It seems that Brabham, one of the hallowed names of F1, has filed an entry for the 2010 season along with the other hopefuls. That includes March, another well known name from the past although not quite as illustrious as Black Jack's and Bernie's old team. For a moment, it might seem that the great and carefree days of the seventies are about to return.
We should remember, however, that these are not the teams as we knew them; the rights to the names were sold after their demise and nothing remains of the actual teams themselves. These are effectively new start-ups, therefore, with perhaps even less chance of success than the GP2 teams moving up to try their luck. One can only hope that, should these two teams ever appear in the starting line-up for a GP, they do not completely shame the glorious names they have assumed.
Max Mosley's old team, March, has rather less to live up to than Brabham, having never won an F1 championship in its previous incarnations. Perhaps its greatest claim to fame was not the early days of Mosley involvement but the March-Judd 881, the first F1 car to showcase the talents of a young designer named Adrian Newey.
Brabham, however, is a name that will be hard for any new team to live up to. Founded on solid, no-nonsense values, its cars earned championships for Sir Jack himself and Denny Hulme before being sold to Bernie Ecclestone. Thanks to the expertise of Bernie's designer, Gordon Murray, the team was soon winning GPs again and provided Nelson Piquet with two of his three championships in the eighties. The decline after Murray left and Bernie sold the team is best forgotten, especially as it might prove an ominous pointer to the new entrant's chances.
Which leaves me in two minds regarding the revival of these old names. It would be wonderful to see them return with anything more than a shadow of their previous gravitas but this is unlikely, to say the least. One might even suspect that the entries have been made with a view to selling on to whichever FOTA teams find themselves excluded by Max's intransigence over the budget cap.
That such an idea should even occur to me is surely an indication of how low our expectations of the politics of F1 have become. Just as money is threatening to be the cause of the sport's degeneration into farce, so it appears also as a possible motivator for the wannabe teams lining up for entrance. And since when did any team in F1 participate for profit? It is traditionally an expensive game and teams have been fortunate to survive financially from year to year.
Not that I would argue for the continued spending of astronomical figures by the existing teams. Obviously, each team has to cut its cloth according to the means available and there was always going to be less money to spend in the near future. It is this strange idea that competing in F1 should be a profitable business that does not seem right. If that is now the ruling motivation behind the sport, it seems that the spirit of Minardi is indeed gone forever.