Sidepodcast

Visiting the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Hall of Fame Museum

Our first guest post of the new year comes courtesy of JPancoast who visited the Indianapolis Motor Speedway plus museum, and took plenty of photos along the way. Here he is to share them with us:

Credit: JPancoast

Blue Corvette at the Hall of Fame Museum, Indianapolis Motor Speedway

What many don't know is that there's a super secret slave holding pen in Sidepodcast towers where Mr. and Mrs. C force users to write guest posts. The punishment for not complying? Eating baguettes with Bertrand Baguette!. So here's my guest post. Hopefully they'll let me out. I miss good pizza. And my family.

Late last summer we went to visit some family in Indianapolis. When you're a bit of a racing fan, and you're in Indy, the first thing that comes to mind is the speedway, sometimes referred to as the "brickyard" because it was originally paved with bricks. I thought I might be able to steal some time and go by myself or with my son and maybe daughter. As it turns out I actually convinced the wife to go so off we all went!

The only racetrack I'd ever been to before is a dirt oval in upstate New York so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The first thing that hit me was the sheer size. The size of the stands, the track, everything. You have to drive under the track to get to the infield! Who'da thunk that!?

You can pay a few dollars and get a bus ride around the track so we did. This is where the size of the place comes in. The track has permanent seating for 250,000, but if the infield is used (as they like to do in Nascar) the capacity goes up to 400,000. When you watch it on TV and you see the lap times (in the high 30's/low 40's) you think it's not that long. But you're wrong. At least I was. The oval is 2.5 miles and the F1 circuit was slightly longer at 2.6 miles. The tour takes you around the oval.

You tour the oval counter-clockwise, opposite to the way the F1 circuit went, starting between turns 12 and 13. The first thing you might notice is that inside of turn 13 they've cut out more road course since the US GP, similar to the turns 1-7 area. They run Moto GP races and other things I can't remember in those areas. The banking is very severe (to me) and the bus stays all the way at the bottom as it's not travelling at a zillion miles an hour. The back straight actually runs through the middle of a golf course and several holes are in the infield.

Coming down the main straight the first thing I noticed was the Pagoda which is a very out of place design in my mind. There was also a MotoGP awards stand (they were getting ready for the Indy Red Bull race). But then I see what I'm really there for... the F1 garages! Proof that, yes Virginia, they once had Formula 1 races right on this very spot! I never thought I'd get so excited at seeing garages, but I was. Hopefully they'll be used for F1 again someday (and my family is still in the area so I have a place to crash). Here's an aerial photo of the track taken when they were putting the road circuit in turn 13. The pagoda is almost exactly in the center of the picture. The museum is the white building on the right side of the picture just above the dirt area. You can see a few holes of the golf course and also the F1 circuit if you look closely enough.

As one might expect, the IMS Hall of Fame Museum is full of cars of all sorts, ranging from old Ferrari's, Maserati's, and Alfa's all the way up to modern Indy and Nascar. The history of the track is covered in some detail with a short film (the wikipedia article gives a good summary). I didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked, as I was stuck with a fixed 50mm lens and couldn't get most of the cars fully in frame, but this is what I managed to get. You can view the full gallery on SmugMug.

Credit: JPancoast

Benetton B191B from 1991

This right here is the Benetton B191B from 1991. It's powered by a Ford/Cosworth engine. The drivers for the team that year were some guy named Michael Schumacher and Riccardo Patrese.

Credit: JPancoast

Jim Clark's 1963 Lotus

This is probably my favorite car in the museum. It's a 1963 Ford powered Lotus, built by Colin Chapman, and driven by Jim Clark during his rookie Indy 500, in which he placed second. To be honest, it wasn't my favorite when visiting, but after reading Steven Roy's excellent post about Clark I realized that this car had been driven by someone special. Plus, the paint job rocks, I love the general look of the car, and it's powered by a Ford engine! I'm constantly amazed by how thin the tires were on earlier cars. Another interesting point is the geometry. I didn't notice this while I was there but you can easily tell in the picture that the wheels on the right side are farther away from the body than the wheels on the left.

Credit: JPancoast

Graham Hill's 1968 Lotus

One of the more interesting cars in terms of technology (the paint scheme is terrible). This is Graham Hill's 1968 Lotus which he raced in the 500 that year. The interesting thing about this car is it is powered by a Pratt and Whitney turbine engine. Unfortunately a suspension part failed on lap 110 and it didn't complete the race.

