Racers

Racers

- Beginning

Wiesloch, a city of twenty six thousand people in the south west of ----Germany, has an interesting historical claim to fame. On August 5th, 1888, the city centre became the location of the world's first ever pit stop. This momentous occasion occurred because Bertha Benz, driving her husband Karl's Patent Motor Wagen, had surreptitiously borrowed the new machine, without his knowledge, to take a drive from their home in Mannheim to the neighbouring town of Pforzheim, forty miles away. She told people the trip was to visit her mother, but the real reason was to get her perfectionist husband's invention out of his workshop and into the world. To demonstrate just what it was capable of doing. The Patent Motor wagen did need a little bit of publicising; it was a small tricycle, with a four stroke petrol engine putting out around three horsepower and pushing up to three passengers well below the speed of a galloping horse at ten miles per hour on a flat road. The sixty six mile round trip took several days, and required many improvisations from the intrepid driver. The Motor Wagen could not climb hills, so Bertha had brought along her two teenaged sons as passengers, partly for company, but mostly to help push. This first true car was not equipped with any form of fuel tank, so the Benz family ended up in Wiesloch buying jars of petroleum to pour into the engine from a pharmacist in the town centre. This first ever test drive also brought up the need for a stronger driving chain, and something better than wood for brakes. The motor car was on it's way, and one hundred years later, cars bearing Bertha's married surname would be racing at speeds up to 240 miles per hour against grids of other cars, developed over the intervening century in hundreds of different ways, over millions of miles, by thousands of designers and engineers, producing some of the most fantastic, beautiful and soulful machines ever created. If Frau Benz had known what she was getting started, she might have stayed at home. Or, more probably, she would have wished to have another car to race against.

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The 1894 Paris to Rouen race, organised by the Parisian newspaper Le Petit Journal, was the first organised motoring competition. Though a German invention, credited jointly to Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, the French were first to get the car racing bug. There were 102 entries lined up at the Porte Maillot, on the western entrance to city, ready to head out through the Bois de Boulogne heading the seventy eight miles to Rouen. A good proportion, 21 vehicles, were steam carriages, and it was a steam carriage that arrived first just over six hours after the start. The driver, Jules-Albert, Le Comte de Dion, aboard his de Dion Bouton steam carriage, was followed in during the next hour by two teams of French competitors, the Peugeots and the Panhard-Levassors. These two teams would share the five thousand franc prize. De Dion did not win any money because his carriage needed a second man to stoke the boiler - the rules of the event specified that the winning car would need to be easy to use, operable by one person, and 'not dangerous'. The event was also not intended to be a race as such, and the winning time was only a curiosity.

The next year came the first race proper, from Paris to Bordeaux and back. At stake was a 70,000 franc purse, to be contested among twenty one cars. After two days of driving, the winner was Emile Levassor, driving his Panhard & Levassor car. It took the four horsepower, 2 cylinder car, who's engine ran up to eight hundred revolutions per minute, forty eight hours and forty eight minutes to complete the course. Six hours later came the Peugeot of Louis Rigoulot, and eleven elapsed before the top three were completed by another Peugeot driven by Paul Koechlin. Then, controversy - the first two cars only had two seats, and the rules stated they needed four. So Koechlin won the prize money, though Levassor got most of the glory for his impressive performance in a race that had only nine finishers. Driver and car were immortalised in stone relief in a square near the starting line. Over in the United States there was another race being organised in Chicago, though in the end only six cars showed up for the journey around the city in the November snow. Frank Duryea won aboard his own car, taking ten hours to do the lap. Though it was not a scintillating performance, with an average speed of five miles per hour, the Duryea and the race were the first time most American's had heard of motoring. Duryea became, for a brief time, the biggest maker of automobiles in the country. He made a whole thirteen examples in 1896.

French city to city races took off over the next few years. Paris to Marseilles; Marseilles to Nice; Paris to Dieppe, Something about the speed, noise and power clearly appealed to the French love for futurism, philosophy, art and photography. The drive to win the prizes meant that road and competition were soon diverging. A racing car only had to be strong enough to win a race after all, if it fell pieces after the finish it had done it's job, so riding mechanics sitting alongside the driver were de-rigeur, so the car could be repaired en-route. The mechanic also provided an extra set of eyes and ears while the driver wrestled with the complicated controls. Everybody had also forgotten about the need to the cars to be "not dangerous". Emile Levassor hit a dog during the 1896 Paris to Marseilles race and was overturned, smashing driver and his riding mechanic into the ground. The driver died of an embolism while at work in his offices in the next year, a direct result of his injury. The cross country racing era was a cauldron of development. The rough unpaved gravel roads shredded solid rubber tyres and damaged the wooden wheels that were no different from horse and cart wheels. Michelin's patent pneumatic tyres, already tried in cycle competitions, appeared on cars for the first time. To cool the engine water radiators were mounted on the noses of the vehicles, the snakes of metal coils dissipating heat.

The best way to go faster was to build larger engines. The cylinder's capacity went up to whole litres of fuel, then more than one cylinder became common. A Panhard won the 1898 race from Paris to Amsterdam over 889 miles, in a mere thirty three hours, an average speed of twenty seven miles per hour. The car had a whole eight horsepower, and a steering wheel instead of a tiller for control. Power went up and up; 20 horsepower by the turn of the 20th century, a 10 litre, 60 horsepower car by a mere year later. The first annual racing competition, the Gordon Bennett races, sponsored by the same C. Gordon Bennett who's brattish antics who inspire the colloquial British "Gordon Bennett!" exclamation, arrived in 1900, and encouraged non-French cars by limiting entries to two teams per nation.The German Mercedes, a sporting model line built by Daimler, named after the daughter of one of the company's engineers, won 1903 Gordon Bennett trophy with French driver and land speed record breaker Camille Jenatzy driving. Daimler being the company carrying the name of the co-creator of the car, Gottlieb Daimler, the man who had created the first workable internal combustion for a vehicle and built his own self-propelled carriage with the engine in the same year as Benz had built the Motorwagen. Since the two creations were in spirit the same concept both men usually get co-credit for the invention, even if the Benz was more familiar to what would come afterwards. The British had finally relaxed a preposterous rule that any motorised vehicle would have to putter along at five miles per hour behind a man carrying a red warning, and to celebrate a parade of cars ran from London to Brighton - and they still do every year, as long as they date from the pioneering epoch. Parliament still didn't think that the continental habit of racing on public roads was quite the done thing though - and they still don't - but their edict didn't apply outside of the mainland, so places like the Isle of Man, Ireland, and Ulster could and did hold races, though motorbike racing would eventually be the main draw in these places. This harsh ruling had major ramifications for the future of motoring as the British, barred from road racing, had to think of another direction. Despite the handicap, the British Napier Works built racing cars that had some success on the continent, as well as inventing the British Racing Green livery that would become synonymous with British racing cars ever since.

Already categories of competition were being created divided up along weights, engine sizes, and car dimensions, and the 'big' cars were now under threat from smaller, lighter cars - the 'Voiturettes' as the the French called them, a term that persisted for many more decades. In harder economic times, voiturette racing would come be the saviour of European circuit racing on several occasions when the more expensive entries dried up, and Grands Prix would have to be held for the lower classes. Only in the 1980s would a harder split between the Grand Prix level and the more junior cars appear, and the latter merely a stepping stone to the former. A so-called 'light' car with a mere 19 horsepower won the Paris to Vienna race outright in 1902. 1902 also witnessed the first genuine closed course race on public roads, around a 53 miles route in the Belgian Ardennes. Clearly closing roads off completely had a major advantage with organisation and crowd control, and also created the service pits so cars could be repaired during the race by a crew rather than just the riding mechanic. The safety advantage was driven home in the next year in the disastrous 1903 Paris to Madrid road race. A huge entry of 275 cars lined up to take to the course, a course lined with millions of people now keen to see the spectacle of cars that were now matching steam locomotives, getting up to 90mph, and increasing in sophistication, now with engines that had mechanical inlet valves to increase the rpm rate. 

Five drivers and three spectators would be killed in crashes during the opening leg, and the race was abandoned at Bordeaux among bitter recriminations and calls for all motor racing to now be outlawed. The biggest profile casualty was Marcel Renault, he and his mechanic were killed in an 80 mph smash with a tree. Brother Louis Renault  retired from driving immediately, leaving Hungarian Ferenc Szinz, a Renault company mechanic, as lead driver. Racing wasn't banned, of course, but the carnage brought a new sobriety to the sport after the carefree early days. Drivers were now going to be professionals, cars more rigorously tested and regulated, rather than sent out to compete on a wing and prayer.

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- Grand Prix

The 1904 edition of the Gordon Bennett race had a very wide cast of characters, including the Italian F.I.A.T. (Fabricca Automobili Torino) cars and a new 4 cylinder engined Mercedes, (Fiat's early years would be filled with derring-do and excitement, before it became a more sober maker of the Italian family car in the 1950s). Americans were finally getting in on the act in their homeland; the new Vanderbilt Cup race was created by the immensely wealthy William K Vanderbilt to be run in Long Island, though it was still dominated by powerful European cars. After ten years of motor races these machines already could produce one hundred horsepower, and a real sense of competition had emerged between the European marques, all now establishing the positions in the car buying marketplace they would retain ever since. Still, this increased competition did not prevent French resentment over the Olympic-style format of Gordon Bennett cup, limiting the French chances of winning though their factories could still provide the most number of potentially winning cars. The Automobile Club de France decided to have their own big race that would be open to all comers - hopefully French cars of course. The "Grand Prix" was to be held in two parts over two days on sixty mile triangular course to the east of the city of Le Mans, and had a level of preparation and promotion unlike anything seen before. The plan for a home victory came to fruition as driver Szinz and the Renault team won the Grand Prix, helped greatly by the new innovation of detachable wheel rims that kept the time for a service down to about ten minutes. With tyres shredding throughout the field on the rough road surface the time advantage the new wheels gave to the mechanics made the winning difference. 

The 1906 Grand Prix Renault still survives, as do many of the early racing cars, and shows off the pace of technological change, and how many of the design features everyone would soon take for granted came into being in this half-forgotten era. Along with the changeable wheels, another big innovation in the Renault saw putting the power to the wheels done via a driveshaft rather than a chain drive like a pushbike. The chain remained in motorcycles, but was too crude and flimsy for the torque created by cars. Yet despite the innovations, the French were under threat. A Fiat was second in the Grand Prix, and Italy now had a major home race to hone their cars; the Targa Florio circuit race in Sicily also began in 1906, and the twisty "Madonie" course - ninety two miles through the dusty sun-bleached hills, with thousands of narrow bends - was a greater challenge of car handling than the power-course of the Grand Prix. Barred from the roads, Britain too was still going to racing on a purpose built course, the giant egg-shaped concrete bowl of the Brooklands speedway in Weybridge, Surrey. Modelled on horse racing venues, Brooklands borrowed some of the terminology and habits; the start line was on a separate straight running through the centre of the bowl, the cars were prepared in the 'paddock', there was a control tower for the Clerk of the Course, the prime "Pole position" next to the winners post, and most significantly a weigh station for having handicap races. Weight limits being the easiest way to facilitate a weekend of racing for different car classes. Fortunately for the continentals the class-obsessed Edwardians in Southern England often seemed more content to use the big banked corners of this world's first purpose built race track for showing off to their friends than actually developing racing cars - at least for the time being.

Naturally local rule makers were biased in favour of their own cars, setting out engine classes, and weight limits to suit. Not that this worked for the French, as a second Grand Prix, now in Dieppe, was won by Fiat and their driver Felice Nazzaro. His mount, a sixteen litre, 130 horsepower car, turning it's cylinders at a dizzying sixteen hundred RPM, also won the Targa Florio. This giant was a terrier compared to another Fiat of the age, the so-called "Beast of Turin", a 28 litre speed record car, built in 1911. The flame spitting red and copper giant even overshadowed the famed "Blitzen Benz", the two hundred horsepower, chain drive, German record car, that was frequently wheeled out for demonstration races, and was especially famous in America, being driven by record breaking showman driver Barney Oldfield.  Building one-off record breakers was one thing, but the bubble soon burst on actual racing; the Grand Prix race was cancelled from lack of entries after a third running in 1908. 

Voiturette cars took up the slack in Europe, and for a while America became the leader. Inspired by Brooklands, and seeking a test track in the heartland of American industrial production, a two and a half mile rectangular banked course had been built in the small city of Indianapolis in 1909. Two years later the track put on a new race over five hundred miles, paying a sizeable winners prize. Without much of consequence going on in Europe the Indianapolis "500", as it was known almost from day one, was the biggest race of the year. Though the Grand Prix came back in 1912, the "500" seemed to have taken over as the race everyone wanted to win. That honour had gone to a local car in 1911, the Marmon company of Indianapolis, and their yellow painted 'Wasp' car. Though the car was a converted production model, it still boasted some innovative ideas. Wind cheating was attempted with flat disc wheel covers, a curving cowling around the driver's seat, and a long tapering tail. Since the track was only a couple of miles around the need for a riding mechanic seemed superfluous, so the car had a single seat in the middle of the frame. Other teams questioned how driver Ray Harroun was supposed to spot other cars without an second man on board; the Marmon solution was to place a mirror on a mounting over the driver's head that he could glance up at. Though impossible to really substantiate for cars in general, it was certainly the first rear view mirror on a racing car.

Ray Harroun and the Marmon Wasp were both one shot wonders - neither won any other races again. No sooner had Indianapolis made a name for it's big race than the Europeans were coming over on the ocean liners with their cars looking to win the pot. Big time racing was rejuvenated, and so were the French. Peugeot had set up their own specialist racing department, under the guidance of designer Ernest Henry and drivers Georges Boillot, Jules Goux, and Paul Zucarelli. They were known as "Les Charlatans" by some sceptical Peugeot managers - all were still in their twenties after all. There were so many different rules and restrictions by this time on engine sizes and car weights that the young guns realised that the best way to go forward and win as much as possible was to do more with less. The Power to Weight Ratio. The holy grail of performance - getting more power without adding needless bulk - was the new mantra. Ernest Henry's new Peugeot engine could get 120 horsepower out of a mere seven and a half litre capacity. The secret was the combination of two very complicated design features; the Double Overhead Camshaft (DOHC), and having four valves in the cylinder. The DOHC engine has more valves in the cylinder than a Single Overhead (SOCH) design, and can intake and exhaust more fuel and exhaust gases, at the cost of extra complication and expense.The Peugeot engine could turn at 2200 RPM - thirty six times per second - and deservedly dominated both the Grand Prix and Indianapolis for several years. Winning Indianapolis was now undoubtedly the biggest prize in America and the the Vanderbilt Cup and an annual American version of the French original called the "Grand Prize" both fell off the map, the beginning of the great philosophical divide that would see wide banked oval speedways come to dominate American racing, and Grand Prix and sportscar racing would never be quite so visible in American culture ever again. Not that this would ever hurt the domestic sports car industry. The race track had germinated a need for speed, and sporty cars like the Mercer Raceabout and the Stutz Bearcat won in competition and sold well to rich young men about town and country, paving the way for the Corvettes and Mustangs of later decades.

The American cars and drivers were racing around a new breed of wooden speedway courses. Indianapolis had been paved with bricks (hence it's "Brickyard" nickname), not a very cheap option, and racing promoters hit upon building oval circuits like cycle velodromes with wooden planking. The rise of a whole summer season of Board speedways, such as one in the heart of glamorous Beverley Hills, California, would herald a golden age for one particular brand of American racing car. War had overtaken Europe, the mechanisation of the world and nationalistic posturing seen in cars like the Peugeot and Mercedes now escalated to horror of the trenches. The ill-omens were there for France in the 1914 French Grand Prix, where a new Mercedes had beaten Boillot in the Peugeot on home ground. The Mercedes matched the Peugeot's technical features, also having a DOHC engine, and soon the company would be put to work building engines and cars for the army. While war consumed Europe, America stayed neutral until 1917, and within three years the armistice was signed and the United States was the only country capable of restarting competition quickly. 1919 only featured two big races; Indianapolis, won by a pre-war Peugeot, and a quickly organised Targa Florio. Wartime had claimed casualties; Georges Boillot had joined the French air combat corps and would be shot down fatally in 1916. Among the Fiats in Sicily were new names on the entry list, names that would be known one day; The Italian Alfa Romeo cars, driver Enzo Ferrari, fellow Italian Antonio Ascari. Decades later the two names would become synonymous. Germans were exiled from the international scene in the immediate years following the war, boosting Italian chances to improve, and overtake the French too.

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1920s

A completely unexpected winner emerged from the revived Grand Prix in 1921. After four hours of racing the car crossing the line first in front of quiet French grandstands was an American Duesenberg, driven by Jimmy Murphy. The same car and driver won the next year's Indianapolis 500, only this time without the Duesenberg engine under the hood. Instead power came from a Miller engine, built in Los Angeles by the machine shop of Harry A. Miller. The next year, emboldened by the Indianpolis success, Miller, and his engineer Fred Offenhauser, built a whole car, the Miller '122'. Skinny, light, finely tuned and producing 120 horsepower and 4500 RPM the car took full advantage of new rule change dropping the need for drivers to carry along a riding mechanic. As such the driver sat in a cockpit only half a metre wide as they headed down the straighaways at 140 mph. The 122 was an immediate success; there were eleven of them on the 1923 Indianapolis starting grid, in time the Miller cars would win twelve 500s, and they dominated the 1920s board speedway circuit. The Millers and board track racing were American through and through. Youthful, glamorous and spectacular racing, tailored to bring in the crowds. Motor racing of the early 20th century was nothing if not a technicolour showcase for national stereotypes; The romantic French, as in love with as much with idea of the car at speed in the Grand Prix than the practical needs of organising a good field of cars every year. The Germans were of course efficient and regimented, with an unnerving ability to build a car, and turn up and win at will, when they cared to do so. And yet they lacked home grown events. Now Italians, many from small medieval towns where the oxen and cart were still standard transport, fielding blood red cars, driven with gusto by such as Giuseppe Campari - an opera standard singer in his spare time. And that was just the drivers; the crowds too were large and enthusiastic, flocking to wherever there might be the sight and sound of cars. Then there were the British, who were remarkable mostly for their complete lack of distinction. The country of engineering giants like Vickers, and Rolls-Royce, had never come close to winning a Grand Prix.

Now that might change, the Sunbeam, designed by expatriot French former Panhard and de Dion apprentice Louis Coatalen, borrowed so much from Turin it was practically a green painted Fiat. It won the 1923 French Grand Prix with Henry Segrave at the wheel, the first win for a British car and driver in a Grand Prix event. The same year showed off some great innovation on the starting grid. The French Bugatti cars, designed by the Italian born Ettore Bugatti, now based in Molsheim in eastern France, were quickly nicknamed the 'Tanks' as they were short and low with a beetle-like all enveloping body for streamlining. The Benz "Tropfenwagen" (Teardrop car) had it's engine in the middle, behind the driver, and was clothed in a shiny streamlined body that looked like it should be upended and sent flying off to the moon. The Benz had been licensed off a concept patent from aeroplane manufacturer Rumpler - builder of the innovative monoplane Taube (Dove) fighter of the war years. Aeroplane companies naturally took to high speed cars. In the early 20th century many large engineering works tended to try their hand at both anyway, there being a lot of interchangeable technology, especially with engines. A Napier had given Britain it's first glimmer of success with a win in the 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup, before the company focused on building aero engines. One plane builder having a go at motor racing brought aeroplane structural technology with them. The French Voisins were 'monocoque', with the chassis and frame all built as one solid box of wood and aluminium skin. The angular wedge shaped car looked a little like a giant silver wood working instrument. Like the Benz it was strikingly low and the driver sat so close to the road it could almost have driven underneath the upright racing cars of the pioneering era. Unlike the Benz the rear wheels were tucked in tight underneath the rear bodywork, out of the air stream. They even squared off the steering wheel to keep it's profile from jutting out above the cowling on the straights. 

-Supercharger

These strange cars did not have much of an impact at the time, though they would eventually prove very influential with the passing of time. The Benz company merged with Daimler and Mercedes around this time. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, one of their engineers, went away from the Tropfenwagen convinced of the mid-engine layout's potential strengths were worth pursuing development. Andre Lefebvre, designer of the Voisin C6, eventually joined Citroen and penned the ubiquitous 2CV and futuristic DS cars - two of the most important designs in automotive history. The radical racing designs had been born out of a need to give smaller engines a chance. A two litre capacity limit had come into force - there would be no more aero engine monsters except on record runs - and Fiat were still kings on the Grand Prix track thanks in no small part to their prowess with engines. The 1922 '804' car had an in-line 6 cylinder engine, with a DOHC arrangement, and won the French Grand Prix in the hands of Felice Nazzaro, now a veteran in his forties. The next year's car added two more cylinders and a supercharger. This latter feature was the latest idea to get more power out of a smaller engine. The supercharger concept had been around since the mid nineteenth century as a way of feeding blast furnaces more air than bellows. In a car engine the spinning interlocking rotors pumped air into the intakes and boosted the pressure heading into the carburettors, making the fuel burn hotter, and literally giving more 'bang' for the buck. The downside was the device took away some of the engine's power from the wheels to power itself. Implemented well the power boost easily offset the former problem and Fiat were doing it better than anyone; the supercharged 804 could push 140 mph. Other marques wanted some of that, and began to poach some of Fiat's engineers; Alfa Romeo winning the prized designer Vittorio Jano, the thirty two year old chief engineer of Fiat's racing team.

In America the power of the supercharger was not unnoticed. Miller Engineering fitted their new designs with one, boosting power by over one hundred horsepower. One version of the supercharged Miller 91 had an unusual design feature; front wheel drive. Now the standard for passenger cars, front wheel drive hardly ever featured on top racing cars for obvious reasons; there was no point. Except on the fast and smooth American speedways the complications getting the same wheels to drive and steer were less important as steering inputs were much lighter than in road races. The Miller did away with a driveshaft, making it lower, and kept the weight of the engine over the driven wheels. Essentially it was the mid engine Tropfenwagen in reverse, though more successful. The supercharger pushing the Millers to a dizzying 170 mph top speed. Meanwhile in Europe Vittorio Jano built Alfa Romeo the P2 car, and it propelled them from also-rans to the frontrunners. As well it should as, like Segrave's Sunbeam, it was suspiciously similar to the Fiats, only this time it was the original designer taking his work with him. Alfa were struck by tragedy when their star driver Antonio Ascari died at 1925 French Grand Prix at Monthlery, only a few weeks after winning the new Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps. This was a decisive time, when the die was cast on the Italian car industry for ever more; Fiat left before the end of the 1920s, never to return to Grand Prix racing. Instead Alfa Romeo became the premier sports car racers and builders in the country, and they would spawn a customer racing team run by one of their former drivers. The Scuderia Ferrari, run by Enzo Ferrari, who had abruptly retired from the driver's seat in 1924, came into being in 1929 as a professionally run collection of Alfa Romeo cars, aiming to race across the spectrum from Grands Prix to long distance races to Voiturettes. The team was a rare success in the time of the worldwide economic slump after the great stock market crash of 1929. Ferrari was no engineer, and retired as a top line driver, but he was an organisor; "An agitator of men", he found the best new Italian drivers, and prepared winning cars for them. 

The same could not be said of Harry Miller and his company, a genius engineer with little business nous he was left exposed by the Depression. Ten years of engineering prowess and Indianapolis wins counting for nought when nobody could afford to buy his cars anymore. The 1930s saw the so-called "Junk formula" at Indianapolis set the clock back slightly by reinstating the need for riding mechanics, and the banning of supercharging. With the depression biting the board speedways were being sold off and torn down, and racing was mostly going to be on dirt tracks and the Indianapolis bricks. The drive was to bring back road car companies to the races, and it worked for the most part, keeping the "500"  going through the lean years, but at the expense of Miller, since they didn't build passenger cars their work dried up. The Miller engine design was bought by Offenhauser, and the basic block continued to power Indianapolis cars up until the 1980s. Though the name of Miller would live on in racing legend, the 1920s were also the decade that made the name of two marques that became arguably the two most prestigious sports car brands; Bugatti and Bentley. The French Bugattis had already seen racing action with a few sporadic efforts. Their tiny Type 13 raced before the Great War, and their "Tank" showed great foresight with it's enclosed body. The little light blue cars went simple in 1924 with the Type 35, one of the most successful racing cars ever designed. There were plenty of customers for the tidy, 8 cylinder, supercharged car with excellent handling and fine fit and finish. The 35 could win lots of races partly because of it's customer base, but also there were lots of new races; a Spanish Grand Prix, German Grand Prix, even a race around the principality of Monaco. The race around the tight course was ideal for the nimble Bugatti, and a mysterious British driver, William Grover-Williams won the first Monaco Grand Prix in 1929 for the French.

-Bentley Boys

"The world's fastest trucks". That was Ettore Bugatti's verdict on one of his fellow manufacturers products, the Bentley. On first impression it was a fair assessment as the big British car looked like it should be hauling a field gun behind it, but it was a road going touring car rather than a pure bred racer. After a few dabbles at Indianapolis and in races at Brooklands, Walter Owen "WO" Bentley had seen his cars being entered in the 24 Hour Race at Le Mans. Set up in 1923, the endurance race used the same course that Jimmy Murphy had won on in the Duesenberg in 1921; a relatively compact layout south of the city, that featured several long straights and put a premium on power and rugged reliability. Clearly 24 hours of uninterrupted racing was a whole new world compared to even the longest of other major events - Indianapolis took about five hours to complete. The race was designed by the organisors to be for touring cars, and it had to be as no custom racer could hope to finish such a test. A Bentley had won the second race in 1924, but it had been a private entry with no official interest. Despite the success the company itself was struggling financially, but saviour would come from one of it's aristocratic customers. the British class system was finally going to pay off for it's cars. J. Woolfe Barnato, a former army officer, diamond heir, had a Bentley in his garage, and by the end of 1925 had the entire company too, though W.O. stayed on in charge.

With an injection of funds, Bentley built a new car, the 3 litre, and headed back to Le Mans with the "Bentley Boys". There had never been quite such a cast of characters in the drivers seat before, or since. Along with Barnato, there were Dudley Benjafield, Harley street physician; Glen Kidston, Navy submariner and long distance aviator; Sir Henry 'Tim' Birkin, Baronet and former Flying Corps pilot; Sydne 'Sammy' Davis, draughtsman, Navy engineer and journalist. Benjafield and Davis won in 1927, twenty one laps ahead of their nearest French opposition. Barnato and his Australian friend Bernard Rubin won 1928, Rubin a pioneering Australian expat racing with the British - there would be plenty more in years to come. In 1929 the newer, larger Speed Six Bentley won with Barnato and Birkin. As the name suggested it was a six litre car, with 200 horsepower on tap. Barnato and Kidston took the team's hat trick in 1930, a one-two finish for the British Racing Green cars. The Speed Six was a brute of a car - twelve feet long, weighing two tons, and took a lot of manhandling. Tim Birkin especially wanted the team to try supercharging their engines to make them more potent. There were threatening clouds of the horizon in the white painted shapes of the Mercedes SS's, and the new Jano-designed Alfa Romeo 8C two seat sports car. Birkin was often described as the fastest of the Bentley Boys, and he knew a fundamental truth of racing cars; as dominant as they seem, and as successful as they are, the next year things can all be different. The race never stops.

W.O. Bentley was dead set against supercharging but Barnato and Birkin had the clout, the former was the majority owner after all, and the latter had the financial assistance of Mrs Dorothy Paget, one of Britain's richest women. So the Birkin "Blower" Bentley was born, using a smaller 4 litre engine, and built in his own workshops, the design could match the power of the Speed 6, but was unlucky on the track. The car with it's distinctive supercharger sticking out infront of the radiator, driving straight off the engine driveshaft, dropped out of the 1929 Le Mans race, along with the Mercedes SS it was racing. A single seater Blower model, the appropriately named Number 1, gave Birkin wins at Brooklands, and it's windcheating profile showed the possible future downsized direction for Bentley. But even all the success they couldn't beat the economic forces at work in the wider world; 1930 was the last year for the Bentley Boys, Barnato with his perfect three-from-three score in the big race sold the company to Rolls-Royce. Tim Birkin won the 1931 Le Mans race, aboard an Alfa Romeo 8C, a design that won the next three on the trot for the Italians. Though Alfa Romeo won more of the era's races the legend of the group of young British sporting aristocrats would persist as perhaps the most famous yarn from the Le Mans twenty four hours. 

