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 Kauhsen.
Kauhsen was a racing team founded by Willi Kauhsen, a former sportscar driver. Originally starting with modified Renault cars in the Formula Two series in 1976 and 1977. Despite limited success in Formula Two, Kauhsen shifted his focus to Formula One.
Kauhsen originally planned to enter into the 1978 season with cars used by the failed Kojima team. The deal failed, so Kauhsen hired Klaus Kapitza to design a copy of the Lotus car that was dominating the 1978 Formula One season. Kauhsen bought a supply of Cosworth engines for the car.
The team failed to get the ground effects engineering concept to work properly on their car and had to redesign the entire car, eventually abandoning the concept. The expensive design process put Kauhsen in finance troubles before the season even began. Nevertheless, Kauhsen was able to scrape together enough money to pay the entry fee into the sport and acquire some old Goodyear tyres for the car.
After an early retirement from the car’s debut at a non-championship race in Belgium, the car was again modified for its first Formula One appearance at the Spanish Grand Prix in 1979. The car was horribly off of the pace and was the slowest out of all of the entries. It failed to qualify for the race. More modifications later, the team car was ready for the Belgian Grand Prix, but again failed to qualify.
With two failures under their belt, the team was closed and broke. The team assets were sold to the Merzario Formula One team in a failed attempt to improve their own performance in the sport.
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.