I don't have much information on the rest of these cars, other than the obvious (what you can already tell from the pictures). The first one is a Porsche of some sort, the picture at the top of the post is a Corvette. Of those below, the Alfa, Ferrari, and Maserati are my favorites. I just love the style of those cars and the thin tires. They lead me to thinking "the guys that drove these were crazy".

Credit: JPancoast

A Porsche at the Hall of Fame Museum

Credit: JPancoast

An Alfa Romeo at the Hall of Fame Museum

Credit: JPancoast

A Ferrari, at the Hall of Fame Museum

Credit: JPancoast

A Maserati at the Hall of Fame Museum

Jim Clark - Yes, He Really Was That Good

Having previously discussed Jim Clark on a couple of occasions, Steven Roy returns to highlight some more of the man's success, but from another perspective

Credit: Lotus

Clark's Lotus Type 18, at Group Lotus' HQ in Hethel.

Having watched BBC4’s re-run of Jim Clark: The Quiet Champion recently I was surprised at the effect that he had on people even though I know all the stories and I have seen the film before. It seems incredible to me that someone like Dan Gurney still breaks down and cries when speaking about Clark even though the film was made 40 years after his death.

I have never been a big fan of using statistics to assess a driver’s ability. There are many examples of drivers who never achieved the results that their ability deserved. Chris Amon was rated as one of the very best drivers of his time but never won a world championship race due to his incredible ability to change teams at exactly the wrong time. However there are other cases like Fangio where the raw statistics tell you that this was indeed a great driver. There is only one interpretation that can be made from 24 wins from 51 starts.

Clark’s results like Fangio’s lead to only one conclusion but I want to dig into the bald statistics to show how he dominated the sport.

In simple terms, he started 72 races and won 25. Given that the reliability of the cars in the 1960s was nowhere near as good as it is now these are clearly exceptional results but they don’t come close to showing how good Clark really was. He drove only for Lotus and Colin Chapman made cars with two characteristics. They were fast and they were unreliable. Clark as a result retired from 23 of his 72 races and in many of those he retired from the lead.

So although he started 72 races he only finished 49 and he won more than half of those. You may think those statistics sum him up but there is better to come. Of those 49 finishes 32 were podiums and 40 were points scoring. In a career that lasted 8 seasons he only finished out of the points 9 times.

In those days, of course, young drivers were not able to spend time in simulators learning the vagaries of their car and the circuits. Neither did they have telemetry to let them know where they were gaining or losing time. So they had to take time to settle into F1 and learn how far they could push their cars. Any driver who pushed the limit too early was liable to have a very short career.

Jim’s first race was the Dutch GP of 1960 but it was not until 1962 that he won his first race. The real measure of his domination is to be found in his results from the start of 1962 until his death after the first round of the 1968 championship.

During that period he started 58 races and failed to finish more than a third of them recording 20 DNFs. From his 38 finishes he scored 25 wins, 29 podiums and 34 points scoring finishes. In just over 6 full seasons he won two-thirds of the races he finished and only finished outside the points 4 times.

In those 6 seasons he only finished outside the top 3 in the championship once. This was in 1966 when the engine regulations were changed from 1.5 litre to 3 litres and Lotus did not have a very good engine until the Cosworth DFV arrived the following season. He won two championships but had Chapman gone for a bit more reliability at the expense of a little speed he could easily have taken 5 and drastically improved his already impressive statistics.

Of course, in those days, drivers drove in many other categories and few drove in as many as Clark . Frustratingly for his rivals, it didn’t matter what he drove he was just as good in any kind of car. In 1964 he finished third in the world championship but he won the British Touring Car Championship in the Lotus Cortina. He won in formula two, sports cars and saloon cars. He won the Indianapolis 500 by two laps in 1965 and but for some dodgy lap scoring and some officials ignoring their own rules to ensure that one of their own won he would have won two more. He was even at home at the wheel of a rally car.

In the winters of the 1960s the top F1 drivers drove in the Tasman Series which was a series of races in New Zealand and Australia . It goes without saying that Clark dominated. He entered the championship for the first time in 1965 winning 4 of the 8 races and finishing second once to take the championship. The following year was his least successful finishing third in the championship with one win and 2 seconds.

In 1967 he was truly dominant. That year there were only 6 races of which Clark won 3 and finished second in the other 3. He scored 45 points while his nearest rival Jackie Stewart scored only 18 from his two wins. In 1968 the championship was again up to 8 races and Clark won 4 and was second in another to take yet another championship.

