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 Token Racing.
Token Racing was briefly a Formula One that competed during the 1974 Formula One season. Near the end of 1973, Rondel Racing, a successful Formula Two team founded by Ron Dennis, was interested in joining the world of Formula One. With financial backing from a French oil company, the team designed a car.
However, in a strange turn of events, the team found themselves without the financial backing required to enter Formula One. The oil crisis of 1973 has hit the oil company badly and the company withdrew their promised backing. As a result, the team was taken over by Tony Vlassopulos and Ken Grob, both of which had provided sponsorship for Rondel Racing.
The team was renamed to Token Racing, a combination of Tony and Ken, and had hired Tom Pryce to race the car in the 1974 non-championship BRDC International Trophy event. The car didn’t make its Formula One debut until the Belgian Grand Prix that same year. Pryce qualified the car in 20th on the grid on his Formula One debut, but collided with another car on lap 66 and retired.
The team entered into the Monaco Grand Prix, but was not allowed to take part because the event organizers felt that Pryce lacked the experience. Pryce later accepted an offer to race for Shadow, the team that he would race for until his death in 1977.
David Purley was called in to replace Pryce for the British Grand Prix, but he didn’t qualify for the event and left the team. At the next round in Germany, Ian Ashley was asked to make his Formula One debut with the car. He was able to run has high as P8 in the race, but a tyre issue put him one lap down in P14 by the end of the race. In Austria, more tyre issues prevented Ashley from completing the required race distance in order to be classified in the results.
After that race, the team’s budget had run dry and the team owners decided to close the operation. The car was sold to Safir Engineering, a British engineering company that entered the car into some non-championship events in 1975.
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.