The Mercedes SS never did win Le Mans, but that did not stop it from being one of the most important cars of the period. For one thing it put the newly amalgamated Mercedes-Benz firmly back on the map, bringing some new German driving talent to the fore, and winning their home race on the new Nurburgring circuit. Fourteen miles of purpose built circuit in the eastern Eifel mountains, the twisty "Ring" was ideal for the powerful and agile SS. This was a two door, road legal sports car with as much power output as the mid-1920s Indianapolis and Grand Prix racers. It looked and sounded purposeful, ominous even, the six big silver exhaust pipes snaking down the side of the hood throwing out a piercing screeching whine when the driver pressed the accelerator down to engage the supercharger. The Italians had created their own epic sports car road race, the day long Mille Miglia - a time trial from Brescia in the North, down the Adriatic coast to Pescara, across the hills to Rome, and back to Brescia again - and the SS won it in 1931, averaging a sensational average speed over 100 kilometers per hour around the course. 

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1930s

Twenty years after the Marmon Wasp had been the first true single-seater, and ten after the Millers showed how sleek such cars could become, the layout finally made it's way to the European racing circuit. The new Alfa Romeo car for 1932 was the P3 "Monoposto", the first Grand Prix car with no room for a passenger. Reliability of parts was such that in shorter races co-driver mechanics were no longer necessary, leaving just the driver in the car. The P3 Alfa had a novel Y-shaped split rear driveshaft arrangement, the drive going to each wheel in it's own shaft running each side of cockpit This in turn could be lower down, perfect for the bantamweight master of the P3, the "Flying Mantuan" Tazio Nuvolari. The diminutive Italian who went down in history as one of the greatest racing drivers won nearly everything there was to win in the 1920s and '30s, his never-say-die spirit making him quick in sprint races, but he also had the temperament and mechanical sympathy to keep cars going to win long distance events too. He was crazy enough to drive along without headlights in the Mille Miglia, yet cunning too; he was only flying blind to mislead his teammate ahead into thinking he was no threat. Other tales were the stuff of legend; the time he drove injured with only one functional foot; the time his seat mountings broke during another Mille Miglia, so he sat atop a sack of fruit borrowed from a roadside trader, much to the alarm of his co-driver. Nuvolari perfected the 'four wheel drift' style of throwing the car into turns and then balancing on the edge of the tyres grip, steering more with the throttle than the wheel.

Alfa's low slung 6C and 8C's did not have the Italian sportscar scene entirely to themselves. Founded in 1926 the eponymous company run by the five Maserati brothers in Bologna was doing exceptionally well for itself considering it's tiny budget compared to Alfa and Mercedes. Their Maserati 8CM, a tidy single seater with a useful 275 horsepower engine, won the Belgian Grand Prix in 1933, and was also a winner at Brooklands British Empire Trophy. Among others who had taken to the car was Bira, the Prince of Siam, a man who made the Bentley Boys seem like hoi polloi. Bira's blue Maserati carried along a man who had been to Eton and Cambridge, lived in Geneva, and who was of course, Far Eastern royalty. Wealthy though he was, as an amateur Bira couldn't hope to win outright Grand Prix's in a professional age, but he campaigned in voiturette racing to great success. His team, run with his brother Prince Chula, had three British E.R.A. cars, all painted light blue and yellow, and named; Romulus, Remus and Hanuman. Though the actual naming of cars would never really catch on (except for a few other driver's nicknames for the favourite steeds), the three car privateer team anticipated a time, far in the future in the 1930s, when manufacturers were not so directly involved in racing, and it was up to those who wanted to race to do so off their own initiative. Maserati also did well in voiturettes, keeping themselves in business with a smaller car, the 4CM. 

The Alfas, Maseratis, and Bugattis kept winning races across many classes well the 1930s but were about to have their thunder stolen on the Grand Prix scene, by some new machinery that could easily have been mistaken for a force of nature. The National Socialists had come to power in Germany, and were spending wildly on technology projects, including motor racing. Years before the full horror of what Hitler and his Nazis had planned for Europe was unleashed, a different kind of Blitzkrieg was to be deployed on racing circuits. Hitler had grand plans for Germany, quite how maniacal and grotesque these were hidden behind a wall of nationalistic propaganda and crowd pleasing vanity projects. There was an ulterior motive too; by handing money to the likes of Mercedes Benz the Nazis were not just aiming for ego boosting glory on the race circuit but technology improvements to place in military hands. To that end they were also enlisting engineer Ferdinand Porsche, one time Mercedes engineer and designer of the Mercedes SS, now running an independent consulting firm - with the tongue twisting name of 'Konstruktionen und Beratungen für Motoren und Fahrzeugbau' - to built a car for the German volk - what would become the Volkswagen, or the Beetle, and the military version, the Kubelwagen, hundreds of thousands of which filled the ranks of the army and the SS. Porsche was also in demand from the Auto Union company to head up a much more exciting project. Auto Union was as the name suggests an amalgamation of smaller car firms, and Dr Porsche, keen for work for his consultancy, wanted a share of the government largesse so Auto Union could build a Grand Prix car. He had a useful ally in racing driver Hans Stuck, who had contacts of influence with Hitler get a share of the money. To the incredulity of Mercedes, expecting the lions share as befitting their status, Auto Union would be awarded half of the racing budget, the government reasoning a little competition would be productive. The funding was a key factor in the German teams leap into their own new level of competitiveness, but the engineers came up with some great design innovations to make their cars work.

"V" engines - running two banks of cylinders from the same crankshaft - had been first built and run back at the same time as the earliest automobiles in the late 19th century, but racing would not be where they would be developed. The appeal of getting more power from less space appealed most to the aeroplane industry, especially during and after the Great War. The original V2 engine built by Daimler, became over time a V4, then a V8, V10... Each one became more complicated to build, as the V configuration naturally needed two sets of camshafts, one for each bank, and had to be balanced to stop the engine pulling itself to pieces. The exhaust system was complicated too, requiring either snaking pipes, or cut off banks of exhausts, to keep the power delivery efficient. The advantages of such engines were ready to be utilised on the race track when the time came, and they were reliable enough to last. The shorter length and lower centre of gravity of the design could make cars more compact and streamlined. Soon the bookshelf-shaped rectangular prow of the racing car would be consigned to history. The Ford "Flathead" V8, introduced in 1932, was the first truly affordable automotive V8, and made for some quick road cars, and eventually becoming the engine of choice for the new art of 'hot rodding' modifications late 1940s.

-Silver Arrows

Dr Porsche remembered the Benz Tropfenwagen; the 1934 Auto Union A-Type sticking the engine behind the driver in the middle, and this engine would not be left behind as the Benz's had. They had built a massive V16 engine, 32 valves, 6 litres and a supercharger, all exhausting straight out of the cut-off pipes in a deafening thunder. But the car had to put it's massive power on the road, and not blow up its gearbox or axles. And it had to be below the maximum weight limit to race at all. The frame was fashioned from molybdenum and chrome alloy, the dull silver bodywork unpainted aluminium panels, aluminum also making the block of the V16 engine. Developments in suspension design began to appear too. Through the many years when races were held either on rough gravel roads, or the smooth oval tracks of America, suspension remained on many cars relatively crude; rigid axles, and longitudinal leaf springs, like a horse drawn waggon. The Germans had designed independent suspension; all four wheels working on their own rods, springs and shock absorbers, and all adjustable. New words entered the lexicon of racing; camber, caster, toe-in, shock rate, rebound, the suspension 'set up' of the car, tuned to each circuit.  

Theoretically putting the engine in the middle had great advantages over front engine cars. It made the frontal area smaller, lowering drag. There was no need for a driveshaft from the engine to rear wheels, the drive went directly, and the driver could sit low to the ground, as if in a tin bathtub. In a front engine car fitting in the gearbox between cockpit and engine pushed the engine forwards. Putting the engine in the middle meant the gearbox could hang off the back of the car, bringing the weight of engine closer to the middle. In practice the mid engine layout of the auto union, it's drivers were finding out, made its tail very lively, even despite the best efforts of the suspension designers. Sitting right in the nose of the torpedo shaped body, cramped behind the huge wooden steering wheel, it took great skill to find the limit in a corner without much 'feel' of the what the rear was doing. And on top of that the radiator pipes, threading round the cockpit, were very hot, not a welcome feature on a continental summer day. The new Mercedes Benz made do with a smaller inline 8, but it had four valves per cylinder and a dual overhead camshaft. Mercedes were bringing a machine gun to battle the Auto Union blunderbuss. The new Mercedes W25 met the auto union for the first time at the 1934 French Grand Prix on the Monthlery circuit south of Paris. The track had long straights and a big concrete banked oval track like a mini Brooklands, but some tight twisty corners too that sorted out low speed handling too. 

Neither German team won that day in France, Louis Chiron in a Alfa Romeo did when the silver cars all had to park with technical problems. In those days before television, a huge local crowd had come to the track to see the awesome spectacle in person, and went away pleased with the French win. A short lived triumph as the Germans cars were soon up to speed, winning nearly every major Grand Prix race for the next five years. It wasn't only brute force that won trophies, the two teams tested extensively, Mercedes chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut personally taking his creations out to drive to see how they performed. The auto union engineers came up.with a very primitive data logging system using paper charts and a stylus to record, the sort of recording that wouldn't become computerised and commonplace until the 1980s in Formula 1. Alfred Neubauer, the sizeable Mercedes team manager, ran a tight ship, the precursor to the modern racing team with its company of uniformed mechanics, and invented the pitboard for sending messages and instructions to drivers as they flashed by the pit. Often these boards were used to instruct the drivers to hold station if Mercedes were out in front - the prototypical modern team also perfected the controversial art of politically motivated team orders - especially if one of the German favourites, like the acknowledged driving master Rudolf Carraciola, or the aristocratic Nazi favourite Manfred von Brauchitisch were in the lead. Occasionally things went against the plan though, such as when the young English team recruit Richard Seaman - hired some said to appease British anti-German sentiments - won the 1938 German Grand Prix after von Brauchitisch suffered a fire during a refuelling stop. 

Von Brauchitisch had previously suffered a crushing defeat at the Nurburgring in 1935 when his tyre blew halfway round the last of the fourteen mile laps. Even worse for Germany, the beneficiary of this problem was Tazio Nuvolari in the Ferrari Alfa P3. The Italian car, looking like a chest of drawers next to the silver arrows, and now completely outclassed to the tune of 140 horsepower, had been considered such a no-hoper by the organisors that they didn't have a record of the Italian national anthem to hand for the winners podium. They reckoned without Nuvolari's peerless skill and fearlessness. The Mercedes tyre had thrown it's tread because von Brauchitisch had been pushing hard to keep ahead of Nuvolari, who had been riding high in second place, ahead of Carraciola and the new young star Bernd Rosemeyer in the Auto Union, until a disastrous two minute pit stop had left him back in sixth. The Italian drove like few had before or since to pass four cars in one lap, and close to thirty seconds from the lead when his rivals tyre gave up the ghost. From that day forward Enzo Ferrari considered Nuvolari's drive as his yardstick against all other drivers were measured. Any driver could win against the odds and aboard inferior equipment he reckoned, an accurate assessment for the cars and venues of the 1930s, like many of Ferrari's entrenched beliefs it would become a hindrance in later years. Rather more careful drivers than Nuvolari had been often found the Commendatore's attitude to his drivers at odds with their wish to preserve their own necks and often didn't hang around the team too long, to the detriment of consistent results.

Auto Union acquitted themselves well in the first two years, considering the vast gulf in resources between them and Mercedes and had an excellent 1936 with Rosemeyer taking three of the four European championship Grand Prix wins. Their rivals even gave up on any further development of their W25, to finish their new car, the enormous W125, now boasting over six hundred horsepower crammed into a huge low slung body. With Rudolf Carraciola at the wheel they won back the European championship in 1937, the only place Rosemeyer could win was in England, on the new Donington park circuit, finally giving the British somewhere to race other than Brooklands. Not that they stood a chance against the Germans in their antiquated ERAs and Sunbeams, literally being left in the dust ad the German cars, belching out fumes from the alcohol and benzine fuel cocktails they ran on, leapt over the crests of the scenic parkland track. Caraciolla was third of the great drivers of the age, first coming to the world's attention behind the wheel of the SS. His victory in Ulster at a streaming wet Ards TT, beating the Bentleys in the Mercedes over the long open road circuit, established his reputation as the first great "Regenmeister". He was the driver in the 1931 Mille Miglia who overturned the formbook and beat the Italians in their backyard. He was European champion in 1935, 1937 and 1938, winning ten Grands Prix, in a frustrating 1936 he still won on a soaking wet Monaco circuit.

All three great drivers came to early ends. Carraciola returned to driving after the war, but crashed heavily at Indianapolis, leaving him sidelined for several years. He died from renal failure aged 58 after seven years of retirement in a 1959. Nuvolari also came back to racing in 1946 but by now was well into his fifties and Clearly lacking strength. He died from a stroke in 1953 aged sixty. Rosemeyer was killed in a speed record attempt in January 1938, a few months after an inspired win at Donington park. The record runs were a distraction the smaller team didn't need, they were unlikely to beat the mighty Mercedes W125 Rekordwagen - a streamlined V12 projectile capable of 268 mph, and they were running down a stretch of autobahn, setting class records; Malcolm Campbell's absolute speed record of 301 mph was not under threat. The Mercedes was driven by Carraciola to it's speed record, still standing as the fastest recorded speed on a public road. Naturally Auto Union was expected to respond, and Rosemeyer had to drive their streamliner at insane speeds down a mere four lane road. The the 260 mph crash that left Auto Union's star driver dead among the trees was the biggest disaster, but the loss too of Dr Porsche to the greater Nazi wartime goals was also a major blow. For good measure the grand prix rules had also changed, the maximum weight rule now supplanted by a three litre engine limit, necessitating a new engine. Both teams went for a V12, supercharged, and the more compact design allowed more streamlined designs. The Auto Union D Type moved the driver back to a more central position, and had a smoother nose. The Mercedes 154 was lower than its bull nosed predecessor, but could still maintain similar speeds despite the large loss of engine capacity and often now had the measure of auto union, giving Caracciola the 1938 European grand prix title. 

Also in good form in the car was the mechanic turned driver Hermann Lang, not perhaps a match for the team leader on pure pace but because of his background very technically minded and capable of giving Uhlenhaut the kind of detailed feedback that would become standard practice for a racing driver in years to come. To replace Rosemeyer the Auto Unions had the services of Nuvolari, finally driving one of the silver cars and he could sometimes make the difference, such as in England where he have the team a Donington park hat trick of wins. Alfa romeo had tried to keep up with the Germans; when the sheer volume of their power was realised the Scuderia Ferrari tried a very literal minded solution. They took the design of the P3, enlarged the frame, and stuck two straight 8 engines in it. There was more to the "Bimotore'" than being a crude Frankenstein's monster, the design needed some ingenious gearing and transmission to get the two engines, one in front in the usual place, one behind the driver facing rearwards, to drive the two back wheels through the twin driveshafts. And because an engine now occupied the space where the fuel tank had been the car needed new pannier tanks on the side of the the frame. The two engines certainly did the trick for power as the car made over 500 horsepower in 1935, when the Germans were still in the four hundreds, but the Bimotore was unavoidably heavy, and chewed through tyres and fuel in a way that was not conducive to winning long Grands Prix. It was a dead end, there were still many lower class races that Alfas could win, and the double engine beast was not eligible for those. 

Enzo Ferrari's team had been entrusted with the whole of Alfa's racing programme in 1933, but by 1938 the company wanted back in on the game. Ferrari had built the Tipo C, replacing the P3 monoposto with a new single seat version of the 8C sports car. This was the golden age of streamlining in industrial design, and the basic 8C racing car had been swathed in many luxurious touring bodies by coachbuilders. There was a roadster 8C, strippped down to a cigar-like body and given fenders and headlights. The beautiful and dramatic Pininfarina bodied coupe won the Mille Miglia twice. With the continued successes the factory took over the Scuderia Ferrari entirely and made it the new Alfa-Corse team. Their big ideas for 1938 were a re-clothed 8C coupe for Le Mans, and a new Grand Prix car for the new 3 litre limited class. Things didn't quite go according to plan though, as the long, high-tailed 2900 Le Mans Special didn't win the race, despite looking fantastic, and the new 308 single seater still chased the tails of the Germans. A smaller engine variant, the 158 "Alfetta", did acquit itself well in voiturette racing, and would one day have it's day in the sun. 

The new Mille Miglia roadster won the race it was intended for, looking fabulous with it's big overhanging tail as if it were really meant to be motoring down the riviera.  Maserati had been sold by the brothers to industrialist Adolfo Orsi in 1937, though they stayed in charge of day-to-day matters and the racing team kept going with the new 8 CTF Grand Prix car. Taking after the Alfas and Mercedes it was much more rounded and streamlined than previous Maserati's. It was a simple creation; they effectively bolted two of their smaller 4 cylinder engines together to make an eight, and supercharged it, but it had well over three hundred horsepower and was quick on the straights. A journey to America to race in a short-lived revival of the Vanderbilt Cup (on a circuit on the Long Island airfield where Lindbergh taken off for Paris ten years earlier), led to the car's finest hours. Indianapolis racer Wilbur Shaw and his backer Michael Boyle saw the Maserati in action and wanted one; it was clearly no match for the Mercedes and Auto Unions but those were not for sale, especially with the ever more contentious relations with the Nazi government.

Maserati, however were only too willing to sell them one of the three 8 CTFs and let them take it to the "500" as the "Boyle Special". The car had been unreliable in Grands Prix, but Shaw had it prepared well and won a dominant victory against the American opposition in the 1939 Indianapolis 500. He came back next year and did it again. His hat-trick in 1941 was only thwarted by a broken wheel, and the car came back post war for two thirds and a fourth, by which time Shaw had helped engineer the deal that stopped the Speedway itself being sold off to developers. The 1939 season was, in all senses, the end of an era. Never again would racing cars have so much power versus relatively little grip, be so elaborately funded by a government and operated under the veil of propaganda. The 1939 Mercedes had an even more streamlined appearance, quite the most high performance car that would be built for many years, its drivers now dwarfed by the long aluminium body, and giant rear wheels like the paddles of a steamship, but it's time was numbered. One took the Englishman Seaman to his death on an awful rainy day at spa in Belgium, and only two lined up.alongside two Auto Unions and a solo Bugatti on the streets of Belgrade in Serbia for the sad end to an era. Nuvolari won the hour long race. It was September 3rd 1939, two days after German troops had marched into Poland. The silver cars were taken home from Belgrade to the news of Britain and France declaring war on their homeland.

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1950s

-Ferrari

Racing cars were squirreled away during the Second World War, many of their owners fearful that they would be cannabalised for scrap metal. The car companies were all put to work making military vehicles, and passenger cars. Racing frivolities could wait. Surprisingly some of the German cars not only survived wartime but were revived to race again afterwards. European racing was out, with much of the continent in ruins what racing was going on was now strictly for privateers in smaller cars. Indianapolis was still on the cards for those who could get their hands on one of the pre-war supercharged racing monsters. A Mercedes W154 made it's way to America, and started two 500's, starting second in 1947 but retiring with a burned out piston, and retiring again in 1948 with an oil leak. An Alfa 308 too, went stateside before the war, racking up three top ten finishes in four starts pre and post war. On the European scene, a familiar name had appeared, this time as constructor. Enzo Ferrari had left Alfa Romeo on the brink of the war, leaving his name behind too as his former employer still held the rights for four more years. He had spent the war manufacturing aeroplane parts, but with peacetime the racing obsessive from Modena decided to try his hand at cars again. This time they would be his own, with the old Scuderia mascot of a rearing black horse on a yellow shield as the badge. A prototype Ferrari car had in fact appeared in 1939, shortly after Ferrari went solo. His reputation preceded him, and though officially "Auto Avio Construzioni", a wealthy local aristocrat was ringing up asking for a racing car. The AAC 815 had raced once in a race at the home of the Mille Miglia. Brescia, in the strange twilight world of fascist Italy in 1940 before the war damage hit. Now, seven years later, the new Ferrari 125 sports car would take after the AAC - a compact two seat open Barchetta car, conventional in design. It was mostly sketched out by Giocachinno Columbo, a former collaborator with Ferrari at Alfa, but suspended while his fascist wartime connections were investigated. His freelance project upset Alfa management who told him to cease work with Ferrari while on suspension, but eventually he was able to come back again to finish the car. At the heart was a V12 engine, and not a great deal else. The car had functional bodywork, the radiator being a basic square block on the front, surrounded by two basic lights. 

Ferrari's long standing belief was that the engine was the heart and soul of a car, and everything else would follow. In the uncertain days in post-war Italy his approach was right on the money. Columbo's design had a good engine, and on the ad-hoc new racing events spreading around Italy that was what mattered. Not that Ferrari neglected other parts of the car; when seeing the chassis frame for the first he rejected it. 'Too heavy', he proclaimed, and told the engineers to make it lighter. 'Impossible' came the answer... but in time the chassis lost a whole twelve kilogrammes without losing strength. This was Ferrari all over, stubborn and demanding, but he was going to get results. He was on the verge of fifty years old and had seen a lot; the wartime AAC factory had set up outside of Modena, where the old Scuderia shop had been, to the nearby town of Maranello, to escape bombing roads aimed at the city. This had been before Mussolini was deposed, and bombs still found their way to the new factory. After the bloody end of Italian fascism, many loyalists were tracked down by those intent on the same gruesome revenge they had doled out to Mussolini. Ferrari's old boss at Alfa was assassinated by an anti-fascist gunman as he left work one day. Eduardo Weber, who's carburettor company became thhe default choice for all Italian cars, and many others besides, went missing in 1945, never to be seen again. 

A Ferrari 125 made it's first public journey in March 1947, with it's namesake behind the steering wheel, burbling sedately for a few miles through the fields around Maranello before returning home for immediate tweaking. Two months later on the streets of Piacenza the Ferrari nameplate made it's competition debut. Two cars were ready to race; one crashed, not hard but enough to force a retirement and one was leading only three laps from home when the engine began misfiring and it had to pull over. It wasn't the win, but it was the lead first time out, and a 125 won the next race it entered, around leafy roads at the ancient Terme de Caracalla in Rome in the hands of Franco Cortese, an old Alfa customer driver from the thirties. It was the first of several wins that year for the 125 and a larger engine model, the 159. Ferrari's persistent got them off to a flying start, winning races and soon selling cars to customers, with an American importer Luigi Chinetti providing an important contact across the Atlantic. The 125 became the 166, a much more refined elegant shape with all the fender bulges smoothed out into an elegant waist-high cheat line down the flanks and the radiator rounded off - already Ferrari's were pretty to behold - and in only the second year of Ferrari 166's claimed the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia, and a place in the collection of Barbara Hutton, the fabulously wealthy heiress to the Woolworth stores. 

Wins on the Grand Prix scene was still slightly out of Ferrari's grasp. A customer 125 made the first Ferrari Grand Prix start in the Monaco GP, and an official team entry came at Valentino Park, Turin. The 125 GP variant won a race against a piecemeal opposition at the scenic course around Lake Garda, the first for a Ferrari Grand Prix car. A mere five years after the end of the war the motor racing world was well and truly back on it's feet with a new World Championship for the newly renamed "Formula One" cars. It began in Britain at Silverstone, one of the many new British airfield venues taking advantage of the runways and perimeter roads of demobbed bomber bases. At the head was an old face; the Alfetta, a design dating back to pre-war times, but now perfect for the Italian-dominated post war racing world. The Alfa 158 produced 190 horsepower in it's original thirties guise, by the 1951 season a two-stage supercharger gave it 450 horsepower. This power output may have lagged behind some of the pre war cars, but this was now being produced by half the capacity. It was a pattern of squeezing out power from the same cylinder capacity that would continue on ever since, adding nearly one thousand horsepower to the output of a 1.5 litre engine in the thirty years after the Alfetta. The car's performance enhanced by a new generation of drivers; Giuseppe Farina won the first championship race and title aboard the Alfa. He beat his teammate Juan Manuel Fangio to the crown, but Fangio turned the tables in 1951. Fangio, an import from Argentina, had been bought a Maserati by the Argentine government, and at the age of forty was already stamping his superiority on the European scene. He would have to do it without Alfa Romeo though, with two titles and an ageing car, they had done enough and withdrew from racing for 1952, bringing a belated end to the 1930s era of single seater racing.

In 1952, with a dearth of entries the top Grands Prix, the World Championship had to be downgraded to Formula 2 rules, and Ferrari was ready to take advantage. Drivers had been a problem - they needed their own ace behind the wheel. In 1940, there had been a second AAC 815 car made and raced for one Alberto Ascari, the son of the late Alfa star Antonio. With war's end Ferrari and Ascari reunited, struggling in the wake of Maserati, at least in Grands Prix. In sports cars the 166 had taken Ferrari to top very quickly, they won the Mille Miglia again in 1949, and far more importantly they had won Le Mans overall for the first time, with Luigi Chinetti driving twenty three of the hours, handing over to his aristocratic British co driver Lord Selsdon for a brief respite. The company was growing exponentially, splitting into various departments. Columbo, who was the original designer of the Alfa 159 before the war, favoured supercharging engines to beat them. Ferrari disagreed and packed him off to the sports car department to allow in Aurelio Lampredi to build single-seaters with 4.5 litre naturally aspirated engines, eventually the 125's designer packed his bags and went off to Maserati, to design them a new single seater. More and more customers were knocking at Ferrari's door for a car - Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman had one, as did some racers in South America, drivers like Froilan Gonzales, the heavy-set driver nicknamed "The Pampas Bull" who won a race aboard a Ferrari in the 'Temporada' series.

Gonzales joined the official racing team after that, and took Ferrari's first championship Formula 1 victory at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1951, finally beating the Alfa Romeos, and Ascari followed suit at the next two races, at the Nurburgring, and on home ground at Monza. The V12 Ferrari's got much better fuel mileage than the thirsty Alfa's, saving on pit stop times. They had to be put aside for 1952 as there was nobody to race against, so Lampredi's tidy Formula 2 Ferrari 500 would take centre stage. The smaller inline-4 cylinder engine made the 500 much more compact than any Grand Prix car seen before, Ascari towering over the prow from behind his steering wheel, at the controls of a car with excellent handling. The Italian won every since championship race he entered in 1952, the only one missing being the opening round in Switzerland, when Ferrari went to Indianapolis with a modified version of the V12 car. Ascari was lead driver, in the factory car, and there were three customer cars sold for the race. The Grand Prix car was not entirely suited to the high speed track, and only Ascari wound up struggling onto the starting grid. In the race, though soon-to-be World Champion was up to eighth place before the wheel hub failed. Had the Ferrari team heeded the local's advice to strengthen the wheels history might have played out differently. Ferrari did not go back to Indianapolis, but given the successes of 1952 and '53, they could have been forgiven for thinking they did not need to. Ascari won the title easily, and then won the first three races of 1953 too, making for nine straight, a record unmatched till 2013. 

With the turn of the decade and the war behind them the Germans were making noises about coming back to competition. Dr. Porsche had founded his own company, though the small outfit was not in the position to challenge for many races for the time being. Mercedes Benz too, were coming back. The Mercedes W194 coupe won Le Mans in 1952, the first closed top car to do so, and a one-two finish no less, though it wasn't too popular a result in France. This was seven years after the end of the war and the silver cars had won after the foolhardy  but valiant French driver Levegh had tried to drive his Talbot single handed through the whole race. In the lead With a hour to go he missed a gear, blew his engine, and handed the Germans victory. Ferrari, Ascari and Italy had ruled the roost in Grands Prix but success would be fleeting with the return to a new 2.5 litre Formula 1 bringing in Mercedes with a formidable new effort in 1954, and Maserati bringing along their new 250F car. Facing the new threats, Ferrari did not help themselves with their driver relations. Already the team had snubbed the new English prospect Stirling Moss by promising a drive in a race, inviting him down to Maranello, then failing to provide a car when he turned up. Moss spent several years savouring beating the red cars at every opportunity, sometimes aboard the Maserati designed  by another person Enzo's politicking had sent elsewhere. 