In four seasons Clark scored 12 wins, 7 seconds and one third from 30 races. In 4 seasons he finished on the podium in two-thirds of the races in the Tasman Series, winning 40% of them and taking 3 of the 4 championships.

It is hard to put into words how utterly dominant Jim Clark was but the numbers give an indication.

Sidepodchat - Jim Who?

• Length: 9:45 
• Size: 11.3 MB 
• File: chat16.mp3 
• Transcript: Coming soon 
• Torrent: chat16.torrent 

In this final installment of Steven Roy's guest podcast, he tells us the previously published story of a forgotten man - a driver mostly known as Jim Who?

"There are people who believe that the thing that sets F1 apart from other classes of racing is technology. The theory is F1 has the best people and has always had a technological lead. Only F1 could have ever made the great breakthroughs in technology that have taken us from barely modified road cars to cars that, in theory at least, could run upside down on a ceiling. Every time a piece of technology is outlawed we get howls of protest that F1 won’t be F1 any more because F1 must have better technology than any other class..."

Read more on the original post.

Jim Who?

There are people who believe that the thing that sets F1 apart from other classes of racing is technology. The theory is F1 has the best people and has always had a technological lead. Only F1 could have ever made the great breakthroughs in technology that have taken us from barely modified road cars to cars that, in theory at least, could run upside down on a ceiling. Every time a piece of technology is outlawed we get howls of protest that F1 won’t be F1 any more because F1 must have better technology than any other class.

Of course all of this is based on a false premise. F1 has not always led all other classes and at times F1 has even been behind road car design. It has also been argued by those same people recently that USF1 has no chance of success because American racing technology is and always has been a long way behind European racing technology.

It has been argued that only a genius of Colin Chapman’s stature working in the unique pressure cooker environment of F1 could have shaped the under-side of the car to produce ground effect aerodynamics. Except that is not true. He was beaten to that technology by Jim Hall. Jim Who?

_{Jim Hall designed Chaparral 2H}

The thing that made Chapman’s ground effect Lotus 79 so special were the side skirts fitted to the car to seal it to the ground. Only a Chapman in F1 could do that. Except that is not true either. Jim Who did that before Chapman as well.

Only a genius of Gordon Murray’s standing having to find an answer to Colin Chapman’s ground effect Lotus could have come up with a revolutionary idea like the Brabham fan car. Except that is not true. Jim Who did that too.

Only a genius like John Barnard working under the pressures that only F1 can exert could have invented the semi-automatic gearbox. Except that is not true. You guessed it. Jim Who did that too.

Jim Who, sorry Jim Hall was born in Abilene, Texas on July 23rd 1935. His family were very wealthy oil people so Jim enrolled at the California Institute of Technology to study geology. A month before he was due to start his course his parents and sister were killed in a private plane crash. Jim inherited $15 million and went off to university while his brothers ran the family business. The family firm sponsored Carroll Shelby and while at college Jim became interested in racing and Shelby taught him race driving.

Jim started racing his brother’s Austin Healy and changed his course from geology to mechanical engineering. After graduation he worked in the family oil business while financing Shelby’s sportscar business and his own racing program.

Hall’s racing eventually led him to F1. In 1960, 1961 and 1962 he hired a Lotus to compete in the US GP. He failed to start one race, retired from another and finished a lap down in 7th in 1960. In 1963 he contested the full F1 season in a British Racing Partnership Lotus 24. His best results were sixth place, two laps behind the leader at Silverstone and a fifth, one lap down at the Nurburgring. Hall did not enter the final round of the championship in South Africa and turned his back on F1 to return home to run his Chaparral sportscar company which he had set up at the end of 1960.

Hall had set up Chaparral Cars Inc with Hap Sharp in Midland, Texas in 1962. From the start Chaparral produced fast, innovative cars. Chaparral 2 was a mid-engined car with a semi-monocoque fibre glass chassis. Towards the end of 1963 Hall took Chaparral 2 to Riverside for its race debut. He took pole position and quickly built a substantial lead before an electrical problem ended its race. In 1964 Hall won the United States Road Racing Championship with that car taking 7 wins from 25 starts. The following season was one of utter domination with 16 wins from 21 starts including a win against a top international field in the Sebring 12 hours.

