It’s that time of the week again: time for us to look at the past teams that made an exit from the sport of Formula One, having scored no points. This week, we remember Scarab.
Scarab was an American sports car racing team that had achieved mild success in late 1950s. The company was owned by British-born American, Lance Reventlow. In 1960, the decision was made to enter into Formula One.
The car was powered by a custom built V4 engine similar to the Offenhauser engine. The downside to the car was that it was a front-engined design, which by that time in Formula One had almost entirely been wiped out by the newer rear-engined layout. The engines were also rather unreliable and the cause of a lot of the team’s performance and endurance issues. A main issue was with the engine’s valves, which was later discovered to have been caused by some incorrect measurements in the diagrams for the engine design.
The team made its Formula One debut in the 1960 Monaco Grand Prix. Reventlow was driving one car, while his chief mechanic, Chuck Daigh, drove the other car. The cars were hopelessly off of the pace of the other competitors and were even lapping slower than some of the Formula Junior cars. Stirling Moss even tested the car to ensure that it was the car to blame for the slow lap times and not just the drivers, but it was indeed the car to blame.
The car performance improved at the Dutch Grand Prix, with the cars able to set some rather competitive lap times. However, some of the rival teams began to question the validity of the lap times and a frustrated Reventlow withdrew the cars from the event, despite having qualified in 15th position.
At the next round in Belgium, Daigh qualified in last position and Reventlow on the row in front. However, the race was short lived for both of the drivers, as Revelentlow’s engine became damaged by a piston after just a single lap and Daigh’s engine ran out of oil less than halfway through the event.
Frustrated by the car’s poor performance, Reventlow had no desire to race the car at the next round in France, instead giving the car to Richie Ginther. The car suffered more engine failures during the first sessions in the race weekend and by race day, the cars had used up all of the spare parts. Neither driver was able to take part in the race because of this.
In one last attempt in Formula One, Daigh was able to convince Reventlow to enter a single car into the United States Grand Prix, the home race of the team. Daigh had made some changes to the car before the race, having lightened it and made some changes to the engine to help improve some reliability issues. It worked, as the American driver claimed a top ten finish in the race.
His failure in Formula One caused Reventlow to lose all interest in motorsport. His Formula One project was closed following the United States Grand Prix and the company only produced a single sports car before closing only a few years later.
Points are a difficult thing to obtain in Formula One. In this weekly series, we will look back the past teams who gave it their all, but fell short.
Points are a difficult thing to obtain in Formula One. In this weekly series, we will look back the past teams who gave it their all, but fell short.