Far more problematic for Ferrari was that he had also kept Ascari hanging on too long over money, and his champion walked off to join an all new racing team founded by Lancia. Mercedes' W196 was fairly conventional in many details; despite the success of the auto union cars before the war the Mercedes did not take up the mid engine format. Instead their innovations were in the technical details; they dropped their customary supercharger for the then-radical fuel injection technology. The chassis frame was ultra light aluminium and the body panels magnesium, a material that famously reacts with water when burning to burn more fiercely. Such a dangerous material would never be countenanced these days, but in the 1950s performance could be achieved  by any means necessary. The car was strong and so was the driving lineup. They had to have Fangio; no lover of Ferrari and their Machiavellian ways the Maestro happily joined the Germans. The cars were not ready until July's French Grand Prix but Fangio set himself up with two wins aboard a borrowed Maserati before he breezed to the title, winning two races in the standard Mercedes and two more in a re-bodied streamlined version, ideal for long straights of Monza and Reims. Ascari, and Lancia struggled with their new car, and Ferrari too were all at sea after their brain drain. 

-Mercedes

In 1955 Stirling Moss joined Fangio; The young English man was nominally the understudy, but although Fangio would again take the title, moss would go down in history for one of the great victories in any race in any era. The Grand Prix W196 was joined by the new 300SLR sports car - essentially the same car with an enclosed body, doors, and for Le Mans a large airbrake built into the rear where a convertible top of a road car would be. The 300SLR's year would encompass both the heights of glory and the depths of total disaster. On May 1st Moss and co-driver Denis Jenkinson drove up to the start ramp of the Mille Miglia at the wheel of a 300SLR. The cars started all through the morning at several minute intervals with the cars being numbered to their start time - Moss was Number 722, written in large red numbers on the tail. Moss and Jenkinson were armed with an additional weapon; like all the drivers they had scouted all thousand miles of the course in the weeks before, but they compiled their notes into a enormous roll of paper held inside a handheld metal box with a viewing window. It was the kind of pace notes that rally drivers would use by routine decades later, but in 1955 it was a radical innovation and it put Moss - not used to the roads as many of the local drivers were - on a more even footing, and he could use the full power of the Mercedes and his considerable skill. With his co-driver reading the notes and using hand signals to communicate the road's course ahead over the noise of the straight-8 engine the driver could put his foot to the floor knowing that a blind crest was flat out. The understudy won the race in a record time of ten hours seven minutes, beating Fangio's time by half an hour (though Fangio's drive, unaided, was still something to wonder at too) The race itself would be discontinued two years later after a fatal crash that killed ten spectators, leaving Moss and number 722 SLR as the all time record holders of the race.

Less than two months later the Mercedes came to Le Mans with three SLRs to race against the might of the Jaguar team. Both teams could get their cars up to 180 mph on the course's three mile Mulsanne straight, and lap the circuit in just over four minutes. The duel between the lead cars, Mercedes driven by Fangio, Jaguar by Mike Hawthorn, consumed the opening hours, the two exchanging the lead until Hawthorn pulled slightly ahead before pitting. The pitstop led to disaster when the Jaguar slowed up to head for it's service, a lapped backmarker Healey swerved to avoid rear ending Hawthorn and slid straight into the path of two of the Mercedes. Fangio was following the third Mercedes car, being driven by Levegh, the vanquished Frenchman from 1952 now installed in one of the German cars, perhaps as a PR gesture to appease bruised French pride. Whatever the reason the end result was the steady Levegh was nearly a lap down on the leaders already and would forever be associated with the terrible calamity. His 300SLR crashed into the back of the Healey and flew into wall at the end of the main grandstand, exploding and disintegrating, flinging the engine and other debris into the packed enclosure and killing over eighty people, and the driver. It could have been any car in the race - Fangio narrowly avoided disaster by a split second - but a few hours the Mercedes other two cars were withdrawn and packed away. The cars were brought out again as year continued but Mercedes would not be back to either Le Mans or the Grand Prix circus in 1956

The original W194 coupe had been turned into the very successful "Gullwing" 300SL road car, the 1950's most glamorous sports car beloved of celebrities and high rollers. Re-established on the world stage, Mercedes didn't need to stay in motor racing to be a successful company, and unlike Ferrari there was no sentimental man at the helm with a passion for racing. Both the successes and the Le Mans disaster cemented the team's withdrawal at the end of 1955 after their brief period of domination. There was a tantalising glimpse of what might have been had they stayed; two of the 300SLR chassis had been combined with the road cars's gullwing top to create coupes. Unraced, the one finished example was picked up by the Mercedes technical boss Rudolf Uhlenhaut, fettled a bit, and used as his daily road car. The "Uhlenhaut Coupe" as it was informally known, was easily the fastest road-legal car in the world, it's top speed of 180 mph not matched by a genuine production car until the Lamborghini Countach arrived in the 1980s.

-Brits Abroad

The departure of the Germans seemingly left the world's racetracks clear for the Italians to rule again, just as they had after the war, but if Ferrari and Maserati expected to dominate, they reckoned without another new contender; the British. The door had been left ajar by Mercedes and the British Vanwall team lept in, the hitherto unheralded team, run as an offshoot of the Tony Vandervell Ball Bearing company, hiring Stirling Moss to drive their new Grand Prix car and shot to the front of the pack. The Vanwall was a curious looking device; it's tall engine and transmission meant that it's driver's head sat perched over a metre over the road - hardly ideal for high speeds or handling. Generally lower is better for both. Being a captain of industry Tony Vandervell knew talent when he saw it and hired a young automotive engineer and racing driver called Colin Chapman to design the chassis. Chapman ran the Lotus Cars company building small lightweight kit cars for club racing, cars that were already known for their good handling characteristics and light weight. The Lotus name, and the British club racing habit of building small cars with good road manners and low weight that could make up for the lack of a powerful engine would soon be known throughout the world. One key lieutenant of Chapman at Lotus was engineer Mike Costin, who put Vandervell into contact with his brother Frank, an aerospace aerodynamicist. Frank Costin put real aerodynamic theory and mathematics into a body for the Vanwall; the design featured a wide ovoid cross section, keeping the wheels as recessed as possible, a small radiator opening, and a big windscreen cowling wrapping around the driver like the conning tower of a submarine. Like Mercedes before them the team experimented with an enclosed streamliner, and again the extra weight and bulk of the bodywork negated the top speed advantages on all but the fastest circuits.

The British had a handle on genuine aerodynamic efficiency in a way that did not seem to occur to their competitors. Italian cars were generally coachbuilt by artisans like Scagletti, Pininfarina, Fantuzzi, Ghia, and Vignale. They came up with beautiful shapes, but the eye couldn't match the chalkboard, and the Vanwall was the quickest Grand Prix car in straight line. Likewise when the engineers at Jaguar were set to work on the task of winning the Le Mans 24 hour race at the start of the 1950s the small Coventry sports car company, not too many years removed from it's beginning building sidecars, would end up beating both Mercedes and Ferrari. The Jaguars won five times at the French classic in the decade, first with the C-Type and then the D type. The C-Type used the road going XK120's engine, tuned up slightly and clad in a wind-cheating body designed by Malcolm Sayer. Sayer, another aerospace trainee, gave the C-Type a body that put twenty miles per hour on the XK120 (named for it's top speed). The C-Type won first time out at Le Mans in 1951. But for a defective cooling system they could have challenged the Mercedes for the win in 1952. They won again in 1953, the C-Type now fitted with another game changing innovation; disc brakes. The disc brake, around since the 19th century, was more efficient than the drum brake, but curiously unfashionable, and stayed on the periphery until improvements in materials, especially during the second world war, put the disc brake in the spotlight again for cars. After a few years of trial-and-error development (boiling brake fluid being a particular hazard of the new system) Jaguar proved it efficacy at Le Mans in 1953 with the new brakes letting the C type stop in half the distance of it's rivals, adding up at the chequered flag to the first over-100 mph average winning run at Le Mans.

The logically-named successor the D-Type was more advanced still, though technical problems let Ferrari run away with the 1954 Le Mans race, and after the disaster in 1955 the win for Jaguar was probably the most hollow race victory of any motor race. Given that the rival Mercedes had withdrawn many castigated the British for not following suit. As one driver had asked of their team manager "What are you going to do when you win?". The works entry didn't win again but the Scottish Ecurie Ecosse team took the next two Le Mans with their distinctive metallic blue painted D-Types. In 1957 the Jaguars took five of the first six places, and this all privateer teams, pitted against a field of Ferraris, Maseratis, Porsches, and Aston Martins. The car was easily the most technically forward thinking of the field, being built around a one-piece monocoque chassis rather than a tube frame, clad in another Malcolm Sayer body design, with very low drag, and a tail fin for added high speed stability. The British were taking over international motor sport, it seemed, though the trailblazing Vanwalls and Jaguars would soon be gone, replaced by an upstart new generation, from much more humble origins.

Juan Manuel Fangio had won the 1956 championship with a one-off season driving for Ferrari, then moved to Maserati and piloted their sleek 250F to a fifth title, helped by the excellent handling of the car, and the teething troubles for the Vanwall. In Germany at the Nurburgring he drove the 250F to a win reminiscent of Nuvolari, twenty two years prior, catching up the two Ferraris ahead after a slow pitstop, breaking the race lap record nine times, lowering it by twenty four seconds, breaking his pole position lap time by eight seconds with much more fuel aboard, clawing back a minute on the two leaders, passing both and winning a famous victory - his last. Fangio retired aged 47 in 1958 after the French Grand Prix, leaving the championship a straight fight between the ever-present Ferraris and Vanwall. Without a star driver Maserati had won their last race; the company was broke and effectively withdrew from grand prix racing along with Fangio. More surprisingly Vanwall too would not see out the decade in any meaningful way. The Brits had won their home Grand Prix for the first time since the twenties in 1957, had beaten the Italians by several minutes on home ground in Pescara, and Vanwall took the new constructor's world championship in 1958 with six wins, though in both years the perpetually unlucky Stirling Moss missed out on the driver's crown through retirements. The Englishman never would win the title, and remains the driver with the most victories to not do so. Moss won the last race of 1958 in Morocco, but his team mate Stuart Lewis-Evans crashed in flames during the race. Team boss Vandervell was not in good health, and the death of his young driver a few days after the crash convinced him to retire the team. The car returned for a one-off reappearance at the British Grand Prix a year later, and was already several seconds off the pace. The reason was clear when looking at the cars on the front row, in just a year, the Vanwall and it's fellow conventional front-engine fellows had become obsolete.

-Mid Engine Revolution 

The car that sat on pole position at Aintree that year, overturned the order and killed off the front engine cars was built in a small garage in Surbiton, South London. It was the Cooper, a racing car maker founded by the father and son team of Charles and John Cooper. This company was different from the Ferraris and Jaguars; it did not build any road going cars, just racing chassis, and it did well enough to get by purely on that. Perhaps as a consequence of this the team of the Coopers and their designer Owen Maddock were free to experiment with whatever worked well on the new airfield racetracks that dotted the English club racing scene after the war. Their most influential decision was placing the car's engine behind the driver's shoulders in the middle of the chassis. Not a new idea of course, but one that suited the courses in Britain. Grands Prix were still usually held either on closed road tracks, with many bumps, crests and cambers that gave the car's durability a test, or on fast autodromes that stretched the capabilities of the engine. In such environments, handling characteristics were only one part of the puzzle; any car with that was slippery through the air and had a powerful engine could dominate at the likes of Monza and Le Mans, even if it handled like a truck in the slow corners. And frequently points and even wins were there for the taking if a car was reliable - "to finish first, first you have to finish" as the saying went. But in the British club scene the benefits of a mid-engine layout made themselves clearly apparent on the wide airfields and twisty park circuits, Without needing to lug around a huge engine the Cooper was much lower, lighter, and more compact than Auto Unions had been. It turned much more responsively, had a better power-to-weight ratio, and was more slippery through the air than the rest of the front engine Grand Prix field.

Still, when the Cooper crew rocked up at a few Grands Prix with their Formula Two car, the engine gave away so much power and torque to the front runners that nobody took much notice. At the 1957 Pescara Grand Prix - an old open road racing circuit even in the classic tradition of Italian racing - the two Coopers of Jack Brabham and Roy Salvadori were at the back of the grid, a minute and a half down on Fangio's Maserati 250F over the fifteen mile lap that included two straights of three miles. Yet a few months later at the opening race of 1958 in Buenos Aires, Stirling Moss, available as a free agent since changes to regulations meant Vanwall were not race-ready, drove a Cooper to a race win, the first ever championship Grand Prix win for a rear-engine car. Moss won by a couple of seconds over a Ferrari because he had not taken a pitstop to change his tyres. Because of this the result was dismissed by many as a fluke, and all down to the virtuosity of Moss. But of course the little Cooper T43 had not needed to change it's tyres because it put so much less weight through them. Without the two long full throttle blasts of a place like Pescara the balance of power shifted back in it's favour, The next season, without Vanwall or Maserati, became a battle between the 275 horsepower Ferrari 246 and the 240 horsepower Cooper T45 Coventry-Climax. Heavyweight versus welterweight, Maranello versus Surbiton. Except at the really high speed tracks it was no contest, and the previously unheralded Australian Jack Brabham was champion in both 1959 and again in 1960 aboard the Cooper. 

Ferrari fought back with a vengeance in 1961. After delaying the inevitable for two seasons, repeated defeats to the English "garagistes" and their funny little club racing cars persuaded Enzo Ferrari to swallow his pride and build a new rear-engine racer. Rule changes that knocked the engine capacity down to a minuscule 1.5 litre capacity helped Ferrari greatly. Once again the men in Maranello's tenacious undimmed passion for turning up every year to race, come rain or shine, was rewarded; for the first time in ten years the red cars were ahead of the curve technically. The Ferrari 156 was the last great design of the venerable Vittorio Jano, who had long ago left Alfa Romeo to work for Lancia but came back to the Ferrari banner after nearly twenty years when Lancia went bust and the Italian government allowed Enzo Ferrari to take over their stillborn Formula One team in 1955. The move saved Ferrari a lot of trouble after the disastrous 1954 year when they were completely vanquished by Fangio and Mercedes, and were facing having to abandon racing altogether only seven years after they started. It also inadvertently led to the loss of Ascari, who was suddenly brought back into the Maranello fold only to fatally crash a Ferrari sports car during a shakedown session at Monza. 

The loss of Ascari in his prime was a major blow for Ferrari, who had a stable of keen youngsters looking to make a mark, but no clear team leader. Mike Hawthorn had stepped up admirably, enough to beat Moss to the title in 1958, but was killed in a road accident in England a few months later. Another Englishman, Peter Collins, had won the British Grand Prix that summer for Ferrari, but was killed in a crash at the Nurburgring at the next race. The Italian Luigi Musso had also crashed to his death in France, making for a quite dreadful summer for Ferrari, even though the cars were not at fault for any of the deaths. It all added to the mystique of the beautiful but dangerous red cars though, and so did the intrigue behind the scenes at Maranello, something to rival the court of the Borgias. Jano replaced Aurelio Lampredi, out of favour and off to work on road cars for Fiat, and drew up the Ferrari F1 cars for the rest of the decade, and a new V6 engine to replace the outdated inline-4 cylinder units. His 1961 156 looked puny compared to it's predecessors but it put Ferrari back on top, dominating the season with American driver Phil Hill champion. The unmistakable split nose intake of the car gave it the nickname "Sharknose". 

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1960s

The early 1960s were Ferrari's salad days at Le Mans, the company won seven times in eight years from 1958, with the V12 250 'Testa Rossa' getting the ball rolling. The red painted cam covers on the engine gave the car it's feminine nickname, so apt for the bulging curves of the bodywork, the teardrop-shaped fenders and tapered sides exposing the exhausts. If the Jaguars had been the automotive Audrey Hepburn then this was Jayne Mansfield, a Playboy pinup of a car. The Sharknose front end from the single seaters transferred to the sportscars for the 1961 season (a rare early example of corporate identity styling) though the mid-engine layout had to wait until the 1962 268P, Ferrari's first sports car with the configuration. The front engine continued in GT classes with the 250 GTO coupe, a customer model that one day would be valued as the most expensive car in the world. Quite why is something of a conundrum as the car made no new breakthroughs in design, never stood a chance to win Le Mans overall, and though pretty, was quite similar in appearance to Jaguars, Maseratis and Aston Martins. What it was though was much more exclusive, and one of the last of the breed of turn-key road racing cars for gentlemen amateurs, and that aura of a lost age made the car popular in the heady days of 1980's excess, and the GTO has remained priceless ever since.

That the 250 GTO was the last of it's kind was indicative of Ferrari's problem at the time, as road and racing cars became ever more distanced, racing successes didn't guarantee profitability in sales. Already rumours floated around that the Agnelli family would take Ferrari under the Fiat banner. These only gained traction with a large scale exodus of technical staff from the racing department in 1962 over money and working conditions. It had looked so promising when they finally looked like hiring the one that got away; Stirling Moss. Moss had insisted that if he were to drive a Ferrari it would have to be run by the Rob Walker team, and painted blue and white. The fiercely patriotic Ferrari had agreed to abandon racing red to secure Moss, only for the man himself to be grievously injured in a pre-season race at Goodwood in England. The year had been a disaster for the Formula 1 team as the car was caught up and outpaced; the legend of the Sharknose lasting but a few months of racing in the summer of '61. So when out the blue appeared a solid offer from Detroit and Ford - 18 million dollars for 90 percent of the company - it looked like the beleaguered Commendatore Ferrari, nearing retirement age, would throw in the towel and continue under American ownership... until Enzo discovered the clause in the offer that stated he would have to have the budget for racing reviewed every year by the suits in Dearborn. Outraged, he walked out, leaving Ferrari in limbo. One day the red cars would have Fiat badges on them, but not until after the company had been well and truly put on the ropes. Maranello would win one more world driver's championship in the next fourteen years, and only five more races in the whole of the 1960s. They were going to be de-throned from their place at the head of the table in international motor racing by the unlikely pairing of the Ford Motor Company - makers of family runabouts and inoffensive saloons - and Colin Chapman, the softly spoken engineer from Norfolk.

-Lotus

After the Vanwall job Colin Chapman had gone back to his Lotuses with eyes on Le Mans and Formula 1. His Le Mans entries were tiny one litre cars not in contention but they won their class. For 1960 the new Lotus 18 Formula 1 car was also a tiny boxy car but it had excellent dynamic handling and a customer car owned by Rob Walker racing was taken to a win in the Monaco Grand Prix by Stirling Moss, and then the factory team took their first win in America with Innes Ireland driving. Unfortunately for Ireland the win didn't guarantee his place for Chapman had found an unlikely new talent for his team. Jim Clark was a young Scottish farmer from the borders country, he had tried his hand at motor racing as a weekend lark with his friends "Border Reivers" team. Eventually the team won enough to start racing a second hand Jaguar D-Type, and Clark had been so startlingly quick that even professional teams started to heat about the amazing flying Scotsmen who was running rings round everyone on the club  racing scene. Chapman hired Clark for Formula Junior racing, and in very short order was entering him in formula 1 races. 

Chapman was obsessed with lightness and keeping his cars a simple as possible. A small company like Lotus could not get hold of powerful engines so keeping the cars light was the only way to stay competitive. The downside was that the Lotus 18, while capable of holding its own with the Coopers and Ferrari, was found out on the rougher Grand Prix venues. At only his second Formula 1 start Clark was driving along with two other young British drivers in the Lotus stable, Mike Taylor and Alan Stacey. Stirling Moss too had the Walker Lotus 18 on hand. The venue was Spa, the eight mile high speed public road circuit through the Belgian countryside that  dated from the twenties. In practice a wheel hub failed on Moss's Lotus and he crashed heavily in at high speed Burnenville corner, leaving him sidelined for several races. Then Taylor also crashed hard when his steering wheel cracked from the column, the impact leaving the driver paralysed. Considering the tiny Lotus was essentially a aluminium box with wheels that both survived at all was unlikely, but worse was to come in the race is itself when Stacey went straight on at one corner and was killed in the crash. Only five laps earlier a Cooper driven by another young English man, Chris Bristow, had skidded wide on the same curve where Moss crashed and the driver was decapitated when he was thrown out into a barbed wire fence. Stacey's crash had not be caused by failure (some witnesses claimed the driver had been hit in the face by a bird), but Taylor's undoubtedly was and the driver won a lawsuit against Lotus for negligence.

Clark by his own admission detested the high speed Spa track after this experience but he didn't have to worry about driving the Lotus 18, or the updated version the 21, for much longer because Lotus were going to give him the new Lotus 25 to drive. The 25 was the masterwork of Chapman and his team, featuring a much more powerful engine courtesy of Coventry Climax engines, but the real step forward was in the chassis. The new Lotus confused rivals on first appearance; they couldn't see where the frame was under the body. They couldn't see it because it wasn't there. The body was a monocoque, like the 1920s Voisin car, but made from sheet aluminium riveted together into a box. The idea began when considering the difficulty of packaging the two fuel tanks down the side of the car in a tubular spaceframe. The thought occurred to simply make the fuel tanks the sides of the car and the front and rear bulkheads holding the engine and suspension the ends of an open top box with the driver sat in the middle of the box. With all the important parts were held together by the monocoque it could be very shallow, stopping with a flat top at the height of the drivers elbows with the whole top half of the car shrouding driver and engine being a removable cowling. This made the car very strong torsionally between the wheels, preventing flexing, but also light, and easy to work on and adjust. The riveted aluminium structure was very expensive to make, a big risk for the team, but the 25 and updated later version the 33 would make their reputation. Lotus and Clark annihilated the opposition in 1963 and 1965, the Scotsman winning a then-record seven races from ten in '63 (a 70% hit rate), only missing the podium once, and six in '65, with three clean sweeps of pole position, fastest lap, and the win.

Even by racing's standards, Chapman was a perfectionist. He was known to inspect cars in the garages, ordering that even washers on bolts be removed before the car went out. He had once been quite a handy driver himself, and knew how everything worked inside and out. The monocoque on the 25 was tailored for it's star driver, Jim Clark having to adjust to having a lot less elbow room than was normal, and being more reclined in his seat - the days of capacious cockpits and giant bus-like steering wheels were numbered. With Stirling Moss exiting the stage in his near-fatal crash at the wheel of an older Lotus 21, the public was robbed of one of the great match-ups of all time; Clark versus Moss. Less obviously Moss's old teammate  Tony Brooks, rated by Moss as being as quick as anybody, had also drifted into retirement in 1961, adding to the sense of changing of the guard. Few things illustrate the vast difference between then and now than the backgrounds of the British drivers of the time; as well as Clark the sheep farmer, and dental student Brooks, there was Graham Hill, former rower who hadn't driven in a motor race until he was twenty seven, John Surtees, the motorcycling champion who took to cars when there was nothing else to win on two wheels. And Chapman himself, taking himself to the top on little more than elbow grease and willpower. If anything brilliant as he was Chapman may have underachieved. Only in one year from 1962 to 1969 was the Lotus outclassed on pace, but they ended up with three drivers titles. But for breakdowns in the last races of 1962 and 1964 Clark would have won four straight. Add in the times the Lotus fell out of the lead 1967 and the Scotsman could have matched Fangio - he won more races. Instead Ferrari, Brabham and Matra all snuck in and pinched the crown. Even the team's adventures at the Indianapolis 500 ended up with a strike rate of one win to six starts. 

-American Invasion

American championship racing had even less reason to move to rear engine cars that the European continentals had. The big speedways placed heavy emphasis on engine power and low center of gravity. Lots of the championship races were still on dirt bullrings in the 1950s. The 1957 "Race of Two Worlds" brought the Indy cars to the banked oval track at Monza to challenge the Grand Prix establishment and the result was a walkover, partly because hardly any Europeans showed up. No Grand Prix teams were there, the only entries with any pedigree being three of Ecurie Ecosse's Jaguar D Types, making up the field along with a Maserati and a token Ferrari. The American cars were far more suited to the high speed circuit, their tyres especially being capable of holding up to the speeds. The pole position time being an whopping 177 miles per hour, Tony Bettenhausen lapping the circuit well under a minute. Jimmy Bryan won all three heats handily to take the overall win. A year later there was a bit more of of an effort from the likes of Ferrari, who entered two cars, with the Chinetti American team adding another, as well as a gaudy custom built Maserati - the Eldorado Special, named for it's ice cream manufacturer sponsor - for Stirling Moss. They still couldn't match the speeds of the Indy cars, Jim Rathmann won the three heats, the overall average speed being a breathtaking 166 mph. Moss felt lucky to walk out of Monza's gates in one piece after the Eldorado Special's steering broke on the high banking at 170 mph, sending him spinning down to the infield without hitting anything,

The Americans cars were nicknamed 'Roadsters' and they were very well suited to the job of going fast and turning left. The Offenhauser engine that dated from the 1930s was still the power unit of choice, though by now it was pushing out 400 horsepower and was laid over on its side to lower the centre of gravity and frontal area in the cars built by the likes of A.J. Watson, Frank Kurtis, George Salih, and many other specialist cottage industry constructors. The Americans embraced the commercial side of racing much more readily then the Europeans too, painting their cars in the colours of sponsors and giving them colourful names; Dean Van Lines Special, The Leader Card Special, the Bowes' Seal Fast Special. The Blue Crown Special of the late forties was the first of the breed, low and sleek cigar shape, impeccably turned out, it swept the three straight wins for owner and builder Lou Moore. Contrary to appearances it was not a world that was all show and no go; the Germans weren't the only people who replaced carburettors with fuel injection technology in the 1950s, as Indy mechanics realised the performance benefits. The Hopkins Fuel Injection Special, a compact Kurtis chassis with a low profile rectilinear shape took Bill Vukovich, the 'Mad Russian', to two straight 500s. It should have been four on the trot: Vukovich's steering broke ten laps from winning in 1952, and in 1955 the double defending champion was killed in a crash while leading comfortably when a crowd of lapped cars crashed in a melee right ahead of him. The Cummins Diesel company, more used to building tractors and trucks, built a huge diesel power car, that sat in pole position like a huge red and yellow painted submarine, but retired from the race. The very low and sleek canary yellow Epperly Belond Exhausts Special won a double in 1957 and 58.

Indianapolis was anything but stagnant technologically, but it did not present as great a challenge to a car's chassis as the road races. Under the colourful skin the roadsters had two huge frame rails holding the engine, and such a basic two speed transmission that the Jaguar D types easily outsprinted them at the start of the Monza races, until they got speed up. The drivers sat in cockpit that made them look like they should be wearing a postman's uniform - upright, holding onto a huge almost horizontal steering wheel. It was still by far the most lucrative race in the world though, so when Dan Gurney, the young American Grand Prix driver, considered entering the 500, he suggested to Ford Motor Company that they might consider putting a big V8 into the back of a Lotus 25 chassis. Putting himself and Jim Clark into the driving seats was a risk - neither had experience of the speedway - but the car could easily run rings round the roadsters with enough power on tap. 

There was precedent; Cooper and Jack Brabham had tried the race in 1961, attracted by the huge prize purse, and had finished a quiet 11th, outclassed on horsepower. Ford took up Gurney's offer and set Chapman and team to work. The Lotus boss had not been at the Race of Two Worlds, and was not fazed by reputations. On a scouting visit to see Indy racing his was privately horrified by what he saw. The 1963 Indianapolis Lotus Ford would finish the job the Cooper started, Clark finishing second that year, thwarted only by the home officials reluctance to black flag home driver Parnelli Jones leaking roadster near the end of the race. Afterwards journalists tried to make something of the controversy (some drivers had spun out on Jones leaked oil) but Clark endeared himself to the home fans by refusing to play the bad loser. When Clark steamrollered the home teams two years later the fans cheered him and his funny foreign car home. The change was immediate;  if they hadn't already American teams rushed to buy a Lotus, Brabham, or Lola. As long as it was British made and mid engined, and if it was American it had probably been drawn up by a British engineer for hire.

