5 replies to this topic

[Ray Bell]

With all this comparison of driver skills, it's not hard to think sometimes of how hard some are on the machinery. Moss, for instance, was often accused of being a car breaker, Brabham of having mechanical sympathy. Gurney brought the Porsche F1 car through to a victory unexpectedly, then proceeded to win the Riverside 500-mile NASCAR race year after year - surely a sign of mechanical sympathy. The Rodriguez brothers, on the other hand, had an early reputation of going too hard in the enduros.
There are other factors, like Moss being the one sent out to break the opposition at Le Mans; drivers who never cracked it for a decent drive; being in a team the year they had a poor gearbox, etc.
Herman Lang was reputed (once again, a Neubauer story) to have pulled into the pits and KNOWN something was wrong with an engine that had a corroded piston - yet it still ran well. Richie Ginther was said to be capable of detecting a change of just a couple of horsepower in an engine.
So what have we in examples that prove or disprove various drivers had mechanical sympathy?

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[This message has been edited by Ray Bell (edited 04-12-2000).]

[BRG]

It was said that Graham Hill would always fiddle so much with his roll bar settings in practice that the mechanics often used to just pretend to make changes. Hill would then promptly go faster. All in the mind perhaps, although as a mechanic himself, you might think that Hill would have been more sensitive to changes.

As for car breakers, I always thought that Alan Jones was a prime example. It was only after Williams made the car bombproof that Jones started to win regularly. And that strength of construction was carried over to Mansell’s days with Williams - another "wring its neck" type of driver!

(Ah, that was always my favourite Walkerism - at Zolder, when the sainted Murray shrieked "…and here comes Williams in the Jones" )





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BRG

"all the time, maximum attack"

[Ray Bell]

Moss tells of his first test day with Astons, and he came in and asked for 1lb extra in the rear tyres. The mechanics - undoubtedly thinking 'who's he kidding?'- did one tyre and left the other. He came in a lap later and told them he thought they must have neglected one tyre. They were on his side from then on...

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

[Dave Ware]

Mario Andretti certainly broke a lot of cars. I read that his approach was "go or blow", either go all out to win or break the car trying to do so.

One of his former employers, someone from the Vels-Parnelli team, said that Mario could break an anvil with a rubber mallet.

I also read that the Porsche mechanics considered Siffert to be hard on his cars. They would certainly know...

Interesting to hear about Moss and the 1 lb of tire pressure. There are a lot of things you can say about A.J. Foyt, not all of them good. In his autobiography he relates a story in which he was called in to help test the Ford Mk IV. McLaren had been working with it for four days at Daytona and couldn't get it to handle. Foyt got in the car, drove to the end of the pit lane, and came back to the pit. "Stagger" is what he reported. Stagger being an oval track trick where you make the outside tire wider than the inside tire. The tire technicians didn't believe him. Foyt was insistant. The tires were measured. Even though they were the same model, there had been an error in the manufacture that resulted in some of the rear tires being 1/4" wider than the others. What impressed me most about this incident is that Foyt didn't even have to get the car up to speed to detect it.

Imagine what he might have done if he had put his mind to F1.

Dave

[buddyt]

Stagger is one rear tire TALLER than the one on the other side, makes the car pull to the side but helps in cornering by makeing the car behave like it was on banking. Mario is thought to have introduced stagger to F1 when he was with Lotus. At a track like Watkins Glen with mostly right hand corners,put the taller tire on right hand side and the time gained would out weight the time lost on the left turns. A J Foyt said in a interview that the didn't do F1 because it didn't pay enought. Prize money is the reason the Grand Prix drivers came to Indy.

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"Speed cost money, how fast do you want to go?"

[Don Capps]

I was supposed to be carrying out a series of tests running on the banked full circuit and I came into the pits before I was scheduled to stop. The pit crew told me it wasn't time to come in, so I replied, "wait a minute, this thing is going to blow up, I can feel the vibration." So they revved it up in the pits and told me it was okay, but I said I didn't want to go out in it because I didn't reckon an engine failure on the banking would be particularly nice. I told them it would blow up after another 12 laps, a figure I'd just mentioned at random. So they put Willy Mairesse in and he had the engine fail on him...after 12 laps. From that point on they thought I was magic!

This is why mechanics wept when Richie Ginther left the Scuderia at the end of the 1961 season for BRM....

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Yr fthfl & hmbl srvnt,

Don Capps

Semper Gumbi: If this was easy, we’d have the solution already…