15 replies to this topic

[nmansellfan]

OK, so 'H-pattern gearbox era' spans a hell of a long time, and I won't attempt to tie down a start date - but we know that in GP racing, aside from the odd pre-selector gearbox equipped car and cars like the Lotus 76, every car on a GP grid had three pedals and a H-pattern gearbox up to the end of 1988, slowly declining with the introduction of the semi-automatic gearbox and sequential shifter until Forti's FG01 ditched it's manual gearbox and went semi-auto during 1995.

 

I have read many snippets of info and heard interviews etc. over the years about drivers 'driving without the clutch' during a race, due to clutch failure.  The common theme being, they sometimes shifting gears without the use of the clutch pedal - the clutch itself was still transferring drive from the engine to the gearbox, just that it could not be disengaged by the pedal.  But that was the exception rather than the rule during racing.  However was there any point in time before H-pattern boxes were phased out, when the clutch pedal wasn't needed to be pressed to get a clean shift, at least with some cars? Watching onboard cameras over the years, at least from the mid-80's onwards it appears that some drivers were't using the clutch in a healthy car, at least on upshifts.  There are of course some videos out there where it was obvious the clutch pedal was still being used - Patrick Depailler at Monaco with the bodyless Tyrrell P34 for AFAVA in '77, Ukyo Katayama at the Japanese GP in '93 where a foot cam was installed (I think the Tyrrell 021 was a sequential gearbox car as well).

 

It's not GP racing, but the few modern H-pattern equipped single seaters that are aout there - mainly Formula Ford cars - don't need the clutch pedal once the car is rolling.  So was there a point where some gearboxes on Formula One cars became developed enough that it was possible to regularly shift without the clutch pedal?

 

My personal experience is limited to me being lazy in some road cars - perfectly possible to shift without the clutch pedal, but I never done it with the throttle wide open...

[wheadon1985]

Believe it or not given what is written on the internet but the Forti FG01 did have a sequential box, just with a forward/back selector where the normal H-Pattern gear knob would be. It never ran with a H-Pattern at all but didn't always have paddle shifters on the steering wheel either. This was confirmed by Forti designers and mechanics on an italian based podcast about the team and I have also seen photographic evidence of this set up in the Forti. 

 

Link for the Forti podcast - https://www.youtube....=TheForgottenF1

 

Video of Sequential Gear Knob - https://www.youtube....n-MichelBoileau

Edited by wheadon1985, 18 October 2024 - 13:05.

[Bloggsworth]

If you learned to drive with crash gearboxes and central accelerator pedals, clutchless gearchanges were but a short step from double-declutching, and something I always did when driving a VW beetle owing to an aversion to having my kneecap hitting my left ear when changing gear.

[midgrid]

Thank you for this information - many years ago, I wrote the bulk of the Forti and Forti FG01 English Wikipedia articles and none of the sources I could find made this distinction, simply indicating that the team started testing a semi-automatic 'box during the final race weekends of the 1995 season, but not racing it until 1996 due to reliability problems. Presumably the famous photo of Roberto Moreno launching his FG01 off a kerb at Suzuka may be related to this.

On a related note, is there a definitive list of when the contemporary teams switched from manual to semi-automatic units, with Ferrari first and Forti last?

[Catalina Park]

With a dog ring box like a Hewland you don't need to use the clutch on upshifts. It's cleaner without. 
With the downshift you basically just need the clutch to get out of gear. 

[GregThomas]

With a dog ring box like a Hewland you don't need to use the clutch on upshifts. It's cleaner without. 
With the downshift you basically just need the clutch to get out of gear. 

 

This is true - but between the "crash" box and the dog box came the Porsche synchromesh box.  Coming into use in race cars from 1952 on I believe that upward changes can also be done without the clutch.

The dog box will ultimately be a faster change but the Porsche type was a definite advance at the time.

Edited by GregThomas, 19 October 2024 - 06:06.

