In my recent post about Number 38, I promised more of Roy Jacobson’s accounts of motor racing at grass roots level. Well it’s time to deliver – here’s how to take an old M.G. and challenge the big boys.

Just An Old M.G…

The Australian Grand Prix was held over the weekend but it was also the 12 hours race at Sebring. I had an experience there that may be entertaining.

In the early 1970s I began racing an M.G. TD, a Mark 2, which the company had offered in 1953 as the competition option. Larger carburetors, 4 extra dampers and a lower rear axle ratio – hardly competitive options. Over time I learned to drive and developed the car to a high degree and became bold enough to enter it in a “curtain raiser” race just prior to the Sebring
12 hours race of 1977.

Long sentences are not necessary; just imagine a 1,400 mile drive in an old bread van, towing the M.G. on a trailer, no reservations, a room I found in Lake Worth – I had to chase the chameleons out first. At entrant registration came word that an IMSA competition license was necessary and that cost about all the cash I had – I had not even entered the circuit yet!

Practice went well but the competition looked rather intimidating; have a look at the photo – that’s a 1959 Lister-Chevrolet, 5.3 liter V-8. Final practice confirmed we were ready but Sebring is a long way around, 5.3 miles in those days. It can get lonely out there and the IMSA folks must have realized this during my practice for they sent out a few modern cars to do “exhibition laps”.

Half way down the long straight, topping 100mph, a glance in the mirror – NOTHING – but as I reached the 90 degree right hander I felt the ground shaking. John Greenwood’s Corvette was passing me! On another lap a Porsche 908 passed me doing 170+. That car didn’t make noise but you could hear the air displacement as it ‘whistled’ past.

The race went better than expected; that monster Lister-Chevrolet lost a wheel in turn one, others expired from the flat out running, but the M.G. never failed me and I remember some cheering as I managed to pass a single car, a 6 cylinder Mustang which I had harried for 10 laps or so.

With a 15th place finish in my logbook and a time sheet, the M.G. loaded on the trailer, some sandwiches and a Thermos of orange juice presented by a friend’s wife, I headed north in the bread van. Many, many hours later, freezing cold, late at night, north of New York City, the van’s fuel tank ran dry. I had to drain the M.G. tank to feed the van for the final 100 miles!

Not really F1 is it? But come back next week for another adventure.

Number 38

I see that BMW are also under suspicion of having a flexible floor on the F1.07. Which makes it harder to believe the dismissive “Oh, Ferrari always gets accused of cheating when they’re fast” statement from the red brigade. Let’s wait and see what the FIA have to say on the matter, shall we?

It is interesting that it is BMW who are accused along with Ferrari; they were also suspects in the flexi-wing saga of last year and I begin to wonder if they have a mole in the Ferrari camp who passes along all the latest tweaks. Industrial espionage in F1 – who would have guessed it?

But mention of moles reminds me that I have been meaning for some time to point at a rather entertaining occasional column on GrandPrix dot com. It is called simply The Mole and is well worth a read, especially if you’re British (some of the humor is very English).

To return to The Amazing Moving Floor Scandal, however, it strikes me that the idea might be related to Ferrari’s much-questioned longer wheelbase this year. All the other teams have gone for shorter wheelbases (although I seem to remember reading somewhere that Honda are another exception – hmmm, could that be an explanation of their poor performance so far?). It is just possible that Ferrari discovered that the flexi-floor worked really well with a long wheelbase and so went against standard theory on the Bridgestone tires. Which would argue against BMW adopting the system since they have a short wheelbase – except that they could have found that it still gives them a measurable performance advantage.

All conjecture, of course, and I am no engineer – I just like to look at possible motives behind all these upsets in F1. And, as long as I’m doing that, we could consider what would happen if the FIA decide that the floors are illegal and must be changed. That could really mess with Ferrari’s performance, as we saw with the Renault handicapped by the banning of mass dampers in 1976 – design your car around a certain tweak and you’re in big trouble if it is suddenly made illegal.

But I suppose the fuss will die down and be forgotten in due course. And, whatever Ferrari and BMW are doing, you can bet that everyone else will be by the end of the season.

One race done and already the muttering about cheating has started. Ron Dennis has been hinting that Ferrari’s speed can be partly attributed to a flexible floor on the cars. Since the scrutineers had a good look at this during their inspection, it may be that Ron made sure that they heard a rumor.

