Over at F1 Fanatic, Keith Collantine has written an excellent article entitled Banned! Ground Effects. That era has special significance for me because it coincided with my return to England after many years in Africa and so I was able to watch the televised races as they happened.
Lotus 79
Although I saw a few races in 1977, it was not until 1978 that I viewed a full season and got back into the swing of things. I was a Brabham fan at the time (as ever, I am swayed by the look of the car and Gordon Murray's offerings were always so pretty) and so I had mixed feelings about the dominance of the Lotus 79 that year. The idea of ground effect seemed fairly obvious to me (I had been thinking about the airflow under the cars since the late sixties) but it was the implementation in practice that proved Chapman's genius.
His key invention was the introduction of skirts. Any attempt to suck the car on to the road by creating a low pressure area under it was bound to fail because air would be drawn in from the sides; some form of device was required to prevent this happening and Chapman's first solution was the same as imagined by me: brush skirts. He tried them on his first ground effect car, the Lotus 78 of 1977, and they worked well enough to produce impressive downforce for the time. But the real breakthrough came when rubber skirts were tried, soon to be replaced with rigid ones that moved up and down within a groove at the edge of the sidepods. This invention allowed the ground effect period to take off and cars began to corner at incredible speeds.
But I think the governing body missed a trick at the time. They could have put a stop to the whole idea without altering the rules and we would never have experienced that time of horrendous crashes caused by a sticking skirt, crashes that claimed the lives of far too many great drivers. The point is that the skirts were movable aerodynamic devices.
Whatever you do with the airflow over or under the car, you are utilizing aerodynamics and ground effect is an aerodynamic effect. Any device that moves and is designed to assist in the use of such an effect is, therefore, a movable aerodynamic device, something that had been banned in F1 after the primitive wings of the late sixties began to break off and cause accidents.
So the rule was in the book and skirts were clearly illegal as a result. They should have been thrown out from the first. Why FISA missed this point I do not know; perhaps their attention was distracted by the coincidental rise of turbo power in the sport. But in later years, when they were trying everything to end the use of ground effect, the obvious does not seem to have occurred to them.
How different a world it was from today's, when the FIA can maintain that mass dampers are a movable aerodynamic device (huh?) and ban them summarily. I have to be thankful that there was a time when the designers could run rings around the regulations with such clever innovations as the Brabham fan car, Tyrrell's sneaky "water-cooled brakes", and cars that altered their ride height as soon as they hit the track. What a glorious free-for-all that was!
Lotus 79
Although I saw a few races in 1977, it was not until 1978 that I viewed a full season and got back into the swing of things. I was a Brabham fan at the time (as ever, I am swayed by the look of the car and Gordon Murray's offerings were always so pretty) and so I had mixed feelings about the dominance of the Lotus 79 that year. The idea of ground effect seemed fairly obvious to me (I had been thinking about the airflow under the cars since the late sixties) but it was the implementation in practice that proved Chapman's genius.
His key invention was the introduction of skirts. Any attempt to suck the car on to the road by creating a low pressure area under it was bound to fail because air would be drawn in from the sides; some form of device was required to prevent this happening and Chapman's first solution was the same as imagined by me: brush skirts. He tried them on his first ground effect car, the Lotus 78 of 1977, and they worked well enough to produce impressive downforce for the time. But the real breakthrough came when rubber skirts were tried, soon to be replaced with rigid ones that moved up and down within a groove at the edge of the sidepods. This invention allowed the ground effect period to take off and cars began to corner at incredible speeds.
But I think the governing body missed a trick at the time. They could have put a stop to the whole idea without altering the rules and we would never have experienced that time of horrendous crashes caused by a sticking skirt, crashes that claimed the lives of far too many great drivers. The point is that the skirts were movable aerodynamic devices.
Whatever you do with the airflow over or under the car, you are utilizing aerodynamics and ground effect is an aerodynamic effect. Any device that moves and is designed to assist in the use of such an effect is, therefore, a movable aerodynamic device, something that had been banned in F1 after the primitive wings of the late sixties began to break off and cause accidents.
So the rule was in the book and skirts were clearly illegal as a result. They should have been thrown out from the first. Why FISA missed this point I do not know; perhaps their attention was distracted by the coincidental rise of turbo power in the sport. But in later years, when they were trying everything to end the use of ground effect, the obvious does not seem to have occurred to them.
How different a world it was from today's, when the FIA can maintain that mass dampers are a movable aerodynamic device (huh?) and ban them summarily. I have to be thankful that there was a time when the designers could run rings around the regulations with such clever innovations as the Brabham fan car, Tyrrell's sneaky "water-cooled brakes", and cars that altered their ride height as soon as they hit the track. What a glorious free-for-all that was!