The Indy adventure was not the only fruitful collaboration between ford and a British racing constructor. After the Ferrari deal fell through, a furious Henry Ford the 2nd had returned to Detroit and demanded vengeance for the slight. If he couldn't buy Ferrari he would beat Ferrari, and he knew what country to go to for a car that would do that. Ford picked le mans as the place where battle would be joined and the Lola company of England to build a chassis to house their 350 horsepower, four litre V8. Ford's people didn't know it at the time but they were pioneering the way if the future. Increasingly car manufacturers would be the suppliers of Engines for racing while specialists built the chassis. Just as at Indianapolis success didn't present itself straight away for Ford. The GT, or "GT40" as the press dubbed it thanks to its forty inch height, went to Le Mans in 1964 unprepared with low expectations and they were met with all the cars failing to finish. Ferrari won with the mid-engine 250P, as they had in 1963. More than a little impatient Ford hired Carroll Shelby, the engineer and driver whose Daytona Cobra coupes had beaten Ferrari to the Grand Touring class in 1963. Shelby's team would run the cars, and tune them up, upping the capacity by 700cc, and changing the gearbox. At the same time Ford's own engineers were making a Mark 2 version with a huge 7 litre V8. Six GT40s entered the 1965 race, and all were out with mechanical problems by the one hundred lap mark, four of them not even making it as far as the previous year. Ferrari swept the whole of the top three.

The American corporation would not be messing about the third time of asking. They were helped by there being two new American endurance races, one at the Daytona speedway and one down the Florida highway at Sebring airfield, both providing a good proving ground for the GT40. Eight Fords turned up in France having won both Daytona and Sebring, and dominated the race, leaving the Ferrari's to break down trying to keep pace. GT40's took the top three places, though the corporation managed to sour relations with their chief test driver Ken Miles, the man who had covered thousands of laps developing the car to winning form, by trying to create a dead heat by pulling back Miles' leading car to finish line astern with the number two car, being driven by kiwi F1 aces Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon. The number one car dropped back as instructed, only to find the McLaren car edging past at the line to finish ahead. The two New Zealanders were declared the winners and handed the champagne and garlands, but there was great confusion then, and ever since, about what had happened. Ford made noises about the rules stating that because the two car had started further back on the grid, it had in fact travelled further in the time and thus was the deserving winner. However, this didn't address the rather obvious fact that McLaren was ahead by a nose past the chequered flag. Why would Miles allow his car to be passed, unless he got "The call" from the top? Perhaps the finish line was not where the flagman was standing and the organisors had messed up, awarding the laurels without doing a proper review. Or had Mclaren been devious and claimed the win for himself and Amon, and now management were smoothing things over with a bit of obfuscation. The confusion would not stop successful teams trying to do similar photo-ops in future, though they usually made sure the leader when the team order came unequivocally came home first. The sad postscript to the race was that John Miles was fatally injured later in the year, evaluating a new GT40 test car in preparation for the 1967 race, and never got his win. 

As well as the new 1967 Ford, with much longer bodywork for maximum top speed, there was a limited run of thirty one road legal examples. Lamborghini, a company that has never really had much time for racing, usually get the credit for inventing the mid engine road going supercar with the Miura in 1966, and indeed they did build the first supercar that was not for a racetrack, but Ford showed them the way with the road GT40. The longevity of the styling of the car shown by it's revival, first in the 2000s with a new road-going Ford GT model, and then again in the 2010s with a road and racing spec Ford GT, both sharing essentially the same styling, albeit with great aerodynamic changes. Having finally got their Le Mans win in 1966 the GT40 won the next three in a row. The 1967 edition arguably being the strongest lineup ever seen at the track; Grand Prix drivers filled the field, Ferrari tried to stem the Ford onslaught with their 330-SP4, often called the prettiest sports car ever built, the curvaceous machine could not win back the big race, though Ferrari won the world sport car championship over the ever stronger challenge of Porsche, the small German marque, quietly growing in experience and driving strength. 

- Aerodynamics

Also in the pack that year stood the tall white wing of the Chaparral, a new comer on the scene, the cars built in Texas by Jim Hall. Hall had come to prominence in the extraordinary Canadian American sports car challenge, a sports car series with a very open rulebook, only a few 'common sense' rules requiring certain dimensions. Engines were unrestricted. In the early 1960s not many people could have believed the quantum leap in performance that would happen during the decade. The rapid advance of tyres, aerodynamic down force, and suspension would be akin to the speed of the space race, though instead of flying high racing cars were being glued to the road with aerofoils. As always with these things the idea had been knocking around for a while; in the 1920s Opel put big inverted wings on their Rak 2 experimental rocket car, to stop it taking off. The potential performance benefit was not noted. In 1956 an enterprising young engineer called Michel May turned up at the Nurburgring in a Porsche 550 fitted with a big aerofoil sat like a roof over the open cockpit. May did understand the principle.that an inverted wing would push his car down and stick it.to the track. Others couldn't help but notice that the amateur was as fast as Fangio, and in the slippery drizzle at that. They reacted in the time honoured way of racing teams facing an unexpected rival with an ingenious performance advantage they hadn't thought of; they protested. The wing was dangerous as it obstructed the drivers view and could fly off in a wreck. May had to race without his wing, and went back to being an automotive engineer away from the fragile egos of the race track.

Wings clearly would have made a huge difference to the cars of the 1950s and early 1960s so why did they not catch on sooner? Since the. Beginning of motoring air resistance, or drag,.had been.the enemy of efficiency. Every racing car ever built had been made with at least half an eye on cutting through the air. Wings did the opposite; sticking a barn door on the top of a sleek speedster as Michel May had in 1956 was anathema to many designers. Then there were the tyres; until synthetic rubber came along in the 1960s racing tyres were skinny lumps of very thick and solid rubber. These tyres could usually last several races without a change, but would have been shredded under heavy downforce loads. Circuits too, in Europe often fast and flowing, maybe did not present themselves to aerofoils obviously as the American courses. So when the can am series began, it presented competitors with a series of twisty American road racing circuits like Laguna Seca,  road Atlanta, and riverside California, a free rulebook, decent prize fund, a less of the snobbery that led European teams to cry foul at the sight of innovations.

The Chaparral 2E, a tidy white roadster with a big 7 litre engine only won one race in the 1966 CanAm thanks to reliability problems but it's tall tail mounted wing gave it a clear advantage in corners. The wing could be feathered flattened) by the driver from the cockpit in the straights, preserving straightline speed. The cars design also presaged the future by taking the water radiator off the nose - where it had always sat in water cooled cars - and placing two radiators on the sides. This further moved weight to the centre, to the improvement of handling,.and made the nose slimmer. The open roadster 2E became the coupe 2J for Le Mans. Sadly the speeds in 1967 led to rule changes at the end of the year that downsized the engine sizes in the race to 3 litres maximum, ruling out the big American hot rods unless they were prepared to put some new engine in. A little outfit like Chaparral did not do such extravagances and stayed at home. Neither, it turned out, did Ford, so the latest mark four GT40, a long tailed creation, went home to the museum, and the smaller capacity, older GT40s were upgraded instead. The Ford's were painted Gulf Oil light blue, with an orange centre stripe, and invented perhaps the most iconic motor racing livery. The tidy looking Chaparral 2J won it's last international outing handsomely at Brands Hatch, right in the heart of Formula One country it must surely have had an influence on thinking. 

-Jet Age

Meanwhile the other next big thing was looking like being a major overhaul in the engine bay - if jet turbines had taken over from pistons in the air, the thinking went, then high performance cars must surely be next. In the early 'sixties the unlikely host to the first turbine at Le Mans was the Rover BRM, bringing together the maker of big saloons for bank managers and accountants, with the self styled 'British Ferrari', British Racing Motors, who's ambitious remit to build the complete racing car and engine (just like Ferrari) had seen little success since its debut in 1950 but had now won the F1 title in 1962 with Graham hill driving. That victory owed a little to the fragility of the Lotus letting Jim Clark down, though BRM were more than passing acquaintances with gremlins in the works. The  first BRM, a V16, 550 horsepower monster had been supposed to dominate the early 1950s Grand Prix scene, but hadn't started its first race, and spent a year mostly making a truly demonic racket but winning nothing. Now, ten years later, Rover and BRM's new project was illustrating the pros and cons of a turbine. The big drawback was lag: the engine just didn't pick up as quickly to the throttle as a internal combustion engine. The power lag also applied to coming off the throttle and slowing down, not something drivers were used to; they got used to treading heavily on the brakes. On the other hand, it was very compact, With fewer moving parts, and it didn't need a transmission or clutch. the fuel consumption wasn't great. A refined version with a new coupe body appeared the next year to help but the car never got over this large hurdle to competitiveness.

Indy looked like the ideal hunting ground for turbines, with its sustained high speeds. The crowd at the 1967 event were to be astonished by the sight and sound of the "Whooshmobile"  - the Granatelli run Paxton turbine car, driven by Parnelli Jones. The darling of the crowd when his leaky roadster fended off Lotus from an embarrassing debut win, now he was in a much more divisive car. The helicopter turbine was built into the side of an I shaped frame opposite the driver, and for good measure the power went through four wheel drive. Nothing could touch the bright orange STP sponsored, strangely quiet, rocketship... until Jones's transmission failed and rolled to a halt with a handful of laps to go. Much of the opposition smiled quietly to themselves at the reversal of fortune for the 'cheater car' as many thought of it. Naturally such dominance inspired project leader Andy Granatelli to partner the turbine with a Lotus chassis for 1968. The Lotus 58, lacking the need for radiators was shaped like a wedge - or a doorstop, or a slice of cheese, depending on viewpoint. It too was bright day-glo orange, and there were three for Clark, Graham Hill and American Joe Leonard. Clark tested the flying doorstop at Indy in March, posing for some photos alongside Parnelli Jones and the 1967 turbine. With the thrust equivalent of 500 horsepower and four wheel drive it looked like the race was Clark's for the taking in 1968.

1967 marks the zenith of diversity and innovation in motor sport. Every series had variety, new ideas, vitality and challenge. The Formula 1 drivers and constructors still raced in other series rather than being isolated in the one. And power had returned to the Grands Prix. In 1966 the rules had been released to allow 3 litre engines instead of capping at 1.5. With 7 litre hot rods racing in sports cars, Indy speeds pushing 170 and the Ford GT40 pushing the double ton down the three mile straight at Le Mans, Formula 1 was looking weedy in comparison. So bigger engines were in and so were the ford racing division. Looking to win in the one arena they were missing they paid 100 000 pounds to a pair of British ford aftermarket tuners, Mike Costin, formerly of Lotus, and Keith Duckworth, and their Cosworth company, for a new V8 engine. The Double 4 Valve, or DFV engine spent the next fifteen years taking Grand Prix victories, being such a well behaved and adaptable engine that so many of the British constructors plugged in a Cosworth and concentrated on the chassis. It began at the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix, among the coastal sand dunes of Zandvoort, where the new Lotus 49 Cosworth won first time out. The car used the big new V8 as a part of the chassis, attaching suspension to the sides of the crankcase - not a novel idea per se, but never used so minimally before. The cars structural bodywork stopped at the roll hoop behind the drivers head. This was the minimal blueprint for everything to come afterwards, when all kinds of aerodynamic pieces would be stuck to the flanks of cars to come.

After the carefree summer of '67, the year of Sergeant Pepper, Monterey Pop and the 'Summer of Love', the world took a darker turn in 1968. The wave would break on motor racing too. Weeks after testing the new turbine Indy car, Jim Clark raced on Sunday April 7th at the Hockenheimring in the forests of eastern Germany. The race was for Formula 2 cars, there was no need to race for championship points, and Clark's car was recalcitrant, struggling for pace in the wet weather. On the fifth lap, while in a lonely 5th place, something on the Lotus failed (possible a tyre, or a engine fault) and the car swerved and skidded before veering into the surrounding trees. Clark was killed instantly and the motorsport community was stunned in a way it had never known. There had always been a perception right back to the beginning that racing was risky but that drivers determined much of their fate. They knew they could be killed suddenly, but cars had always provided the leeway to lay back or to push to "Ten tenths" as Denis Jenkinson memorably put it. The new cars though could now go faster, much faster, and the sprouting aerofoils would stick them to the road. The limit was being pushed out ever further and the loss of Clark underlined the point with terrible emphasis.

The turbines would continue at Indy that year, and fall short again. The lead Lotus of Joe Leonard flaming out and stopping ten laps short. To combat the jets the lesser funded teams began equipping their Offenhausers and ford V8s with turbochargers. Superchargers had once been the order of the day in the 1930s and now so called 'forced induction' was back, only now it was the exhaust gases propelling an impellor and boosting engine power. Where the turbine fell short the turbo came Through to win in 1968 driven by Bobby Unser, one if a new generation of Americans who would make the race their own in the next twenty years; Mario Andretti, Johnny Rutherford, Bobby's brother Al Unser, and Rick Mears. Curiously, though the Formula 1 drivers would generally stop making the journey across the pond for the 500, more often than not these all-American heroes would still be at the wheel of British made cars. The CanAm series had already felt the force of British engineering ingenuity. The new Anglo-Kiwi McLaren team, founded by New Zealander Bruce McLaren, a protégé of the original antipodean export Jack Brabham, had dominated the championship with the simple combination of a simple finely tuned chassis and a big Chevrolet V8. The McLarens invaded Indianapolis with a similarly purposeful (and strikingly orange) machine. As always Colin Chapman had got there first with his wedge shape Lotus 56 turbine, which begat the F1 Lotus 72, borrowing the Chaparral layout with hip radiators on either side. The 72 had cleaned up in 1970, after contentious two years when Grand Prix cars had suddenly sprouted ever more precarious aerofoils.

After the worst possible start to the year in 1968 the Lotus 49 had come good in the hands of Graham hill, winning the championship over the new pretender, Jackie Stewart. By the end of the season the field had embraced wings on their cars like they were born again converts, and with great speed they got larger and higher, standing over a metre tall over the back, and then the front wheels. Trying to hold back the tide the rule makers banned tall wings across the board in 1969. It was eminently sensible - the wings posed a lethal hazard if they broke off and flew into the path of following drivers, and the sudden loss of down force caused some frightening crashes; Hill and Jochen Rindt both crashed their Lotuses hard at the Spanish Grand Prix when their wings fell over, Rindt hitting the wrecked car of his teammate, who had crashed himself when the wing fell backward and picked the back wheels off the road as the down force turned to lift. It was a turning point; innovations were giving way to concerns about safety and competition. The Indianapolis bosses had banned turbines, for no other reason than convention - cars were usually driven by regular piston engines, even if the turbine promised a different future, it was cut off. Even American NASCAR stock car racing - the most bread and butter racing in the world - was grappling with its identity as aero science took over.

-NASCAR

What had begun as jalopy racing for Appalachian moonshine runners and other outlaw types across the American south quickly evolved into a professional racing championship. The 'stock' in stock car racing lasted as long as it took to find how slow a regular 1950s passenger car was, and how fast it fell to pieces doing laps of a dirt track. The moonshiners of the thirties and forties had specialised in the 'sleeper' car - a normal looking sedan with beefed up suspension, steering and engine, and they were the ideal folks to take to legitimate racing. The success of the early Nascar seasons brought about a new form of racing; the 1.3 mile Darlington Speedway in 1950 was the first of a new generation of American tarmacadam superspeedway in 1959 it was joined by the huge Daytona speedway in Florida, the high banked track turning the southern stock car racing into a high speed motorpsort to match the Indy cars. This was the end of the decade was a time when American cars had ballooned in size, stuffed with gadgets and luxuries. Most of the innovations that came out of the USA concerned creature comforts; power windows, push button radios, folding metal convertible roofs, and the gaudy chrome adornments. The hot rodding culture of California rose in reaction to this emphasis on style over performance, as many young men, often recently demobbed from wartime army service, took on the cars of the 1930s and 40s and modified them to race. Many ended up drag racing - a whole other narrative in itself- or taking speed runs on dried lake beds. There were some cars of the early 1950s that did have good performance; the innocuous Hudson Hornet had a winning record on the early Nascar circuit thanks to its good handling chassis, but for many of the hot rodders older cars like the 32 ford coupe were the thing to have. For men schooled in repairing tanks or fighter planes stripping down cars and putting in big V8s and toughened up transmissions came naturally.

In time the popularity of the California hot rods and Carolina dirt trackers could not be ignored by car bosses in detroit any longer. The cars of the 1950s had sported jet plane style tail fins and acres of chrome decoration, but that fashion was rapidly dying off in favour of cleaner lines and technical dynamism, befitting the space age. The new generation of sleeker road cars were perfect fodder for the new kings of the track. At the forefront were the likes of the Petty family of Randleman NC; Lee Petty and sons Richard, the driver, and Maurice, the engine builder. Henry 'Smokey' Yunick of Daytona Beach, the Wood brothers, Glen and Leonard, of Virginia, Now that chrome and colourful paintwork was old hat, manufacturers were keen to be involved in the new game of one-upmanship; Ford, Chrysler and General Motors all took up arms, and the V8 engine was the king of the arsenal. All GM divisions - Buick, Pontiac, Chevrolet etc - had their V8's, but Chevrolet's small block and big block v8s, that came along in 1955 and 1958 respectively, were the most popular, offering off-the-shelf engines with over 300 horsepower to wannabe racers.

The American habit of measuring in imperial units rather than metric meant these engines became known by their Cubic Inches rather litres. Once they could see how the wind was blowing NASCAR bosses quickly added a Cubic Inch limit of 428 CI (around seven litres) to their series. Naturally the manufacturers sized up right to the limit, so "Four twenty six" and "Four twenty seven" became common parlance to American car enthusiasts ever since. Ford's Y Block engine of 1954 quickly overtook the old 'flathead' for hot rodding and racing, and the more compact 1961 Windsor V8 and 427 FE big block V8 became the engine of choice for sports car racers. Lee Petty won the first Daytona "500" race (modelled of course on the Indianapolis 500) in 1959 for Plymouth, but General Motors dominated in 1960 and '61. The 1960 race going to 'Junior' Johnson, the one-time moonshine runner turned driver and team owner, who would one day become the "Last American Hero" of literary lore when he was profiled in 1965 by Esquire Magazine - the first brush the Southern stockers would have with the American mainstream. Ford went winless in the NASCAR circuit in 1962, a humiliation that sent them ramping up their efforts. Chrysler got in on the act in with the 1964 426 Hemi, named for the hemispherical combustion chambers with rounded cylinder heads that made for more power. 1964 was all about the young pretender Richard Petty in the "Hemi" Plymouth, winning Daytona and the championship. The engine was suddenly outlawed by NASCAR on new grounds that declared all engines must be mass produced units. All the Chrysler teams boycotted the 1965 season and the Hemi returned in 1966 as a production road car engine, and thus eligible again to win in NASCAR, which Petty's Plymouth Belvedere did - a lot. Petty won twenty seven of forty eight races in 1967, so Chevrolet got in on the act with their own 427 mass produced road car unit. "Muscle cars" had arrived. 

Right from the off in 1949 there had been controversy in NASCAR over what 'stock' car racing entailed. The winner on the track of the first "Strictly Stock" series race had been thrown out for having modified moonshine runner springs, and the battle between rulemakers and car builders continued ever since. The undoubted champion of finding loopholes in the NASCAR rule book was 'Smokey' Yunick, possibly the greatest racing iconoclast of them all. Yunick's lateral thinking frequently led to ideas that came from very far out of left field; his interpretation of the mid-engine Indycar revolution was to built a compact car with the driver placed in a side-car. It didn't qualify for the race. Another car that never raced went into legend; the 7/8th's scale Chevrolet Chevelle, intended for the 1968 Daytona 500. A simple look at the black and gold car, now a museum piece, shows that it clearly was never actually scaled down to sneakily exploit a performance advantage. Instead the car was tweaked across the board - the stance altered, the body moved back very slightly on the stock frame, the front bumper deeper to the ground and flatter to the grill, the engine offset slightly from the centre. NASCAR was long used to dealing with Yunick - he once built a car with a five gallon capacity fuel line, fuel tank sizes were regulated but nothing was said about the delivery pipes - they rumbled the ruse and refused the car an entry, but the Chevelle set in concrete the use of the measuring template, created by cutting pieces of sheet metal around a stock model, and comparing the race car to it.

Carroll Shelby had shown how good American racers could be on the world stage if they put their mind to it. His Cobras began as British AC Aces, mild two seat 1950s sports roadsters, and became road chewing monsters with the addition of Ford V8's. They cleaned up against Ferrari 250 GTOs and Maserati's spaceframe "Birdcage" roadster (a car that owed it's name to it's mass of exposed metal tubing under the dashboard) on twisty club courses but with a shape dating to 1953 the aerodymics were terrible on long straightaways. With an eye on Le Mans the Cobra Daytona Coupe was created by Shelby, Peter Brock and GT40 driver Ken Miles. Trial and error led them to an unexpected shape, that to contemporary eyes looked almost like a van. The back of the coupe had a huge window and stopped short with a large flat back, topped with a spoiler tab. The reskin on its own added 20 mph to the top speed of the Cobra roadster, and Ferrari were beaten in the GT class at Le Mans in 1964. 

In 1969 Daytona gained a twin in Alabama, the Talladega Speedway, and Chrysler realised they could gain an advantage on the quickest circuits by building limited edition streamlined muscle cars, and thus qualify as 'stock' despite the performance add ons. Thus the Dodge Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird were born. Taking a 'regular' Charger, still a fearsome machine, and replacing the front with a long beak, and sticking on a metre tall wing did not make for a very wieldy road car. But overhangs the size of a dining table did not matter on the big turns of the speedways. A Daytona Charger recorded the fastest ever lap of any racetrack in 1970 at Talladega and the first over 200 mph average. Chrysler couldn't stop Ford winning the title, but that would be it for the Blue Oval, the company withdrawing at the top from its last official racing programme. The Petty's blue cars had sported Ford badges in 1969, Chrysler underestimating their star driver's willingness to stay competitive when they had told him 'no' to his request for a Plymouth version of the Charger. Petty jumped ship for a year, and NASCAR called Detroit's bluff by insisting on two thousand new road Chargers for 1970. To win back Petty they instead built an aero Plymouth instead, all one thousand nine hundred and twenty of them, and enjoyed a Daytona 500 victory, only it was the Petty's number two driver, Pete Hamilton, who won it in the huge blue streamliner. In 1971 rules changes lopped off the wings. The template that had defeated Smokey Yunick's Chevelle was the yardstick again. In the 1970s racing would become increasingly commercialised and innovation have to share the driving seat with spectacle and sponsorship.

-----------------------

1970s

-Porsche

With his stetson hat, baroque signature and vote winning toothy grin, Richard petty knew how to market himself. In 1972 his pale blue number 43 Plymouth would get a generous dollop of dayglo STP red (giving a slightly more patriotic look than the bright all over orange used previously), the beginning of one of the great racing sponsorships, taking Petty to 200 victories, five more Daytona 500s and the title of The King, not just a nickname used by NASCAR folk but all across the world. Compared to the PR savvy Americans the Europeans were quaintly old fashioned. Cars usually turned out in the traditional national racing colours dating back decades; red for it lay, silver for Germany, light blue for France,  yellow for Belgium, and British racing green. Even at Indianapolis the winning Lotus was green with a yellow stripe. The next year though they were in STP colours, and Colin Chapman, whose bright ideas were not confined to the drawing board, went back to England looking to do something similar with Grand Prix cars. He did something bold, and not a.little gauche, according to detractors, by signing up the imperial tobacco company. In 1968 therefore his cars went from traditional green to Gold Leaf cigarettes red gold and white; the.'flying fag packet' was born.

With cheques from tobacco firms, oil companies, cosmetics, beer, and spirits, high performance again became the preserve of the low volume sports car builders, and specialist racing teams. This was no bad thing for competition. The likes of Ferrari, Porsche, Lotus and McLaren didn't build many road cars and had to race to have an identity. The 3 litre rule change that worked so well for F1 nearly killed Le Mans in a year, so the rule makers relented and allowed 5 litre cars... just as long as there were at least twenty five working examples built. Porsche had spent the best part of a decade racing in sports cars, winning races like the Carrera Pan-Americana road race in Mexico (hence the 'Carrera' badge that lasts on Porsches to this day). But they were always lagging behind Ferrari and Ford. They came up short at Le Mans  by a few car lengths in.1969, the closest non stage managed finish in the race. That race had seen the debut of their new car, but it had proven unreliable after leading much of the way leaving the win between Hans Hermann in the older Porsche 908, a tidy prototype that looked a bit like the Ferrari 330 SP4 - a closed top central bubble cockpit, big curved flanks stacked with headlights at the front, and a long swoopy tail. It looked faster compared to the chunky old Ford GT40 but the Gulf Ford team had Formula 1 front runner Jacky Ickx at the helm and he had the legs on the Porsche. He wouldn't have been close to the new Porsche though; it was running up to 224 mph on the straight, lapping the eight miles in three minutes twenty seconds, only breakdowns stopped it.

This was the Porsche 917; the Jimi Hendrix of racing cars; a short lived child of the sixties, a step ahead in performance, and fantastically superior to everything else. It was the dream of Porsche motorsport chief Ferdinand Piech, a car to.use the newly relaxed rules to their full.effect. Ferrari were going to come back, the French Matras had won the world championship with Jackie Stewart and raced at le man's too. It was now or never for Porsche to make its reputation, but it the 917 took a bit of figuring out. The governing body were not satisfied with a few finished cars and twenty boxes of bits, they had to finish all the cars before they could race. Their top drivers tried the cars out for the first time at Spa English ace Brian Redman and German Rolf Stommelen took them out... and soon brought them back, reporting that the 917 was so unstable it was frightening. Even in a straight line it wandered from one side of the road to the other at high speed. It had 540 horsepower from its massive flat 12 engine, and weighed all of 800 kilos. The driver sat in a tiny aluminium spaceframe, like an astronaut in a space capsule, feet between the front wheels almost touching the road as it flew underneath at an fantastic rate. But it needed a better body that could generate some downforce and stability and the option of sticking big wings on was out - just like in Formula 1, high aerofoils were banned in sportscar racing.

With the help of sheet metal and tin snips, mechanics created a new tail during testing to get the car working. The method was crude and most un-Germanic but the upswept panels like a birds tail feathers and cobra coupe inspired flip ups finally gave some stability. Porsche 917s dominated the next two years of endurance racing, helped by the factory hiring the John Wyer Gulf Oil team to replace the GT40s with 917s, and F1 drivers of the calibre of Jo Siffert and Pedro Rodriguez in the driver's seat. The Gulf cars were the lead Porsches, except at Le Mans, where an Austrian Porsche affiliate team won both years when all the Gulf cars dropped out. The car was so impressive even Hollywood noticed; Noted car nut Steve McQueen came to the 1970 Le Mans to film an eponymous movie. The plot and dialogue were all but non existent, and the film struggled at the box office, but the footage preserved the 917 in full chat down the Mulsanne straight. Two years later and it was over. Five litre power plants were out again leaving Ferrari and Matra to race at a much less spectacular Le Mans. In 1971 the 917 had lapped in 3:13 and won at 138 mph average, thanks to the gradual slowing of the track since the time record still stands... just. The 2015 race came closest to topping the 917's pole position time at 3:17, on a slower and longer circuit. It took until 2010 for a winning car to travel further in the day. Both 1970 and 1971 had seen a colourful cast of Porsches; The Gulf cars, the purple 'hippie' car, painted up like a Janis Joplin album, the red Austrian car that won in '70, the martini car that won '71, the 'Pink Pig', painted with cuts of pork on it. This was the high water mark for many years. Some of the 917s had new long tails designed  for speed and downforce, and they could reach 248 mph. In the next two years there was a brief rivalry between the French and the Ferraris, won by the former, before both left the sports car scene for good. As it turned out Ferrari's 1965 Le Mans win was their last, ever.

