Super Aguri's upstaging of "big brother" Honda in 2007 may have done more harm than good for the team's long-term prospects. (LAT photo) » More Photos

Audetto is a wily old fox. He was Ferrari team manager in the litigious Lauda/Hunt era, and that tells you all you need to know. A charmer and a great salesman, he began to try to put some pieces together. In essence, and more by chance than design, he recreated the Arrows team that had collapsed in the middle of 2002. The Leafield factory was available, a group of former Arrows designers had been working on an F1 project while hoping that a customer would come along, and many other ex-TWR/Arrows staff were still at a loose end. Audetto himself had been Tom Walkinshaw’s marketing guru.

The final touch was getting hold of the 2002 Arrows chassis, which had been bought – but not put to any good use – by wheeler-dealer Paul Stoddart. Stable rules meant that the aging chassis, one of which was famously salvaged from show car duty at Melbourne Airport, could be modified to take the Honda engine.

The rest is history. The team made it to Melbourne in March with its awful “cut and shut” cars, but by the end of the season, the gap to the rest had diminished, and the team was earning respect.

For 2007 Aguri was given the works team’s otherwise obsolete RA106 design. The legality of that move was open to question, and seriously upset genuine constructors Williams and Spyker, but we were told that the intellectual property was owned not by Honda Racing, but by another third party division of the Honda Motor Company, and it was theirs to give away.

Amazing things happened. Sato finished eighth in Spain, and an incredible sixth in Canada, where he overtook a tire-troubled Fernando Alonso. The works RA107 was junk and the works team was often humiliated.

It was like a fairy tale – and like all good fairy tales, it was too good to be true. The team may have gained respectability on the track, but there was a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. Apart from the issue of the IP, all concerned were very vague when it came to discussing where actual components were coming from. Aside from engine and gearbox, how much was coming straight from the works factory in Brackley, something that the rules as written did not allow?

At Spa a Japanese TV pundit, always on the lookout for conspiracies, told me an interesting tale. He insisted that Aguri’s loss of competitiveness since the test at the same venue was because the frustrated works team had not supplied its customer with the newer, more competitive front wings...