The Life And Death of Formula 1’s Most Hopeless Dream: The Bizarre Saga Of Life Racing Engines

In the high-flying, high-dollar world of Formula 1, a win can represent a matter of seconds and a loss a matter of dollars, and in such a high-flying, high-dollar environment, a legend, a legend of such outlandish, such epic failure, will forever exist in legend form: that of Life Racing Engines, a one-season wonder, a one-year marvel, a one-race entrant in 1990, a reflection of dreamers everywhere, but dreamers whose dreams, unfortunately, could not pilot a competitive F1 car.

The Origin of a Vision

Our story opens with Italian businessman Ernesto Vita, whose family name, in a fortuitous coincidence, happens to mean “Life” in English. Vita himself was a dreamer, a dream whose dream, in an exercise in myopic thinking, would not pay off in practice. In the late 1980s, Vita acquired the rights to an unconventional W12 engine concept designed by one-time Ferrari designer Franco Rocchi.

The W12 car was a one-off monstrosity. With V12s then dominant in F1, such a configuration in a W format, with three sets of four cylinders, seemed, on paper, to deliver a V12 level of performance in a V8 weight, and it represented an engineer’s dream: new, potentially groundbreaking, and wholly untested in the high-pressure environment of Formula 1.

Bold in a misguided direction, Vita took it upon himself to revolutionize the sport with this new unit of power. Vita approached several current teams, in an endeavour to try and find a willing participant in a gamble with his engine. Not surprisingly, in consideration of most F1 teams’ reluctance to gamble with untried technology, Vita could not find any takers.

Not undismayed at such disappointment, Vita took a step that started one of the most tragicomic years in F1 history. In case no one in current form would have him, he’d start a new one himself. And so, Life Racing Engines was born, with operations in Formigine, not a long distance from Ferrari’s holy precincts in Modena.

A Car is Born. Sort of

Without a budget and with no expertise in the high-tech environment of Formula 1 car development, Life could not possibly have designed a chassis in-house. Instead, therefore, they have taken recourse to the secondary car marketplace of F1, assuming such a monstrosity even exists.

They discovered salvation in an unbuilt chassis of a failed First Racing team. Designed for 1989, but not yet having seen a wheel, it sat in a state of limbo, having folded even before attempting to make a qualifying run for a race, and therefore a perfect base for a doomed-to-fail team to start with.

The Life crew rushed to modify a one-year-old design to make it compatible with the W12 unit. What developed was baptized with the name of Life L190, a Frankenstein’s monster of a racer that even in its first foray onto a racetrack, appeared outdated.

The W12, in theory, a breakthrough, in reality, woefully under-powered, with a 480 horsepower output, below its 600-700 horsepower competition level. To make its problem even worse, its chassis, at 530 kg, was one of the largest and most bulky in its field, a long, long distance removed from Ferrari and McLaren’s slender cars.

The dream team

For its maiden campaign, Life recruited a three-time champion’s son, Sir Jack Brabham, Gary Brabham. Gary, whose illustrious name, ironically, boasted little high-level motorsport heritage, at best, having won a British Formula 3000 title in 1989. Yet, a Brabham, and a name, helped lend a modicum of legitimacy to a new and unproven outfit.

They signed Franco Scapini, not for any distinguished record in lesser formula, but for availability and willingness to lend face and name to such an untried cause.

The car was completed in February 1990, with hardly any testing time between then and opening weekend in Phoenix, Arizona. It soon became apparent that the L190 was not slow, but horribly, embarrassingly slow. In early testing at Vallelunga, the car could make no more than a dozen or two runs at a stretch before shutting down. On its best runs, it could hardly beat a well-handled streetcar.

A Year of Humiliation

The 1990 Formula 1 season involved a brutal pre-qualifying session for slow cars, with a mere four cars qualifying through to the actual qualifying session. For Life, pre-qualifying became an insurmountable hurdle that could not be overcome in any form.

The best lap in Phoenix for Brabham was a whopping 30 seconds under the slowest car in competition. To gain an idea, in a competition in which a fraction of a second can mean a first and a last, Life was in a whole different zone.

The situation grew desperate enough for him to leave in two races, not wishing to embarrass himself any further. In a farewell shot, in a parting message, it was tactful but condemnatory: “I joined thinking it could work, but it soon became apparent that it couldn’t.”

Now that Brabham was gone, Life had a new pilot in mind. In comes Bruno Giacomelli, a seasoned pilot who hadn’t competed in an F1 car in 1983. Giacomelli, no doubt spurred on by Vita’s $30,000-per-race offering (spoiler: he saw not a single one of them), took it upon himself to drive the Life L190.

The Hits Never Stop

Track for track, the crew for Life visited circuits all over the globe, and with each, new lows in humiliation in store for them. Not only did they fall short in performance, but even in absurdity, they descended.

In Mexico, Giacomelli took one lap with a failure in the engine. How long? 4 minutes and 4 seconds. To put that in a little perspective, 1 minute 17 seconds took the record for starting position. Life was actually lapped in an attempt at a single flying lap.

Optimistically, at Paul Ricard, Giacomelli cried, “The engine was perfect, but it doesn’t yet have the kind of reliability we require.” On a best lap of 2 minutes 10 seconds, a full minute adrift, Giacomelli could hardly have been much less competitive, and the team press releases began taking a surreal tone, announcing minor improvements and glossing over a chasm of almost laughable proportions between them and even the slowest competitor.