-Turbo

In ten years since the debuts of the Lotus 25 and Ford GT40 racing cars had doubled in power, grown wider, longer, and faster. Wings were back on the agenda, as long as they were kept low and were immovable. Sticky 'slick' treadless tyres were standard issue by 1972. All in all the lap record at Le Mans had tumbled from 3:57 to 3:13 (with a chicane added in the last corner); Formula 1 at Silverstone from 1:34 in 1964 to 1:16 in 1973; Indianapolis went from the 150 mph lap being broken in 1962, to 195.94 mph in 1972, seventeen of that in a single year when Indy bosses relented and allowed cars to have larger wings in 1972. The one thing had not changed too much was the thin sheet metal, flimsy glassfibre and volatile fuel cocktails in the tanks. It was dangerous business, now the limits were higher, more than ever. Jim Clark's tragic crash was just the start of an era of awful bloodshed. A young up and comer called Mike Spence took.the empty seat in the Lotus 56 turbine, and died at Indy when he crashed and was hit by the loose front wheel. The first customer driver for the Porsche 917 crashed it on the opening lap of the 1969 Le Mans and as killed as the car exploded into pieces. The 1971 sports car year began with a fatal wreck as Ferrari's new 312PB hit the back of a Matra being pushed across the track by its driver, killing the Ferrari's pilot Ignazio Giunti instantly. Star 917 pilots Siffert and Rodriguez did not survive 1971, they were both killed in other cars, in non championship events. Nine formula 1 drivers died in eight years. The Gold Leaf Lotus 72 won four straight Grands Prix in the summer of 1970, then a broken brake linkage sent it's star driver Jochen Rindt into a Monza barrier at 170mph, the whole front end tearing away and killing the occupant on the verge of a title triumph, one that would be awarded posthumously. Nobody was safe; McLaren's Bruce McLaren had already been killed that summer when his new CanAm sports car had shed it's downforce generating rear bodywork and flown from the track.

Racing seemed to be inflicted by a terminal malaise. The CanAm series died with a whimper as everyone who was anyone departed, Le Mans looked like going the same way, F1, Indy and NASCAR grappled with the practical problems and future implications of the 1974 fuel crisis and it seemed like all the great racing cars were now in the museum, and countless drivers gone forever. Even the rain gods seemed against them; three of four Indianapolis 500's were stopped before full distance as rain fell. The 1973 edition delayed several days, and finishing in front of half empty stands, with two driver fatalities, and some spectators in hospital after being sprayed by burning methanol fuel in a start line crash. After this the Indycars were subject to more and more turbo boost restrictions and the really big wings were out in favour of smaller F1 style designs. After two more Indy wins McLaren cars retreated from America, and the American Penske team gave up on F1, severing the last link to teams that raced both in the series. The Renaissance would come eventually, and it would begin in the drama-filled 1976 Formula 1 season, fought between Ferrari and McLaren, Niki Lauda and James Hunt, Italy and England, would spread from the back pages to the front. Reigning champion Lauda and the tidy Flat-12 312 F1 car had brought Ferrari their first title since 1964, but the Austrian nearly died in a fiery crash at the Nurburgring, and returned only to lose the title to Hunt at the end. The year was marked by protests and controversy between the two camps, bringing hostile partisan crowds to both the British and Italian grand prix, fanned by the press. This was racing as showbiz, and the year ended in front of the television cameras, broadcast live. across the world from Japan. New markets were opening, and racing cars would become more accessible to the general public, both in terms of regular television coverage, and a resurgence in road based cars.

Legisilating the 917 away from international racing sent Porsche to America and the CanAm series in a 1972. Faced with the dominant McLarens and their 7 litre Chevy V8s, Porsche hired the Penske Indy team to run the effort, chopped the roof off the 917, fitted new bodywork with a tail wing, and plugged two turbos into the Flat 12 engine. With 1000 horsepower on tap the 917/10 was the most powerful racecar outside of the drag strip and it destroyed the rest of the field. It's successor for 1973, the Sunuco sponsored 917/30 had another one hundred horses under the back, and effectively killed off the whole series, since nothing could possibly match the blue and yellow monster, especially in the hands of its consummately skilled driver Mark Donohue. Having wiped out the only place it could race in 1975 Donohue and Penske ran the Porsche around the heartland of NASCAR, Talladega Speedway, at an average of 221 mph, a new world lap record. Ten days later it's driver was dead after a crash at the Austrian Grand Prix. Few contrasts could illustrate the fantastic highs and wretched lows of 1970s motor sport; the world record breaker dying from a cerebral haemorrhage after banging his head on a trackside post in a survivable shunt. Speeds have not increased so much as medical care has improved since the 1970s.

Turbocharging was just the fillip that motor racing needed. It brought new interest, in squeezing more power from more compact engines and less fuel, and could make the ordinary folks road cars into fire breathing monsters to match the exotics of previous eras. Like the original, the racing Renaissance would turn out to be for everyone. Behind all of the exotic racing cars and always been some more prosaic models for the consumer; Porsches 911 coupe, the Ferrari 512BB, the Alfasud, the Jaguar E type, and a cornucopia of American muscle - Novas, Gran Torinos, Firebirds, Coronets, Corvettes, and Camaros. In the mid 70s the 'silhouette' series was more and more attractive to racers looking to soup up these grand tourers. Jaguar, glory years long in the past, and anxious about their fading American presence, sponsored an American racing E-Type that was heavily breathed on by tuner/racer Bob Tulius and driven to championship trophy glory in 1975. At the same time Porsche were bolting turbochargers into the 911, and huge wings and flared wheel arches to create the 935. A 911 on steroids the 935 started out with around 500 horsepower and within a couple of years was over 800. Turbo charged Indy cars and can am had been over 1000 hp already in the 1970s but these figures were from an endurance racer, all at the twist of dial on the dashboard. It wasn't subtle; the engine was still right in the tail, the tyres like huge lawn rollers, the drivers would have to jab the throttle and spin the wheels up to drive around the paddock because the turning circle was so wide. The 935 sold well - Porsche always sold many cars to customers - but compared to prototypes it had the aerodynamics of a delivery van. To combat in 1978 Porsche built an even more extreme body, with low scoop nose, and big prototype tail and wing; finished in martini white and pinstripes it got the nickname 'Moby Dick'. Despite everything it couldn't beat the bespoke racing cars at le mans and got ignominiously retired. Prematurely perhaps, as year later the sparse entry and terrible wet weather meant two 935s led the field home to an unexpected overall one two finish. The media went into a frenzy - not because of the upset but because movie star Paul Newman (at the not so tender age of fifty four) co drove the second placed car. 

After practically inventing then sport, writing the rule book, and naming the Grand Prix itself, the French had been also rans since beyond many people's living memories by the late seventies. There had been no French world champion driver, only the Matra in 1969 had the constructors title, and that had been run by the British Tyrrell team. When the same team won two world titles with their own car and Jackie Stewart they had the French Elf petrol group as sponsor, and Francois Cevert the young pretender ready to step up. But Cevert was one of the many victims of the age, killed in a gruesome wreck at the season finale in 1973. Renault, Citroën, and Peugeot were conspicuous by their absence. Historic names like Panhard, Bugatti, and Delahaye were long gone. Glory came to some of the smaller concerns, like the Matras, the little blue Alpine rally cars, and the little Gordini-tuned Renault's. In time the latter bought up both Alpine and Gordini, and like a massing Norman Army, lined up the pieces required to re-conquer Grand Prix racing. So it was a little bit fitting that it was the British Grand Prix at Silverstone that the French chose as the place to race their new Formula 1 car for the first time. The car that was unloaded on the Northamptonshire airfield paddock had a tiny 1.5 litre V6, fitted with a turbocharger. It was certainly not a world beater straight out of the box, it started near the back and was out long before half distance, and it was a long year of failures before it scored a championship point. The big downside to turbo power is that there is an inherent 'lag' to the power delivery from a slow corner until the engine can spin up to higher revs to get the exhaust pressure up to power the turbo. Turbo lag was not nearly as noticeable on oval speedways than road circuits, a turbo F1 car took a while to perfect, but thanks to bags of francs from Boulogne-Billancort the results would come, and create a divide that threatened to split F1 right in two. Down the pitlane was the other side of the impending battle, the new Lotus 77 'Wing Car'. 

-Ground Effect

Another bright idea from the fiercely inventive Lotus team, the car was the answer to the question "why not turn the whole car into a wing?". The hard part is that regulations limited the width of the car, restricting the size of a winged body and the driver and engine were in the way in the middle. The answer had been provided way back in the 1970 CanAm championship by the last and most remarkable Chaparral. The 2J 'Sucker car' used a small two-stroke driven fan on the back to pull the air out from underneath. With the fan running the car stuck to the ground like vacuum cleaner hose. Compared it's beautiful parents it was awfully unglamorous, though it retained the tendency for breakdowns (for all the innovations the little Texas team won only one can am race in five year of trying). To seal up the sides of the vacuum box the 2J had plastic side skirts that ran along then ground. This was.the solution for.the Lotus engineers in 1976; seal up sides of the stubby side wings with sliding skirts and create tunnels. Fans were not on the table; they were deemed moving aerodynamic parts and outlawed after the 2J's CanAm season, but the high speed air flow through the side pod tunnels had the same effect, totally legally, just as long as the sides sealed with the ground the downforce generated was huge - up to five times the load pressing down. Yet again unreliability denied Lotus the title, the two Lotus 78's winning five races, obviously the fastest cornering car, but dropping out fifteen times in thirty four starts, the DFV engine now ten years old but the team still finding ways to make them fail when it mattered the most. They had to push it because the wing car still needed conventional aerofoils to balance the big low pressure bubble under the car, and these created drag. Facing the big flat 12s in the Ferrari the Cosworth was breathless in a straight line and it cost them dearly.

"Painted to the road" was the memorable description that Mario Andretti gave to the new "ground effect" Lotus. It got better as a year's development went into the new Lotus 79 and put another step on their pedestal. The 79 added another thirty percent of downforce to the 78 through tidying up the air flow through the bodywork and extending the length of the ground effect underside under the rear wheels. And because the low pressure under the car was now much more stable, the big wings could come off, and the top speed went up too. Sixteen years separate the Lotus 25 and 79, painted in John Player Special black and gold, the wide and low 79 may as well have come from a different galaxy; in the time of "Star Wars" it looked like Darth Vader's car.  

-----------------------

1980s

The 79 won ten pole positions and six races, three with one two finishes for Andretti and Ronnie Peterson. It would have been more but the car only replaced the 78 at the sixth race of year - such lateness is extraordinary by modern standards but nothing too exceptional in the days when the points system only counted the best eleven result of the year.Only on the power tracks and when failures struck did Ferrari stand much of a chance. There was one extraordinary exception to the status quo at Anderstorp in Sweden when the Brabham Alfa Romeo wiped the floor with the Lotus and Ferrari. Alfa had returned after 27 years as engine supplier to Brabham, the quietly industrious team founded by Jack Brabham , and the only team to ever carry it's owner to a drivers title, but the team was now owned by the English wheeler dealer Bernie Ecclestone, a fixture in the racing scene since the late fifties when he had managed the ill-fated  Stuart Lewis Evans. Brabham's designer, a South African prodigy called Gordon Murray, realised the deal with the Lotus ground effect and knew the big Alfa flat 12 was too wide to incorporate it into the car properly. So he and Ecclestone contrived to place a car 'cooling fan' on the back of the car for the Swedish GP. It was no.such thing of course, and after the 'fan car' had crossed the line the protests grew to a.sea of indignant owners and drivers. Ecclestone, half an eye already on the commercial side of the sport, backed down as a show of unity with the other teams. But skirts were here to stay, and cornering speeds went up far beyond what seemed safe for the circuits.

By 1980 it was slot car racing, the drivers throwing their cars into the corners with scarcely a dab on the brakes. The rule makers laid down the law; no more sliding skirts, there had to be a minimum ride height in 1981. The British constructors, Lotus, Brabham, Williams, McLaren, and Tyrrell took umbridge figuring that the rule - written by French rule makers - favored the Renault turbo, that would Be way ahead on power if ground effects were reduced. Ecclestone had banded the British teams into an informal association and it looked as though F1 could splinter in two; Ferrari and Renault Versus a breakaway championship. Things came to a head in 1981 when Gordon Murray and Ecclestone realised that the ride height rule could only be enforced in the pitlane where the measuring equipment was, and strictly speaking there was nothing in the regs about the condition of the car on the track. The new Brabham therefore had hydraulic suspension that raised in the pitlane to be measured and sank bank on track, keeping the ground effect. The governing body were stuck; everybody started copying the Brabham, blatantly flouting the spirit of the rules. Eventually Ecclestone, the consummate political Machiavelli, negotiated a truce; the skirts could return and there would be no breakaway in 1982. He could also see the writing on the wall for the Cosworths as Ferrari had a turbo too and Renaults chassis now matched its engine. Mclaren too were planning ahead; after the successes of the mid 70s, with the Indianapolis wins, and F1 titles Emerson Fittipaldi, and then James Hunt they had fallen way behind the times and we're eventually sold off. The new manager was Ron Dennis, of the Project 4 Formula 2 team, he too knew the pressing need for a turbo.

The last time McLaren had won the title it was he summer of '76 and the venerable m23 had taken James Hunt to the last race - indeed last lap - championship won in Japan, when then fiery Englishman had run his tyres to the canvas on the drying track and had to fight back to a vital fifth place to beat Niki Lauda, who had parked the Ferrari in torrential rain on lap two in protest at the insanely dangerous conditions. This principled stand was symptomatic of the changing seasons in racing, no longer was it seen as so heroic to suicidally charge into the rain as if there was no tomorrow. The visit to the 14 mile Nurburgring had been the last for F1 after Lauda's near fatal crash, though the famous circuit would continue in the hands of sports and new touring cars. The new kings of the ring would be the silhouette cars, and the most iconic was the BMW CSL. Just like their German counterparts at Porsche the Bavarians were a small outfit seeking customers for their performance cars. To this end they turned the BMW 2000 coupe into the CS Leicht (lightweight), with steel panels replaced by aluminium, glass with perspex, and some not-too-subtle aerodymaics. The deep snowplow bumper, big wing and flared wheel arches earned the CSL the nickname "Batmobile". 

The Batmobile won the European Touring Car Championship seven times, such a rampantly successful touring car racer put BMW on the motorsports map in a big way and only a few years later a tiny 1.5 litre straight-4 BMW turbo engine was plugged into the back of the Formula 1 Brabham, and winning the title with Nelson Piquet. The engine began life in the early 1960s as a passenger car engine with around seventy horsepower. The cast iron block was ideal for handling the stresses of turbo boost pressures, the nascent F1 engine's turbo adding 3 bar of pressure, raising over several years to 5.5 bar during qualifying sessions. How much power they were producing when dialled up to full boost pressure for a qualifying lap time wasn't clear - the dynamometer reached it's upper limit. The BMW took its first win in 1982, a bizarre and tragedy stricken year that saw no team win more than two races. Ferrari should have won the title; for the first time they had a British designer, Harvey Postlethwaite, who could bring some needed tidying up to the teams aerodynamics, and the fastest driver, the exciting darling of the crowds (and Enzo Ferrari), Gilles Villeneuve. McLaren were still stuck with a Cosworth but had the experience of Niki Lauda and a car with a cutting edge construction. Lifting the outer shell panel off the new McLaren MP4 revealed the chassis to be black rather than the usual metallic silver. This was carbon fibre, a composite material made from sheets of woven carbon threads baked into rock solid panels. It was very strong and much lighter than aluminium and had been tried before for the odd panel and component, but never for the whole chassis. McLaren showed that it worked, though the constuction was still conventional, the outer skin like a carapace over the straight edged central tub. In time the technology advanced to form everything as a single unit, in any shape possible, and F1 cars became some of the most complex aerodynamic puzzles in the world.

Carbon fibre would also make racing cars much safer - it could stand up to impacts much better than metal - though too late for two drivers who lost their lives in 1982. Racing had always been dangerous but ground effect put drivers into a strange twilight zone where they felt a little out of control. Even the freakishly talented French Canadian Gilles Villenueve, the fastest man on the grid, and Ferrari's best shot for another title, was outspoken about the need to restrict the cornering speeds. When he took to the track at the 1982 Belgian grand prix in the number 27 Ferrari to set a qualifying time he faced a breathless roller coaster ride. Near the end of his run he raced flat out around a left hander into a tighter right, glued to the track by the cars ground effects, saw a slow car in the way, and dived right to pass. In a flash the other car obligingly moved right to give him the preferred line. Villeneuve was killed in the ensuing collision, the little Ferrari flying off the track, crushing the flimsy aluminium cockpit, and tearing out the seat belt mounts. A.few months later the rookie Riccardo paletti died, crushed in his cockpit after hitting a stalled car at the race start.

The regulations took a u-turn - now all shaped underbodies were out in 1983, and through the 1980s the drivers pushed back from sitting right in the nose. They even began crash testing the cars as though they were for public consumption. Removing the ground effect was safer, but it was in the end it was only a temporary fix. There was a lot of money in the formula one pitlane by the mid eighties, enough to hire some very brilliant young people, and they set about getting the lost speed back. Other series weren't so sure about having completely flat undertrays on cars - limited group effect stayed in Indycars and prototype sportscars. The Lotus 79 concept had not gone unnoticed in America, and made its way onto the track in a very similar looking machine. In a reversal of previous form, that car was a new Chaparral, only this time Jim Hall was copying someone else for a change. Or rather the English engineer he had hired to design his car, John Barnard. The smooth looking ground effect car had the appearance of a thoroughbred in a field of cart horses. It even had a more TV friendly paint job - bright canary yellow in a sea of fussy blue, white, red and black. True to the form of its badge the 'yellow submarine' broke first time out in 1979 letting the slower, uglier cars in, but it came good the next time around, helped by one of the frequent turbo boost restrictions reducing power and emphasising aerodynamics.

The Indy win convinced the newly reconstuted McLaren team that Barnard was the man they wanted, so he returned to Britain to design the carbon fibre MP4/1. Formula one teams didn't run indy anymore, they hired engineers who did well and kept them. In Britain the racing car cottage industry was booming, and anyone not in Formula 1 still had a good chance of a big win somewhere. The American Indy teams simply gave up building their own cars: in 1980 there were 13 different chassis in the Indy 500, by 1984 the figure was three, 1986, two. The opposite was happening in Formula 1, as tobacco money poured in, soon it was set in the rules that teams had to build their own cars. McLaren and Williams were now the dominant forces. The title winning MP4/3 in 1984, 1985 and 1986 driven by a Porsche turbo, the Williams picking up a Honda turbo and taking the crown in 1987. Honda had a couple of wins from a brief try at grand prix racing in the sixties but now came back as an engine supplier. The partnership worked well for the teams, the big car company invested in the engine and gearbox, and the team could do the chassis. The past masters of this, Lotus had been left reeling by the death of founder Chapman of a heart attack aged only fifty four, but fought back with an idea of which their late creator would have been proud

The edict in 1983 that all F1 cars must have flat undersides threw away a huge amount of down force but engineers could stock create low pressure by running the car very close to.the ground,.and shuffling the air out of the back with a shaped diffuser. Easily done on a rolling road in wind tunnel, less so on a real race track. The Lotus team had the idea of programming the suspension to stay at a level optimising the underfloor down force. Active suspension rather than passive suspension. The 1983 Lotus 92 was the first car to have an active suspension system, though the hydraulic pump that powered the actuators took too much power away from the engine to be worth the effort. Four years of reasonable but unspectacular results with conventional cars later the Lotus 99T brought the concept back, now using  digital as well as mechanical technology. The hydraulic dampers were now controlled by a computer behind the driver's seat, fed by data from eighteen suspension sensors, reacting to eighty parameters, and two nose mounted aeroplane-style pitot tubes sensing speed and direction. The system still added weight and drained power output, but the floodgates were open. If computers could run the suspension, then they could run the throttle, the steering, the engine... The 99T was the last Lotus to win a race, aided just as much by the driver , the young Brazilian hotshoe Ayrton Senna, and the Honda engine, as the trick computer suspension. But it did not go unnoticed that Senna's two wins that year both came on the bumpy streets courses at Monaco and Detroit, for all it's vices the active Lotus handled the rough roads well. But it was too late for the team that could once beat at all comers on the track but not economics. Senna and Honda would leave for richer climbs, then the tobacco money stopped, until the team faded away to a quiet midfield end in the nineties without winning another race. 

-Off Road

The Lotus car company would carry on well enough without the racing team. As itt turned out a car company could build quite a handsome reputation in the eighties and nineties without going anywhere near the increasingly ratified world of Formula 1. Many years after abandoning their entire 1954 Formula 1 team to Ferrari due to bankruptcy, the Lancia nameplate was back and dominating the off road world of rallies. Once a relatively genteel form of motor sport, where the challenge as much about finishing as winning, rallying had been given a injection of pace in the 1960s by the British Mini.  John Cooper was an acquaintance of Alex Issigonis the minis designer and suggested selling warmed up minis for competition. The likes of Cooper and Chapman had made their first racers using standard road cars - the Austin 7 formed the basis of the first Lotus and the was the first car Bruce McLaren raced - and Cooper could see the potential. Other economy cars were usually patently unsuitable vehicles for tuning up such as the Messerschmidt 2 seater, the push me pull you Zundapp or the Citroën 2CV. Even the more sensible Fiat 500 still crammed it's engine into the back under what was the boot lid on the Mini - one day the Abarth company would tune the 500 for racing, and the bigger engine meant they left the boot lid fixed open like a crude tail spoiler.

The Mini Cooper and even quicker Cooper S pushed the power up from the original 800 cc (0.8 litre) engine to a 1 litre, and then 1.2, in a car weighing about 600 kilos the performance was sprightly. Issigonis' design for the mini pushed the wheels into the corners of the car, and made the floor very low, both nominally for space, but the same features also led to low centre of gravity and long wheelbase. When the Cooper works upgraded the suspension and engine of the mini they had a four seat roofed go kart on their hands. The unlikely racing car found an ideal event in the Monte Carlo Rally, the most famous motor rally in rope, in the early 1960s still running to its original format. Before the 1970s the competitors in the Monte Carlo Rally could start from any of several nominated European start cities equidistant from each other, and raced to the principality across different routes. The little Mini Coopers proved ideal for tackling twisty alpine roads with their thousands of hairpin bends, and strong enough to keep running without problems. The 1964 Monte Carlo was won by of the Minis, driven by the cheerful Ulster man Paddy Hopkirk, instantly turning the little car into a 1960s pop culture icon, and tipping the balance in rallying from endurance to performance, from the heavy saloon cars the like of which had been standard for a long distance multi day event, to tuned racing cars, albeit with the mud guards, number plates and mufflers required to keep them road legal. The Mini won again in 1965 driven by Finland's Timo Makinen. In 1966 they finished in the top three positions but then disqualified for the tiny infraction of running with headlight bulbs that were not available on stock Coopers. The judgement caused much mockery, firstly for being so preposterous and nothing to do with the car's performance, secondly for not being picked up before the event by the scrutineers, but mostly because it conspicuously left a French Citroën with winners laurels. The uproar did nothing the harm the Mini's sales, and the car got revenge in a 1967 with a third win at the hands of another Finn, Rauno Aaltonen.

That was the last time the works Mini raced. By the next year things had moved on a pace - Vic Elford won in a Porsche 911. The Porsches were a little too expensive for most competitors; the more prosaic Ford Escort RS was more the ticket. The tidy three door fastback coupe would power slide it's way to famous victories in rallies like the 1970 London to Mexico event, and the 1972 RAC Rally with Englishman Roger Clark giving the home fans a memorable win, one he repeated in 1976 during the same summer that James Hunt was winning the F1 World Championship, and Barry Sheene the motorcycle Grand Prix series. It was the golden age of maverick English racing champions. Roger Clark like the others was fast talking, no nonsense, and self-sufficient. All three attracted the new class of sponsors'; Hunt carried Marlboro cigarette branding, Sheene advertised Brut aftershave on the television, Clark's Escort was in Cossack hairspray colours. The Escort was joined in the racing forum by the ultimate seventies wideboy, the Ford Capri. Taking inspiration from the American Mustang 'pony car' three door people's sports saloon, the Capri began life as mundane Cortina parts before, like the rally Escorts feeling the magic touch of Cosworth's engine works, getting V6's up to 150 horsepower for the European Touring Car Championship cars. On the road the Capri gave the common European motorist high performance without needing an impractical two seater, or an exotic sports car. 

In the mid seventies the curves and smooth lines of the 1950s and 60s had outstayed their welcome. Sixties icons the E-Type Jaguar, Ferrari Dino and Aston Martin DB5 all finished production, and the wedge shape came into vogue, possibly inspired by the new world of slab-sided, downforce-generating racecars. All kinds of rakish concept cars graced the world's motor shows; the Maserati Boomerang, Pininfarina Ferrari Modulo, Lancia Stratos, and the Lamborghini Countach. The first two stayed as historical curiosite, while the latter inspired two of Italy's most famous cars. The Countach never went near a race, but the Stratos inspired Lancia to reuse the name and look in their next big idea. In 1974 they turned everyone's heads by unveiling a new rally car with the looks of a spaceship. No souped-up touring car, the new competition Stratos was a purpose designed off-road racer. The two man crew sat squashed inside a cabin not unlike a Le Mans prototype, helmets almost resting on a mid-mounted 245 horsepower Ferrari V6 engine, and transmission. Like the Mini the engine was placed in the engine bay in a transverse arrangement to keep the wheelbase short. The body had nary a curved line to it's bodywork except for the huge flared rear wheel arches. It weighed 890 kilos, so the little wedge shaped car went like it had been stolen, and turned corners like a cheetah on the hunt. Three consecutive World Rally championships went the way of the Stratos in the mid seventies, as did four Monte Carlo Rallies. 

Like BMW, Audi was a German brand trying to make a name for itself in the 1970s. This 19th century company had been absorbed into the Auto Union group in the 1930s, then coming under the Volkswagen umbrella in the sixties, never quite becoming a brand with a strong identity. Bosses were trying to change that in the seventies by combining the modern but austere Audi 80 with a Volkswagen military car. The VW Iltis (Polecat) was the German Jeep, and Audi were interested in its four wheel drive system. All rally cars followed the conventional model; front engine, rear drive. Fast, but with the heavy engine still in the nose clearly lacking in grip on.the slippery mud of the English forests on the RAC rally or the dusty loose of the San Remo in Italy. All wheel drive would seem to be the answer, but for the weight problem. Mid engine racing cars worked well partly because they got rid of the driveshaft and it's unwanted heft. As experiments in F1 in the late sixties showed four wheel drive brought it back, along with many more parts to go wrong. The Lotus 49 had lasted through four seasons because it was supposed to be replaced with a four wheel drive variant, the Lotus 63 but that had been a complicated flop. The turbine 56 was tried on the Grand Prix trail and never went as well as it had at Indianapolis. Both produced exasperating understeer, and could not be maneuvered on the edge mid-corner with the throttle pedal - they didn't shift their weight under power like a rear drive car. The driver had to be very careful to hit the line perfectly or go flying off the edge of the track. 1960s mechanical technology was unable to get around the problems to make four wheel drive F1 practical. On the loose however the benefits of having two additional driven wheels inspired the creation  of the Quattro - the Audi 80 mated to the Iltis 4WD system. A boxy coupe, all sharp angles and big windows hiding a system underneath that would unleash a bump in performance that would make rallying as popular, if no more so, as Formula 1.

-Group C

At the change of the decade the motorsport governing body the FIA had a sort out of their racing categories. To simplify things they divided sports car, rallying and touring car racing into three categories that would apply across circuit and off road racing; Groups A, B, and C. Group A for mass production cars, Group B for road legal limited production cars, and Group C for pure prototype sports cars. The last group was purely for circuit racing and would be defined by a fuel use limit - a way to reign in big engines without being too limited on the engines potential manufacturers could use. Group B too was commercially minded, with the hope that the big car companies would be encouraged to build Lancia Stratos-like specials. It was a nice idea in theory but the men in Paris had reckoned without four wheel drive appearing on the rallying scene. Technically the Audi Quattro was a group A car, Audi had started with a prexisting saloon car and built several thousand road going examples of their coupe, ushering in a whole new world of 4wd performance road cars. But under group B anyone could plug a four wheel drive system into a custom racer, as long as they built 200 examples and could make them drivable on the public highway. Fireworks were imminent.

Group C was a hit with constructors, now formula 1 was getting increasingly rarefied and expensive the kind of team that would once have tried Grand Prix racing now built sportscars. Or bought a Porsche 956. If the 917 was the short-lived legend then the 956/962 design was the long-lived king, the car that won seven of Porsche's eighteen Le Mans titles, while the 917 won but two. Rule changes killed off the 917 at Le Mans after three years, but the later model kept going for well over a decade, even outliving the rules that created it. Porsche did not use their new turbo engines purely in the stocky 935, they returned to race in prototypes with the open-top 936 in 1976. This car won Le Mans twice, while still being at heart an updated 917, with tubular frame and borrowed bits and pieces from the old car. The 956 was Porsche's first all-new project for an all-out racing car in ten years, and the car showed all that had progressed in that time. The 956 had F1-style monocoque chassis construction, a little wider to accommodate two seats, and integrated roll cage. The chassis was tiny, being less than half the length of the car, from the bulkhead behind the seat, to the pedal box. The rest of the car was made up of a central fuel tank, side radiators, and the flat-6 turbo engine. All in all it was identical in concept to a Formula 1 car, with the exception that Group C rules would still allow a limited ground effect undertray. The body was wind-tunnel tested to avoid the mistakes of the early 917's, with the requirements of very low drag and stability carving out a very sleek unfussy shape. 

