Sidepodcast - All for F1 and F1 for all

A little piece of the auction - HRT chassis still going nowhere, long after F1

Published by Christine

Liuzzi looks on
Credit: Hispania Racing

It's been just four short months since HRT went missing from Formula One, and it hasn't taken long for them to be forgotten about. The battle of the backmarkers continues with just four participants, and the first session of qualifying is actually more interesting without them.

One company trying to forget the team but currently struggling to do so is Pirelli, who have a 2011 HRT F1 chassis on their hands, and want to shift it. The tyre manufacturer bought the car in February of this year after the assets of Hispania Racing were sold off.

The plan was to use the car as a display model, rebranding it in the corporate Pirelli colours of black and yellow and sending it to showrooms and motorsport events around the world. However, as Paul Hembery noted this weekend, no one within the company seems all that bothered about spicing up the old HRT car.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm, it's a bit of a shame really. Our marketing department said nobody seems to want to use it.

- Paul Hembery, Motorsport Director, Pirelli

Instead of holding on to an ancient chassis - minus the engine and gearbox which were returned to their respective owners Cosworth and Williams - Pirelli have decided to pass on the carbon fibre once more, this time by putting it up for auction on eBay!

Hembery says the money raised will go to charity, but he also points to a unique problem when selling modern Formula One assets on the internet.

We're trying to find a category on eBay for an F1 car and we'll probably run it for quite a few months to see what money we can raise for charity.

- Paul Hembery, Motorsport Director, Pirelli

Of all the issues that HRT have been subjected to in their short Formula One history, not fitting into any eBay category is fated to be their last.

If you have a bit of cash to spare, you could purchase yourself some genuine carbon fibre as driven (and most likely crashed) by Narain Karthikeyan and/or Daniel Ricciardo and/or Tonio Liuzzi.