After officially bowing out of the sport as the chequered flag fell on the Brazilian Grand Prix, Cosworth race engineer Chris Jilbert admits he will find it hard to imagine
Formula One in 2007 without one of their engines being featured on the grid, but maintained that will return in the future.
Having known midway through the year that Williams had opted for a manufacturer backed customer engine supply from
Toyota from 2007, Cosworth were unable to find a berth elsewhere, originally courting M
F1 before they were bought by Spyker, who duly won a supply from
Ferrari.
As a result Cosworth are set for a forced sabbatical, with no indication as to whether they will be able to sustain themselves as a company without Formula One in their portfolio. Furthermore, their final race with Williams ended rather dramatically when
Nico Rosberg and
Mark Webber came together on the first lap of the Brazilian Grand Prix, something Jilbert admits was not the way they had expected to exit the sport.
“Not quite the way that we had envisaged our current involvement in Formula One to draw to a close, but I guess we can genuinely say that we ran both engines at 20,000RPM for the whole race! It really does not seem possible that there will be no Cosworth-powered cars in the F1 paddock in 2007.
After a difficult season in which
Williams' occasional speed was countered by regular reliability problems, Cosworth insist the mechanical errors were not related to their engine, maintaining that they instead had produced one of the quickest and most reliable V8 units on the grid. With that in mind, they are devastated to have been overlooked by the F1 teams.
“It is an incredibly sad day for everyone who has been involved in making our Cosworth F1 engines so powerful, reliable and successful and I'm sure that these comments will be echoed by the numerous people up and down the pit lane who have either worked at, or with, Cosworth in the past.