Porsche always sold cars to customers and the 956 was no exception to that rule, so many privateers bought one and challenged the official Rothmans factory team. The 1984 and 1985 le mans races both went to the German Joest team, and not just the team but the exact same chassis. Ford, Jaguar, Lola, and March all laid out plans to take on the army of Porsches . Lancia were already there, thanks to their little LC1 roadster (allowed into Group C races on a grandfather clause equivalency formula), and after a few early successes they were feeling the pain. Porsche 956s won thirty one times in world championship competition between 1982 and 85. The first win set the tone; it was Le Mans 1982 and it was a one two three walkover for the numbers 1, 2, and 3 Rothmans 956s in their second major race. The next year was a first and second for the factory in a rather less stage managed finish as the teams lead car, the previous years winning team of former f1 star Jacky Ickx and England's Derek Bell hunted down the number 3 car of Al Holbert, Vern Schuppan and Hurley Haywood. Bell and Ickx won three Le Mans races together in their time and they came seventeen seconds from getting another when the engine in Holbert's 956s came close to failing one lap from home. Before rules came in stipulating a minimum final lap time drivers could limp round the final lap slowly, but the chase meant that Holbert couldn't stroke it home. His engine seized crossing the line with two minutes left on the clock, but working on instinct he jammed the gear shift into 2nd gear, buzzed the redline and revved the engine back to life for one more winning lap. After the two Joest privateer wins the factory won again in 1986 and 1987 this time with an updated version the 962 with a longer wheelbase to allow it to be sold in America, where the safety regulations demanded that the drivers feet were placed behind the centreline of the front wheels. This basic measure to protect a driver from having their legs crushed in a shunt was a.long time overdue by mid eighties as countless drivers in all series had been left with a permanent limp after hitting barriers nose - and then feet - first. 

The flimsy front end of the 956 and it's ilk bad been brutally exposed by the 1985 season where two promising German f1 drivers who guested as Porsche drivers were killed in shunts. Manfred Winkelhock died from head injuries after running off a long left turn at Canada's Mosport park and hitting the nearby concrete barrier. Stefan Bellof, who had taken the Rothmans 956 around the 14 miles of nurburgring Nordschleife in a lap record six minutes and eleven seconds (it still stands), and was almost certainly F1 world champion material died in a heavy crash at Spa. Driving a customer 956 he tried to pass Jacky Ickx in the factory car for the lead at the super fast Eau Rouge left-right sweep past the pits; the crowd.in the stands saw the two cars bang sides as Bellof's impossible lunge led to a collision and the German's car smashing straight into the bank at full speed, crushing the cockpit back over the engine cowling. If the heat of competion was intense between the Porsches then it was possibly because often they were each others biggest rivals. The new Lancia LC5 coupe arrived in 1983 and with its Ferrari suppied x turbo was quick. The chassis was supplied by Dallara, Italy's most successful chassis builder, and one of the few interlopers in the British domination of racing car building. But the white martini cars had trouble with the endurance aspect of sports car racing, and only scored three wins before Lancia gave up in 1986 to concentrate on rallying.

Ford had kept their hand into roofed European racing cars in the late seventies with the Ford Capri, and had built a racing silhouette version that thrived in a German domestic championship. The Zakspeed Capri looked a little like it had been run over by a steamroller so wide and stretched out was its body and chassis. It gave Porsche 935s something to worry about at the Nurburgring and elsewhere. Group C however would be a Ford free zone after their bizarre 1982 car made a few perfunctory appearances. It was a riot of sharp edges and strange angles, as if it was origami. Zakspeed took over the car and ran it for a few inconspicuous years. A resurgent Jaguar stood a better chance with their American-derived XJR-5, a car that had very little to do with a production Jaguar except for the v12 engine under the tail. Many years earlier Jaguar had built a one off prototype with a V12 and E-Type styling cues called the XJ-13 but the change to 3 litre engines in 1968 at Le Mans nixed the car with only one built, a forgotten example of a racing return Jaguar never made.

Fifteen years later a.much more functional and less curvy Jaguar brought the marque back to the track. The XJR-5 was built by Bob Tulius, the campaigner of the E-Type in the seventies, to race in America, but made trips over to Europe. The big boxy ground effect car evolved over more sophisticated iterations in the US but was replaced at le mans in 1986 by the British built XJR-6. The 1986 race again showed the dangers of the Group C cars speed when Austrian driver Jo Gartner was killed in a shunt in a 962 when a failure pitched his car straight into a barrier on the Mulsanne straight. The Jaguar's fell victim to mechanical failures both years but in 1987 the new XJR-8 protected it's driver Win Percy when his tyre blew at 240 mph and sent the car flying down the road. The spectacular crash went unseen by the television cameras as it was in the dead of the night but the huge debris trail left other drivers in no doubt that a big one had occurred - probably the biggest crash ever in the event. That the driver emerged walking from the ruins of the car after flying over the height of the nearby trees showed how tough the roll cage of the Jaguar was, and maybe it was a bit of a karmic reward that the team finally broke the Porsche stranglehold in 1988, the XJR-9 winning over works Porsche. The 962 would have the last laugh however. The rigours of Group C's fuel consumption rules had driven development of electronics and computer engine management. The earliest 956s had threatened to be a disaster when they had to be tuned down in their first race to make the finish on the fuel restriction, but soon the high tech Bosch "Motronic" engine computer was occupying the passenger seat, a new digital riding mechanic to assist the driver. The evolution of the design, helped by all the customer teams, meant that the 962 was still a mainstay of the grid into the 1990s. With the car fading from the front, eventually some enthusiasts had a go at converting some cars into road legal supercars. The very special edition Dauer-Porsche 962 could claim to be the quickest car on the street in the early 1990s, though it was hardly a practical daily driver. What it could be, though, was a "GT" entrant for Le Mans, and a factory-assisted Dauer 962 won the race overall in 1994, adding an unlikely coda to the car's career.

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1980s - 2

-Group B

Racing was rapidly reaching its speed limit. Prototypes hitting 240mph at Le Mans, formula one cars making 1450 horsepower in qualifying trim, ever more slippery Indy cars averaging 220 mph round superspeedways, the Group B rally cars accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in under 3 seconds - on the loose. The Nascars were supposedly based on production  cars but these cars were now rounded and low drag shapes, no giant wings required to cut through the air. It may have seemed like crude racing but the myriad restrictions on the NASCAR teams fostered ingenuity. The racing had distilled into a contest between Chevrolet, Ford, Buick, and Pontiac. Two races had kick started the sport's popularity in the mainstream of American sports coverage; the 1976 and 1979 Daytona 500s both had memorable finishes that set a marker for future expectations. Richard Petty, The undisputed star of stock car racing, starred in both finishes. While Petty was easily the most famous racing driver in much of America (and certainly in the South), and his 43 Plymouth the most recognised car, aficionados rated David Pearson and the white and red number 21 Wood Brothers Mercury as highly if not higher than The King. Pearson was second the Petty's win record, but was a man of few words, and thus overshadowed - until the 1976 "500". In the final turn of the last lap, both men were nose to tail racing to the line. Pearson led, trying to win his first Daytona trophy, Petty trying to get by the win a sixth. Petty drafted past in the slipstream, and drifted up in front of Pearson's bumper. Both men had a long history of minute antagonisms towards each other. A few years before Pearson had won a race at Talladega by lifting off right ahead of Petty coming to the last lap, to force Petty into the lead and thus stop him getting the last lap pass. Petty thought his arch rival's engine had failed, so suddenly did he slow, only to see the white car come shooting right back past again to win. King Richard made sure everybody in the media knew exactly what he thought of the trick.

So when he put the "Slide job" on Pearson he probably had in mind a bit of revenge, not only winning but getting his rival to lift off the gas. Only, he missed - by a few millimetres. It was enough to clip bumpers and send both cars spinning wildy into the wall and wrecked into the grass next to the start line. Petty's car stalled, and his pit crew came sprinting out to it to see what could be done, but Pearson had kept his car running - unbelievably having the prescence of mind to press in his clutch while spinning at over 100 miles per hour so his engine would not stall - and he crawled his squashed Mercury over the finishing line, and into the winners circle. Three years later Petty won once more, this time taking an unexpected sixth win as the two leaders up ahead, Donnie Allison and three time defending series champion Cale Yarborough collided, again on the final lap, this time on the back straight. The live television coverage (a novelty in 1979) shared his lap of honour with a brief punch up between Yarborough, and Allison's brother Bobby, who stopped his car to back up his brother. Though the fight was little more than handbags at dawn it was broadcast coast-to-coast, and cemented in America's mind the idea that motor racing was a contact sport, in more than one way. Daytona in the 1980s began to outshine Indianapolis as speeds increased and the drivers became the stars. Ford took the speed laurels with the Atlanta-based Elliott family team, the young new star Bill Elliott taking the sleek Thunderbird lapping at 210.364 mph at Daytona, and 212.809 mph at Talladega in 1987. The records still stand, as NASCAR brought in power-sapping carburettor restrictor plates in 1988 for the two largest speedways. When installed the plates blocked a large amount of the air heading into the engine through the carburettor (fuel injection being outlawed in the series), and cut down output by 250 horsepower. NASCAR racing would not pass 200 mph any more, and the big speedway races became slipstreaming competitions between huge packs of strangled cars, and aerodynamics were ever more important.

To some car makers The Group B rules had been like a red rag to a bull. The Audi Quattro had cleaned up in 1983 and 1984 with double the grip of the rear drive opposition and some of the best drivers; Stig Blomqvist, Hannu Mikkola, and Michele Mouton. Without a hope of creating a road car like the Audi, the new rules created a bypass by removing the need to have the existing road car. First into the breach were the unlikely form of Peugeot, last seen at the top of a major motor race in the 1919 Indianapolis 500. Rallying though was more their forte, having taken the near indestructible 404 and 504 to Safari rally titles in Africa. The new Peugeot Sport division, under the direction of Georges Boillot's son Jean Boillot, and rally codriver Jean Todt, built a mid engine turbocharged car, effectively a custom spaceframe racing car with Peugeot 205 body panels. To keep things compact they put the engine in sideways - a transverse layout - behind the drivers (the Lamborghini Miura had the same layout but it was rare in racing cars) and used a Citroën SM gearbox from the parent companies parts bin. Using preexisting parts saved time to build the 200 road legal examples required by the rules. These were massively detuned from the 350 horspower the competition version would run. The 205 T16 made it ready to the start of the 1984 season, and promptly blew the Quattro in the weeds. For all the Germans speed advantage they had in fact enjoyed less time at the top than might be expected. Though  they debuted in 1981 with three wins the title went to Ari Vatanen in a privateer British run Ford who also took three wins. In 1982 the Audis won the constructors championship handily, but the drivers crown went to the consistent Walter Rohrl in an Opel Ascona. As often happens in racing the dominant team divided.the wins among their drivers and let a outsider slip in to win the war. 1983 and 1984 did go the way of Ingolstadt, but the writing was on the wall for the Quattro as soon as the Peugeot 205 T16 rolled down the start ramp. 

Peugeot had their own Scandinavian warriors in the drivers seat too; 1981 champ Vatanen and Timo Salonen. The Martini Lancia team had persisted with a rear drive car, the 037 Rallye, but in new age it's layout was more suited to the tarmac rallies than the loose, and the Italians looked to follow Peugeot with a tiny mid engine rocket. The Lancia Delta S4 upped the ante even more, the 1.7 litre engine turbocharged and supercharged. The boxy machine looked like it should have been delivering the mail, but the opposition recognised the warning shot across their bows. Peugeot updated their 205 T16 to over 500 horsepower, and added big spoilers for better aero performance. Everyone else wanted in on the party, Toyota, Nissan, Opel, Austin Rover, Ford, Porsche, even Ferrari all built a Group B compatible cars for track and off road use. In 1985 and 1986 the World Rally was the greatest free show on Earth - Formula 1 cars with mudguards - attracted the crowds, impressive at first but soon becoming frightening. Drivers were alarmed by the rows of spectators lining the road on some stages, and on the more sinuous routes were getting tunnel vision trying to keep up with their cars. 1986 saw it all come to a head; three spectators were killed in the Portuguese rally when one of the new Ford RS200 Group B cars overshot a corner and plowed through a wall of packed in spectators. Lancia's driver Henri Toivonen and his co driver died in a terrible fiery wreck in Corsica, their car upturned into a ravine and exploding in a fireball. Group B was removed from the World Rally rules at the end of the year on safety grounds. The decision was divisive; many new cars were on the drawing board, and others were ready to race in 1987 but had to be cancelled. Equally, a little sanity had to prevail, as the horsepower arms race would clearly continue probably at the expense of more lives.

Lancia, Toyota and Ford stayed, with Group A road cars, while Peugeot, point proven in the World Championship, took it's T16s rallying in a different arena. The very French Paris to Dakar rally began in the late seventies as a bit of a lark for bikers and car enthusiasts racing from France to Africa, when Peugeot showed up and won with lengthened and strengthened T16s and Ari Vatanen driving they brought the event up to a whole new level of professionalism. Porsche's new 959 Group B car, thwarted in conventional rallying, had won the previous year's Dakar, showing the way for others to come to the event, but Porsche decided to focus on turning the car into a pure road car instead of doing more racing. Audi had never made a custom Group B car, trying instead to keep the Quattro competitive. They ended up with a monstrous 500 horsepower engine in the nose, behind a huge front-winged front bumper, balanced by another wing on the back. The Sport S1 and S2 Quattros had no wins on the World Championship, instead they took a moment in the sun on the Pikes Peak Hillclimb in Colorado, USA. Once upon a time the historic hill climb event had once been a round of the Indycar National Championship, when there were still dirt track races and cars to race on the gravel mountain road. When the dirt tracks were dropped from the championship in 1970 the race fell into a period of obscurity, until the Audi Sport Quattros showed up in 1984 and won, doing the same again every one of the next four years, boosting the power output up to 600 hp and knocking the course record down by a minute and a half. Peugeot, having won the Dakar with the 205 T16, now built a larger new car clothed in their 405 road model's body panels and went to Pikes Peak too. In 1988 Vatanen took the "Race to the Clouds" with the 600 horsepower 405 T16 - featuring four wheel drive, and a four wheel steering setup - and then the 1989 and 1990 Dakar rallies for good measure. It was conclusive redemption for the Finnish driver who had seen almost certain victory in the 1985 World Championship aboard the 205 disappear in a terrible crash mid-season that had left him unable to race for a year and a half.

The same rulemakers who had brought the axe down on the Group B rally cars also had the knives out for the turbos in Formula One. The sight of F1 cars heading around on qualfying laps spitting flames amid a haze of fumes, spinning their wheels in a straight line when driver shifted the gears was spectacular but not, in their opinion, sustainable for much longer. In the words of the long-dead Jochen Rindt, when publically castigating Colin Chapman's high aerofoils of the early 1969 season, it wasn't meant to be a "hot rod show" with drivers as guineau pigs for the manufacturers flexing muscles. Ironically Renault, the originators of the 1.5 litre F1 turbo, had quit their own team after 1985, the board fed up with seeing their name on cars coming to a steaming halt when another overstretched engine turned into a hand grenade. Oddly they would then turn out to be a great benificiary of the reversion back to naturally aspirated engines in 1989. Before that happened the last turbo season would see a car that would dominate a Grand Prix year in an unprecidented way, riding roughshod over the record book. McLaren International, as the team was known by 1988, was an appropriate moniker for a British based team, funded by American Marlboro tobacco dollars, powered by Japanese Honda engines, and driven by a Frenchman and Brazilian. Honda had made a quiet re-entry to F1 in 1983, and had spent threeyears powering the Williams team to plenty of wins but no championship. In 1986 the teams's drivers Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell divided the wins, and lost the driver's title to McLaren's Alain Prost at the last race. In 1987 Honda finally took the prize with Brazilian Piquet, who, bristling at what he took as the team's preferential treatment of Englishman Mansell, left for Lotus, taking the Honda engines with him. The McLaren Porsche had reached the end of it's useful life in 1987, but with the prospect of powering Prost and Ayrton Senna, who had danced the Lotus Renault Turbo to sixteen pole positions and six wins, but had been shoved aside for Piquet, Honda also signed on McLaren, leaving Williams suddenly adrift without an engine.

-Williams and Mclaren

The Williams team had first made their move to the front of the grid in 1979, their designers Patrick Head, Frank Dernie and Neil Oatley taking the layout of the Lotus 79's ground effect design and making their own superior version, the Williams FW07. This was a changing of the guard; Colin Chapman now found himself being outdone by a new generation of British engineering whizzes, brought up with his designs, now outpacing him. In time the original Williams team eventually went their separate ways, but Head and team owner Frank Williams set their sights on highly rated British aerodynacist Adrian Newey, then working in Indycar racing. With Newey's skills, Head would eventually topple McLaren and get their revenge on Honda. The musical chairs wasn't just confined to the drivers; Ferrari had made a big money offer to John Barnard to bring some of the British fairy dust to Italy, the men from Maranello falling back down the grid again after the brief resurgence of the tragic 1982 season. Without Piquet the Brabham team had struggled in 1986, their radical looking new car not performing, and then tragically taking their driver Elio de Angelis to his death in a crash in a testing session. McLaren made their move and swiped Gordon Murray. Brabham lost BMW engines when they withdrew with the end of the turbo era, then Bernie Ecclestone sold the lot and moved soley into administrating the sport. Like it's one time rival Lotus, the famed badge never won another Grand Prix and disappeared forever in the early nineties. Meanwhile McLaren, with Murray in tow assisting Barnard's replacement Steve Nicholls, would steamroller over the 1988 season. Murray's 1986 Brabham had been daringly low and sleek, but the aerodynamic advantages of the shape had been spoiled by the BMW engine not cooperating with being laid on it's side in the super-low engine bay. The Honda engine had no such troubles, meaning the new McLaren had a stiletto thin monocoque, making it's precursors look like elephants, and big wings taking full advantage of the low bodywork. Ayrton Senna had shown promise in the Lotus but now in the McLaren Honda he was unleashed. Prost and Senna won 15 of the 16 races, only thwarted in one when Senna tripped over a backmarker a few laps from home, coming home first and second eight times, winning pole in every race but one, often the McLarens between one and three seconds ahead of everyone else.

Only one thing could overshadow the greatness of the car, and that was the feud between it's two drivers. Things began easily enough, the calm Prost, never one to be overly concerned by a teammate on a hot streak, unfazed by Senna until he found himself being swerved at while trying to overtake on the pit straight in Portugal. Senna was known to be a uniquely intense and single minded racer but the move was an ugly demonstration of how much he wanted the title. The great car had been brandished as a weapon against it's sister, something rarely seen before, and certainly not between teammates so early on in a race. But racing was changing, the money involved had skyrocketed in only a few years, the worldwide television coverage made Prost and Senna exponentially more famous than their forbears. Senna took the title in Japan, in front of the Honda top brass on their Suzuka circuit, and an adoring new audience of fans lionizing the exotic Latin in the wonder car. A year later the same crowd would see something even more sensational. 

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1990s

The new naturally aspirated Formula 1 hadn't changed the balance of power much. The McLaren was not quite as dominant as before, but the driving lineup more than made up for that. The two world champions now no longer on speaking terms and living in a world of paranoia and intrigue; Prost now believing that Honda were favouring Senna at his expense. Senna thinking Frenchman Prost had the inside line to the French dominated governing body. Prost, unnerved by Senna's ruthless driving style, calling him dishonest and unsporting. Senna, singlemindedly in pursuit of his prize, unable to even acknowledge his rival by name. So when Senna came up behind Prost in Japan, knowing that he had to pass to keep the championship alive to the last race, he dove to the inside at the circuit's chicane as if Prost was not there. Prost, for his part, sick of Senna's bullying tactics, simply shut the door on his teammate. The two white and red Marlboro McLaren Hondas slid to a halt in the escape road, wheels locked together. For the television bosses, and promoters, this sort of drama was, as the great television commentator Murray Walker called it as it happened, "fantastic!". Senna got started again but was disqualified for rejoining through the escape road rather than driving through the chicane, leaving Prost the champion. A hugely contentious decision, ridiculed by many (what, after all, was the point of the escape road if not to provide a run off area to drive though?) it cemented Senna's belief that he was not being given a level playing field by those in charge.  A year later, yet again in Suzuka, he had his revenge, driving the McLaren into the back of Prost in the first corner of the first lap. It took a further year for him to admit it was deliberate; if he saw Prost ahead in the first corner, he had decided, he would take him out. This time Senna had the title, though the manner he had done it left a nasty after taste.

If Ron Dennis had felt Senna had let him and the team down he wasn't in a position to do much about it. Prost had left McLaren in disgust at the end of 1989, unable to work in the same pit as Senna, and had taken a resurgent Ferrari team, guided by the former McLaren man Barnard, to a place where Senna had to resort to force to decide the title. They could ill afford to have a brain drain with the opposition catching up. Ferrari had been revolutionised from the very Italian-flavoured team of the previous decade. Barnard had brought a big technical shake up, most prominently the semi-automatic paddle shift gearbox first seen in 1989. The purposeful new Ferrari, with it's big anteater nose, and throaty V12 engine, was no longer the pretty brute of old, but had a technical edge over the English teams too - even if it was the result of hiring one of the old enemy. The sequential semi auto worked with paddles behind the steering wheel, one to shift up, and one to shift down. As well as making the driver more comfortable, it meant he could not miss a shift and let another car through under acceleration. It was a false dawn for Ferrari though, after the 1990 Spanish GP win for Prost, they would be left reeling again, and wouldn't win another race for four interminable years. Lining up behind the Prost and Senna in 1990 were the ever improving Williams, now running a Renault V10 engine. In 1991 they rehired their old alumnus Nigel Mansell after his disappointing two year stint with Ferrari, and set about overhauling the McLarens.

The Adrian Newey-designed Williams chassis was noticeably curvier than the McLaren, it's tapered nose cleverly bypassing the flat base rule with a false floor hanging from the under the nose on thin struts. Under that nose sat Williams' unfair advantage - the computer controlled active suspension. Technical director Patrick Head took to team into the computer era with such aplomb that Ferrari's semi auto gearbox would quickly look quaint. The Williams FW14 was as much a computer with wheels as a car with a few microchips aboard. The suspension was the biggest benefactor of the huge increase in computing performance. Where Lotus had once struggled with clunky hydraulics and wiring weighing their car down and negating the benefits of the idea, Williams really made active suspension fly. The computer could orient the car up perfectly for every corner before it got there, maximising the downforce from Newey's efficient shape. And the microchips could do much more - traction control, controlling a electronic fly-by-wire throttle through software, removed any wheelspin, maximising power to the road. The same control applied to anti-lock brakes, stopping tyre flat spots and unwanted overshoots on tight corners. They even set to work on a Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT), to smooth out the engine delivery. The Williams FW14 was a little too unreliable to win the title in 1991, Senna and McLaren took a third championship, but all was soon forgotten in 1992. Mansell won the first five races at a canter, and had the championship sewn up by the Hungarian Grand Prix in late summer. The 1992 FW14B won ten races, all but one pole position, and like the 1988 McLaren was sometimes over a second ahead of anything else. The man who had driven that McLaren, Senna, let Williams know publicly that he was prepared to leave McLaren's Marlboro money and drive their magic carpet for nothing.

He reckoned without his nemesis; Prost, seething after the Suzuka collision, endured a tough 1991 season with the ailing Ferrari team. Enzo Ferrari had died aged ninety in 1988 and though long since a figurehead leader than the active manager of the team he left a political vacuum in his wake. The chaos in the team's management led them to the extraordinary move of firing Prost at the end of 1991 when his criticised the team's difficult year. With no clear spot available Prost waited out 1992, watching Mansell clean up in the Wonder-Williams from the sidelines, while angling to have the seat for himself. Frank Williams, despite the title success was no fan of Mansell's personality or financial demands, and took up Prost happily, leaving Senna stuck. Prost and the updated Williams FW15 took the 1993 title, though much of the focus of the year had been on Senna's heroic efforts in his much slower McLaren. Now lacking a Honda engine after their withdrawal in 1992, Senna still took five races, including Monaco and a spellbinding wet weather masterclass at Donington Park in Britain (the historic track hosting a one off "European Grand Prix"). Senna left onlookers entranced by his win in the English gloom and drizzle he had spent so much time racing through in his junior formula years, but the man himself was less impressed. He had traction control, he pointed out, and other driver aids too in the cockpit. It wasn't pure racing to compare with the 1980s, he said. He could reckon on beating any other driver, but not the Williams' computers, he pointed out. In 1992 he had taken the option of test driving a Penske Indycar at the invitation of fellow Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, the 1970s champion having revived his long career in America. The big American racer without all electronic driver aids, he said, was a "human's car". 

-Changes

Powerful people were listening. The FIA had killed off turbos in the hope of making Grand Prix racing sensible again, and had to watch as McLaren, Honda, Williams and Renault had created an era when races were predictable than ever, and drivers seemingly a passenger aboard a car stuffed with electronics doing all the work. Then when Frank Williams couldn't agree terms with Nigel Mansell the reigning Formula One champion had flown off to America to drive an Indycar, taking much of the world's sports press following after him. Mansell won the American championship, finshed third in the Indy 500, and was battling hard with other two household names - Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti, thriving in their post-F1 lives. Worse still, there to welcome the Englishman in victory circle wasn't some quiet English engineers, but ''the'' Paul Newman, Hollywood icon, no longer racing but co-owner of Mansell's team. After a year of "Professor" Prost carefully picking his way to the title aboard the gizmo-filled Williams Formula 1's commercial bosses felt the heat. Indy may have been technologically backward compared to F1, but it was great entertainment, and now even Senna was making noises about defecting to America. So at the end of 1993, out went all the driver aids - no more traction control or active suspension, brakes would lock again, spectacle was coming back. 

It was a major turning point in motorsport. For the first time, road cars would unquestionably be more sophisticated in many ways than racing cars. All of the driver aids that were now banned from Formula 1 were still available to buy in a showroom. Nearly everything that had been a major innovation was now outlawed;  moving aerofoils, turbines, ground effects undertrays, forced induction, electronic controls, even fitting six wheels was now officially forbidden. The engine bay was home to a naturally-aspirated power unit, cylinders in a V pattern. The number of those cylinders about the only obvious variation; the Ferrari discernible with it's V12 screaming an octave higher than the Renault V10. Indycars were all V8 turbos, most of the cars built in England by specialist manufacturers. NASCARs still bore a slight resemblance to their stock roots, but aerodynamics smoothed them down to near uniform shape. For those looking for variety there was always sports car racing, or that had been sportscar racing. The World Endurance Championship had, quite unbelievably, been killed off in the space of two years by a misguided rule change in 1991. Seeking to bring some standardisation across the board, the FIA had decided that endurance cars would have the same engine rules as Formula 1. Theoretically this meant more freedom for people to enter both disciplines. In practice it priced out all the private teams with the widely available pool of customer Group C cars, shrinking the grid dramatically, and all the factory teams packed up from sportscars reasoning they may as well race for the much bigger prize in Formula 1. 

