Gary Anderson was driving home from work one day, early in 1989, when he was surprised to see what looked like a racing monocoque in a ditch beside the road. It is not what you expect to see in Warwickshire and so Anderson stopped his car and went to inspect.

He was astonished to discover that it was, indeed, a monocoque and it looked like an F1 car. He noted that the chassis had been badly smashed and recognised that the damage had probably been the result of a failed crash-test at the nearby MIRA facility in Nuneaton. His conclusion was that the chassis had probably been dumped by a disappointed team, on its way home.

A little research revealed that it was exactly that. The First-Judd L189 had been entered in the Formula 1 World Championship that year. In order to compete it needed to undergo crash testing and, as Anderson had concluded, it had failed these tests in comprehesive fashion.

It was a story that dated back to the summer of 1988 when former racer Lamberto Leoni, the owner of the First Racing Formula 3000 team, which had been established in 1987, decided that he wanted to become a Formula 1 team owner in 1989. The rules were changing. A lot of other people had the same idea and there were an impressive 40 entries accepted by the FIA in December that year.

Leoni asked his chief engineer in Formula 3000, Brazilian Richard Divila, who had worked in F1 with the Fittipaldi brothers, to design a Grand Prix car for him. Divila did the first layout and the pre-design work, but then went back to work on the March 88B Formula 3000 car which was causing the team difficulties at the time. The result was a victory for Pierluigi Martini a few weeks later at Enna with podiums at Brands Hatch and Birmingham.

The F1 design was left in the hands of Gianni Marelli, who had worked at Ferrari in the late 1960s before moving to Autodelta in 1971, where he worked on the Alfa Romeo F1 cars before departing to do consulting work from 1981 onwards. The First Racing tub was built by a carbon composite company near Turin. When Divila saw the result of the work he demanded that his name be removed from all First Racing literature. He considered the resulting chassis to be unsafe and advised drivers not to go anywhere near it. He later remarked that the chassis was good for nothing except perhaps for use as “an interesting flowerpot”, believing that the monocoque had not been properly cured in the production process and so would delaminate in an accident. He left the team and accepted an offer to design F1 cars for Ligier. When the Italian magazine Autosprint linked his name to the project he visited First Racing with two lawyers in tow and initiated legal action against the team.

While all of this was going on, the car was completed and in the early part of December 1988 it was shaken down at Misano by Gabriele Tarquini. It then appeared in the Formula One Indoor Trophy at the Bologna Motorshow, with Tarquini driving. Then it needed to be crash-tested…

Although the chassis was destroyed in the test, as Divila had predicted, the design still existed – even if it was too late to build anything new for the 1989 season. The team withdrew its entry and the sponsorship package collapsed.

In the summer of 1989 Leoni sold the design to an Italian entrepreneur named Ernesto Vita who had plans to enter F1 with a team called Life Racing Engines, with an interesting W12 engine designed by former Ferrari engineer Franco Rocchi. The car was built by Marelli, but the resulting project was disastrous, as the engine barely ever ran without a problem. The team eventually fell part because the money dried up.