But the scientists were in charge now: they had to be, or there was no point in being in competition. You couldn’t just leave it to the driver and hope for sheer native skill to carry the day. It was the scientists who told the drivers what to do, not the other way round.
Brabham’s engineers had therefore come up with an alternative approach to the ground-effect question: a ‘FanCar’ that used a large, well, fan, like an industrial extractor fan, driven off the gearbox, to suck the Brabham BT46B to the ground. Amazingly, this device worked, although it infuriated Mario Andretti, the 1978 champion, who complained that it was ‘like a bloody great vacuum cleaner. It throws muck and rubbish at you at a hell of a rate.’ The FIA bleated, ‘At the moment we cannot find anything illegal about the car,’ and Lauda used it to win the Swedish Grand Prix in June ’78.
A couple of races later, though, the FanCar was withdrawn, only for Brabham to come back in 1981 with a piece of fiendish cunning in which hydropneumatics lowered the car’s suspension, once under way, to enhance the ground-effect environment, given that side-skirts – integral to the original ground-effect systems – had just been banned. This also went down staggeringly badly with the rest of the F1 family. ‘We cannot tolerate any longer illegal behaviour by other teams,’ said a Ferrari spokesman, at the same time as he threatened to reinstate the skirts on the sides of his car, in retaliation.
Not that Brabham were fussed, this time. They took the ’81 title, Nelson Piquet at the wheel.
Or was the real story at the start of 1981 the Lotus 88 twin-chassis car? And was this another work of genius or a piece of willed insanity? After all, Chapman, having given the world ground-effects, then felt he had to deal with their consequences as suffered by the drivers, not least of which were intolerable vibration, double vision, severe bruising and, occasionally, difficulty in actually keeping their feet on the pedals.
His answer was to build an almost completely rigid outer chassis, strong enough take the worst ground-effect batterings, with a softly suspended inner chassis in which the driver lounged, like a trucker in his sprung cab. It weighed a bit more than a conventional F1 machine, but the pay-off was that the ride could be brutally stiff and low (to keep the car stuck to the tarmac) without actually killing the pilots (Elio de Angelis and Nigel Mansell). ‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ said a Team Lotus employee. ‘It’s so brilliant, it’s scared everyone else.’
So brilliant, it never raced. At its first appearance at the United States Grand Prix West, the Lotus was met with official protests from eleven other teams at the track, even though no one could actually specify what rule or rules the Lotus 88 was breaking. The car was allowed to practise, but was then withdrawn from the race. At the Brazilian Grand Prix, two weeks later, McLaren, Osella, Alfa-Romeo, Ferrari, Williams and Ligier all complained again. This time, the stewards banned the car outright and effectively doomed Lotus’ season.
Oh, but the cat was out of the bag, Lotus 88 or no Lotus 88. McLaren, with their inventive designer, John Barnard, had gone off to the wind tunnel at the Department of Industry’s National Maritime Institute at Feltham, inserted a fake ‘rolling road’ and were using the setup to work on the new McLaren MP4, which, in turn, had its own major innovation, a carbon-fibre chassis. Brabham, meanwhile, had got their hands on a usable turbo, courtesy of BMW, with which Piquet took the 1983 Championship: the first to be won by a turbo car.
Ferrari, at the same time, had got their turbo working, and while Piquet won his Drivers’ title, Ferrari, with Patrick Tambay and René Arnoux, took the Constructors’ Championship. And Ferrari were about to acquire (they were pretty proud of this) a cutting-edge CAD package from the Digital Equipment Corporation, consisting of a VAX 8600 and four MicroVAX IIs, complete with a LAN to link them all together. That’s how serious things were.
There was a deeper issue, though, deeper than computer soft-ware, engine hardware, wind-tunnel testing, composite materials, computer-aided design, or suction overkill. James Hunt’s original despair at the way technology was usurping the role of the driver had touched on something fundamental about Grand Prix racing, something that made it unlike any other sport.