The point is that, if the floor moves downwards at speed, it can alter the under-car aerodynamics and lessen drag, thereby allowing more speed on the straights. That would show up on the speed traps but you could disguise it by increasing the wing angles, thus slowing the car to a believable speed on the straights but reaping the benefit of extra downforce in the corners. All of which would be illegal under the “no moveable aerodynamic devices” rule.

The scrutineers passed the cars in Melbourne but this does not necessarily mean that something underhand is not going on. Apparently, they test at the moment by looking only at upward flexing of the floor – but it would be downward pressure that would clear the matter up once and for all.

Naturally, a lot of people are saying that it’s just Ron looking for excuses for his own cars not being as fast as the Ferraris. But that presumes that he knew before the race that the McLarens would be beaten. It is far more likely that his concern is genuine, having noticed the complex arrangement for keeping the Ferrari’s floor in place at the front.

Probably, Ron hopes that the rumor will activate the FIA and they will have a quiet word in Ferrari’s ear to tell them to get rid of the system. That would be the most sensible way to proceed, avoiding any possibility of legal action and a continuing unseemly fight throughout the season. F1 has had enough of those, surely, with the mass damper fiasco fresh in everyone’s mind and the customer car row about to enter litigation.

This is the kind of thing that happens when the rules become so all-embracing and extensive, however. With the importance of aerodynamics and every constructor having wind tunnels, the cars get ever closer in design and performance increases become a matter of subtle and sometimes dubious tweaks. Since every designer is looking for ways to gain an advantage, it is no wonder that they work in areas that are not completely dictated by mandatory measurements.

And that means they push the boundaries of legality on occasion, thereby forcing the FIA to be even more stringent on what they will allow. It is an endless cycle of increasing complication that needs to be stopped before the rules become so limiting that there is no difference at all between the cars, apart from the color scheme and badge on the front. How do you do that?

Well, you could start by simplifying everything immediately; extend the flat bottom from nose to tail, for instance, and let the designers work out how they are going to cope with that. But it’s a long subject and I could best sum it up with the philosophy of “We need less regulation, not more.”

Over at F1-Fanatic, Keith Collantine asked the question, “Which Manufacturers Will Quit (F1)?” and received a long reply from Number 38 of Halifax VA. Now, I like Number 38; for one thing I learned from a previous comment of his that he’s even older than I am. And Keith’s answer, including the fact that he’s not old enough to remember the introduction of the Tyrrell six-wheeler, set me to thinking of the first innovation in F1 that I was witness to.

I started watching Grands Prix in 1962 – which means that I just missed Cooper’s revolutionary idea of putting the engine in between the driver and the rear axle. But I can remember when Colin Chapman introduced the monocoque to F1, thereby consigning the spaceframe to the scrapheap. Although monocoque chassis had been around for a while in production cars, racing cars still relied on the tried and tested formula of welding tubes together to make a frame (known as a spaceframe) and then bolting body panels to it. The monocoque made the body into the frame upon which everything else was hung.

In Chapman’s hands, the monocoque became a large tube that housed the front suspension and driver; he then bolted the engine to the rear of the tube and hung the rear suspension on the engine. The resultant saving in weight enabled him to build a car that was much more nimble and just as strong as the other cars – the mighty Lotus 25 that Jim Clark used to such good effect.

And so the spaceframe welder’s art disappeared into history. I say art because the development of the spaceframe had led to some incredibly intricate and complex constructions from steel tubing; and the high point was probably not a F1 car but a sportscar known as the Birdcage Maserati (for obvious reasons).

The Birdcage was introduced in the dying days of Maserati’s involvement in racing – after their withdrawal it was the French Maserati dealers who tried every year to win at Le Mans with the original design supplied with various bodies. The car was very quick and invariably established a lead over the pack of Ferraris and Aston Martins in the early stages of the 24-hour race. But it was fragile as well and, sooner or later, something would break and it would be retired. It became almost a tradition that the Birdcage would be the hare in the first couple of hours at Le Mans but, in the end, reality had to be faced and the Maserati disappeared from the entry lists.

Take a look at the photograph above that shows the Maserati’s spaceframe. It is a model of the real thing but gives some idea of how complex a structure it was. Before the Lotus 25, all F1 cars were constructed in this way; after it, they went monocoque, chassis-less in effect, unless you regard the body as the chassis.

Chapman’s revolutionary idea also illustrates perfectly one of the most important rules of design: simplicity is always better than complexity. Colin had the vision to see that the spaceframe had become too complicated to develop further and something much simpler was needed. It was a logical step to use the existing technology already present in production cars – but it took genius to see that.