For 1966 Jim introduced not one but two new sports cars. Chaparral 2D competed in the World Endurance Championship winning the Nurburgring 1000 kilometres in the hands of 1961 F1 world champion Phil Hill and Swedish ace Joakim Bonnier. The Chaparral 2E was entered in the Can-Am championship. This was a very high level sportscar championship which took place in Canada and the USA hence Can Am. Many F1 drivers including the likes of Jackie Stewart competed in it and McLaren, over the life of the championships, built its best cars. Rules were few and far between giving someone like Hall the chance to indulge his innovative streak. Chaparral 2E had its radiators in sidepods rather than in the traditional location in the nose. Its most striking feature was a huge rear wing mounted on struts. By taking the radiator from the nose Hall was able to shape the front of the car to generate downforce. Bear in mind this all happened in 1966 before F1 cars had sidepods and still had radiators in the nose and when the only aerodynamic aim of F1 designers was to cut drag and reduce frontal area. In addition Hall fitted a pedal which could be use to adjust the rear wing and ducts in the front of the car. As the car came on to a straight the pedal flattened the wing and closed the ducting to give less drag and at the end of the straight the driver pressed the pedal to open the front ducts and raise the wing to create maximum downforce. 2E was more advanced than its opponents but had a 5.3 litre engines while many of its rivals had 7 litre motors. It won only one race at Laguna Seca with Phil Hill driving.

Hall’s magnum opus was the Chaparral 2J of 1970. This car was a car that was so far ahead of its time it is ridiculous. It pioneered technologies that would be hailed as breakthroughs in F1 nearly two decades later. In 1977 Colin Chapman introduced the F1 world to ground effect aerodynamics by shaping the underside of the Lotus 78 to produce downforce. The Chaparral 2J did that 7 years earlier. In 1978 Chapman’s Lotus 79 featured side skirts which created a seal to the ground and massively increased the downforce that could be generated. The Chaparral 2J had skirts 8 years earlier. Also in 1978, to combat the Lotus 79, Gordon Murray used a substantially increased engine fan of the Brabham BT46B to suck air from under the car to produce downforce. Eight years earlier the Chaparral 2J had two fans driven by a snowmobile engine which did the same job.

Perhaps the most advanced feature of the Chaparral 2J was a semi-automatic gearbox. It would be 19 years before John Barnard’s Ferrari 640 introduced such a device to F1. Despite, or perhaps because of, all this technology the 2J was anything but a success on the track. It frequently qualified on pole by more than two seconds such was its performance advantage however poor mechanical reliability no doubt partly due to the stresses caused by all that downforce meant that results were poor. At the end of its first season before the reliability could be sorted out the SCCA banned the car. Like so many of Colin Chapman’s innovations in F1 the car was legal but the organising body gave in to pressure from other teams who simply couldn’t compete with it.

Chaparral moved in to Indy cars and in 1978 Al Unser won the Indianapolis 500 with a Chaparral prepared Lola. In 1979 Unser led the race in the John Barnard designed ground effect Chaparral 2K and in 1980, 2K won the 500 in the hands of Johnny Rutherford. This was the last Chaparral car.

After taking some time away from racing Jim Hall returned to run customer Indy cars via Jim Hall Racing but this was never as successful as Chaparral. He also set up the Jim Hall Kart Racing School in California with his son.

There will always be people who think that F1 is all about technology and that taking away any of that technology automatically devalues it. The next time someone tells you that F1 has always been more technologically advanced than any other class of racing just tell them about Jim Who.

_{Photograph by El Caganer.}

Jim Clark Grew Up as a Boy Who Loved Cars

On April 7th 1968 Jim Clark died in a formula two race at Hockenheim. He remains one of the small group of drivers inevitably mentioned whenever the subject of "the greatest of them all" arises. This tribute explains the effect that Clark's fatal accident had on a small boy in Scotland.

_{Jim at the 1967 USGP}

40 years ago the greatest driver of his generation was killed in a Formula 2 race at Hockenheim in West Germany. Today it is inconceivable that a top grand prix driver would compete in a lower formula but then it was quite normal.

It is well known the Clark drove for Lotus in all 72 of his world championship grands prix and Lotus like Brabham made F2 cars and their GP stars drove them. Although, on this occasion Clark and his team mate Graham Hill were originally scheduled to drive Alan Mann’s new Ford F3L sportscar in its debut at Brands Hatch but Lotus boss Colin Chapman insisted they go to Hockenheim.