The misery of the team wasn’t limited to pace or lack of pace. On its out lap at Silverstone, its undertray popped off. In Hungary, its engine overreached. With every new grand prix, new and inventive failures lay in store for the Life L190.

The most surreal moment, possibly, at Estoril involved Fate at long, long last deciding to drop W12 for a traditional V8 Judd, but in a mad dash to change, not checking whether a cover for it could fit. It couldn’t, and during its first lap, a cover flew off, adding a whiff of slapstick to a long run of events in a catastrophic direction for the team.

The Closing Curtain

The performance of Life grew ever more absurd week in and week out during the campaign. In Belgium, Giacomelli finished but two circuits when a blow in the engine compelled him out of contention. “A fine boom, that one,” chuckled Giacomelli, ever one for a laugh in defeat.

By the Portuguese Grand Prix, with its budget drained and no hope for improvement, the team disintegrated. Having not even qualified for a single Grand Prix, consistently outpacing even Formula 3 cars, their best performance, and even that a stretch, in Britain, saw them 19 seconds adrift in pre-qualifying.

The Legacy of Life

They have become a legend in a cautionary manner, a benchmark for failure in Formula 1, in years gone by, having become a record for not pre-qualifying, not qualifying, not starting, and not completing a single grand prix in all its entries in F1 history.

But there is a beauty in the narrative of life, too. In an era of omnipresence, big business, and multimillion-dollar budgets, Life is one of a kind, a collection of dreamers who dreamed of taking a stand in a universe with nothing but determination and a new idea.

The W12 Engine: A Never Realized Aspiration

The W12 at the failure’s heart, engineered by a former Ferrari designer Franco Rocchi, was an out-of-the-box thinking exercise in its bold form. With four cylinders in a W configuration in three sets, it was a try at having a V8’s narrowness and a V12’s horsepower in one unit.

In theory, the design had several advantages. It was shorter than a conventional V12, which should have allowed for better weight distribution. It also had a lower center of gravity, which could have improved handling. However, these theoretical advantages were never realized in practice.

The car’s engine saw numerous faults. It under-powered at a mere 480 horsepower when modern cars’ engines in F1 produced 600-700 horsepower. It even couldn’t survive even a dozen runs at a stretch, with a failure propensity in its early days.

Perhaps most significant, the car was incredibly difficult to maintain. With its sophisticated engineering, even simple maintenance jobs became big deals. With its sophisticated engineering and Life’s limited capabilities and expertise, its crew struggled simply to make the car go, not to say run competitively.

The Drivers: Unsung Heroes

Where Gary Brabham’s stint with the team was a kind one, Bruno Giacomelli is memorable for determination. Giacomelli, a one-time F1 runner-up with Alfa Romeo, hadn’t seen an F1 grid in seven years when he joined Life.

To contrast with the futility of events, Giacomelli approached each competition with a level of professionalism and, remarkably, humor. Giacomelli gained a reputation for having a tongue-in-cheek post-race comment, finding humor in an undeniably infuriating ordeal.

The best expression of Giacomelli’s frame of mind could have been seen in his reaction to yet another failed engine: “We’re at least consistent, consistently slow.” Keeping morale high in the face of continuous disappointment and not allowing any one failure to discourage him was probably Life’s greatest achievement in 1990.

The Impact On Formula 1

Although its period in F1 was short and disappointing, it did have a lasting impact in that its failure helped to make new entrants into the championship even stricter. The FIA added stricter financial and technical requirements for new entrants, in an effort to make new entrants for future years a little less unprepared for life in F1.

The privateer’s life, too, is a reminder of the less glitz and glory side of the sport. For every Ferrari and every McLaren, there have been numerous small, under-funded privateers scrapping for survival. Life’s life, possibly, was most extreme, but it continued a long line of under-funded, out-classed privateers striving to make a name for themselves in the most expensive form of motorsport in the world.

Epilogue: Life After Life

Astoundingly, the Life L190 lives on. The car was restored and entered at 2009’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, when it continued in character and started to smoke halfway through the hill climb. Today, it resides in a private collection, a concrete reminder of one of F1’s most surreal times.

Ernesto Vita, a dreamer in the group, became a name no one ever heard about with the failure of Life. W12 thinking, however, took off in a vastly disparate direction. Volkswagen developed a W12 for production cars, utilizing it in high-performance vehicles such as the Bentley Continental GT and Volkswagen Phaeton.

What Having High Hopes Can Do

Now, Life Engines for Racing is a side note in F1 history, a gag to failure in car-racing humor. Perhaps, then, we can’t rejudge them. In a car race filled with ever-growing corporate presence and caution-first executives, Life bet big and dreamed big and failed big, too.

They could have been the most disastrous team in the history of Formula 1, but they were one of its most memorable ones too. Theirs is a reminder that sometimes, not necessarily getting to your destination, but getting through your journey, is enough. Life Racing Engines failed in any traditional terms, but they etched an unforgettable mark in the sport.

In the end, isn’t that what life—and Life—is all about? To dare greatly, to strive valiantly, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Life Racing Engines may have failed on the track, but in the annals of Formula 1 folklore, they achieved a kind of immortality. They are proof that sometimes, it’s better to aim for the stars and miss than to never leave the ground at all.