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 Trojan.
Trojan was a car manufacturer founded in 1914, but it wasn’t until the business was sold to Peter Agg in the ‘60s that the team began in motorsport. The company purchased the Elva sports car company and began producing sports cars for McLaren.
With some assistance from Ron Tauranac, the co-founder of the Brabham team, Trojan was able to put together a car for the 1974 Formula One season. The year before, the company had developed an open-wheel racing car that McLaren refused to produce. This was the basis for the team’s Formula One chassis. With a Ford engine in the rear, the team hired Tim Schenken to race the car.
The Trojan car made its debut in the Spanish Grand Prix that season. The car qualified near the back of the grid and Schenken was the last of the running cars, although he spun off with less than ten laps remaining in the race. The race result was a bit better in Belgium, although qualifying performance was still low. Schenken finished 2 laps down in P10.
Monaco didn’t go well for the team, as the car was caught in a first lap collision that took out many of the cars. The team skipped the Swedish Grand Prix, failed to qualify for the Dutch Grand Prix and skipped France. The car returned to the grid for the British Grand Prix, but an early suspension failure ended the team’s day.
The team didn’t qualify for the German Grand Prix, but they finished in tenth position at the Austrian Grand Prix. The team’s final race was in Italy, although they never finished the race because of a mechanical issue. The team did not compete in the final two non-European rounds of the season. The company did not continue their Formula One operations, opting to focus on sports cars instead.
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.