Most people first become interested in racing after watching a race on TV or being taken to a track. My introduction was a bit different. At the time I was eight years old and living in the west of Scotland. In the 11 years between 1963 and 1973 Scotsmen won 5 drivers’ world championships yet there was practically no media coverage. Races were not shown on TV and newspapers covered football and nothing else. It is hard to imagine someone growing up in Germany during the Schumacher period that would not have recognised him but Jim Clark could have walked through almost any town in Scotland unrecognised. Motor racing was very much a minority interest.

During my childhood my father worked night shift for a total of six weeks. I only remember this fact because one Monday morning he came in while I was eating breakfast and put a newspaper down. There was a picture of a man in a helmet and a line saying he had died. I asked if that was another astronaut dead and he said ‘No son, it’s Jim Clark. He was a racing driver.’ That was the limit of his knowledge. Despite being someone who read the paper every day he knew Jim Clark was a racing driver and nothing more. I have always been curious as to why I asked if it was another astronaut who had died and the only astronaut deaths I can find any record of were those of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo test AS-204 that was retrospectively named Apollo 1 but that took place 15 months earlier - which is a lifetime at that age.

That afternoon when I returned from school as I always did I took the paper and spread it out on the floor and read what I could. As always I started with the sport at the back but what caught my attention was the double-page spread in the centre of the newspaper. It was all about Jim Clark. It had a few pictures of him racing, on his farm and one of him as a young child on a pedal car. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The opening line read ‘Jim Clark grew up as a boy who loved cars’ and I can remember thinking that is just like me. Needless to say he wasn’t just like me and over the decades since I have acquainted myself with his legend. I read every word of those two pages and became fascinated with the man and motor racing.

To me it still seems incredible that at a time when Scotland (and England) was dominating F1 there was no coverage of it. At that time I knew Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill were racing drivers and I knew that the little snippets of racing I had seen on TV interested me and that was it.

Jim’s career is well documented from his original meeting with Colin Chapman, where Chapman beat him in a race where they both drove Lotus Elans, to his two world championships, to the two others he lost to mechanical failure in the last race of the season. His win at Indianapolis, the second ‘win’ that was credited to Graham Hill although most people believe that was due to a lap scoring error. His second place at Indy to Parnelli Jones whose car was spewing out oil but the officials refused to black flag him because the didn’t want a ‘furriner’ in ‘one of them funny little cars’ to win.
After that race which was his first visit to Indy he demonstrated the well disguised steeliness in his personality by insisting Chapman took his car to another oval race. They went to Milwaukee and won.

Clark would race anything. He famously raced the Lotus Cortina in the British saloon car championship and won that. The images of him three-wheeling that car around a track have gone down in legend. He raced sportscars, he almost won the RAC rally, he even raced in NASCAR.

Nowadays all that matters is a driver’s results in the F1 world championship. Jim Clark contested 72 races and won 25 of them; a record number of wins at the time. He took 33 pole positions which was also a record. The most telling statistic is that, although he won 25 races, he only finished second once. If the car was good enough to win, he won. Of course Lotuses had two distinct features: they were quick and they were fragile and Jim lost a lot of wins because the car broke down while he was leading. He was very much the driver who liked to get pole, make a good start and lead from the front. He drove for seven full seasons and won two championships in 1963 and 1965. He also lost the 1962 and 1964 championship to mechanical problems in the last race of each year. With a little bit of luck he could have won the majority of the championships he completed.

In 1963 he won a record 7 races in one season. There were ten races in the season with the driver’s best six scores to count. So not only did he score the maximum number of championship points he had a win to spare. However it could be argued he was more dominant in 1965. After 7 world championship races he had won six and again a driver’s best six scores counted so he was champion by August 1st. He did not win the Monaco GP but that was because he was winning the Indianapolis 500 instead.

During the winters of the 1960s top racing drivers did not spend weeks on end pounding round Barcelona, testing endless new pieces of carbon fibre. They decamped en masse to Australia and New Zealand for the Tasman series. This championship was run for formula one cars but with 2.5 litre engines. The championship ran for six seasons from 1964 to 1969 and was made up of 4 races in each country. Jim Clark contested the four of these championships and won three of them.

Jackie Stewart tells a story about Jim Clark that shows the difference between the assured, confident racing driver in total control of his environment and Jim the man. The two of them were in the USA and arrived at a railroad crossing in open country. According to Stewart they could see about two miles in each direction with no-one else around and Clark, who was driving, turned to Stewart and asked if he thought it was safe to cross.