For the F1 enthusiast, how much of the pleasure lay in the talent of the sportsman, and how much in the technological appeal of the machinery? How important – to anyone’s sensuous and intellectual enjoyment of motor racing – was the driver, really, when it came down to it? How much of the excitement of the track was located in the thuggish purposefulness of the machinery, the mind-blowing noise, the smell, the kinetic violence all around? Or again, was it all about the teams, anyway? Was one’s allegiance to the équipe which enabled all the hardware to exist – charged with history and the culture of racing, like Ferrari, or provocative and brilliant, like Lotus, or rich and glossy and efficient, like Marlboro McLaren?
The early 1980s were, after all, a time when Formula One expended quite a lot of energy in tearing itself apart, just to see who really had the power: the drivers, the constructors, or the sport’s governing body. What became known as the FISA–FOCA War, a battle between the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile and the Formula One Constructors Association, was partly a flare-up of Anglo-Saxon and French cultural differences, partly an extended protest by the smaller garagistes, who felt themselves being squeezed by the bigger corporatist Continental outfits (i.e. Ferrari, Renault and now Alfa Romeo), and partly a matter of extreme personal antipathy between Jean-Marie Balestre, the arrogant, absolutist, head of FISA, and Bernie Ecclestone, tough-nut business-headed owner of the Brabham F1 team and FOCA chief executive.
It was, however you looked at it, a vicious squabble. Balestre claimed that FOCA ‘don’t know what they are in to, they don’t understand power, they’re just little men playing with toys, making cars in garages: who do they think they are? They don’t own motor sport!’ Ecclestone’s equally furious take on FISA was expressed thus: ‘Who the hell is FISA? They are a bunch of nobodies, they appointed themselves and they think they own racing, when all they really have is a bunch of clubs around the world and self-important people living off the back of the sport.’
Things came to a head at the preposterous Spanish GP of 1980, in which FISA attempted to fine those drivers who had failed to turn up at the drivers’ briefings for the previous two races. The drivers didn’t pay. FISA threatened to suspend their licences. FOCA argued that FISA was acting beyond its authority and threatened to withdraw the FOCA teams from the race. The Spanish race organisers offered to pay a deposit on the outstanding fines – a gesture refused by FISA, unless the money could be proven to have come from the drivers themselves. In the end, the race was run with only the FOCA teams participating (and was won by Alan Jones in a Williams-Ford, first of six remaining runners) after FISA had declared the race illegal. Unsurprisingly, no points won counted towards either Drivers’ or Constructors’ Championships.
The conflict rumbled on for another year, until, in 1981, with the Concorde Agreement between FISA and FOCA, a working compromise was achieved. This did not, however, stop the drivers – under the aegis of their collective organisation, the GPDA – from organising a strike at the 1982 South African Grand Prix, to protest against new contractual restrictions.
And it was a real strike, too. For a while, everything ground to a halt. The big name drivers – Prost, Lauda, Rosberg, Piquet – sat around the pits or the hotel pool, cracking jokes, playing the piano. Only one car went out to practice – Jochen Mass in a March, for whom every team at the track held out a pit board. Days passed, and for a while it looked as if the Grand Prix was about to founder completely, until a solution was at last cobbled together, the offending contractual restrictions were lifted, and the drivers were promised that they wouldn’t be punished for striking (but they were, as it turned out, by FISA).
The fact of the matter was that, on this occasion, both FISA and FOCA were so incensed by the drivers’ actions that Bernie Ecclestone was moved to articulate a profound but unpalata
ble truth about the state of Formula One: ‘We have been watching Ferraris for fifty years. Ferrari has had God knows how many drivers. They come and go but still all that people want to see is a Ferrari. They cannot see the bleeding driver anyway! Really, I ask you, what asset are they?’
It was a fair point: which was bigger – the sport or the driver? Teddy Mayer, of McLaren, had long espoused the view that drivers were ‘light bulbs’, interchangeable and replaceable, and Ecclestone was clearly thinking the same way. After all, if Manchester United could rebuild a whole squad after the Munich air disaster of 1958, how hard could it be to lose even a season’s worth of drivers and start from scratch? There were hundreds of good drivers out there; and, as Bernie had so cogently remarked, the spectators couldn’t see the bleeding driver anyway – a figure now reduced to not much than the brightly coloured pill of his own helmet, scarcely discernible at 150 mph, and, increasingly the mere plaything of the engineers’ fiendish ratiocinations –
– Which had now come out with – fresh for 1983 – active suspension, courtesy of Team Lotus, again.
