Although the official founding date of Onyx Race Engineering is 1979, its origins trace back to 1973 when Mike Earle and Greg Field began working together for the Lec racing team, owned by the father of David Purley, a refrigerator industrialist. For the following three years, the duo supported Purley in Formula Atlantic, Formula 2, and Formula 5000, eventually winning the European Formula 5000 title in 1976. When Purley chose Mike Pilbeam over Field to design a Formula 1 car, Earle and Field decided to go their own way, founding a new racing team in Littlehampton, Sussex, shortly thereafter.
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| ONYX ORE-1, Stefan Johansson Hungaroring, Hungarian GP 1989 |
Onyx Racing Engineering, as the new team was called, began competing in Formula 2 and quickly partnered with March to field Johnny Cecotto and Riccardo Paletti in the 1980 season. In 1982, Earle and Field made their first foray into Formula 1, entering a March 821 driven by Spanish driver Emilio de Villota and managed by their team. However, the venture yielded poor results, with the car entered in five Grands Prix but never making it past pre-qualifying. This prompted Earle and Field to return to Formula 2 while continuing their collaboration with March. For 1983, they planned a new attempt at joining the Formula 1 World Championship, this time with a car of their own driven by Riccardo Paletti. However, the death of the Italian driver during the 1982 Canadian Grand Prix at the wheel of an Osella drastically changed Onyx’s plans, especially as the sponsors expected to finance the project were closely tied to the Milanese driver.
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| ONYX ORE-1, Bertrand Gachot Montecarlo, Monaco GP 1989 |
Greg Field chose to leave the team, leaving Mike Earle solely in charge. In the following years, Earle achieved solid success in Formula 2 and later in Formula 3000, with multiple victories by respected drivers such as Beppe Gabbiani, Christian Danner, Emanuele Pirro, and especially Stefano Modena, who won the 1987 Formula 3000 Championship. The following year proved less fruitful, but nonetheless Earle decided to take the big leap into Formula 1. He secured new funding from Englishman Paul Shakespeare, who bought a significant stake in the team, and from eccentric Belgian billionaire Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, owner of Moneytron. Thus began the team’s Formula 1 journey under the new name Onyx Grand Prix, with Martin Dickson as team manager and solid financial backing from sponsors Marlboro and Moneytron.
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| ONYX ORE-1, Bertrand Gachot Paul Ricard, French GP 1989 |
The car presented for the championship was the Onyx ORE-1, designed by Alan Jenkins, an engineer who had worked for McLaren from 1981 to 1986, and built around a classic carbon fiber monocoque chassis fitted with a Ford-Cosworth DFR V8 engine, prepared by Brian Hart. The new ORE-1 featured very clean and sleek lines with a sharply tapered rear end, a design element Jenkins had borrowed from the MP4 series of Barnard, on which he had previously worked. However, the team’s early struggles delayed development, and the two cars, assigned to experienced Swede Stefan Johansson and French rookie Bertrand Gachot, were only ready a few days before the season started. Onyx used the first three races mainly for fine-tuning the new ORE-1, and from the fourth race in Mexico, things began to improve, with Johansson qualifying 21st. The ORE-1 proved to be a good car, fast and easy to set up, and in the middle part of the season, the team achieved its first positive results, including a fifth-place finish in France and even a third in Portugal, making the team’s debut season in the top tier a positive one.
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| ONYX ORE-1, Stefan Johansson Hermanos Rodriguez, Mexican GP 1989 |
Despite these reasonably good results, the internal situation of the team soon became explosive. Van Rossem, a notoriously uncontrollable figure, bought out Shakespeare’s shares and became the majority shareholder. In September, Van Rossem fired Gachot for criticizing the team’s management and replaced him with promising Finnish driver Jyrki Juhani Järvilehto (J.J. Lehto), while Mike Earle was diplomatically “invited” to leave the team. With these internal shake-ups, the magic faded, and the final races of the season saw a series of failed qualifications. Still, the debut season was more than satisfactory, with 6 points scored and an eleventh-place finish in the Constructors’ Championship.
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