The ending of Group C was as wasteful and unnecessary a rule change as ever happened in motor sport. So bungled was the move, it had long fuelled a theory that the move was intentionally designed to kill off endurance racing to boost Formula 1. If true it certainly worked, to some extent;  Mercedes and Peugeot upped sticks and went to F1 as engine suppliers. But lots of others simply left, years of work undone by one piece of legislation. Mazda had been trying their hand at sportscar racing for a decade, their unique Wankel rotary engines screaming round at 9,000 rpm, and had scored an upset Le Mans win in 1991, the tidy Mazda 787B, with a 700 horsepower four-rotor engine, beating the Jaguars, Mercedes and Toyota. It couldn't come back the next year. The Mercedes factory team had come back to the race for the first time in 1987 with the Swiss Sauber team running the Sauber C8 prototype. The new generation Silver Arrows won in 1989, putting one over the Jaguars all over again, the slippery car the last to take victory on a Le Mans circuit with an uninterrupted three mile Mulsanne straight. The terrifying crash of the Jaguar in 1986 had signalled the possible end of the minute long flat out blast. In 1990 the FIA demanded two chicanes be installed along it's length. Again the law of unintended consequences applied; doubtless the circuit was safer, the risk of tyre blowout lessened, but without the long straight the teams could dial-in downforce and larger wings to their cars, making them much quicker in the turns. Duly equipped the Jaguar team won again in 1990. The absurdity of the new rules was demonstrated in 1991 - Jaguar had built a stunning new 3.5 litre car for the new formula, the XJR14, but it was never tested suitably for the twenty four hour race and was substituted for the old Group C XJR-12. The XJR-14 featured on the race poster, but would not be seen in person. Mercedes new C11 had one Michael Schumacher behind the wheel, the young German the talk of the town and viewed as a future world champion. 

Peugeot, having had their fill of the Dakar rally, had come to sportscars in time to see the rules change. Being their home race they were more inclined to stay for 1992 than maybe some of their former rivals. Like the Mercedes and Jaguar the Peugeot 905B was an F1 car with a suit on. The latest generation were even more sculpted aerodynamically, shrink-wrapped around the components, the smooth nose of the 1991 905 being swapped out for an upright bluff nose, evidently more efficient. It faced a new Mazda, with conventional F1-sourced engine, and the trio of Toyotas. The Japanese giant had been trying at Le Mans since 1983, always a little behind their European rivals. Despite their best efforts, the French would have their measure like the British and Germans before them, as the Peugeot 905 won the next two Le Mans before the team was retired in favour of Formula 1. Toyota tried again with their old 1992 Group C car in 1994, in a Le Mans open to practically anyone who cared to show up, only to be thwarted this time by the Dauer "GT" Porsche 962. By this time the World Championship was dead, the big race the only thing left, and a grid's worth of high performance prototypes put away under the dust sheets. Jean Todt, with no team to run, accepted a offer from Ferrari to run their flailing Formula 1 outfit. The offer had come from the Scuderia's saviour from the 1970s, Luca di Montezemolo, who had been the team manager and brought in Niki Lauda and supervised the 312T. After working his way up the corporate ranks Fiat had placed him in charge of Ferrari, charged with getting back the drivers title after ten years of futility. His first move was an eye-opener in Italy; a Frenchman running the Scuderia? But Todt had won everything Peugeot had tried, and was now a free agent.

If Ayrton Senna, after his frustrating 1992 spent chasing the Williams, really had upped sticks and gone American in 1993 the history of racing could have taken a quite different path. Doubtless the Brazilian would have installed in the Penske team - they wore the same Marlboro chevrons as McLaren, who would have paid all the money needed to make it happen - and would have been in for a good shot at big wins. Emerson Fittipaldi took the Penske to the Indy 500 win in 1993 - had it been Senna winning the big one the headlines would have been huge. The Indycar championship had become increasingly international in the 1980s, spearheaded by likes of Fittipaldi, finding the championship recreated much of the ambiance and competition of 1970s Formula 1. The increasing appearance of road circuits and street course as well as the traditional American oval speedways made things more diverse, and brought an influx of sports car racing figures. Paul Newman had once raced Porsche 935s, now he ran an Indy team. The team to beat by the end of 1980s were the Penskes, owned by Detriot automotive mogul Roger Penske, the team won it's first Indy 500 in 1972 with their CanAm pilot Mark Donohue, in an immaculate McLaren M16 Offenhauser, finished in the same dark Sunoco blue and yellow as the team's Porsche 917/30. It took a few more years for the next one, in 1979 with their own chassis and young Californian Rick Mears. Mears was Penske's Jim Clark, quick, intelligent, but quietly spoken, the perfect match for the taciturn "Captain" of the team.

After most American teams gave up on their own chassis only Penske were succeeding with construction, and succeeding well. The Lotus 79 and Chaparral 2K inspired Penske to follow suit with a skirted ground effect car, and to outsource their cars design and construction to England too. Like Williams in F1 the Penske beat the benchmark car at it's own game, the yellow submarine 2K suddenly looking very big compared to the minimal newcomer that won Indy in 1981. Ground effect aero persisted in America after Formula 1 had banned it, leading Indy cars to retain the look of early 1980s single seaters, with long sidepods for the underfloor aero, and also kept turbos after 1988, sending the two disciplines into their own bubbles, with little of the crossover there had once been. The customer nature of American racing also mitigated against electronic gizmos and driver aids. Penske installed new Chevrolet racing engines in the team's cars in 1986, only they were really British built by another cottage industry company - Ilmor, founded by former Cosworth engineers. The Ilmor Chevy spent a decade racing against their Alma Mater, the Ford-badged Indy engines naturally being Cosworths. So when Ayrton Senna tried out the 1992 Penske Chevrolet in a test he was on familiar ground; a British built single seater, with a British engine, carrying the same colours. Only this car had more power, a turbo like Senna's first F1 car, no power steering, active suspension, or traction control. It was very pretty to boot, ten years of aero refinements on the high speed banked tracks carving out a very fetching, low and wide shape, with some flashy touches like chromed suspension rods - even these flourishes were outlawed in F1. It must have been a tempting thought.

As it was Senna stayed at McLaren, doing his heroic best to halt Prost. Without Honda McLaren had to make do with a Ford Cosworth, and it was not even the latest example of those engines. Ford were backing the Benetton team, begun as Toleman in the 1980s they had given a first F1 season to the young Senna, but were now under Anglo-Italian ownership and were armed with the new Senna - the twenty two year old German driving prodigy Michael Schumacher. Benetton had an impressive technical team, headed by Ross Brawn, the British engineer who had begun his time in F1 with Williams, before joining Jaguar and designing the XJR-14. The car, with the Ford Cosworth V8 F1 engine in the back, and a closed top prototype body, would have been quick enough to qualify for the 1991 British Grand Prix, despite giving away a third in extra weight to F1 machinery. There was plenty of rule-bending lateral thinking involved; the 'doors' were the opening windows, as nothing in the rules said they had to be separate parts. No door piece meant the monocoque chassis was much more tapered, leaving room for the radiators to be in the sides on the floor. Combined with the engine it was a wider F1 car with a roof. The back wing had a biplane arrangement, with the lower wing becoming part of the rear air diffuser, creating more downforce. Jaguar's regular sponsor Silk Cut painted it in a new all-purple finish, adding to the insectoid appearance of the car. It was streets ahead of the opposition in 1991, and was remembered by the the veteran British driver Martin Brundle as the best car he ever raced over twenty years of driving, F1's included. When Jaguar withdrew at year's end, five new XJR14 chassis were built and rebadged for Mazda to replace the 787. The Mazda defended the company's honour in 1992, but was gone for good at the end of the year.

Ross Brawn was now in charge of technical matters at Benetton-Ford, with long time designer Rory Byrne penning the car and with Michael Schumacher in the driver's seat all three were ready to make a mark. With Prost settling for the quiet life of retirement, Ayrton Senna finally had his Williams drive, and he was certainly not doing it for free. Senna was going off unopposed to a fourth title with the new Williams FW16. Or so it seemed in January 1994. But without the electronics they had been so good at developing the team were struggling to readjust their design to conventional passive suspension, and to make the aerodynamic balance work. There had been other rule changes too. The new Williams had a fuelling coupling behind the driver's head, in race refuelling being allowed again after ten years of being forbidden. Nobody quite appreciated it at the time but the change would bring a whole panoply of race strategy options into play, and Brawn and Schumacher would be the masters of playing the new game. Even the familiar patchwork colours of Williams' livery were gone too, replaced by the sober dark blue Rothmans sponsorship once displayed by the 956 Porsches. Against all form and expectations, Schumacher won the first two races of the year, while Senna didn't score in either. The Benetton was not a pretty machine; it had two tall thin side radiators like bookends, and a duck-billed nose raised on struts above the front wing. This shape had first been tried by the Tyrrell team in 1990, raising the nose pulled more air under the car creating more downforce. Curiously Newey and Williams hadn't gone this route, keeping the Williams nose low, while Benetton had for two years already and now they were winning. 

Michael Schumacher won the third race of the year too, but history would not remember that. The image of Senna's crashed Williams FW16 sitting at the side of the Imola track, largely intact but with it's right front wheel missing and it's cockpit scuffed, would be the defining image of the year. Senna's third race for williams had been his last. A day before he'd won pole position, hustling the awkward handling Williams round Imola faster than it wanted to go. The day was totally overshadowed by a fatality, the first in F1 since Elio de Angelis's death in 1986. Austrian rookie Roland Ratzenberger died on the fastest section of the course when his front wing detached, and fell under the front wheels, leaving the driver powerless to stop the car heading straight off into a concrete wall at 190mph. The deceleration left the unfortunate driver with fatal head injuries. A day later, leading Schumacher on lap 7 of the race, Senna's car failed to round the long left hand Tamburello sweeper and smashed into the concrete wall. The medical team raced to the stopped Williams, it's driver sat still in the cockpit, and found the driver mortally wounded. The missing right front wheel and the smashed suspension rod had come straight back into Senna's crash helmet in the impact, and killed him. 

In a strange echo of history, Williams' second driver, Damon Hill, had to right the team's season and he did it with a win at the Spanish Grand Prix a month later - just as his father Graham had done after Jim Clark had died. Adrian Newey and Senna were destined never to win championships together. Schumacher, Brawn and Byrne instead took the top spot in 1994 and 1995. Controversy had not been far away from their 1994 season. The driver aids ban attracted questions of how it supposed to be policed. One of the Ferrari drivers accidentally let slip that Ferrari still had active traction control software early in 1994, and a lot of backtracking and embarrassment ensued. From watching the Benetton in action the meticulous Senna suspected that car too still had some form of illegal electronic assistance. Safety came into sharp focus after the double disaster of Imola. F1 cars were beefed up, the uncompromising pursuit of aero performance tempered by new measures to protect drivers. Most obviously the cockpit sides were built up to cushion the drivers head and the openings widened. Cars of the late 80s and early 90s crammed their drivers into thinner and thinner cockpits, to maximise the cars performance, leaving taller drivers very uncomfortable with no leg room, or room to move their arms fully. The safety changes at last gave them some space again and relive their bruised knees and numb arms. The whole structure of the drivers 'survival cell's, as it had come to be known, was thickened up, sidepods were made taller and wider for better protection, wings reduced, ride heights raised, engine size reduced... and still the cars got quicker. Such is the nature of the game. The Williams stayed as the top car in 1995 and 1996, it's nose now raised to match the Benetton that Schumacher steered to a humiliating title over the Williams drivers in 1995. Had Senna been driving things would have been different, the late Brazilian maybe winning four straight from '94 to '97. Nobody would ever know.

-----------------------

1990s 2

-Hot Hatches

The end of Group B in 1986 seemed like a giant step backwards for rallying. Peugeot and Audi were gone, Lancia stayed but the purposeful Delta S4 was put away, and the wheel spinning go kart with the fibreglass body was replaced by the stock five door Lancia Delta hatchback. The Martini colours were the same, Peugeot's 1986 champion driver Juha Kankunnen was behind the wheel, but the slad-sided car looked parked in comparison. It wasn't as bad as it seemed however. Though the championship soldiered on for a while with many interlopers from circuit racing -   - adding to the motley ranks of starters, everybody was realising that while the Group B option was out, there was still nothing to stop a manufacturer building "performance" variants of road cars. The "Hot Hatch" had almost killed off the old two-seat sporty roadster stone dead in the eighties. They were fast and lairy, but still useable everyday. The standard Peugeot 205 GTI, the VW Golf GTI, the Renault 5 Turbo, the Ford Escort XR3... they all sold in the hundreds of thousands. Ironically rally fans mourned the loss of Group B, but the blanket implementation of Group A brought rally-bred road cars into the showroom within their grasp. Soon the Lancia Delta was available as a beefed up "Integrale" version with a wider wheels, flared arches, bigger bumpers, more power, and spoiler on the tail. All advertised in the brochure at the dealership. 

Lancia won the championship in 1987 and 1988, with the former-Peugeot wheelman Kankunnen giving them the very title he had denied them in 1986 while with the French team. He added a third in 1991, the last flourish of the iconic Martini works team era. The name disappeared from racing and rallying after 1993 as the brand was hit by crisis. Though the racing cars had long been successful the road cars were saddled with an embarrassing reputation for quality control problems and rusting especially. Things got so bad that Fiat simply gave up.in the UK, withdrawing entirely from the market. The European manufacturers were about to be invaded by pseudo Europeans, carrying a foreign flag but built next door by some familiar people. The Japanese invasion had been presaged during the Group B days, with Toyotas winning in Africa on the Safari Rally, and with Group A taking over again Toyota led the charge, being the first cars from the far east to win the title, in 1990 with Carlos sainz driving, with Mitsubishi and Subaru following their wheel tracks. As the rising sun was starting to set by the time most of the European races began it was natural for the Japanese to set up in Europe closer to the action. Mitsubishi Ralliart was based in Rugby, England, the Subarus built by Prodrive in Banbury, and Toyota Motorsport worked out of Cologne. All three shops grew out of independent teams who competed in the seventies and eighties. Prodrive was headed by Ari Vatanen's former Co driver David Richards, and worked with Porsche and Austin Rover before Subaru came calling. Toyotas had been on and off sights at rallies since the seventies before their European arm brought them success, as had Mitsubishi who took an early win at the 1989 RAC rally long before their late 90s purple patch. 

Subaru probably got the most mileage out of their association with rallying, especially in great Britain. The convenient fact that Japan and Britain shared right hand drive made it easier to export the Japanese homologation specials to the UK, and the Prodrive connection only cemented the bond between the two car cultures. The third ingredient in the mix was Subaru's star driver, Colin McRae. The  young Scottish driver took their first win in the world championship in 1993, and it was also the first for a British driver since 1976. The Finns had long held sway off the road, the small Scandinavian country full of forests and unpaved roads seemed to provide the perfect nursery for rally drivers. McRae quickly became a folk hero in his native country for breaking the drought and his press-on style that led to crashes but also results. The dark blue Subaru Impreza saloon, with 555 cigarette livery, was at heart a very ordinary family car but became something entirely different with the addition of turbos and four wheel drive. In this Subaru and Mitsubishi with their Lancer Evolutions differed from Toyota by modifying four door cars rather than a coupe as Toyota had with the Celica. The 3 door GT4 celica had won four titles, 1989, 1990  1992, and 1994. The German-Japanese team then rained on their parade when the scrutineers at the 1995 Catalunya rally discovered an illegal turbocharger modification allowing higher engine power. Since the end of Group B engine power was capped at 300 horsepower and enforced by a restrictor plate system similar the one in NASCAR, only the plate in this case was a funnel inside the turbo intake manifold. Toyota engineers had built a spring loaded bypass system to force the restrictor open by 5 millimetres, allowing air to flow around the outside of the funnel and into the turbo impellor, thus giving an illegal power gain. The real trick was that the device was rigged to close when removed for inspection. It took considerable time for the scrutineers to work out how it was done. Management pleaded ignorance, but the book was well and truly thrown, the 1995 results annulled and the team banned for a year.

The sudden removal of the Toyotas left the way clear for Subaru to win the 1995 championship, though not without internal controversy as team orders stipulated that double champion Carlos Sainz, now driving for Subaru, should take priority over McRae. At the same event that Toyota were caught cheating in Spain, McRae made his displeasure clear, holding the lead until the last stage, blasting past his team waving him to slow near the finish, then checking in his time card late to incur the penalty that dropped him to second. Revenge came in the season ending RAC rally as the Scotsman and his (coincidentally) patriotic blue Anglo-Japanese car took the title at home ahead of Sainz. Neither man would win a championship again, the Spaniard having to settle for the early successes in 1990 and 92, Mcrae coming up short by one point in 1997 before taking a big money.offer from Ford for 1999. The European arm of Ford had never managed to equal the 1981 drivers title with Vatanen; the Group B RS200 had to be pensioned off after only a few months, remembered mostly for the Portugal tragedy. The car kept on trucking in rallycross events in Europe, eventually the road version becoming a rare collectors car, but it's moment was well and truly stolen by the Escort RS Cosworth Group A car.

The "Cossie" never won ford the world rally championship in its five years but that didn't matter too much. The brand- synonymous with 'rep mobiles' and bland products like the was Mark 5 Escort the Cosworth rally special was based on - was given a large kick towards being respected again by the 4wd car with the big whale tail on its hatchback. Unlike many previous hot hatches this rally spoiler really did produce down force, and it was well needed with the standard road car making the sprint to 60 mph well under six seconds. The famous wing was ditched in 1997 when the Cosworth became a World Rally-spec car under a new set of rules for the World Championship, freeing up the specifications for cars to allow the manufacturers some leeway in creating their designs. Something similar had been planned in the late 1980s to replace Group B - the "Group S" idea had limited horsepower like Group A, but still allowing non-production cars to race, but Group S was killed off along with Group B. Ten years later the governing body had second thoughts, worried that once again only a few manufacturers were interested in rallying they created the World Rally Car category for the 1997 season, with various defined parameters that could differ between the competition and production car. This meant that Subaru could build a three-door Impreza for rallying, Ford could refine the Cosworth with new aero parts, and the reinstated Toyota team could build a highly beefed up Corolla for their return to rallying.  On first sight the new WRC cars were exciting - the new Impreza looked halfway on the way to being a track car - but on the flipside there might not be any need for road specials like the Celica GT4 any more.

Enthusiasts need not have worried. Though the rules now stated that the likes of Subaru did not need to build road models with all wheel drive cars with turbocharging to compete, the connection between the world championship and the road was too great to drop entirely, so rally-inspired performance editions continued to appear. Subaru had great motivation to keep making their hot Imprezas since Mitsubishi kept on competing in WRC with a Group A car, and they were not being left behind - quite the opposite, the ever evolving "Evo" was winning the championship, and selling road cars. A new Flying Finn, Tommi Makinen, won four consecutive driver's titles between 1996 and 1999, the British built Ralliart car beating the Fords and Toyotas, with a little following breeze. Makinen looked to have thrown away the title in 1998 in the final round in Britain when he slid on a oil patch and clouted a hay bale on the first day, the impact tearing his wheel off. Adding the indignity the traffic police then pulled the Finn over for trying to drive on three wheels to the next stage. All seemed lost for the Mitsubishi team as Toyota, now reunited with their champion-emeritus Sainz, just had to finish in the top four to regain the top spot after four years of self-inflicted turmoil. So the sight of the Corolla pulling over to a smoky halt within the last few hundred metres of the final stage was almost too unbelievable for the television coverage and spectators to believe. The car's engine had failed at almost the last possible moment, with no warning, leaving the two man crew wandering around the roadside in a daze for many minutes, trying to comprehend how such a calamity had occurred so close to glory. 

Nearly lost in the drama was the victory in the rally by Richard Burns, another British winner, in the second Mitsubishi. Burns would move to be team leader at Subaru, winning the title like McRae before him, at home, in one of the blue cars. The era of rallying heroes who came of age in the post-Group B years would slowly fade away during the early 2000s; the French returned with a flourish, Peugeot taking full advantage of World Rally Car rules to make good where they had flopped in Formula 1. The Japanese would win one more title, with Subaru beating Peugeot in 2003. Toyota left a year after their last round disaster in 1998, Mitsubishi built WRC versions of the Evo but slowly faded away, withdrawing for good in 2005, followed three years later by the once-mighty Subaru team, now also-rans. World Rally began a slow slide from the back page headlines, eclipsed by Formula 1 in the public's eyes, and in a sad coda to the age, both British champions would be lost. Richard Burns blacked out while driving the British rally in 2003, and would be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. He died aged thirty four in November 2005, four years to very day he had won the championship. Two years later Colin McRae crashed his helicopter in a wooded valley near his home, killing himself and his three passengers. Without a regular seat in the World Rally championship, he had planned to build his own affordable car for young rally drivers, and had unveiled the compact looking McRae R4 a year before. It's creator's death would leave it forever a prototype.

-Going Global

Ferrari under Luca di Montezemolo was going to be a very different beast. In fact he and Todt were going to go after the Benetton braintrust; Brawn and Byrne, and with millions of dollars of Marlboro money (Philip Morris had long since paid the Ferrari drivers salaries in exchange for a small logo under the drivers name badges on the cars and suits) would snag the services of Schumacher. The German was quite the least Latin driver the team had had since Niki Lauda, but he had the same galvanising effect. The 1996 Ferrari was a bit of a mess, a long way behind the Williams, but Schumacher dragged it's ungainly form to three wins, including a memorable demolishing of the field in the Spanish rain, and a triumphal homecoming in front of the tifosi at Monza. The 1997 Ferrari, the first Byrne and brawn car looked much different than its predecessors, there were no more curves, it looked like a red painted Benetton, with the raised flat nose it was clearly a product of the 'new' Ferrari team. Even the colour was different, the traditional Ferrari blood red lightened to a more television friendly shade. Up against them was a.familiar name; Villeneuve. So long had elapsed since Ferrari last title in 1979 that the son of one of that years drivers was now racing against them. 

Jacques Villeneuve had come to F1 from Indy cars, he had won the 500 in 1995, and been hired for the Williams. Potential box office gold for Bernie Ecclestone, bringing the famous name back in a front running car. The F1 big wigs relished the breath of fresh air that be combative newcomer brought, hoping he would go toe to toe with Schumacher. They were not disappointed in 1997 as the championship went down to the last race. Villeneuve, needing the outscore Schumacher, tailed the Ferrari early on before diving for an unexpected move on lap 48. The Ferrari driver then cast a pall on the occasion - clearly taken by surprise Schumacher simply turned right across the Williams bows. In 1994 Schumacher had collided with Damon Hill in a near identical way to win the championship in.the last race. With a little squinting It was possible to.give the benefit of the doubt to that move, but not this time. The Ferrari clobbered the Williams side and clattered into the gravel trap, the multi million dollar car and driver combination beeched like a beginner. Unlike Hill in 1994 Villeneuve could continue with a minor scrape and win the title.

Not many people would have imagined that afternoon that Villeneuve would never win another race, and Williams, winner of four in the last six titles would still be waiting for the next one twenty years later. The clues had been there during that year though. Renault were leaving f1 again, halting any further factory support for their V10s, McLaren had taken Adrian Newey from them, and fthe rules were changing again. Williams fell from the front, only to return fitfully ever since. The new regulations in 1998 aimed to reduce speeds by narrowing the track of the cars considerably, and giving the slick racing tyres unsightly circumferential grooves. The narrower car suited neweys talents to a 'T', as the turbulence from the open wheels, moved closer to the chassis would now have an larger impact on the cars aero performance. Newey's 1998 McLaren was the only car on the grid that did not look like the previous years car squashed narrower. So began the tale of formula 1 for the next decade; Schumacher versus Newey. Driver versus aerodynamicist. There was a little bit more too it than that, of course, but there is he undeniable fact that one never drove the others cars, and in between 1998 and 2004 there were only 31 races won by those who were either not Schumacher or drivers in a Newey car, and a good proportion of those were Schumacher's Ferrari team mates.

If the average racing fan was growing weary of the predictability of Formula 1, then their options elsewhere had narrowed in the nineties. The World Endurance Championship had died a sorry death, and the IndyCar series would nearly follow, being rent asunder by politics. In 1996 the Indycar series was split in two by the Indianapolis Speedway management creating their own series, separate from the existing CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) championship; the Indy Racing League. The "IRL" was an attempt to try to return to the old way of doing things, to turn the clock back thirty years and bring back the young American dirt trackers who now raced NASCAR. Like the beleaguered French decades earlier, watching in stony silence as an American won their Grand Prix, the great divide was fuelled by native resentment. Dislike of the influx of outsiders coming to the "500" and making it their own that began with Lotus in the 1960s and had seen the CART Indycar series awash with expensive English chassis, even more costly racing engines, million dollar sponsors, and the brash European and South American drivers who took to the oval tracks with ease. Some of the spark for the war was provided by Mercedes, Penske and Ilmor in 1994. Rules still allowed much higher turbo boost for "stock" engines, including pushrod designs, less complex engines using spring loaded tappets to control the engine valves rather than camshafts, still common into the 1980s on some American V8s. A Buick Indy engine had been granted higher boost in the early 1990s on that exact rule, but the car was unreliable and though quick had not lasted long in the race. Ilmor and Penske realised that there was nothing in the rules that said the engine block actually had to be a an actual production design. Theoretically they could build a custom pushrod racing engine - unheard of in modern times - and be granted push higher horsepower levels. That they did, in great secrecy, and won the 1994 Indy 500 at a canter, nearly lapping everyone else.  

It was the straw that broke the camel's back. Some of the smaller teams willingly joined the new Indy Racing League, glad to see the back of such high stakes games for the wealthy owners in the CART championship. For a time the two series had the money and sponsorship to run separate schedules. IRL was cheaper, for a while. And it's all-oval track season recalled the 1920's age of the wooden board speedways with some close daredevil racing for American grassroots racers who had never stood a chance of making it onto the same grid as Fittipaldi, Mansell, Villeneuve et al. The IRL's owners made a major tactical error however; they reckoned without NASCAR. Even into the 1980s NASCAR had still been a largely Southern concern, the likes of Bill Elliott, Dale Earnhardt, Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin only household names south of the Mason-Dixon line. Elliott had come to prominence with his two Daytona wins in the eighties, his record breaking speeds in the Thunderbird, and his million dollar bonus in 1985 for winning a jackpot of selected big races. The seventies generation - the Pettys, Pearson, Yarborough, and Allison - were winding down, to be replaced by the new guard, led by Earnhardt,, who would match Richard Petty with seven championship titles, though he was famously thwarted in the Daytona 500 until 1998, leading nearly every running for twenty years, and finishing second five times. By 1994 it had taken off in popularity thanks to television and the new generation of younger drivers, one in particular; Jeff Gordon. In a previous generation the gifted young dirt-tracker would have been certain to drive Indycar, but in the early 1990s he had no way in to the CART club. Instead he went south and drove the stock cars, and his rivalry with Dale Earnhardt, the black-clad "Intimidator" was pure working class hero versus punk kid box office gold. Gordon's rainbow coloured number 24 Chevy, versus the Earnhardt's black number 3. 

NASCAR cars were still big, heavy, front engine cars that the young dirt trackers could handle. The IRL introduced a new formula for itself in it's second year but, although cheaper, it was still based around European style open wheel formula cars. Only slower, and much less powerful than the previous generation of Indycars. It was a no-win situation for both CART and IRL. Young Americans went to race NASCAR because that was where the television and sponsorship money was, but the IRL had now killed off innovation and interest from the wider world of motor sport in Indianapolis. Soon, the foreigners were winning the 500 again too, only many sponsors and technical backers had left American racing. In 1999 the CART series still retained Mercedes Benz, Honda, Ford Cosworth and Toyota as engine builders. Within a few years all but Ford had gone. The uniformity of the late 1980s had been broken somewhat in the late 1990s with some new Indycars to break the British stranglehold, but the divided series meant that the American-built Swift and Eagle chassis could not race at Indianapolis. By bitter irony that race was the sole preserve of Italian Dallaras and a small British concern called G-Force. After many years of division the two series lived on only because of a few wealthy backers; some team owners and the family owners of the Speedway. Things finally became desperate enough that a merger happened. Toyota and Honda had left CART to race for a few years in the IRL championship, bringing top teams with them, but Toyota left to go to NASCAR, the first non-American car maker to do so full time. Had Honda not propped the newly re-merged series up with engines there would have been no championship. 

In the 2010s the only company left building Indycar was Dallara. Lola had gone, so had the other Brits; Marches, Reynards, G-Forces. The Swift did not last past 2000. Even Penske stopped building their own cars. The 1990s Eagle Indycar had a brief life before vanishing too. This was especially poignant as the name had a long career in racing, and the CART era car held some early promise. Founded by driver Dan Gurney, who had won races for Brabham in Formula 1 in the 1960s, and even took Porsche's solo Grand Prix win in the 1962 French Grand Prix, set up his own team in 1966, at the height of the American invasion of European racing. Gurney had been one of the drivers of the 1966 Ford GT40 that won Le Mans - four time Indy 500 winner AJ Foyt being the other - and followed that up with a win in the 1967 Belgian GP in his Eagle. The 3 litre F1 Eagle is often named as the most elegant Grand Prix racer ever built; it had to be long to fit it's tall driver, and was finished off in metallic American national racing colours of blue with signature white racing stripe. The nose radiator featured a Ferrari sharknose-like beak, and the proportions were matched by the tangled exhaust pipes sticking out of the back. The car had been the first American racer to win a Grand Prix since the Duesenberg in 1921. And it was the last to date. 

