4 replies to this topic

[Jhope]

I was looking through some pictures of the 1981 season, and I came the realization that at the beginnig of the season, there were skirts on every car on the grid, then all of a sudden, they are gone from the cars. The question I ask now is, at what point of the season did the ban on skirts happen. I know this led to Brabham's ingenious hydraulic suspension that squashed the sidepods to the track when rolling.

[fines]

Sliding skirts were banned from the beginning of the season, only at the non-championship South African GP were they used. This, of course, led to the "hydraulic cars", at which point Citroën were seriously considering an entry into F1... :just kidding:

[Jhope]

So basically the skirts were allowed, but they were not allowed to slide on the track surface. As a result of this, Brabham took it to the extreme and created their hydraulic suspension. Did any other teams follow Brabham's lead, and create hydraulic suspension? If so, which teams?

Moving forward a bit, to 1982, Venturi's were banned at the end of the season due to an increased risk in serious accidents. As far as I can remember, there were only two severe accident involving ground-effects cars that can be related in a weird way to the Venturi tunnels. The first was Villeneuve's, and the second was Peroni's. Can these accidents be caused by the ground effects? The banning of ground-effects was good then because the resulting rides were pretty uncomfortable on the drivers, and I'm sure the risks of accidents were rising as the Turbo era came of age. I'm sure that if they retuned in today's F1, driver comfort would be greatly improved.

[fines]

Brabham appeared with the hydraulic suspension at the first championship race in Long Beach, but it didn't work properly. From the South American races on the advantage showed and the team dominated to a rather ridiculous degree, until the other teams followed suit during the European season. Even the poorer teams such as Osella or ATS jumped the bandwagon pretty quickly, so that by mid-season (British GP, I think) all the cars were equipped with hydraulic suspension.

The skirts were banned because the cornering speeds rose exceedingly quickly, prompting a response from the governing body. However, designer genius quickly undid the new rules and the new breed of cars seemed to be even more dangerous, because suspension travel was limited to a very small amount. So the skirts were to be allowed back for 1982, but had to remain fixed to the chassis/bodywork. This did not help with the suspension travel and in the end flat bottoms were decreed mandatory, thus limiting the venturi effect to the wings and the diffuser.

I wouldn't say that the Villeneuve and Pironi accidents were *caused* by the "ground-effect" cars, but the general feeling back then was that the cars, once they became airborne, went violently out of control because of the stall in the underbody airflow, besides the fact that they were travelling much quicker than they would have without the venturis.

[Gil Bouffard]

My complaint about the skirts was that they made so much noise that you couldn't hear the engine.

I remember standing out at Hugen Holze at Zandvoort listening to these "modern," Formula One cars clattering around like buggies. I also remember a spectator at Hockenheim asking me if there was something broken on Andretti's Lotus because it was making so much noise.

I'm a sorta esoteric kinda guy. I didn't like the 935K3 Porsches because you couldn't hear the motor until after the car went by. (You could hear the distinctive wastegate chirp which I once described as sounding like sneakers on a basketball court.)

I liked the Turbo Capris because you heard the engine.

Gil Bouffard