F1
Origins
The Early Years
The
British Era
Wings,
Shunts & Ground Effects
The
British era continued after Jim Clark's death.
Graham Hill took the 1968 title in the
Lotus 49, fitted with the then-new Ford Cosworth
engine, introduced at the Dutch Grand Prix in
June 1967, and with the first sponsorship colors
and logos seen in F1 racing. But the mantle of
champion would soon pass to Clark's close friend,
fellow Scotsman and protégé Jackie
Stewart Clark
arranged for Stewart's first F1 test drive
who would surpass Clark's career record for GP
wins and capture three World Championships between
1969 and 1973.
Formula
One technology developed at a furious pace in
the 1970s and early 1980s, beginning with the
introduction of wings (or "aerofoils")
mid-way during the 1968 season. Borrowed from
Jim Hall's revolutionary Can-Am Chaparral,
wings allowed for the creation of "downforce,"
pinning cars to the track for greater traction
and vastly increased cornering speed. Starting
precariously the original high-mounted,
manually adjustable rear wings tended to fall
off, causing tremendous shunts F1 aerodynamic
engineering proceeded in fits and starts.
Jackie Oliver's practice crash in the Lotus 49B
at Rouen in July 1968, followed by disastrous
accidents for both Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt
during the 1969 Spanish GP at Montjuich Pack,
caused wings to be banned for Monaco and the balance
of the championship that year.
Jackie
Stewart's finest victory may have been in the
1968 German GP at the Nürburgring, where
in the mist and torrential rain he outpaced the
field to win by just over four minutes from Hill.
The 1969 season belonged to Stewart and his team
owner, Ken Tyrrell, who dominated F1 with
their Matra MS80, winning at Kyalami, Montjuich,
Zandvoort, Clermont-Ferrand, Silverstone
and Monza although Graham Hill captured
his 5th Monaco Grand Prix. Lotus returned in force
in 1970, a season which was all about the brilliance
of Austrian Jochen Rindt with the new Lotus
72 (taking the laurels in Monaco, Holland, France,
Britain and Germany) and was overshadowed by Rindt's
horrific death in practice for the Italian Grand
Prix at Monza's infamous Parabolica corner.
At
Monza, Stewart was in the act of buckling his
helmet when he broke down, wept in a corner, did
get into the car, wept again. He could taste the
salt of his own tears. Out there as he circled
Monzas broad acres he became a racing driver
again. He spent a few laps examining the Parabolica,
searching for clues as to what might have happened
then drove the fastest lap he had ever
driven at Monza.
Grand
Prix Showdown - Christopher Hilton
Although
the Cosworth engine was by now ubiquitous in F1,
the Lotus 72 with its distinctive "shovel"
nose and nose wings was significantly faster.
Rindt won the 1970 championship posthumously,
and his replacement as number one driver for Lotus,
young Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, piloted
the 72 to his first F1 win at the season-ending
U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. Stewart
and Fittipaldi then split the next four World
Championships, with Stewart taking 1971 and 1973
for the new Team Tyrrell, sponsored by
Elf, and Fittipaldi winning with the black "John
Player Special" Lotus in 1972 and giving
Team McLaren its first F1 title in 1974.
(Bruce McLaren had died, after winning four GPs,
including Belgium in 1968 in his own car, during
Can-Am testing at Goodwood in 1970.) Stewart retired
at Watkins
Glen in 1973, one race short of 100 GPs, withdrawing
from the contest after the death in practice of
Francois Cevert, his friend and protégé
at Tyrrell.
Rising
once again after Stewart's retirement, Ferrari
returned to the forefront of F1 in 1975 with the
flat-12 powered 312T and drivers Niki Lauda
and Clay Regazzoni. Despite a season marred
by protests and concerns about driver safety
Fittipaldi refused to drive in the Spanish GP,
which was stopped after 29 laps when a car launched
into the crowd, killing four spectators
Lauda took nine poles and won five races to capture
his first of three F1 crowns. Formula One cars
now sported huge airboxes behind the cockpits
to increase air flow to the engine, leading the
way (after a short experiment with the famous
six-wheel Tyrrell P34, which was a front-runner
throughout 1976) to the next major technical revolution
in F1: ground effects.
But
another mention of Niki Lauda, one that
illustrates the savagery and heroism of F1, is
required before ground effects can properly be
explored. Coming off his championship, Lauda battled
with James Hunt (driving the McLaren M23
Cosworth) to
win six of the first nine races of the 1976 season.
