2011 Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series season

The first season of the Formula One Rejects Microprose Grand Prix Series was held in 2011, on the same circuits as the 1991 Formula One season.

Entrants
The field consisted of 18 teams, 16 of them entering two cars. Osella and Coloni were the only teams to enter a single car.

Gallery
No official photos or drawings of the 2011 cars exist, but many of them are known to be 1991 models bought on eBay for varying amounts of cash or bartered equivalent, ranging from two pints of mild and a ball of string to the national debt of Paraguay. Some cars had engines supplied, others didn't, and these also had to be sourced from the racing underground. F1 Rejects were the only team to have their chassis built from scratch; they commissioned a Chinese designer from Geely to clone the Dallara 191 (itself a customer car built for Scuderia Italia, who never built their own F1 cars), then fitted it with a Life W12 engine that they tweaked in-house (in much the same way AMG do for Mercedes-Benz), actually making it work in the process. (The F1RM cars are, reportedly, use a livery similar to 1991 McLaren] livery, only with changed decals) The Life team themselves dropped their own engine into a Dallara 190, figuring it was a better bet than the 1989 FIRST chassis they used to comical non-effect in F1 in 1990. USGP took all the best bits of the Williams FW14 and threw them away, crudely shoving in leaf-sprung rear suspension, a live rear axle and a 5.7-litre pushrod V8. They justified calling their car "All-American" by painting it in the most eye-wateringly nationalistic stars and stripes livery ever seen that would make even Abraham Lincoln cringe, and conveniently forgot that most of it was designed and built in Britain. Despite its obvious crudity, the polar opposite of what its source chassis had been, the car still worked and won races as it was damn near unbeatable on the straights.

Other teams displayed varying levels of innovation; the turbo-powered teams, Toleman and Minardi, had to devise a way to adapt the overhead airbox to route the airflow to where it would have been expected on a 1980s turbo F1 car; the results were inelegant, but the tradition of keeping the overhead airbox irrespective of where the air is needed continues to this day, and the resultant bodywork in later seasons has been immensely improved. Some teams did little other than tweak the livery; Super Aguri's SA11 was little more than a Tyrrell 020 with the black stripes repainted red. And then there were the truly lazy teams; Ferrari ran a 1991-spec 643, and despite Simtek's claim to have obtained the services of a 2010-spec F1 car, they were lying and bought themselves a Jordan 191 which they couldn't be bothered to repaint.

How Andrea Moda even made it to the start of the season, let alone the end, is still a continuing mystery, but the formation of Scuderia Andrea Coloni for the 2012 season gave them long-term stability.