Team profile - Aston Butterworth

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Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by Londoner »

Morning everyone.

The late 1950s was when British manufacturers began emerging on the world stage, with names like Lotus, Cooper and BRM going on to dominate Formula One. But what fewer people know is that one plucky club driver cobbled together his own team in the early 50s, aiming to take the fight to the established factory teams.

Featuring bizarre engineering, using the wrong type of fuel, and unreliability which would make even Honda blush, Aston Butterworth caused quite a stir in their brief assault at F1. Our esteemed member WaffleCat has created this excellent profile of their travails, which you can read right here today!
Fetzie on Ferrari wrote:How does a driver hurtling around a race track while they're sous-viding in their overalls have a better understanding of the race than a team of strategy engineers in an air-conditioned room?l
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dinizintheoven
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Re: Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by dinizintheoven »

I'd like to think that, somewhere in Australia, Messrs. McGregor and Law are looking at the ever-growing content of Grand Prix Rejects with a satisfied grin, knowing that the documentation of bizarre and unsuccessful teams and drivers is still in good hands. Though I've looked around 1950s F1 when I've had to, Aston Butterworth were one of those teams that passed me by completely... until now.

And for all of what Archie Butterworth might have said about the team at the end of the article, though they may have been the 1950s equivalent of Andrea Moda with their comedy of errors (I mean, seriously, putting the wrong fuel in the car? What was it, diesel, kerosene, ethanol, coal, peat, wood...?), at least they still managed to get themselves into the lower midfield... however briefly. In a way, the story reminds me of Fondmetal's 1992 season.

And as we may remember from Jamie and Enoch's original efforts, the better known and better funded Aston Martin didn't exactly set the F1 world on fire a few years later...
James Allen, on his favourite F1 engine of all time:
"...the Life W12, I can't describe the noise to you, but imagine filling your dustbin with nuts and bolts, and then throwing it down the stairs, it was something akin to that!"
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Re: Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by Enforcer »

Jesus, I know no F1 car made in the 50s was in any way safe, but this takes the cake:

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"Hi, I want to be killed!"
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mario
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Re: Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by mario »

East Londoner wrote:Morning everyone.

The late 1950s was when British manufacturers began emerging on the world stage, with names like Lotus, Cooper and BRM going on to dominate Formula One. But what fewer people know is that one plucky club driver cobbled together his own team in the early 50s, aiming to take the fight to the established factory teams.

Featuring bizarre engineering, using the wrong type of fuel, and unreliability which would make even Honda blush, Aston Butterworth caused quite a stir in their brief assault at F1. Our esteemed member WaffleCat has created this excellent profile of their travails, which you can read right here today!

Thinking about it, now that we are progressively building up our own database of articles, might it be worth making a few tweaks to the way in which the articles are indexed? Maybe, firstly, we could perhaps have a way of indexing driver and team profiles by name? Would it also perhaps be worth creating a few additional categories too to gather up some of the more esoteric topic, such as the retro game reviews or the retrospectives on various races?

dinizintheoven wrote:I'd like to think that, somewhere in Australia, Messrs. McGregor and Law are looking at the ever-growing content of Grand Prix Rejects with a satisfied grin, knowing that the documentation of bizarre and unsuccessful teams and drivers is still in good hands. Though I've looked around 1950s F1 when I've had to, Aston Butterworth were one of those teams that passed me by completely... until now.

And for all of what Archie Butterworth might have said about the team at the end of the article, though they may have been the 1950s equivalent of Andrea Moda with their comedy of errors (I mean, seriously, putting the wrong fuel in the car? What was it, diesel, kerosene, ethanol, coal, peat, wood...?), at least they still managed to get themselves into the lower midfield... however briefly. In a way, the story reminds me of Fondmetal's 1992 season.

And as we may remember from Jamie and Enoch's original efforts, the better known and better funded Aston Martin didn't exactly set the F1 world on fire a few years later...

I would guess that, with regards to the wrong fuel being used, the mistake was probably filling the car with a conventional pump fuel mixture when the engine might have run on an alcohol based mixture - Mercedes's W196 from a few years later used a mixture comprising of methanol, octane and benzol (with traces of acetate and nitrobenzene thrown in), whilst the earlier Alfa Romeo 159 used almost pure methanol as its fuel. The other alternative might have been Avgas (complex alkene hydrocarbon mixtures that were used, as the name suggests, for aviation engines).

As an aside about the Aston Martin article, strictly speaking I wrote the original draft of the article on the Aston Martin team, though Enoch did then edit and improve the original article after I forwarded it onto him.
Martin Brundle, on watching a replay of Grosjean spinning:
"The problem with Grosjean is that he want to take a look back at the corner he's just exited"
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Re: Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by Londoner »

mario wrote:Thinking about it, now that we are progressively building up our own database of articles, might it be worth making a few tweaks to the way in which the articles are indexed? Maybe, firstly, we could perhaps have a way of indexing driver and team profiles by name? Would it also perhaps be worth creating a few additional categories too to gather up some of the more esoteric topic, such as the retro game reviews or the retrospectives on various races?


A redesign of the front page is something we have in the pipeline. It depends largely on how we can work around the limitations of Wordpress, and whether Biscione has enough free time. :)
Fetzie on Ferrari wrote:How does a driver hurtling around a race track while they're sous-viding in their overalls have a better understanding of the race than a team of strategy engineers in an air-conditioned room?l
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mario
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Re: Team profile - Aston Butterworth

Post by mario »

East Londoner wrote:
mario wrote:Thinking about it, now that we are progressively building up our own database of articles, might it be worth making a few tweaks to the way in which the articles are indexed? Maybe, firstly, we could perhaps have a way of indexing driver and team profiles by name? Would it also perhaps be worth creating a few additional categories too to gather up some of the more esoteric topic, such as the retro game reviews or the retrospectives on various races?


A redesign of the front page is something we have in the pipeline. It depends largely on how we can work around the limitations of Wordpress, and whether Biscione has enough free time. :)

I didn't realise it was something that was already in the pipeline, albeit constrained by time and by what can be achieved on the Wordpress platform. Mind you, I can see that the front page has already been tweaked a bit - I wasn't expecting you guys to start rolling out those changes quite so soon.
Martin Brundle, on watching a replay of Grosjean spinning:
"The problem with Grosjean is that he want to take a look back at the corner he's just exited"
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