Having had a fair degree of success in junior single-seaters, Campos Racing made a successful application to move up to F1 as Campos Meta for 2010. The team was only founded in 1998, so team principal Adrian Campos has done a pretty decent job.

Campos himself was a Minardi driver for a couple of seasons, which goes a long way towards making him all right by us, and he can clearly handle himself¹ in the business arena as well, having beaten off stiff competition² in securing the final F1 slot³.

Campos Meta's application included details of deals they had agreed with Cosworth, Dallara and Xtrac, so that's the engine, chassis and gearbox sorted out, which leaves Campos themselves to contribute just the nut that holds the steering wheel. Or Bruno Senna, as he's better known.

However, following a majority buy-out in February 2010, the squad was renamed "Hispania Racing Team" before its inaugural season had even begun, which was (a) good news for the team's future in F1, and (2) an irresistable opportunity to make lots of childish remarks about hot flushes and mood swings.

For the 2012 season the team built its own car for the first time, having previously raced adapted Dallara chassis, and this move really did bring about a significant change in the team's fortunes: after avoiding the final place in the constructors' title in 2010 and 2011, the team trailed home dead last in their third year. They were put up for sale towards the end of the season but failed to find a buyer and quietly went out of business. HRT RIP.

As a mildly diverting footnote, it may be of interest to learn that the "Meta" part of the team's original name referred to Adrian's passion for metaphysics, in particular the concepts of necessity, possibility and the plurality of worlds and how, in conjunction with Leibniz's theories on alternative realities, they might be used to prove that he could have finished in the points if he hadn't been disqualified from the 1987 Brazilian Grand Prix.


¹Fnarr.
²Oik.
³Yip.

Everyone's second favourite team, it says 'ere, Minardi somehow survived in Formula One for 21 years, averaging just over 1.8 points per season, on a budget that should barely have financed a season in Formula BMW.

The team's very first driver, Pierluigi Martini (who enjoyed three spells with the team), went on to score their first point, claim their only front row start and drive the only lap the team ever led. He also scored nearly half the points they ever earned.

Victory sadly eluded the team but Mark Webber's fifth place on his F1 debut in 2002 at Webber's and team owner Paul Stoddart's home race came pretty close to feeling like one. And no-one except Michael Schumacher remembers who won that race.

Lack of funding eventually led to the end of the Minardi name in F1, when the team was sold to Red Bull on the proviso that the team's base remain in Faenza, which is somewhere that the dotdotdotcomma editors really must visit one of these days.

The second incarnation of Virgin Racing, a rebranding instigated when a Russian car maker decided to increase the level of its sponsorship to such an extent that it effectively bought the team. In doing so, it chose to ignore the recent salutary example of Spyker, another supercar manufacturer nobody had ever heard of before its purchase of the former Jordan team and which nobody has really heard of since it sold it again pretty damned quickly.

Changes like this are usually of no great significance to the viewing public but in this case it means that fans will no longer be able to anticipate commentating faux pas, such as "Let's see how this Virgin handles in slippery conditions." For that reason, the name change is a bit disappointing.