Cuzata Racing

Team Name

Cuzata Racing Team

Team Owner Name

Kolink Helsera

Team Headquarters Location

Croft, UK

Team Primary Sponsor

Ferret's Row Merlot

Team Background

Originally founded back in 1959, Cuzata Race Engineering would begin its history as a team running its own chassis and engine at le mans throughout the 60s. The team would prove themselves competitive and fast, though due to faults with reliability and driver errors would never wind up winning anything until the 1985 Le Mans. Their last real push at Le Mans in '85 ended in claiming the win at the historic race at long last, though their celebrations were short-lived as the team folded before the end of the 1985 season, leaving their winning drivers without a seat for 1986.

One of their drivers, a golden fox from Britain named "Kolink Helsera" would go on to race successfully in GT and Touring series until 1992 where he decided to revive the team that brought him into the spotlight and kickstarted his career, hoping to do the same for other young drivers looking to make their way into the sport.

The revived Cuzata Racing Team's first few years would be spent in the BTCC running with FMW cars as a privateer. A far cry from the glory and expense of building their own cars from the ground up, but it helped the recovering team to get a foot in the door in the new world of racing since its collapse 7 years earlier.

By 1997, Helsera had managed to get a contract with Parroz to run the number 37 Parroz Esperante GTR-1 in the European Le Mans series for the '97, '98, '99 and 2000 seasons, returning to the team's roots in sportscars at Le Mans. The team would see success from the start, taking the unusual looking new GT cars to race wins each season, claiming the GT1 title in 1999 and 2000, and the race win at Le Mans in class in 1999 too.

The success of the CRT GTR-1 would be hindered by a rule change in 2001, removing the GT1 class they had made a home in recent years. In response, CRT would retire their championship winning Parroz and go back to their partnership with FMW, returning with their new M3 GTR for the 2001 to 2004 seasons, claiming two more class titles in 01 and 03.

The team would continue to race and expand their operations in GT and Touring cars over the next few years with continued success, though never quite able to reclaim their late 90s/early 2000s GT dominance for the rest of the decade. Come 2012, Helsera announced a new program to try to bring the team to more series across a few disciplines, sponsoring drivers in a variety of lower classes of rallying, touring, GT, openwheelers and prototype racing. The first of these expansions came in 2014 where the team would start its British Radicat Onemake team, followed closely by their first openwheelers in a UK National Formula 2000 series in 2015. These two series would become CRT's driver scout series, picking up Blaze Pine and Mozilla Redwood as the team's first academy drivers.

The team's expansion plans would continue with rumours ranging from an LMP1 team to moving into Furmula One in the coming years, however to the surprise of fans, Helsera announced a Furmula E team in late 2018, with Mozilla being signed to be its lead driver. However, due to delays, the team was not ready for the 19/20 season and held back to join in the 20/21 season instead. This forced them to have to find a new seat for Redwood, eventually signing a deal with Wellfleet to have Mozilla run with them in exchange for a CRT Sponsoship.

With the team debuting its FE car, hype was rolling to see what else was planned, and few were disappointed by the team unveiling its plans to run in the 2021 Furmula One season, citing the new aero regulations as being a perfect fit for the team's philosophy and development preferences, making this a perfect opportunity to get into the sport. The budget caps brought in around the same time are also believed to be good encouragement for them to step into the sport afresh.

The team looked good in testing for the 2021 season, drivers Cassandra Ouellet and Marcello Kesselmann showing off the car's impressive low-drag chassis by topping the speedtraps all week long in testing.

With a talented rookie, a veteran of the sport and a ferocious car in F1, the team looks set to have a competitive first season, aiming for an upper midfield finish. Their academy drivers performing well in their respective FE and F3 series the past season is also strong encouragement for the team ready to make its mark in the Furmula One history books.