15 replies to this topic

[Megatron]

Just wondering what you think is the toughest time to be a GP racer.

Mine would have to be the 60's. Rear engined fraigle monsters in desperate need of the soon to be debuted areo wings.

What do you think?

[Ray Bell]

Depends on what you call difficult...
Does danger make it difficult - then the fifties. Does uncontrollability make it difficult - maybe the thirties.
What about seeking perfection and precision in comparison to your competitors? That would be the seventies.
Finding the right drive so you have a car good enough to win? The nineties.
Getting permission from you wife to do it at all? Anytime.
There must be more - I'll leave the rest to someone else.

[Dennis David]

For now I'll say pre-war. The war? WWI of course. I'll have more on this topic later but imagine racing cars town to town, not much of a road to speak of, no steering wheel, no brakes or throttle yet doing 70mph and you can get an idea of what it was like. Now imagine crossing mountain passes like the Arlberg Pass in Austria.

"There were gutters you could bury a man in, hundreds of them crossing the road at right angles: it would be a trial of springs as well as motors. Ridges, too, that lent more than a suggestion of the steeplechase, reared their crests across the way. For scores of miles, particularly in the high Arlberg country, six thousand feet above sea level, the road hung on the brink of fearsome precipices. Ruts and loose stones abounded in the Austrian section of the course."

[Ray Bell]

I did think of that, Dennis, but I didn't think of it in terms of Austrian passes, more like GPs. With memories of Lautenschlager...
Maybe Marcel Renault and that lot...
Did they have brakes?
Mind you, there were some ten hour GPs in the twenties, and still on dirt

[Bruce]

I think that the late 70s and early 80s deserve a vote - the ground effect car was a nightmare to drive. It had very little to do with "handling". They were hideously uncomfortable, as the downforce generated by the cars tended to keep the shocks fully loaded all the time, leading the drivers to compare the suspensions unfavourably with go-karts.

When cornering in these cars, Gilles Villeneuve stated that you turn the wheel, your head is snapped over such that you are unable to see the road properly and you wind off when you think it's right... Lauda said much the same thing;

You took a tight line into the corner, turned the wheel and that was it. The steering wheel was in position - for better or worse, for the duration of the corner.As soon as the car was exposed to the centrifugal forces, the steering wheel was locked in position and there was no way you could turn it. If you did manage to move it to take corrective action, the car, which was locked down as if it was in a vice, would start to bounce. Once that happened the skirts would start to leak, the aerodynamics were shot to hell and the car became completely unpredictable and the chances wereyou would end up in the shrubbery.

Apparently the cars, aside from being painful and difficult to drive, were also exhausting. Remember Nelson Piquet (admittedly, not someone remembered for his dedication to personal fitness, but still...) after the 1981 USGP or the 1982 Brazilian GP?

[BRG]

Interesting question. To listen to the whining last year about grooved tyres etc, you would think the most difficult era was 1999. But we know better of course!

The point about the ground effect era is a good one - I'd forgotten just how horrible those cars were. But for me, the late 30s with the big Autounions and Mercs must have been tough. They reckon only Rosemeyer ever really master the Autounion. 500+bhp through skinny tyres and swing axle rear suspension must have been a nightmare. And the "tracks" were still often little more than ordinary roads (and remembering the original Donington with its yumps and passing through the narrow Starkey's Bridge, the circuits weren't any better).

The 50s and 60s were comparatively "easy" with well balanced cars with not too much power. Maybe in the late 60s, the new 3 litre cars with no aerodynamic aids were a bit of a handful.

My vote goes for the late 30s and then the ground effect era.

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BRG

[Dennis David]

Ray, The had hand brakes, 'bout as good as dragging your feet and the engines ran at full speed and did not have a throttle like they do now.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/



[This message has been edited by Dennis David (edited 01-26-2000).]

[mtl'78]

Early Turbos with sliding skirts were pulling over 4g's. That's above any other force recorded in a roadcar. Modern Fighter jets pull between 4-7g's. There was never an F1 make so patently uncomfortable than the 77-83 period.

[Ray Bell]

....Yes, external contracting, with gravel getting into the shoes, and on the rear axle only.
But spare a thought for the braking contests of the present day, and perhaps since ground effect time - when braking distances are so short that it comes down to a miniscule change to make the life or death difference as you enter a corner.
Maybe that's why we don't see so much passing..
I still think those 10-hour Grands Prix would have been tough, and that the fifties bore great danger.

