Kolles flat out to save Campos Meta

Colin Kolles is working hard - very hard - to ensure that Campos Meta make the grid in Bahrain next month for the season-opening Grand Prix.

Yesterday it was confirmed that the former Midland and Spyker team principal has taken on a similar role with the struggling Spanish team under new boss Jose Ramon Carabante and now it is a rush against time...

“For two weeks I’m sleeping two hours a night,” Adam Cooper reports Kolles as saying in his blog. “I’m not giving it up until I’m there. I want to succeed to bring the team on the grid, and to survive the year and to stabilise it and then to build it up.

“My role is to clean up the chaos,” he continued. “They had basically nothing, only chaos. The only department which is basically existing is a software department, with eight guys who never saw an F1 car in their lives, and who are doing software simulation programmes. And then there are two or three engineers with F1 experience, and that’s it.

“We will have two cars in Bahrain. I don’t know how we will have them, and I don’t care, but we will have two cars on the grid. If this is going to be achieved, I think this is one of the most amazing things, I tell you. They had nothing. They had one empty workshop with nothing inside…”

Kolles went on to explain that for the time being, the Dallara chassis will remain in Italy with the Cosworth powerplant and ancillaries all being put together by the Italian design team.

In the longer term, the assembly of the car will be at the team’s Spanish base while former Honda engineer Geoff Willis is acting as a consultant to the team.

Regarding drivers, Bruno Senna has a contract with the team to race this year but given the financial pressures, Kolles is very much seeking pay drivers in order to pay the bills such as USF1 appointed driver Jose Maria Lopez.