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Andrea Sassetti buys out Coloni and enters F1 with fanfare
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The teams featured on this site have one thing in common: they all failed to succeed in Formula One. What they don't share is why they failed. For all their good intentions, Life and Kauhsen had equipment that was so inept and unreliable it was best left for a junkyard. Rial had a rather uneven-tempered team boss. Teams like Pacific simply never had enough money. The MasterCard Lola fiasco was an example of rushing things so much that nothing was done properly. And in its second year the Onyx story featured antics that descended into the realm of farce.
Now add all that together, multiply by a factor of at least ten for bizarreness, and you can start to comprehend the reasons why many nominate Andrea Moda Formula as the worst team in Grand Prix history. In a 1992 season dominated to the point of boredom by Williams, the wacky goings-on at the other end of the pit lane at the team owned by Italian shoe magnate Andrea Sassetti often provided a macabre sort of amusement for those willing to be charitable. Those who weren't were left shaking their heads, wondering if this could honestly be a serious professional racing outfit.
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The Andrea Moda story began towards the end of 1991, when Enzo Coloni decided to give up on his Coloni F1 team, four full seasons in F1 having reaped little more than a litany of DNQs and DNPQs. By the Spanish GP that year, it was announced that the team had been bought for 8 million pounds, and as it turned out, Sassetti was the mystery purchaser. Renaming the team after his fashion business, he had lined up a Judd engine and a Dallara gearbox for the 1992 season, and intended to use them in the back of the existing Coloni C4 chassis.
Though in the early 1990s the announcement of plans for a new team was not exactly earth-shattering, right from the start Andrea Moda and its wealthy flamboyant playboy owner were out to attract headlines. According to Formula One International magazine, when the original deal was announced Sassetti had his Scottish girlfriend guard his motorhome, her rather statuesque figure attracting "the usual welter of randy lensmen". Eager to invite publicity, he also produced a lavish brochure, notably featuring a "shadowy, nude female saxophonist".
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The Coloni C4 dressed up in an Andrea Moda paint job, driven by Alex Caffi at Kyalami.
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A new team? Or not a new team?
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During the off-season, Sassetti also signed two Italian drivers. One was the formerly highly-regarded Alex Caffi, whose injuries and poor form had made him a persona non grata at Footwork throughout 1991. The other was Enrico Bertaggia, who had previously failed to pre-qualify a Coloni in several events in late 1989. Both of them showed up for round one of the 1992 season in South Africa, along with the old Coloni C4 decked out in Andrea Moda's all-black colour scheme, but before they saw any track action trouble was beginning to brew.
A wrangle had broken out over whether or not Andrea Moda was technically a new team, and therefore required to pay the US$100,000 fee for a new entrant. Sassetti thought he had merely taken over Coloni's entry and given it a new name. In addition, there had been precedents in the previous few years. March had become Leyton House in 1989 only to revert to being March again in 1992. Arrows and Osella had become Footwork and Fondmetal respectively in 1991. And Larrousse was lining up for the 1992 season as Venturi Larrousse. None of these teams had been required to pay a new team fee.
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Sassetti therefore thought he was on safe ground. So, when an extra acclimatisation session was held on Thursday, because the revised Kyalami being a new track on the calendar, Caffi was sent out for a few laps. Both drivers anticipated having to battle four other drivers the next morning in pre-qualifying, but neither ended up getting the chance. Officials decided that Andrea Moda was a new team after all; Enzo Coloni had sold Sassetti his team's equipment but not his team's entry. Without having paid the entrance fee, Andrea Moda was scratched from the meet.
That left only thirty entries, and for the first time in a long time, the dreaded pre-qualifying was unnecessary. There was also talk since Andrea Moda was a new team, they would not be allowed to use exactly the same cars that had been previously raced by a different team. For whatever reason, after South Africa, Sassetti decided - wisely - that the Coloni C4 chassis wasn't worth the price of its paint job, and through contacts in Britain got in touch with Nick Wirth of the Simtek design company. Wirth had designs on paper for an F1 car that was reputed to be the prototype for BMW's aborted plans to enter F1 by themselves.
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Andrea Moda launching its new Nick Wirth-designed S921!
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