At his funeral Jim Clark’s father pulled Dan Gurney aside and told him that he should know that he was the only driver Clark feared on the track. Gurney admits to shedding a tear that not only did the great man rate him so highly but his father took time out of what was a personally tragic time to tell him.

Jim Clark was regarded by all of his peers as the best driver of his generation. There really was no debate on the subject. Clark drove at a perilous time to be a racing driver and the fact that the universal reaction to his death was shock that it could happen to him tells you all you need to know about how he was regarded. The corollary of course was that if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone and all of a sudden they all felt more vulnerable than they ever had.

Jim Clark was the greatest driver of his time. Was he the best ever?

_{Photograph by Bob Sanderson.}

F1 People - Series 2 Omnibus

• Length: 30:13 
• Size: 27.7 MB 
• File: peopleomnibus2.mp3 
• Transcript: peopleomnibus2.pdf 
• Torrent: peopleomnibus2.torrent 

Welcome to F1 People - Series 2. This is the omnibus edition of the series, which was seven short shows originally released over seven consecutive days. Now they are all gathered up in one place for easy listening.

Here are the links to the individual show notes:

1. Colin Chapman
2. Niki Lauda
3. Murray Walker
4. Eddie Irvine
5. Jean Alesi
6. Adrian Newey
7. Juan Manuel Fangio

This is the first omnibus edition we've tried, the idea came from a suggestion on Facebook by Dave Monks. I'd love to have your feedback - is it useful to have the information presented this way, or is it just clogging up your feeds with the same shows twice? Also if you missed a mini series, do you think this would be a good way to catch up or are the seven separate shows easier?

F1 People - Colin Chapman

• Length: 4:43 
• Size: 4.4 MB 
• File: people8.mp3 
• Transcript: people8.pdf 
• Torrent: people8.torrent 

Welcome to the second series of F1 People, seven short shows brought to you by Sidepodcast, chronicling the lives of important people in the world of F1. Last time round we looked at Michael Schumacher, Enzo Ferrari, Frank Williams and others. Obviously there are more than seven VIPs in F1, and we had several comments last time round suggesting people we may have missed. Thus, F1 People, series 2, is here to expand on our list, starting with Colin Chapman.

Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman was born on the 19th May 1928, in London, where he grew up and went to University to study mechanical engineering. While he was a student, he learnt to fly and joined the Royal Air Force when he was 20. He wasn’t there for long, although the experience gave him a taste for aeronautical engineering that transferred to his love of cars. After leaving the RAF, Chapman became a member of the 750 Motor Club, a UK based racing club that specialises in Austin’s.

The first car that Chapman built was based around a 1930 Austin Seven and he named it Lotus. The car was entered into some minor races and was so successful that more versions were built. At this point, Chapman was working at the British Aluminium Company, but his girlfriend lent him the money to start up the Lotus Engineering Company. He partnered with Michael Allen and in 1953, Frank Costin joined the company to help create the Lotus Mk 8. The success of this car allowed Chapman to leave his job and work for Lotus full time. Whilst building and producing road and race cars, Chapman’s expertise was sought by Vanwall and BRM who both used him as a consultant to their racing teams.

In 1956, Chapman combined his experience with building cars, and working with the teams, to build his first single-seater, and two years later, he entered the car in its first Grand Prix at Monaco. Graham Hill and Cliff Allison were the first to drive the Lotus 12s in F1. A couple of iterations later, Chapman switched the engine from the front of the car to the rear, and in 1960, the Lotus 18 won its first race with Stirling Moss at the wheel. Team Lotus, however, didn’t win until the next year, at the US GP.

The 1960s were a dominant period for Lotus. Jim Clark won seven races in 1963 with the Lotus 25 – the first chassis to feature a monocoque. This came from Chapman’s aeronautical engineering background, and helped make the cars lighter and stronger. They were also much better for the driver in the event of a crash. Graham Hill was world champion in 1968 with the Lotus 49 – the first car to feature commercial sponsorship. Chapman’s desire to have commercial backing was a key factor in building the big-business sport that F1 is today.

Also in 1968 came the death of Jim Clark. He and Colin Chapman had become close friends through their many races and wins together. Clark died after his Lotus veered off the road and crashed into some trees. Chapman was very publically devastated, saying he had lost his best friend. He ordered the green and yellow Lotus badge to be replaced on all Lotus cars to a black badge for a month after Clark’s death.

