Setting up the most successful motorsport team requires a partnership between the best precision technology partners making each part of the car, the most appropriate drivers for said cars and the best organisations to bring all of the components together.
Racing constantly evolves, leading to fiercely competitive and exciting championships in a lot of motorsport disciplines. However, not every championship is as long-lasting as Formula One.
Whilst many of these end simply because they run out of money or there are not enough teams who enter to put together a competitive field, other motorsport categories have ended for some rather unusual reasons.
Cars That Are Too Good
Sometimes, championships are discontinued because cars have gotten too fast to be raced safely, but in other cases, the championship is discontinued simply because one or two cars managed to solve the regulations.
Probably the most infamous example of this was FIA Group A touring cars, particularly in Great Britain and Australia.
The dominance of the Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth in the late 1980s and the Nissan Skyline R32, the latter nicknamed “Godzilla” due to winning every race it competed in in the Japanese Touring Car Championship and dominating the Bathurst 1000.
Almost every championship that used Group A rules changed their rules to align with another racing category, with the British Touring Car Championship opting for Super Touring rules, Japan eventually moving towards Super GT and both Germany and Australia creating their own rules (DTM and V8 Supercars respectively).
Ugly Split
The collapse of CART, the longest-running and most successful open-wheel racing series in the United States, started with a bizarre loophole in the rules of the most prestigious race on its calendar.
As the 1994 Indianapolis 500 was not organised by CART, it had different enough rules for a dominant Penske-Mercedes car driven by Al Unser Jr. to qualify in pole position and win.
The fallout from that victory was so huge that USAC and CART split, creating the Indy Racing League (now IndyCar) and CART as competing open-wheel championships.
This argument, combined with poor quality racing and an infamous cancelled race in 2001 would lead to CART folding in 2003, reforming as the Champ Car World Series, declaring bankruptcy again in 2008 and merging with the IRL.