In the 1960s the Fittipaldi brothers built a successful small business in their native Brazil constructing karts and tuning engines, subsequently producing customer Formula Vee cars and various one-off sports cars. Both drove competitively in Brazil and travelled to Europe, working up through junior categories toward Formula One. Emerson was the more accomplished racer: driving for Lotus from 1970, he won his first world championship in 1972 and his second with McLaren in 1974. Wilson raced in Formula One for Brabham in 1972 and 1973, achieving a best finish of fifth.
In late 1973 the brothers resolved to start their own team. The 1974 season was spent in preparation. Wilson persuaded the Brazilian sugar and alcohol cooperative Copersucar to sponsor the venture, and the car was designed by Richard Divila, who had worked for Fittipaldi Empreendimentos designing Formula Vee machinery. Embraer, the Brazilian aerospace company, supplied materials and wind tunnel time. The team was based in Brazil and unveiled the long, low Copersucar FD01 — its silver livery carrying rainbow markings — at a ceremony in Brasília in October 1974 in the presence of President Ernesto Geisel.
The team, known as Copersucar-Fittipaldi, entered the 1975 season with Wilson as sole driver. Results were poor; Wilson managed five finishes in the year with a best of tenth, failed to qualify on three occasions, and retired from driving following a hand injury sustained at the Austrian Grand Prix. Emerson joined the team from McLaren for 1976, his arrival representing a major gamble given that he had just taken a second world championship with a competitive works team.
Emerson's debut for the team at Interlagos produced a fifth-place qualifying result — the best the team would ever achieve in qualifying — but only a thirteenth-place finish due to engine problems. The experiment of basing operations in Brazil proved logistically unsustainable: the distance from engine and gearbox suppliers in the United Kingdom and the absence of a deep component manufacturing base made development impossibly slow. Future cars were built at a new base in Reading, and Brazilian Ingo Hoffmann joined as a second driver for four races in 1976. The team scored three points from the entire year. By 1977 Emerson was achieving occasional fourth and fifth places, and the team introduced the F5, carrying yellow livery after Divila had departed as technical director.
The 1978 season saw the most competitive period in the team's history. The F5A was modified to exploit the ground effect principles demonstrated so powerfully by Lotus that year, allowing Emerson to score a competitive second place at the Brazilian Grand Prix after fighting with Mario Andretti and Gilles Villeneuve. He finished the year with 17 points, lifting the team — now formally called Fittipaldi Automotive — to seventh in the Constructors' Championship, one position ahead of McLaren.
The promise did not carry into 1979. Understanding of ground effect was becoming critical to performance, and Ralph Bellamy's F6 failed to capture the aerodynamic principles adequately. Fittipaldi had another largely barren year as sole driver.
At the end of 1979 Copersucar ended its title sponsorship. The team purchased the assets of the neighbouring Wolf Racing operation, becoming a two-car team for the first time under the name Skol Team Fittipaldi, with new backing from Brazilian brewer Skol. Harvey Postlethwaite, inherited from Wolf, headed the design team; his staff included a very young Adrian Newey as chief aerodynamicist, both men who would later design championship-winning cars elsewhere. The two reworked Wolf chassis, designated F7s, brought third places for both Emerson and his new Finnish teammate Keke Rosberg before the less successful F8 replaced them.
Rosberg proved immediately competitive and passed Emerson on the track in only his second race for the team. Friction between the pair was reported from that point forward. The season nonetheless yielded ten points total.
Emerson retired from driving at the end of 1980, later describing his final two years as unhappy, with the pressures of team management eroding both his marriages and his motivation. Young Brazilian Chico Serra replaced him. The Skol sponsorship was lost and the team reverted to the Fittipaldi Automotive name. Postlethwaite departed for Ferrari and the team slid into sustained decline, racing updated versions of existing chassis with a mix of Michelin, Avon, and Pirelli tyres — including one race where the two cars ran on different tyre brands simultaneously.
Rosberg moved to Williams for 1982, where he won the Drivers' Championship. Serra carried on with a single car, often running a chassis that had raced through most of 1981. The team scored its final championship point with a sixth-place finish at the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder, though only after Niki Lauda was disqualified. A new car, the F9, was introduced at the British Grand Prix but improved nothing. The Fittipaldi brothers attempted to raise funds for 1983, but the team closed in early 1983.
Fittipaldi Automotive occupies a singular place in Formula One history as the sport's only Brazilian-based team and as a project defined by genuine national ambition rather than commercial opportunism. Emerson Fittipaldi's decision to leave one of the sport's most competitive seats to drive for a family team that could not provide championship-winning machinery was a significant personal sacrifice, and his best seasons with Fittipaldi were pale reflections of his McLaren years. The team's second-place finish in Brazil in 1978 and Rosberg's subsequent podiums represented the clearest evidence of what the project might have achieved under better circumstances. Both Postlethwaite and Newey, who passed through the team in its final competitive season, went on to define Formula One design in the following decades.