The world championship wins continued into the 70s, and as the successes rolled in, the company began to grow, moving to Norfolk, and building up its sports car infrastructure. In the middle of the 1970s, Lotus began to look at ground-effects, successfully harnessing the innovative technology to help the Lotus 79 win the world championship with Mario Andretti at the wheel. Whilst ground effects were a major advancement in terms of the technology, they were also surrounded by controversy, and eventually banned in the 1980s.

In 1982, Chapman began work on active-suspension technologies, but this was never completed. He died of a heart attack in December that year, aged just 54 years.

After his death, a scandal emerged involving the DeLorean Motor Company. In 1992, Fred Bushell, a close colleague of Chapman’s pleaded guilty to “conspiring with the late Colin Chapman and others to defraud the DeLorean Motor Company.” He went to prison for four years, and it’s assumed that had Chapman been alive, he also would have received sentencing.

None of that takes the edge off the fact that he was one of the great innovators of Formula 1. Without Chapman, and his Lotus team, several of the major stepping stones in F1 technology may never have been made. He remains the engineering mind that all others look up to.

Thanks for listening to this first episode of F1 People (series 2). Don’t forget you can leave your thoughts on Colin Chapman on the blog, you can leave a voicemail on 0121 28 87225, or you can email me on christine @ sidepodcast.com. Join me tomorrow when we’ll take a look at another important name in F1.

Theme music: Natives of the New Dawn, People.

Days that Shook the F1 World - Ground Effects Banned, 1982

• Length: 4:03 
• Size: 3.8 MB 
• File: day4.mp3 
• Transcript: day4.pdf 
• Torrent: day4.torrent 

Hello everyone, welcome to Days that Shook the F1 World, a series from Sidepodcast that takes a look at some of those important days that left the sport reeling, never to be the same again. Today we’re looking at the 3rd November 1983.

Whilst advocating safety at every opportunity, the majority of people involved in Formula 1 also want more speed. That’s the aim of the game, after all - to maximise speed and beat your rivals because they haven’t found that edge within the regulations like you have.

Ground effects was one of those things.

The basic theory behind the ground effect is to create as much downforce as possible, enabling a car to go faster around corners. By making the sides of the car as low as possible, the air pressure underneath the chassis is lower than that above, which basically glues the car to the track.

Lotus were the first team to introduce the concept to the Formula 1 back in the 1970s. They were helped along by the use of a wind tunnel, which resulted in longer sidepods and consistent ride height, creating a reasonable inverse wing effect.

This effect didn’t necessarily help on the long straights, but when it came to cornering, it left the old style cars in its wake. When Lotus introduced their car in 1978, it won 8 out of 16 races, proving that the new developments would revolutionise the sport.

Other teams began to sit up and take notice and it wasn’t long before the ground effects principal was becoming ubiquitous. By 1982, there were no cars without the technology. Fast races, fantastic cornering speeds, all great stuff.

Except, the cars were inherently unstable.

The forces created by the ground effects were all well and good, if the car managed to stay stuck to the circuit, but once the effect was broken, it had potentially devastating consequences. A wing would then act as a wing should, rising up and literally flying the car off the track.

It wasn’t long before serious accidents started to happen. Drivers were often struggling to keep their cars on track during high speed cornering, and incident after incident culminated in the death of Alfa Romeo driver Patrick Depailler in Germany. Although a lack of safety fencing was deemed the reason for his death, there was no denying that the speed carried through the bend had something to do with it as well.

During this time, the two rival governing bodies the FISA and FOCA were at war, and ground effects was one of the big catalysts for their arguments. After Depailler’s death, the FISA finally forced through a new rule, stating that, whilst in the pits, cars had to have at least 6cm of clearance between their skirt and the ground. Teams very, very quickly got around this, by running their cars close to the ground out on track, and simply raising them up on hydraulics when it came to measurements in the pits. Given the ingenuity of the teams, or the uselessness of the rule, the FISA soon revoked their ruling, and allowed skirts to return to the cars.

Big mistake.

Accidents continued to occur, and although they were excused by other circumstances, they could almost always be traced back to the lower sides on the cars. Then came the tragic death of Gilles Villeneuve, and an accident later in Germany that saw Didier Pironi break both his legs in multiple places. The cause of those accidents could not be brushed aside and it was obvious something had to be done.

In November 1982, ground effects were officially banned with a more explicit rule, stating that from 1983 flat bottoms were required for F1 cars from the trailing edge of the front wheels, to the leading edge of the rear wheels.

