Hispania forced to call off test of new car

[Melman Giraffe]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula...

[marshalla]

BBC said:

The team were unable to test after launching their new car on Friday because parts were held up in customs.

WTF ? Where are they building the components ?

[Ahonen]

Colin Kolles said the dampers were held up in customs. This is odd, as dampers are routinely carried around the world as hand luggage or in hold baggage with no problem at all - I've done it plenty of times over the years and my friends at Dynamics regularly rush stuff all over the world in the same way.

Probably more too it than the press release...

[Graham]

maybe they were using cocaine instead of oil in the dampers, wouldnt be the first time


[the above is a joke and in no way infering that drugs are being smuggled]

[IforB]

Ahh the old "it was held up by customs/royal mail/dog ate it" excuse.

[jamiebae]

Bought from Raceland off eBay and shipped from Hong Kong. They're getting their tyres from Linglong and the wheels are Rotas too

[Chrisgr31]

Where are Hispania based, and where are the components coming from? How come every other F1 team can get the bits for their cars to the circuit for testing (well except for McLaren but that was more because they hadnt made enough of them!) but Hispania can't?

Dont we have free borders in Europe these days? So are the parts coming from outside the EU?

[Crafty_]

HRT are based in Germany where Kolles ran his DTM and Le Mans operations from. Far as I can gather its just an assembly shop.
They apparently hired the Williams wind tunnel at grove.
Obviously the engine is built by Cosworth, the transmission and rear end by Williams.
The tub was formed (I think) in Germany by a carbon fibre specialist, although there was talk of formtech doing work for them (formtech are based out of what was the super aguri team).

So all in all they didn't have much machining/fabrication to do themselves.

As I understand it the shocks held up in customs came from the USA.

[Crafty_]

Did a bit of digging it seems that Carbotech (http://carbon.at/en/engineering/einleitung/index.php) built the car.

[Chrisgr31]

If they cant get the bits of the car into Europe what chances do they have of getting them in to Aus?

I wonder what customs would say if they were allowed to comment.

[NHK244V]

You'd have thought they would have taken em already bolted to the car ?
did the car drive? did it even have an engine or did the dog eat that ?

[andyps]

It sounds like a very good excuse to have not had to take part in the test to me. Pretty sure they could have got some dampers to do a test with, even if not the optimal ones. The car was at the track, the drivers were at the track, a simple shakedown with last years dampers (provided they would physically fit, or could be modified to do so) would have at least checked other things worked.

It will be interesting to see if they actually make it to the grid in Australia, I would have said make it to qualifying, but there is a precedent from the team there!