Arrows spent 25 years trying to win a grand prix before it finally folded. Ironically, its second race, the South African Grand Prix of 1978, was the nearest it came, when Riccardo Patrese led until his engine died.

Arrows was established when key members of the Shadow team broke away. Shadow had been sponsored by Franco Ambrosio - who was later imprisoned for financial irregularities - and he became the "AR" of the Arrows name, with the other initials belonging to Alan Rees, former grand prix driver Jackie Oliver plus designers Dave Wass and Tony Southgate. Gunnar Nilsson was to lead the team, but he developed stomach cancer and died less than a year later, so Arrows opted for Patrese as its number one.

After preparing its car in just 60 days, Arrows hit trouble. Shadow believed that the FA1 was a copy of its DN9. The High Court told Arrows that it could not race the car, so the team had to build a replacement, which it managed to do, and continued without even missing a race.

Early Arrows cars raced in the gold livery of the Warsteiner beer company, and the 1979 car, the futuristic-looking A2 "buzz bomb" was much discussed. It was not successful, though, and the team reverted to more conventional thinking for its subsequent cars.

As the 1980s advanced, it was no longer sufficient to bolt on a Ford Cosworth DFV engine to succeed. A manufacturer link became increasingly important to match the turbocharged engines from BMW, Renault and Ferrari. When BMW pulled out, its turbo engines were renamed Megatrons and they were used to good effect by Arrows.

As the 1980s drew to a close, the Japanese Footwork corporation broke into Formula One striking a deal with Oliver. Arrows was renamed Footwork and it looked as though the injection of Japanese funding could move the team to the forefront, especially when a deal for Porsche engines was signed.

Alan Jenkins was design chief after achieving great success with McLaren. Any hopes of a repeat were dispelled when the first 12-cylinder engine (effectively two sixes joined together) arrived. Whereas a typical unit might have weighed 145-150 kilos, the Porsche weighed 210! Footwork soldiered on with Mugen engines and Aguri Suzuki alongside Michele Alboreto, then Derek Warwick.

Jenkins designed the neat FA15 for a customer Ford engine for 1994, but new rules after early-season deaths spoiled the cars. Footwork's Wataru Ohashi reduced his involvement and the team became Arrows again.

An unspectacular 1996 season masked Tom Walkinshaw's arrival as team owner. His signings for 1997 included Damon Hill, Bridgestone tyres and Yamaha engines, but their form was weak, even though reigning World Champion Hill led until the final lap of the Hungarian Grand Prix before falling to second.

For 1998, Arrows built its own engines, with Mika Salo replacing Hill alongside Pedro Diniz, but the engines were the team's downfall and Diniz quit. Pedro de la Rosa scored on his debut in 1999, but that was his only point of the campaign.

With financial backing from Orange and using Supertec engines in 2000, Arrows made clear progress, with de la Rosa twice running third and Jos Verstappen finishing fourth at Monza. Changing yet again, weak Asiatech engines limited Arrows to just a single point-scoring result in 2001.

Arrows started the 2002 season with Heinz-Harald Frentzen scoring a pair of sixth-place finishes in the team's promising Ford-powered A23 chassis, but it failed to last the course as its coffers ran dry. Indeed, the team's transporters turned around once they had reached the Hungaroring as talk of take-over bids came to nothing and the curtain came down for good at the next race at Spa-Francorchamps, when the cars were kept in the transporters through the first day of the meeting then returned back to the UK and were not seen again until they were bought at auction in 2003 by Minardi.

Reproduced from The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Formula One published by Carlton Books