Lotus had been having a fairly dreadful time of it: when the 88 was banned at the start of 1981, it was said that Colin Chapman was so dismayed at this barefaced misappropriation of the rule book that he more or less lost interest in the sport. Then, in December 1982, he died of a heart attack (itself a by-product, possibly, of the ongoing De Lorean fiasco; quite probably a by-product of a lifetime of uppers and downers), and Lotus were never quite the same afterwards.
And yet, here they were with the Lotus 92, Chapman’s last gift to motor racing, which boasted a suspension built round a computer and hydraulic jacks, instead of springs and shock absorbers. The system had initially been devised at the Cranfield College of Aeronautics, and, as Peter Wright, the Team Lotus aerodynamicist explained, ‘The car’s suspension works in much the same way as would a skier’s legs on the slopes. As his legs react to different bumps and contours so his brain receives the message and instantly changes the posture of his legs. Our suspension receives its commands from the on-board computer and instantly obeys.’ Nigel Mansell was the lucky recipient of all this brainpower and gamely announced, ‘It’s rather like having power steering, except that it works on all four wheels.’ Which was great, except for the fact that Lotus’s ’83 season consisted mostly of retirements, with a solitary third place going to Mansell in the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch. Indeed, it would take another few years before the active suspension principle would be properly exploited, and then not by Lotus. But the idea was there, which was all that really mattered. Progress was being made.
And yet, the sport’s centre of gravity had shifted. The drivers had become very slightly less central to the way things were run. And the sponsors’ names had got larger and larger. And the money talked louder. And the cars got cleverer and cleverer. And the engines became more and more powerful: in the mid-1980s they were turning out as much as 1,400 bhp, using a special fuel, the majority of which was toluene, a fantastically potent octane booster, capable of transformation into trinitrotoluene, or TNT. Technology was king. Finance was the First Lord. And no one ever again could jump into a racing car just for the sheer hell of it.
17
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE AMERICANS?
In the year 2000, who do you think was proclaimed Driver of the Century, by the popular autosports magazine Racer? Nuvolari? Fangio? Caracciola? Moss? Clark? Stewart? Senna? Villeneuve? Prost? Here’s a clue: Racer is an American publication. And, yes, the Driver of the Century is none other than Mario Andretti, sports car racer, indy car champion, winner of the Indianapolis 500, and, in 1978, Formula One champion for John Player Team Lotus, driving the Lotus 79, the ground-effect ‘Black Beauty’. What a trouper! He raced (for the last time) in the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2000: aged sixty! Hats off to him!
Well, if you’re American, and you’re going to pick anyone for Driver of the Century, Andretti is as sensible a choice as any. Still held in great esteem by the American racing public, Andretti embodies the Dream as much as anyone can. A humble Italian immigrant with an obsession with motor racing, he slogged his way, inspirationally, to the very top, starting with midget racers in the early 1960s, toughing it out in indy cars for a decade, before entering Formula One full-time with the Parnelli Team in 1975, all the while showing that gritty tenacity (as well as business acumen) which counts for so much in the States. Laconic, physically tough, laid back, determined, skilful, mechanically astute (an essential characteristic for getting the Lotus 78/79 working), affable, a family man, he had a certain craggy Mount Rushmore quality to his appearance, as well as an authentic American perma-tan and eerily tidy hair. Whenever he stood next to Ronnie Peterson – his Lotus team-mate – he looked like a good-quality US-made leather wallet placed next to a floor mop. He is, let’s not be picky about this, a legend of the sport.
He is also the last American to become World Champion. Indeed, he may remain that way, given the startling paucity of North American racing talent in F1 nowadays. When Andretti retired from Grand Prix racing in 1982, he handed the job of Top American to Eddie Cheever, who drove for Renault, Haas Lola and Arrows, among others, achieving some success, before retiring from F1 in 1989. Michael Andretti, Mario’s son, raced in 1993, keeping the flame alive. But between then and 2006, there were no Americans at all competing in Formula One. The encouragingly named Scott Speed did his best in 2006, but in 2007 Toro Rosso (for whom he was driving) let him go. And there, at the time of writing, the matter rests.
