The short, dazzling story of Leyton House in F1: Marching to civil war

It’s March 24 1993, and the team that coincidentally shares its name with that calendar month finally withdraws from the Formula One World Championship, unable to pay for the Ilmor V10 engines with which it intends to plug on for another season. It’s the classic case of an F1 squad hobbling to its grave after spending months on the life-support machine. Just another statistic.

Five years earlier March was the most exciting team in the business. McLaren dominated in 1988, only Ferrari able to offer a token challenge. But in only the second year of its F1 reincarnation, March and lead driver Ivan Capelli had looked capable of shaking up the old order. Better still, the team was colourful, young and oozing spirit. Everyone was rooting for the little Italian guy who looked like Dustin Hoffman and his tiny turquoise machine.

Actually, for ‘turquoise’ read ‘Miami Blue’. This was a team which, bizarrely, was sponsored by a lifestyle marketing exercise based on a colour… How 1980s!  And how sad that it should dissolve within five years of stunning drives from Capelli in the ’88 Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese grands prix, destroyed by the imprisonment of its primary backer, illness, a fatal car crash and unbearable internal politics…

The factory was empty. the phone lines were cut off

The story began in 1986 when Akira Akagi, chairman of a large Japanese property company and attempting to promote his new Leyton House lifestyle brand, formed Leyton House Racing. The team was to run the promising Akira Hagiwara in the major Japanese championships, but Hagiwara was killed in a springtime testing accident at Sugo in a Mercedes 190 touring car. Akagi transferred his colours onto a TOM’S-run Dome-Toyota for the Le Mans 24 Hours. The following weekend, still seeking a replacement driver for his Formula Two March-Yamaha, he attended the Formula 3000 race at Imola.

“The man who physically introduced me to Mr Akagi is now the big boss of Bridgestone, Mr (Hiroshi) Yasukawa, who was following F3000 in Europe at the time,” remembers Capelli. Struggling for funds to complete the season in his Genoa Racing March, Capelli was keen to race for Leyton House in Japan and earn some much-needed prize money: “I said to Mr Akagi, ‘OK, you will give me 30 per cent of the prize money.’ After I finished second for him at Fuji I was in his office and asked to check the money, and when I did I realised it was 50 per cent. So I was giving back the money to him and he said, ‘No, no, you can keep it.’ From that good feeling between us we started to talk about sponsorship of my F3000, and then he gave me more money to continue in Europe.”

With his F3000 car now bearing Leyton House colours, Capelli won the Austrian GP support race on his way to the title. And his luck still hadn’t run out… After the last of his three races in Japan, Ivan and his big pal Cesare Gariboldi (the boss of Genoa Racing) were in more discussions with Akagi. “We were still talking as we went to the airport,” says Capelli, “and finally at the airport we shook hands and Mr Akagi said to me, ‘You are in F1 and I will give you four million dollars!”

Ian Phillips was a party to this. An Autosport journalist, Phillips was a friend of Capelli’s and Gariboldi’s from covering F3000. He was also working in Japan in ’86, looking after Marlboro’s sponsorship of Mike Thackwell with the Nova F2 team. Capelli had some Marlboro backing, so he also became Phillips’s responsibility in Japan.

The FIA had announced that turbos were to be banned from F1 for 1989, with naturally-aspirated engines being phased in through ’87 and ’88. The time was ripe for March to make a low-key return to the sport’s pinnacle. For Capelli and Gariboldi, the Italian importer for March, this was an obvious liaison.

Another figure close to Phillips was March boss Robin Herd. Phillips recalls: “About six weeks later Robin phoned me and said, ‘How would you like to run an F1 team? There’s a factory ready to go. You’ve got 24 hours to make up your mind.’ I agreed, but when I got there the factory was empty, the phone lines and gas were cut off… I didn’t know a mill from a lathe!”

On track the CG891 (the ‘CG’ a tribute to Gariboldi) was struggling too. “We were overambitious in the design,” says Newey, “plus the new Judd engine was a step backwards. When you look through the history books a new team that does well often flounders the next year — in our case in ’88 we were trying to develop the current car at the same time as designing the ’89 car. We didn’t have the infrastructure.”

Capelli failed to score a single point, the season only lightened by Gugelmin’s third place in Brazil (in the old 881), and things were similarly bleak in 1990. At Mexico in June, both cars failed to qualify.

Newey takes up the story: “We used the Southampton wind-tunnel on which — amazingly we hadn’t realised — the rolling road was aluminium sheets with a wooden centre core. That had started distorting with heat, so it was getting more and more bowed. So we were developing cars that had we been racing on bowed tracks would have been fantastic! We finally realised it in the spring of 1990, put it right and redeveloped the aerodynamics (through underbody modifications).”

Just two weeks after Mexico, Capelli led the French GP for 45 laps (with Gugelmin behind him for a while) and was only passed by Prost’s Ferrari with three laps remaining. It was an amazing turnaround, but neither Phillips nor Newey were at the post-race celebrations…

At the Brazilian GP Phillips had been taken ill with meningitis. Leyton House was also running into financial problems. “Akagi was starting to struggle,” says Newey. “He borrowed heavily against the banks but had to be seen to be still in F1, because if he pulled out the banks would have wondered why. He was playing a poker game on the minimum cost possible, so he was reducing the budget constantly and brought in an accountant (Simon Keeble). When Ian had his meningitis Keeble suddenly assumed power and that really was the beginning of the end — having an accountant running an F1 team was a disaster. He and I fell out in a big way.”

Newey already had an offer from Williams and, encouraged by Ian Phillips, (“It was the right thing for the good of his career”), accepted it.

As well as fighting his illness, Phillips was also the intended victim of an intra-team coup, his position rescued by Capelli. “Ivan was the prime mover to save my job,” he says. “The entire race team supported him. There were these complete clowns who had seen the opportunity to get in.” Including Keeble? “I won’t comment.”

Phillips made his return at the Hungarian GP, but at the end of the year accepted an offer to join the new Jordan F1 team for 1991.

Before his departure to Williams in mid-1990, Newey had already started work on what would have been the Leyton House CG911. “Adrian left it all on the drawing board, but the person who took over probably didn’t realise that the car he’d left there turned out to be the ’91 Williams!” chuckles Phillips. “Everything looked like it. We were quite well ahead with active suspension and things like that.”

Newey concurs, but adds that his “active platform control device” was superior to the Williams system, derived from the AP road car format, and that the platform system was first used in F1 by McLaren in 1993, when Senna ran Williams far closer than he should have done…