Keith Wiggins founded Pacific Racing in 1984 to compete in the European Formula Ford Championship, initially with Norwegian driver Harald Huysman and Marlboro backing. Huysman won both the European and Benelux Formula Ford titles, setting the tone for a team that would dominate wherever it competed in the junior categories.
Pacific moved into British Formula Ford with Bertrand Gachot in 1985, and in 1986 Gachot won the Formula Ford 2000 crown. In 1987 JJ Lehto won the British FF2000 title for the team under continued Marlboro support. In 1988, Pacific entered British Formula Three with Lehto and won the title at the first attempt. Moving into Formula 3000, the team took Christian Fittipaldi to the 1991 F3000 championship. Pacific had won in every junior category it entered.
By 1992 Wiggins resolved to take Pacific into Formula One for the 1993 season, renaming the team Pacific Grand Prix. He engaged Reynard Racing to design the PR01 chassis. However, the experienced design team that had led Reynard's F1 research — including Rory Byrne — had departed for Benetton, leaving a smaller group to work with remnants of the previous project. The resulting PR01 shared a family resemblance with the Benetton B193 and Ligier JS37, all descended from the same design roots.
The entry was postponed in January 1993 due to a recession and investors failing to pay. Pacific finally reached the grid in 1994.
The 1994 debut was difficult from the start. The PR01 had been designed for the previous season, lacked adequate wind tunnel development, had completed minimal track testing, and used an Ilmor V10 engine that was underpowered relative to the established front-runners. Paul Belmondo and Bertrand Gachot — a team shareholder — were the race drivers.
The team failed to score a single point and failed to finish any race. From the French Grand Prix onwards, neither car qualified. Pacific regularly occupied the back rows of the grid alongside the similarly underfunded Simtek team.
For 1995, Wiggins struck a deal to run under the "Pacific Team Lotus" name, using the Lotus identity for its marketing potential even though no staff, equipment or technology transferred from the famous constructor. The obsolete Ilmor engines were replaced by Ford ED V8s. Andrea Montermini replaced Belmondo, with Gachot retaining the second seat.
With Larrousse and Lotus disappearing from the entry list, the PR02 was guaranteed a start in each race. However, results remained poor. Gachot vacated his seat mid-season and was replaced by a succession of pay drivers — Giovanni Lavaggi for four races, Jean-Denis Deletraz for two — before Gachot returned when their funding dried up. Pacific's best results that year were eighth-place finishes in the German and Australian Grands Prix, on both occasions as the last car running on the lead lap.
Pacific withdrew from Formula One at the end of 1995. Wiggins returned to Formula 3000 with Pacific Racing, running Patrick Lemarié and Cristiano da Matta, but could not reproduce the team's pre-F1 success. The team wound down after further seasons in junior categories.
Wiggins subsequently joined Lola, then moved into American open-wheel racing, acquiring Bettenhausen Motorsports in 2000 and renaming it HVM Racing. Paul Stoddart, former Minardi owner, bought into the team in 2006 and renamed it Minardi Team USA before it reverted to HVM Racing and eventually exited the sport at the end of 2012.
Pacific Grand Prix represents one of the clearest examples of the gulf between junior formula success and Formula One competitiveness. Wiggins' team had won championships at every rung of the ladder, yet the resource requirements of 1990s F1 — wind tunnel time, engine contracts, large engineering staffs — proved impossible to match. The team's willingness to compete through the tragic 1994 San Marino weekend, in solidarity with the wider paddock after the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, is remembered as a moment of collective determination in the sport's darkest recent weekend.