But at the German Grand Prix on 1 August, Lauda
crashed his Ferrari at Bergwerk, a 150
mph section of the Nürburgring, in a massive,
flaming accident that still brings shivers when
viewed to this day. Suffering severe facial burns
and inhaling toxic fumes from the car's burning
bodywork, Lauda was expected to die and received
the Last Rites in the hospital, but in
a rare display of sheer determination, made a
near-miraculous recovery to return to the cockpit
just six weeks later for the Italian GP, where
he finished 4th. (The Nürburgring's famous
Nordeschlifer was retired as the home of the German
GP the jumps and twists deemed too unsafe
for F1 cars and moved to Hockenheim
the next year, reincarnated only in shortened,
sanitized form 20 years later as the Luxembourg
GP.)
Fuji
was drawn in another dimension: a widespread disbelief
that Lauda was actually alive, never mind driving
his Ferrari. . . After three laps Lauda prised
himself out of the cockpit and as he walked away
from the mechanics someone put a comforting arm
round his shoulders. But Niki Lauda needed no
comfort from another man; he alone would live
with his decision.
Grand
Prix Showdown - Christopher Hilton
After
several victories by Hunt at Mosport and
Watkins Glen, the 1976 Formula One season went
down to the last race, at Fuji in Japan.
Leading the World Championship by three points,
Lauda withdrew from the race after three laps
of torrential rain, giving the championship to
"Master James," Britain's last
F1 champion for 16 years, who nursed his rain
tires until a late-race pit stop and finished
the race, unable to see the track, not knowing
where he had placed or whether he had won the
title. Lauda re-captured the title with Ferrari
in 1977, but quit the team with two races to go,
following a calculated 4th place championship-clincher
at the U.S. Grand Prix, to join Bernie Ecclestone's
Parmalat Brabham team and be replaced
in the Ferrari by Gilles Villeneuve.
Formula
one engineers, now referred to as "designers,"
had been steadily working on aerodynamics for
more than a decade. The zenith of the art may
have been reached in 1978 with the "ground
effects" Lotus 78/79. Ground
effects turned the entire car into a large, inverted
wing, using side skirts and underbody design to
literally glue the car to the circuit. Mario
Andretti, who took the Lotus to the championship
in 1978, explained that ground effects made the
race car "feel like it's painted to the road."
Colin Chapman's careful development of
the ground-effect car principle had rendered conventional
GP machines virtually uncompetitive in a little
over 12 months, as Lotus won nine of the 15 races
in the '78 season. (Andretti's own championship
winning race was marred by the death of team mate
Ronnie Peterson at the start of the Italian
Grand Prix at Monza, an accident for which then
second-year driver Ricardo Patrese was
sanctioned but eventually absolved.) Yet the other
teams would catch up shortly, and 1978 would be
the last time a Lotus driver would win the World
Championship before Colin Chapman's death, with
the Lotus team slowly declining into mediocrity
and dissolution except for brief success
with the young Ayrton Senna in the mid-1980s.
Despite
their advances, ground effects had a problem,
namely that slight miscalculations in set-up would
render the ground-effect F1 car undriveable and
wickedly unstable. The need to keep ground
clearances extremely low led to rigidly sprung,
rock-hard cars with virtually no ride height tolerance
and little if any ability to handle bumps and
curbs. Something really terrible, unnatural and
unpredictable would happen if the airflow
beneath the car was disrupted for one reason or
another.
To
be honest, there was no such thing as cornering
technique in the ground effect era. Cornering
was a euphemism for rape practised on the driver.
. . When you came into a corner you had to hit
the accelerator as hard as you possibly could,
build up speed as quickly as possible and, when
things became unstuck, bite the bullet and give
it even more. In a ground effect car, reaching
the limit was synonymous with spinning out.
Niki Lauda
As
Lauda commented, "The wildest imaginable
things could happen behind the wheel of a ground
effect car." After advancing throughout the
grid, by 1981-82 all teams were using ground effects.
But in an effort to bring more driver control
and skill to F1, ground effects first the
skirts (along with six-wheeled and four-wheel
drive cars) in 1981, and then underbody venturi
tunnels in 1983 were finally banned
from Formula One.
The
Turbo Era
The Active Cars
After Tamburello
Grooves
& The New Legends
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