Epic Fail: Minardi

“I've not failed,” Thomas Edison once said. “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And when it came to winning Formula One races, no team found more ways that didn’t work than Minardi, the plucky Italian outfit that, over 21 glorious years, became a byword for wholehearted motorsport failure.

A family business, Minardi competed in Formula Two in the early 1980s. The fact this yielded no great success failed to dissuade the team from stepping up to F1 in 1985, where it continued its admirable strategy of ‘losing, but enthusiastically’.

The stats are impressive, just not necessarily in a good way. Over two decades in F1, Minardi contested 346 races and some 20,000 laps in total. Championships? Zero. Wins? Zero. Podium finishes? Also zero.

The closest the team came to flirting with victory was at the 1989 Portuguese Grand Prix, where lead driver Pierluigi Martini held first place for a grand total of... a lap. Minardi’s zenith – the term is relative – arrived in the early 1990s, an era that yielded a hat trick of fourth place finishes.

But as the big budget teams became ever bigger, Minardi fell further to the back of the field. In 2005, the team was purchased by Red Bull, becoming Scuderia Toro Rosso. In just a couple of years, TR secured the win that had eluded Minardi for so long, a prepubescent Seb Vettel taking victory at the Italian Grand Prix. Heartwarming and all, but must also have stung a bit.

So, yes, Minardi was an epic failure. But also a noble one. Over its decades suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Minardi wore its backmarker status with grace and humour, earning a deserved reputation for championing the small teams, for engineering creativity, and for nurturing young talent including Fernando Alonso and Mark Webber.

Sure, they bombed. But they bombed with passion, and a smile, and kept coming back for more.