off the Pit Wall" section. Although I found the posts in it really quite funny and entertaining , I think it is rather unfair to keep having a dig at Minardi just because they are so slow. Wasn't it part of the deal to increase the grid to 24 cars that there should be a couple of mobile chicanes in it? There must have been a clause there somewhere to restrict their performance and have them painted orangey/black (similar to warning colours of dodgy insects) otherwise Paul Stoddart wouldn't have signed it.

Oh wait ... um, it's 2012. Damn, I seem to have a skint backmarker team with average drivers in it on the brain .

Phew!

That's a close one. I was about to spend the entire off season clipping in-car Minardi HRT footage into stills to demonstrate how good they should be but aren't .. or something like that ...

Ah, now I temember ... it was something about minnows ...

 

[Slyboogy]

The old man above me has lost it...completely!

 

[Fenderman]

What? You mean Jen was the only one who got it?

Edit: Ah, and Greenlantern101 apparently .. heh, heh.

 

[Slyboogy]

Nah I just think you are mental overall mate

 

[Brogan]

Yesterday was the deadline to pay the entry fees for the 2013 season.
The FIA have released the official entry list and HRT aren't on it, so we have to assume they won't be competing any longer.

http://www.fia.com/sites/default/fi... World Championship Entry List 30.11.2012.pdf

 

[siffert_fan]

Okay, here is a question which the answer can only be conjectural:

How much of the pathetic performance of the HRT squad (and Marussia) is due to the Cosworth being pathetic? No other teams use that engine, so we have no way of knowing. I, for one, would like to see one of those two chassis fitted with another engine and see the difference in performance.

 

[Brogan]

Marussia use it and until this season, Caterham were using it.

Undoubtedly that won't help though as it's a very dated engine and doesn't have the same performance of the others.

 

[Galahad]

Caterham didn't achieve any performance improvement after switching to Renault as far as I could see. Indeed if you factor in the addition of KERS I wonder if they got worse?

It would be surprising if Cosworth, with their available resources, built a engine that was fully the match of Renault, Ferrari or Mercedes-Benz. Still, Patrick Head complimented them on several occasions, and not only when he was a customer. I seem to remember - and I'm sure I won't be able to find a source - that the output figures were competitive, but the engine used a lot more fuel in achieving them than the other engines, leaving the cars overweight at the start of races.

 

[Brogan]

and I'm sure I won't be able to find a source

This is the only source I can find

Then there's the issue of fuel consumption; the Cosworth is by all accounts quite thirsty which means the teams using it require more fuel and hence have a heavier car for most of the race.

 

[Galahad]

Almost certainly wrong then.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Who the hell are HRT?