It wasn’t always like this. Go back to 1960, and not only were Richie Ginther and Phil Hill highly active in Formula One, there was even an anomaly whereby points scored at the Indy 500 counted towards the F1 Drivers’ Championship; an anomaly which ended in ’61, but which nonetheless gestured towards some hopeful post-war proximity between the two racing culures.
It was ’61, of course, when Phil Hill, native of Florida, based in California, won the title for Ferrari, establishing his credentials, at the same time, as an exceptionally nice man. ‘I’m in the wrong business,’ he once said, ‘I don’t want to beat anybody.’ Hill was also a thorough-going Europhile, who was ‘completely captivated by the romance of everything I’d read about it, of the great Mercedes and Auto Unions, of Caracciola, von Brauchitsch, Tim Birkin.’ He even did a training course with SU Carburettors, of Birmingham, which must have been an eye-opener.
Californian neighbour Richie Ginther was then persuaded by Hill to take up motor racing, and he too did the rounds of the Grand Prix season, joining Hill at Ferrari, before moving on to BRM and eventually Honda, to whom he presented their first GP win, at Mexico in 1965. He was solid, old Ginther, very technically aware, managing one win and fourteen podium places, but he simply walked away from motor racing at the Indy 500 in 1967, after getting drenched in fuel, not catching fire, but deciding that enough was enough, all the same.
Or, better yet, how about the great Dan Gurney? Gurney had many things going for him. He was a quick driver; he was extremely tall (six feet four inches); he had chiselled good looks, like a Burt Bacharach in overalls; it was said that he was the only driver Jim Clark ever confessed to fearing; and he helped design and build the Eagle-Weslake, still thought by many to be the most beautiful Grand Prix car ever made. He gave Porsche their first win in Grand Prix racing (French Grand Prix, 1962). He did the same for Brabham (French Grand Prix, again, 1964). And then he went and started his own team – All American Racing – initially planning to win at Indianapolis, but with the subsequent intention of showing the world that America could take on the smart alecs in Britain and Italy and win at Formula One.
It sounds almost endearingly high-minded now, to say nothing of being endearingly Eurocentric. And although the outfit was notionally based in California, in reality the AAR Eagle team was another British garagiste concern. The chassis was the work of the highly regarded ex-Lotus engineer Len Terry, while the sizzling V12 was designed by ex-BRM man Aubrey Woods and buil
t by old-school Weslake Engineering in Rye, East Sussex. In due recognition of this state of affairs, Gurney changed the corporate name to Anglo-American Racing, and in 1966 he hit the tracks with the intensely dashing Eagle F1 car in midnight blue, complete with jetfighter radiator intake and sexy alloy wheels. A year later, and he had won the Belgian GP in fine style from both Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark, and was mobbed by cheering Belgians. And this a week after winning the Le Mans 24 Hours in another great Anglo-American co-production, a Ford GT40. It looked as if Dan’s moment had arrived.
Unfortunately, that was it for Eagle in Formula One. It was a good car, all right, and Gurney was a good driver, and the two of them led handsomely at the Nürburgring in ’67, before a halfshaft gave out. But that was the story, really: the car wasn’t reliable enough (especially galling for a perfectionist like Gurney), and by 1968, he was driving for McLaren, before dropping out of Formula One altogether a couple of years later.
All right, how about Peter Revson? He too made a start in F1 in the 1960s, went back to the States for a few years, then returned in the early 1970s and won the British and Canadian GPs with McLaren in ’73. He died in ’74, practising for the South African Grand Prix and was a fine driver, and was indeed the last American-born racer to win a Grand Prix. Or how about …? Well, we’ve had Mario Andretti. Who else does it leave? Anyone?
* * *
There’s something anomalous about all this, when you consider how much Ford, Firestone, Goodyear, Texaco, Esso, Mobil, Champion Spark Plugs, to name just the big ones, have contributed to Formula One over the years. So many millions of US dollars have flooded into the sport, and yet you can count the number of major American drivers on the fingers of one hand. Fair enough, the industry had no choice but to put money into Formula One, given its reach as a marketing tool throughout Europe and the rest of the non-US world. But why has the sport habitually meant so little, back in the States? Why has it gained so small a cultural purchase?
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 13