Evenutally the money dried up for F1, so Eagles carried on at Indianapolis, the shape flattening out, and big wings and turbos now standard equipment. In 1972 an Eagle Indycar, boost turned up high, was the first car to make a 200 mph average speed lap in a racing event. The early 1980s Eagle was very unusual for the time. In a field of straight-edged ground effect cars it had a dart-like profile, with a huge overhang behind the back wheels, as if a piece of garage equipment had been stuck there by mistake. The reason for the curious shape was that the car had a ground effect generated by something they called 'Boundary Layer Adhesion Technology'. "BLAT" involved having a wide V-shaped rear deck on the car almost enclosing the rear wheels, with small mini skirts infront of the wheels to create two vortexes on either side of the car that then expand out low pressure across the whole of the wide tail piece. As with the sliding skirts, this form of downforce was also outlawed by stricter bodywork dimension rules, but not before the BLAT-Eagle had taken an oval track win, and from the back row of the starting grid. The concept lived on with the 'barge boards' that began to sprout on stalks from the sides of F1 cars cockpits in the 1990s, trying to squeeze as much downforce from the flat undertray of the car.

While Indycar was self-destructing, Le Mans had been an event in great flux. The loss of Group C was a blow to the organisors, but the rise of the new generation of 200 mph supercars, and a championship (the BPR series) gave a new hope that GT racing would be the future. Weary of F1's ever tighter restrictions, Gordon Murray had designed a McLaren a road going supercar to rule them all, the 240 mph McLaren F1, unveiled in 1993. It was not intended to be a racing car, but inevitably when customers saw the record breaking road car they were opening their wallets for a racing version, and eventually Ron Dennis obliged. McLaren F1 GTRs turned up in 1995, ready to take on some new open-top prototype cars running under newly adopted American racing rules. The GTR design was lightened from the road version, and the body squared off with much more downforce built in. Curiously the addition of the rear wing made the F1-GTR much slower in a straight line than the road version. In a very wet race, several McLaren's were in contention; a Gulf liveried car, sporting a darker blue than the Ford GT40s and Porsche 917 of yore; a yellow and green car sponsored by Harrods department store, and unveiled there by it's drivers, including multiple Le Mans winner Derek Bell; and a dark grey model sponsored by a Japanese venereal disease clinic. This car had originally been a spare but was when it's unconventional sponsor came on board with money, it was freed up by the factory to race. It was a wise choice as latter car won through with one of the open prototypes second, the first win in the race by a genuine GT road car since the Ferrari 250LM in 1965. It was also the last. GT racing wasn't the future of overall wins. It was the a story seen before, in NASCAR with the winged cars, and rallying with Group B. For 1996 Porsche built a new "GT" car, nominally a 911, but really the back end of a 962 attached to a squashed 911 cockpit and tail lights. It looked wonderful, but like the Dauer 962 it wasn't really a 'GT' car, but as long as Porsche built enough road versions it could race. 

Protests invariably followed but it would have been hard to turn away such a prestigious brand as Porsche from sports car racing. The niche Dauer car was one thing, the Porsche factory cars were another. The previous year the company had given up on a new open cockpit prototype car intended for the new American formula on the eve of the racing year. That car, the Porsche WSC95, was actually a 1991 Jaguar XJ-14 underneath. Another repurposed example of Ross Brawn's genius design, the WSC took an unexpected double at Le Mans in 1996 and 1997 in a semi-official effort run by Joest racing, a decade after they turned the same trick with the 956. The official Porsche 911 GT1s had poor luck in the 24 hours; they were 2nd and 3rd in 1996, and one was in good contention in 1997 before it came to fiery stop at the end of the Mulsanne, trailing a large conflagration out of it's tail. The newer McLarens with longer tails and lower noses could keep the GT1 honest in other sports car races, so Porsche went even more extreme in 1998, with a updated GT1 that was practically a prototype with indicators. This newer GT1 won Le Mans in 1998, but it was a victory of reliability rather than speed. Porsche's problem was that once they opened the loophole in the rules, everyone else followed them through it, with even more tenuous 'road' cars. Mercedes-Benz, buoyed by their resurgence with McLaren in F1, built a very special edition mid-engine racer, like the GT1 it had a road-car face and tail, with a token attempt to build a run of customer cars with trimmed interiors, tyres and CD players. 

Ridiculous though the rules were, a resurgence of manufacturer interest was the consequence. It was the the Group B effect all over again. Nissan returned to sportscars after great success in their homeland with their Group C cars, and the GT Skylines but less so internationally. They built one R390 for road use, to show that it was theoretically possible to have a production model, but the high tech Skyline, and then the GTR would be their only performance cars. In a world where the ordinary-looking Japanese two door coupe could outrun European supercars with the kind of computer control gizmos that had long been banned in Formula 1 (and also did not feature in cars such as the McLaren F1), the long, low R390 was purely for Le Mans. Anything Nissan could do, Toyota could overdo; their 1998 car - also a GT-1 - looked in every detail like a developed version of a Group C prototype, as if Toyota had been hard at work since 1994 making a new car and had stuck a number plate on it to fit the rules. Not everyone made a GT car; BMW and Audi turned tradition on it's head, the masters of German tin-tops making open-top prototype cars. The rules were supposedly there to encourage cross-pollination with American racing, but in reality everyone was focused on Le Mans. Mercedes won the 1998 GT championship comprehensively, but nobody would remember that after the next year's Le Mans. It was BMW who won the 1999 race, but news reports did not make much mention of that either. What they did notice was a Mercedes Benz taking off from the track behind one of the Toyotas, and flying into the trees.

Pitch-sensitivity had become a problem for racing cars in the nineties. Where once everyone worried about ground effect wing cars taking flight if they hit another car or took a crest too abruptly, now the huge flat undersides of racing cars mandated for safety reasons, were causing their own problems. Already the latest Porsche GT1 had taken flight and somersaulted running in the wake of another car. The most probable theory for the fatal trajectory of Ayrton Senna's Williams off of the Tamburello curve in 1994 was that it had bottomed-out on one of the track's bumps and lost a huge amount of downforce at 190mph, spearing straight on in an un-recoverable slide. The 1999 Mercedes CLR car was much longer and lower than it's championship winning predecessor - too long, and too low to run without being disturbed by the turbulent air spilling from the back of the Toyota GT1. Fortunately for the, car, driver and race, the car did it's aerial acrobatics on the back of the circuit away from spectator areas, avoiding a repeat of the 1955 disaster. Nobody was injured but it was all too much for the Mercedes management, they went back to Formula 1 and left Le Mans to those seemingly less star-crossed in the race. Toyota found no luck either, still without a win they would have to wait longer as the GT1 could't last in 1998, and suffered a puncture while closing in on the BMW with an hour remaining, a possible classic finish went begging with one left rear tyre. Audi had a quiet 1999 race, and came back in 2000 with a purposeful new car, the R8. Noticing another loophole that BMW had already seen, their car had a single roll bar like a single seater, so any passenger who came along would have to watch their head in a rollover. (This loophole would eventually close, along with open cars altogether in the later 2000s) The new Audi's only problem was there wasn't anyone else to race - a new Porsche prototype was axed, a similar Nissan replacement for the R390 made it the track briefly before heading to the museum, Toyota canned the GT1 in favour of F1, as did BMW with the LMR. Mercedes were already there, and doing quite nicely.

McLaren Mercedes bounced back with stunning effect in 1998 and 99, partly down to Newey but also with the Mercedes Benz engine deal that had begun in 1995 coming on song. 1994 had seen the team try Peugeot's new F1 engine, an engine that had a great deal of trouble staying in one piece. Abandoning that partnership they shacked up with Mercedes, another former sports car manufacturer. In many ways 1995 was the teams nadir; they signed Nigel Mansell, who caused much tabloid merriment about his diet while racing in America when he couldn't fit in the new car, a car that looked hideous with its weird needle nose and engine cover-mounted mini wing. A shadow of his former self Mansell left for good in ignominy a few races in, not that Ron Dennis cared too much since his focus was on his other driver; Mika Hakkinen, the Finnish driver who had outqualified Senna in his first race and had been highly rated but stifled by the Peugeot engine's shortcomings. But at the last race of the year they nearly lost Hakkinen too in a harsh crash into a barrier in Australia, his life only saved by prompt medical assistance.

Bouncing back from the brush with death Hakkinen thwarted Schumacher and Ferrari two years on the trot, helped by the German breaking his leg midway through 1999. The tables were turned the next year, Ferrari finally having their first drivers title since 1979, after four years of frustration for the 'new' Schumacher Scuderia. Championships were very like buses for Ferrari; they waited twenty one years for one to turn up, and won the next four on the trot. It was an age where observers didn't know what was more extraordinary, the Ferrari winning streak, or the total inability of the rest to stop them. With much sadness in the paddock Mika Hakkinen retired in 2001, but even with new drivers somehow McLaren Mercedes couldn't string together the form to get back on top. Williams had lured back BMW, the horsepower kings of the 1980s, and the engines from Munich again headed towards 1000 bhp, only this time with ten naturally aspirated cylinders, and they too had their hot streaks without quite managing to maintain for a whole year. 

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2000s

-Schumacher Years

There was no obvious secret to the success of the early 2000s Ferrari as their had been for many earlier winning cars. It was a well funded, well organised bunch of experienced people, devoted exclusively to one driver, who in turn always seemed to deliver the goods for them. Even the Bridgestone tyres increasingly became bespoke to Ferrari as the other teams jumped ship to Michelins, suspicious that Ferrari got tailored tyres to suit Schumacher. The tyres would provide Williams and McLaren with the closest chance to top Ferrari in 2003; the Michelin teams had won seven times during the season before Ferrari protested the legality of their rivals tyres. The Michelins seemed to expand wider than the legal width at speed but were legal when measured in the garage. Just like the infamous sinking ride heights of 1981 the rules were open to creative interpretation. The tyres had to be redesigned ordered the governing body. The counter protest was that Ferrari hadn't seen fit to protest the exact same design in the prior two years when it wasn't beating them. Ferrari and Bridgestone proceeded to have the measure of the last three races. Not for nothing was "FIA' ironically referred to as 'Ferrari International Assistance' by some in the pits. McLaren still remembered the penultimate round of 1999 when the Ferrari was unquestionably found to have illegally oversized bodywork, only by a fraction but rules were rules, and the red cars were disqualified, making Mika Hakkinen an unexpected early champion. Then, curiously, they were then reinstated, leaving a championship decider, the Finnish driver making the result moot by winning anyway.

Bridgestone really did find themselves in problems in 2005, a year after the Ferrari  had won fifteen races (all but three) they could only scrape together one win. The major flaw of concentrating so heavily on one driver was starting to become clear; nobody stays the best forever. Schumacher was now 36 years old. As he had been to Senna, so some new hotshots - Fernando Alonso, Juan Montoya, Kimi Raikkonen - were to him. 2004 had been remarkable for the great strength of car industry interest and money, and it's collective impotence in the face of the red steamroller. The Benetton team had been bought up by Renault and rebranded. Ford now controlled the team set up by former champion driver Jackie Stewart in 1997, they had strategically rebranded it as Jaguar. Toyota now had their own in house team building cars and engine. Their arch rivals Honda were also back in the club, powering the British American Racing team. BMW and Mercedes still partnered Williams and McLaren respectively. And none of them could win more than the scraps. That would change big time the following year as the former Benetton outfit conjured up memories of ten years earlier, winning a first title for Spain and Fernando Alonso. All in all it had only taken a full works Renault racing car ninety nine years to go from winning the first ever Grand Prix to the World Championship.

For a year it was open season on Ferrari, a rule banning tyre changes in pitstops leaving Bridgestone all at sea. McLaren had the fastest car and won six races in a row, but reliability uncut their points total and they came away with nothing. Ferrari were back on the pace in 2006 but Renault and Alonso had their measure in the end, even after another untimely rule change outlawed the Renaults 'mass damper' suspension and hobbled their performance. The wheels finally seemed to come off the familar late season Schumacher title surge; an engine failure and a puncture putting him out of contention in two races.  The greatest age of domination F1 had known was over. With 91 wins, 72 of them with Todt, Brawn and Ferrari, the 7 time champion headed for the exit door. So too, coincidently, did Adrian Newey from the McLaren design office.

-Showbiz

The problem with hiring the English,.Germans and the French, Italian fans might have mused, is that eventually they might want to go back home. Strict new tobacco advertising rules had come into force, leaving the the BAR team, co founded by the BAT tobacco conglomerate looking for an out. Their engine supplier Honda provided the cheque, bought out the BAR team and targeted Ross Brawn to run it. After years of Northern Italy, working back in England was more appealing than carrying on at Ferrari, where there was nothing left to prove. Meanwhile McLaren were losing Adrian Newey to the new Red Bull team, the Austrian drinks magnate Dietrich Mateschitz, after years of sponsorship, going all in and buying the former jaguar team when ford decided to give up on the ailing concern. Two of the traditional 'Big Four' - Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and Williams - had lost two of their top men, but the order didn't change too much.  McLaren had signed Alonso from Renault, the deal of the decade - or so it seemed. In the event the supposed leader of the silver and red cars found itself being frequently outrun by its sister, in the hands of Lewis Hamilton, the young English driver who had been under McLaren's wing since his go karting days. The 2007 title came down to a three way last race battle for the first time since 1986, and this time the McLarens lost out to Kimi Raikkonen in the Ferrari. Alonso, convinced since mid season that Hamilton was already the favoured son in the team went straight back to Renault. Hamilton, so close in his rookie m year went one better in 2008, but only just and at the latest possible moment. Needing 5th place in Brazil to win the prize McLaren were making a proper mess of things. The arrival of light rain, late pitstops, and the fast improving Red Bull car, driven by Schumacher heir apparent Sebastian Vettel, was the last thing they needed and the pesky blue and yellow car demoted Hamilton to 6th with two of laps to.go. With the Ferrari of the other title contender Felipe Massa leading comfortably Hamilton needed a miracle - and he got one when the rain started really pouring. A Toyota ahead was still creeping around on dry weather tyres, dropping back like a stone - or an F1 car on the wrong tyres, which was probably worse. The Ferrari pit crew celebrated wildly at the chequered flag... before somebody pointed out to them that Hamilton's McLaren was on the TV results screens in 5th place. The Toyota had run out of grip at the last corner of the last lap. 

Vettel had caused the biggest upset for years in 2007 driving a Toro Rosso - the red Bull B team - a team that under previous ownership had been perpetual Italian back markers minardi, to win the Italian grand prix in the rain. The Red Bull team itself had no victory  itself at this point, that would wait two more years for Vettel, naturally promoted, to win in 2009's Chinese GP. The first of forty eight wins over the next six seasons, including matching Alberto Ascari's 1952-1953 record of nine consecutive wins at the end of 2013. Adrian Newey was at it again, despite the huge restrictions in the rules defining almost every centimeter of the car, somehow his Red Bull was creating more down force than the rest. Vettel went from being the youngest ever world champion, to the youngest double champion, to the only driver to win three straight, then four straight, right off the bat. Much of this time his car was being stuck to the ground with the 'blown diffuser', the Red Bull system that routed the engine exhaust through the undertray and added more power to the suction effect; a 'fan car' with the engine providing the thrust (something seen before on the short-lived BLAT Eagle Indycar, and also pondered by Colin Chapman in notebook sketches.) One advantage of the ever tightening rules over the 90s and 2000s is that the gaps between the best cars and the rest did start to come down, from several seconds to fractions, probably making the driver matter more again. In the 90s many potentially great drivers came to F1 and sank without a trace in the midfield, unable to register much impact. But small innovations like the blown diffuser still had a massive effect because reliability was so much stronger. Some of this was enshrined in the rules, the FIA capping performance by insisting on durability.

F1 cars changed greatly under the skin in the 2000s, as they gained engines and key components that could last several races, otherwise a penalty would be incurred. As impressive as this was it did have the drawback that once one team had the best car, it rarely failed and let others in to win. Red bulls four straight titles were the culmination of an achievement a long time in coming for Newey's genius, but the fact that it happened only a few years after Schumacher had done the same was telling.. Only had done the four-peat before the 2000s; Clark should have in the sixties; Prost in the eighties; both were let down by reliability. Senna died before he could fulfill his full potential in the Williams. Added in the homogenisation of track layouts; always wide smooth tarmac, large run offs, the usual mix of slow, medium and fast corners, tended to suit the same car every weekend. With a slight changing of fortune, Alonso, now driving for Ferrari, could have easily had two of Vettels titles. The German was even facing backwards on the last lap of the last race of 2013, staring defeat in the face as the field scrambled around his spin. On a wet track they all missed, and he got on his way again.

Red Bulls time at the front was ended by the dawn of the hybrid era. The switch in 2014 from traditional V8 engines back to v6 turbos, this time with electrical assistance from regenerative systems. The road car world was now steering the race car world. On the street the petrol engine and battery hybrid had become commonplace in cars such as Toyotas Prius, the weird looking boxy mid size car that deliberately eschewed prior automotive design language to emphasise it's efficiency and distance itself from 'gas guzzlers' of old. Such an overt anti-perfomance car becoming so popular was a message to those in charge of motor racing that something had to be done to keep Formula 1 up with the times, and hopefully attract manufacturer interest in a sport no longer paid for by tobacco firms. Hence first the regulation requiring cars have some form of Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) - means of recyling braking energy to engine power, either mechanical or electrical - in 2009, and eventually the hybrid V6s. Whether an empty and joyless PR exercise to boost racing's 'green' credentials or an important and interesting shake up to a stale formula, the change certainly placed engines at the forefront again.

So crucial had aerodynamics been just a few years earlier that one particular team had gone from zeroes to heroes in one off season, thanks to one ingenious wheeze the likes of Chapman, Jano, and Uhlehmnhaut would have been proud. The Honda team's 2008 had been a fiasco. Director Ross Brawn, considering an major alteration to the permitted wing sizes to reduce cornering speeds, and maybe remembering the wing-diffuser of the jaguar XJR-14, made the new Hondas rear down force much greater by using some of the required impact absorbing safety structure as another deck to the diffuser. Ain't no rules against it... Just one problem; with global recession kicking in Honda withdrew midway through the winter leaving the team in limbo. Brawn himself arranged a rescue deal for one season  hoping a new buyer would come forward. The sale was made more tempting when the Brawn (as the former Honda was badged) won the drivers title for Jenson Button, who had barely scored points in 2008. Brawn were the ultimate F1 one hit wonder; Mercedes Benz had stepped in to provide the stood-up team some engines bought the team for 2010. Thus the team that began as Tyrrell run Matras in the 1960s, before becoming Tyrrell in its own right, who soldiered on years after their seventies peak, who's entry was eventually bought out by BAR in 1999 as an ill fated vehicle for Jacques Villeneuve, before gaining Honda engines, then Honda ownership, then Brawn, which then begat Mercedes. Such are the complex web of interconnections in motorsport.

By this time Jean Todt was also no longer with Ferrari, having moved up to the presidency of the world governing body itself. With his sportscar racing background Todt oversaw an official revival of the World Endurance championship, inactive since 1992, starring Peugeot, Audi, Toyota and Porsche prototype cars. All now running petrol electric hybrid cars too, only with perhaps a little more road relevance. Not enough relevance for Peugeot though, despite a Le Mans win in 2009 over Audi, the team had withdrawn - or more accurately had been withdrawn by the management citing the poor world economy, as the cars were being developed to start the new WEC when the call came. Toyota, having achieved very little, were back to try another campaign for the elusive Le Mans victory. Audi and Porsche, under the same VW umbrella running diesel and petrol hybrid systems respectively. The Le Mans 24 Hours had been returned to some semblance of competitiveness after years of Audi dominance, where much of the real competition had been in GT class racing. One strange interloper had first appeared in 2012; the Deltawing, designed in America by former English Indycar engineer Ben Bowlby used a similar idea to the 1981 Eagle Indycar, and actually built by Dan Gurney's workshops, with a very wide rear bodywork and vortex generators creating ground effect. Only on the front, instead of the usual front suspension the thin wheels were placed right next to each other in the nose. The narrow nose reduced drag greatly, and it could still turn smartly as the weight and downforce balance was overwhelmingly over the rear.

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2010s

-Where Now?

The Deltawing was a rare example in the 21st century of a radically different looking car appearing, and working on the race track. The triangular arrangement has not been adopted by anyone else, but then the mid engine and the aerofoil took many years to be fully appreciating. That, though was back when racing cars were still evolving, and the track was a development ground for automotive technology. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the time when a fundamental shift happened, from innovation to entertainment. Performance reached a level that was getting beyond the limits of human perception, and computers and electronic controls developed to a point where the software could have driven the car as well as a human driver. The televised fatal crash to Ayrton Senna in 1994 further turned the screw on motor sports, leading to many safety improvements in cars and racetracks, but eventually reaching a level that leads many to ask if racing cars are now too safe, too easy to operate, and too forgiving of mistakes and overly aggressive driving. Driverless cars are now clearly on the horizon for road cars, seemingly leaving the art of driving a car heading for extinction one day. Or, possibly not, after all plenty of people can still ride and race horses even though the practical need has long disappeared. Perhaps racing will be the same, and the process seems to have been well on the way already. The NASCAR series have long since been run by officials who try to equalise the performance of different types of cars to keep the racing close and emphasise the drivers. The "stock cars" have little in common with road cars except that they have four wheels and a windscreen, but crowds and sponsors seemingly don't mind too much. Indycar racing has been a Dallara 'Spec' series since the mid-2000s and the on-track racing is still competitive and entertaining.

Unmistakably the public appeal of racing seemed to shift more to the drivers than the cars in the 21st century. It would probably take a committed F1 nut to discern which of Michael Schumacher's Ferraris came from a particular year, but almost anybody would guess the name of the driver if shown a photograph. The World Rally Championship was dominated by the laconic Frenchman Sebastien Loeb who won a record nine consecutive championships aboard Citroen rally cars. Yet while Loeb is a world renowned figure, the influence of rallying has not permeated the Citroen brand in public consciousness to the extent that it once did with the Subaru Impreza, and Mitsubishi Evo. Some of the blame for this may come down to the homogenisation and increasing safety regulations that trickled into the sport during the late '90s and 2000s. Rallying just was not as exciting and adventurous as it once was - the Citroen WRC car, for example could claim a rally win over three days of stages, many repeats of the same stage. The Group B cars, as well as being more powerful and spectacular (though thanks to tyre and suspension technology certainly not actually faster point to point) also raced over five days of stages, over many more miles. The rally cars of the 1990s still had to travel to Kenya to plug through the mud of the Safari Rally, an event that was dropped in the 2000s.

Consolidation of car companies, mergers, and "badge engineering" have always been part of motoring, though the process accelerated in the late 20th century. Many of the names on racing cars are still the same as existed in 1950, even 1900, though the manufacturers behind them are now unrecognisable to what they once were. Like any other complex industrial product, the car is made from parts sourced from all over the world, and designed by the best people possible, wherever they are from. The badge on the nose can seem like mere decoration, even on the racetrack. Fiat for example own the rights to Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo. The Maserati MC10 GT road and race car of the 2000s was underneath largely a Ferrari Enzo road chassis and engine with different bodywork. The entry of a new Lotus F1 team in 2010 to caused confusion; the famous brand now owned by the Malaysian Proton company, and they licensed the name. But in the record books this was not the same "Team Lotus" as before - the rights to racing team branch of Lotus was still owned separately after it folded in 1994. In 2011 the licence from Proton was revoked, so the team instead approached the owners of "Team Lotus" and licensed that name instead. Proton then bought a stake in the Renault F1 team, and that team was branded as Lotus-Renault, complete with a lookalike John Player Special livery albeit with no involvement from the actual tobacco brand. So in 2011 there were two "Lotus" teams, neither a continuation of the original, but carrying the evocative branding and colours. Eventually the first "Lotus" team dropped that name, after much legal wrangling over who owned what, and became "Caterham" after buying another small British car company, before going bust in 2014 and leaving the grid entirely. Meanwhile, Renault re-purchased the other Lotus in 2015, and rebranded that back to Renault, complete with traditional yellow and black Renault livery. A Bentley won Le Mans again in 2003, the sleek British Racing Green car breaking the three year Audi stranglehold. Except the Bentley brand was now owned by VW, under the same umbrella as Audi, who had been deliberately stood down for a year to favour the Bentley. Under the skin the new Bentley Speed 8 was an all-British design, but from the same team who had built a closed prototype for Audi in 1999. That car had been sidelined in favour of the open-top R8 car that won Le Mans three straight years, but the design team were recommissioned to build the new Bentley, complete with factory supplied Audi R8 engines under the back. 

Cars participation is still at the mercy of the parent companies; as of 2017 the Audi sports car team was withdrawn from the WEC after competing in Le Mans racing since 1999. But the VW group still has Porsche cars in the series, and brand management has clearly instructed to keep Porsche as the sporty wing of the corporation, while the Audi brand will now do something else. Toyota continues in endurance racing, despite being mostly known for the economical Prius. The star-crossed tale of the red and white cars at Le Mans being added to in 2016 with a late race breakdown that rivalled the 1998 World Rally Championship decider for heartbreak. Perhaps if the leading 2016 Toyota had made it around the last two laps of the race the management would have declared Mission Accomplished and withdrawn, like so many had done before, but the hoodoo that seems to affect the company in the race struck once again, in the most impossibly gutwrenching way. Only in the fictional realm of Steve McQueen's Le Mans movie had a car ever fallen out of the race lead so late before, but this time it was a turbo failure that caused the Toyota to roll to a halt at the start line as the second placed Porsche swept by for an unlikely win, making the score eighteen for Porsche, and zero for Toyota. The Hybrid engine era is a point of contention that illustrates the conundrum facing motor racing. Electric hybrids produce less noise than a throaty V8 or V10; hardly much of a spectacle, say detractors. Yet the racing is still close, close enough to give final round Formula 1 championship deciders and  make the 2016 Le Mans finish was the most sensational since the last lap duel in the golden rose-tinted days of 1969. The technology is still cutting edge, and in some case does have some road car crossover use more than simply building limited edition hypercars. The 2010s-era Le Mans and Formula 1 cars get extraordinary performance using technology that only a few years earlier would have been lucky to power a milk float, let alone a 200 mph racer. Despite this all-electric open-wheel Formula E series, running since 2014 might be the future - the cars are so quiet that the kind of city centre races that have rarely been seen since the 1960s - except in Monaco - are back on the agenda. 

That there is a need for a revival of a "Wow" factor to keep the public interested is being realised. Many drivers during the 2010s Formula 1 hybrid era made it clear they thought the cars were not challenging enough to drive. The cars are getting wider tyres and track again, to make them faster and more physical. The insipid World Rally car  is being beefed up, cars are allowed larger wings and aero devices. More power, more spectacular, more exciting, more fans is the hope. The long inert world of Indycar racing edges closer back to it's 1990s formula, when for a time it challenged Formula 1 for international viewers. The Dakar Rally continues, still with manufacturer interest providing high-tech racers capable of racing through desert dunes. Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Toyota, and even the Mini brand has been revived, now under BMW ownership. World Touring Cars, and World Rallycross series have been successfully reintroduced to the world scene, with factory teams and as entertaining as they ever were. The rise of internet broadcasting and promotion from sponsors has helped maintain interest in one-off events like the Pikes Peak hillclimb - the race's heyday of the post Group B years revived with one-off specials from the likes of Japanese cult hero Noburhiro "Monster" Tajima, who's Suzuki branded rockets were one petrol powered cars but now using electric power to race, and Peugeot's hugely be-winged, mid engine 208 T16 that blew away the race record with Sebastien Loeb at the wheel. Then there are still all kinds of grassroots and club racing cars that show no sign of going away anytime soon. And if none of this works... there is always historic racing, using many of the great cars of the past driven as they were built to be used.