1991 Season
Leyton House switched engines for 1991, dropping the Judd V8 in favour of the new Ilmor V10 engine, hoping the new equipment and new faces in management would translate to success on the track. It proved to do exactly the opposite; Capelli retired from the first nine Grands Prix of the season before finally recording the team's first and only point by finishing 6th at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Gugelmin's best finish all season was 7th, which he achieved three times: in France, Portugal and Spain.
In September 1991, team owner Akira Akagi was implicated in a financial scandal involving the Fuji Bank and was arrested. The team was run by Akagi associate Ken Marrable but money was short and the cars continued to struggle to finish races.
With two races remaining in the season, Capelli quit his post to make way for test driver Karl Wendlinger who, like Michael Schumacher earlier in the season, was eased into F1 in a low-key deal made by Jochen Neerpasch of Mercedes-Benz, for whose Sauber-Mercedes sports car team he was driving at the time. In this context, it is notable that the Ilmor V10 was used by the Sauber team to which Wendlinger returned on its F1 debut in 1993 and that Ilmor became the F1 engine manufacturing arm of Mercedes-Benz.
Capelli would go on to sign for Ferrari for the 1992 season and Gugelmin left for Jordan.
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Famous quotes containing the word season:
“The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)