[Fast One]

Everyone has approached this from the point of view of danger or the difficulty in controllingnthe car. These are obviously good approaches. I'd like to bring up another one, because I remember it surprising me as I read it. Phil Hill talked about the degree of perfection needed to drivee the 1.5 liter cars successfully. They weren't violent or anything, like the turbos, but what he mentioned was thet they penalized mistakes more than the more powerful eras on either end, since the cars had too little power to recover quickly. A missed shift, he pointed out, had serious consequences for a lap time. Missing an apex would lose tons of time down the next straight, or all the way up an uphill sequence at a track like the Nurburgring. I'd never given it any thought before, but it made sense. And look at the four great drivers of that era: Clark, Surtees, Gurney, and Graham Hill, plus the other WDC, Phil Hill himself. All drivers known for precision of car control. A modern F1 car is so overpowered it recovers quickly. And missed shifts are a thing of the past. So while those tiny 1.5 liter cars may not have been violent to drive, they may have been among the most difficult to win in.

[Dennis David]

That's a tough one. I think the skills are a little different but hard to say one was harder than the other.

Clark did not like the new 3-litre Formula. He felt that it removed too much of the advantage he had over other drivers. Brabham though did not like the underpowered cars and considered the new 3 litres, proper racing cars.

Driving a W125 which could burn rubber in any gear and pretty much any speed still took a smooth style as demonstrated by Caracciola over the more "overt" style used by von Brauchitsch to achieve maximum results.

My own meager experience tells me that it is easier to be smooth with less power.


------------------
Regards,

Dennis David
Yahoo = dennis_a_david

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Grand Prix History
www.ddavid.com/formula1/

[Ray Bell]

So that's accuracy for the early sixties;
Courage for the teens...
And as is said above, who can compare?
Would Caracciola have done better in a Lotus 25 or 49 or 78.. when would his smoothness have paid off most?
Or was he too big to fit?
I wonder how much difference that made to Gurney and Brabham compared to Clark and Stewart in 1965? The way they talk about the effect of a couple of gallons of fuel today when they have over three times as much power, it must have meant something.

[Fast One]

Odd that Jack more or less faded from the top eschelon after back-to-back titles when the 1.5 liter formula came in, and reemerged with a vengeance when the power came back in '66. I don't pretend that the 1.5's were the most difficult to drive in terms of skill and control, I just found it interesting that one of that formula's champions, who had alot of seat time in high-powered Grand Prix and sports cars pointed out a difficulty with the little cars that would never have occured to me. As Graham Hill proved frequently during those years, the fastest man doesn't always win, rather he who makes the fewest mistakes.

[Ray Bell]

The mistake Jack didn't make in 1966 was get caught without a suitable engine. Ferrari was also ready, but they ruined their year by having that blue with Fearless John, while Cooper should have had it right with the Maser engine as well - but Rindt was young and inexperienced (Jenks said more than that) and Ginther was past his prime, and they had some reliability issues as well.
So it fell to Jack.
Then, I saw him in a fair dinkum race with F. John in more or less equal cars at Warwick Farm once. Surtees in a Lola F1 car fitted with a 2.7 Climax, Brabham in a Brabham of similar spec. John led until he spun, Jack won. Surtees lost 14 seconds in the spin, lost the race by 8 seconds. But Brabham had come from the back of the grid.
Refer to the 1963 Australian GP.
Perhaps the little cars didn't suit his style so much as the bigger ones, but he didn't give up F1 in that time, so he must have felt comfortable about being able to beat them. There were many days he was at the front of the field, it's just that he won no Grand Epreuve races. He did win a non-title race or two, from memory.

[Jonathan]

Dennis David

I agree those pre-war car were a handfull !

My understanding is that they typically ran humongus displacement (10+ Litre) engines at relativly low speed (600 RPM ?) and actually did better then 90 MPH on dusty cart track "roads" where you could see more than 40 feet in front of you. A common trick was to look UP at the gaps between the trees, and from that try and judge where the road should be...

[Joe Fan]

No doubt about it from my point of view--the 1960's shortly before the introduction of wings.