Since then, the sport has never looked back. There’s no denying the fact that it was a brilliant piece of engineering, to get the idea off the page, out of the wind tunnel and onto the cars. But the dangers and speeds involved were just too great, and there is no question that banning the principal was the right thing to do.

That’s all for this episode of Days that Shook the F1 World. Please visit Sidepodcast.com to leave your comments and feedback about this and the other shows in this series.

Theme music: Dylan in the Movies, Better Days and Causeway, Change in My Lifetime.

F1 People - Jackie Stewart

• Length: 4:27 
• Size: 4.2 MB 
• File: people5.mp3 
• Transcript: people5.pdf 
• Torrent: people5.torrent 

Welcome to F1 People, a short series from Sidepodcast presenting a biography of the names you need to know. In this fifth episode, we’re looking at Jackie Stewart.

John Young Stewart, better known as Jackie, was born on June 11th 1939 in Dumbartonshire, Scotland. He was immersed into the world of cars and motorsport from the very beginning. The family business was a Jaguar dealership, where Jackie apprenticed as a mechanic. His father had raced motorcycles in his spare time, and his brother Jimmy was becoming a renowned local racing driver. After an accident at Le Mans saw Jimmy injured, their parents discouraged any interest in the sport. Jackie took up shooting, instead, and just missed out on a place in the 1960 Olympics.

Despite the disapproval from his parents, Jackie accepted an offer from a customer of the garage to test cars at Oulten Park. He entered many races and won a lot of them but the most important win was probably at Goodwood. He impressed everyone present and Ken Tyrell, then running the Formula Junior team for Cooper, heard of this new rising talent and made some calls. Jackie tested a new Formula 3 car against Bruce McLaren, and outshone him, resulting in an offer from Tyrell right there and then.

He made his debut for Tyrell in Formula Three in 1964. His debut race saw him gain a lead of over 20 seconds after just two laps, extended to over 40 seconds by the end of the race. On the strength of this, he was offered a Formula 1 driver with Cooper, but he chose to remain at Tyrell and get some experience. He lost just two races and became the F3 champion.

The next year he impressed Colin Chapman at a Formula 1 test for Lotus, but again declined the drive and chose Formula Two instead.

1965 saw his first full season as an F1 driver for BRM, and he continued his impressive form. Through his career he drove for Tyrell, for March, and Matra, winning 27 races and three world championships. He is one of the few drivers to choose to leave the sport at the top rather than see his performance drop off. He retired in 1973.

During the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, it rained considerably and there were many crashes. Jackie Stewart found himself upside down, trapped in his car by the steering wheel, with fuel pouring around him, for 25 minutes. Two other drivers had to free him using tools from a spectator. Thankfully, he emerged relatively unscathed, but the incident wakened Stewart’s senses to the need for improved safety considerations. There were no crews to extricate drivers from damaged cars, and there were no medical facilities on track. His wait for an ambulance was unpleasant and long. Racing conditions were dangerous and unnecessarily so. During a period of ten years, Stewart knew over 50 friends and colleagues that died during races – the chances of a fatal accident during that time were two out of there.

Stewart teamed up with his BRM boss Louis Stanley to campaign for better safety provisions at races. Safety barriers were a rarity until Jackie called attention to it. He hired a private doctor to attend races, until the medical situation could be improved. Seat belts, helmets, fireproof clothes, all of these are down to Stewarts unwillingness to give in. He rallied track owners to sort out their facilities, and he called on the drivers to boycott races if they were not up to scratch.

After his retirement from Formula 1, Stewart became a consultant for Ford, and a commentator for NASCAR, and even returned to the sport with his own Stewart Grand Prix racing team. He set up the team with his son Paul, and they worked on it together until 2000, when Jackie retired. The team had then become Jaguar Racing. Both his son Paul, one of two, along with Mark, and Jackie’s wife Helen were diagnosed with cancer, and in 2002, Stewart himself had an operation to remove a tumour from his cheek. He continues to be an active spokesman for safety, and is currently having an argument through the media (and through lawyers) with FIA President Max Mosley. His autobiography has just been released.

But his most important post-racing activities were the amazing safety improvements he almost single-handedly brought about. Of course, he upset many people along the way, but in his eyes, safety is more important than popularity, and in 2001, the knighthood that made him Sir Jackie Stewart, proves just that.

That’s all for this episode. Tomorrow we will be looking at another important person from Formula 1, so please, join me then.

Theme music: Natives of the New Dawn, People.