Wings, Shunts & Ground Effects

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 Monza’s 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.