A motoring miracle

They call it "Aguri Suzuki's Dream" but, in many ways, it is Leafield's very own motoring miracle. For what else can you call a project to create from scratch a Formula 1 team and have a car on the grid in just 100 days.

In a sport in which speed and money are ultimately everything, no one in recent times has seen anything quite like Super Aguri, a team seemingly coming from nowhere at breakneck speed to take its place on the track alongside the likes of Ferrari and Renault.

The dream may have been born in Japan, with Honda providing the horsepower and the former Grand Prix driver Aguri Suzuki the inspiration, but it is being manufactured deep in the countryside of West Oxfordshire, in the former home of Arrows.

The demise of Arrows, which folded in 2002 owing millions to creditors and thousands in unpaid wages, must serve as a salutary reminder to the newboys on the track of what can happen when F1 dreams go wrong.

Yet it has been the availability of the old Arrows headquarters, some of its senior staff and even the 2002-spec Arrows chassis, that has proved crucial in getting Super Aguri to the starting line.

It would be wrong to see Super Aguri as emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of Arrows. But it does look a little like part two in Leafield's bid for F1 glory and trying to do it the hard way.

For as anyone who has watched as much as half a Grand Prix in their lives can tell you, Formula 1 is not a sport that offers much of a chance to rookie teams. And with the completion of the French Grand Prix last weekend, Oxfordshire's third F1 team Renault F1 are based near Enstone and Williams F1 at Grove already has the scars to prove it.

In May, the team endured the humiliation of seeing its rookie driver Yuji Ide being stripped of his Super Licence credentials after a series of catastrophic drives. The team principal was later brutally honest about the driver's inexperience.

"He didn't know the circuits," explained Aguri Suzuki. "He'd just run 200km in a F1 car before Bahrain. He didn't know how to drive a F1 car. He didn't know how to load up the tyres."

And there had also been language problems, explained Suzuki.

"He doesn't speak English. On the pit-to-car radio I had to translate that was very awkward for him and his race engineer. In practice sessions I had to ask, 'Yuji, what do you need now?' And because he's so inexperienced in F1, even I found his answers, given in Japanese, hard to understand."

Soon after, Super Aguri were at the centre of chaotic scenes at the start of the US Grand Prix, with the race by Ide's replacement, Franck Montagny, only lasting a few metres. His SA05 car made contact during an incident at the first corner, with the subsequent chain reaction mle wiping out seven cars.

But, in a way, the team had already won the really big race back in February, defying the sceptics, to win official permission to enter this year's F1 championships. The team had been originally left off the list of 2006 entrants by the FIA, the motor sport's governing body, after being a day late in paying its £30m bond that new applicants must submit as a guarantee. But the team was to successfully reapply, thanks in part to the unanimous support of the competing teams.

Visiting the Leafield headquarters on the eve of the French Grand Prix where Montagny took the chequered flag in 16th position for his home race but Takuma Sato retired on the first lap with a clutch problem is to see just how fast Super Aguri has travelled since becoming the first completely new entry after Toyota appeared on the scene in 2001.

Kevin Lee, the chief operations officer, is a former Arrows employee who had moved to Toyota, when he was offered the chance to go back to Leafield.

He recalls returning to the ultimate starting line: "The place was empty. But those of us who had worked for Arrows had a definite feeling of dj vu."

Rumours had begun to circulate the paddock about a mysterious 11th team last summer. But by the end of last season it was clear that Aguri Suzuki was the man behind it, with the support of ex-Arrows man Daniel Audetto.

As is often the way in F1, a driver's change of team was to have far-reaching consequences and a multi-million pound knock-on effect. In this case, it was the fall-out of Honda's decision to sign Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button for 2006, a move that left Takuma Sato out in the cold and potentially without a drive for the coming year.

It is no exaggeration to say the entire team has been created so Takuma Sato could remain in the sport. For it was apparently to appease Japanese fans that Honda floated the idea of forming a second team, with the Japanese former F1 driver, Aguri Suzuki, stepping in to head the project.

After the takeover of the premises previously used by the Arrows team in Leafield, the priority was a recruitment drive at breakneck speed. By Christmas there were 50 staff. Today the total is about 150.

Daniel Audetto has no doubt that reuniting former colleagues back in Oxfordshire has been crucial. "We have all worked together in the past, so we have been able to concentrate on the business of getting us ready to race, rather than getting to know each other, which has been a huge bonus.

"We are stationed in what we all know is the UK's motorsports valley. You get just about anything made in a very short amount of time."

The team's birth though has, however, been far from easy. Although it had Honda's guarantee to supply them with engines, plans to run the former BAR 007 chassis ended in disappointment. Instead, after acquiring the Arrows factory, it finished up acquiring the former Arrows A23 cars as well, bought from ex-Minardi boss, Paul Stoddart, who himself had acquired them from receivers after Arrows folded.

The team used modified versions of the A23 as a stop-gap, re-named SA05, which look to have had their last race in France.

For in Germany, next weekend jul 30Super Aguri will finally see its long-awaited new car, the SAO6, on the track, after passing all the required FIA crash tests.

"We are not going to win the world championship," said Mr Lee. "So we can take a few more risks than our friends at Renault. We took an unconventional approach to F1. There was no time to do it any other way. But the new car represents a big step forward for us." Midland are the team immediately in Super Aguri's sights and the aim is to finish in the top ten for 2006.

The car's appearance was first hit by a delay in the decision on the specification of gearbox the SA06 should use. There was a further problem when all model testing had to be halted for five days because of a technical problem at the wind tunnel.

The workforce has been faced with having to increase working hours in order to make up for lost ground.

Yet they labour at Leafield in the knowledge that they belong to the "first all-Japanese team". As Audetto, the managing director, put it when asked about the wisdom of taking on such an inexperienced second driver: "We are a Japanese team led by an ex-Japanese Formula 1 driver, with Japanese sponsors and Japanese drivers."

He can be sure of the fact there will be high Japanese expectations, with fans no doubt following with eager anticipation the expected changes in F1, geared towards limiting the massive big boys' investment in making cars ever faster.

"It may be a question that instead of us trying to take impossible steps to catch the other teams, the changes in rules could mean they have to come back to us," said Mr Lee before going to inspect the new car. "We are a make-it-happen bunch here, you know."

He paused to recall the moment he most treasures, when the other F1 teams' engineers applauded in Barcelona as the Super Aguri car finally emerged on the track for a test drive.

"It meant a lot because those guys knew what it had taken to get there," he said. Impressing them a second time may well be a good deal harder.