[chr1s]

This is what  Niki Lauda said on the subject in the "The Art and Science of Grand Prix driving"  Like all Formula gear boxes this one (Ferrari 312T) is non-synchromesh, which means that I can change up like lightning WITHOUT de clutching, but I have to double-de clutch and touch the accelerator when changing down.  

[Nigel Beresford]

Drivers typically only used the clutch on downshifts, as stated.

On upshifts they would momentarily partially lift in order to cut the torque keeping the dogs engaged, allowing the separation needed. When we introduced the motorcycle-style sequential shift at Penske in mid 1992 (because Tracy kept breaking the H-pattern shift parts) we also developed a no-lift-shift which (in our original system) was a sensor on a gear linkage rod which sensed a slight movement in the rod and momentarily cut the engine torque allowing the dogs to separate. This principle was something I had read about in a motorcycle racing magazine and then subsequently discussed in a conversation with Doug Toland who was a leading Ducati rider in the AMA Superbike Championship at that time. By happy coincidence we were preparing to test at the same track where they were just finishing up, so I grabbed the opportunity to ask them about how they did it and whether it was worthwhile. Toland was very enthusiastic so I told our senior electronics engineer, John Faivre, about the idea and asked him whether we could do it. Ever-brilliant, John said “yeah we can do that”, so I drew up the mechanical bits and John sorted out the electronics. As the system developed we worked closely with Xtrac to reduce the number of dogs in engagement (from 8 to 6) in order to improve the probability of getting a clean shift and no dog-to-dog clashing, plus we worked on reducing the undercut angle to make it easier to separate the dogs. This was one of several innovative systems we developed in 92 and 93 which underpinned the dominance we enjoyed in 94.

(In)famously Al Unser Jr. rather upset Patrick Head by insisting that the Penske ‘box shifted faster than the Williams semi auto box he tested at Estoril.

Edited by Nigel Beresford, 21 October 2024 - 13:34.

[F1matt]

I remember watching a race in 1993 at Portland when Nigel Mansell held off Emerson Fittipaldi until there was a shower mid race and Mansell outbreaked himself letting Emmo through and then proceeded to hold him off for the remainder of the race, he looked ultra smooth that day. I guess Newman Haas Lola were still running the H pattern then.

[Nigel Beresford]

I think in terms of gearboxes they were a long way behind. We were running an aluminium cased (to take weight off the overloaded front Goodyears), transverse, no-lift, sequential shift box and playing with viscous diffs and all sorts. We worked very closely with Xtrac. I don’t suppose Hewland and NHR / Lola had quite the same synergy.

Edited by Nigel Beresford, 21 October 2024 - 15:01.

[john aston]

Niki Lauda's downchanges were wonderfully fast and rev perfect , but I doubt if he literally double declutched . The expression is often mistakenly applied to  the simple act of blipping the throttle to match the revs on the downchange, even when the clutch is depressed once only  . Of course it is literally true in the case of more vintage machinery (or the 2nd to 1st change on the 2CV I once owned ), where it is clutch /into neutral/blip/clutch into gear ,   but in the case of Lauda era cars the clutch, if used at all , was depressed once with a heel and toe rev match. 

[chr1s]

Niki Lauda's downchanges were wonderfully fast and rev perfect , but I doubt if he literally double declutched . The expression is often mistakenly applied to  the simple act of blipping the throttle to match the revs on the downchange, even when the clutch is depressed once only  . 

Agreed, in fact I remember reading somewhere a quote from Alain Prost who says pretty much this, I think he was talking about the Hewland during his first stint at McLaren, I'll try and find it, if I can remember where I read it!

[nmansellfan]

Thanks all for the replies, very interesting and I have learnt a fair bit here. With mention of Niki Lauda, years ago on TNF someone posted audio from them being trackside at the Nurburgring in either '75 or '76, with beautiful almost isolated sounds of Hunt and Lauda coming down through the 'box info a corner. Hunt's shifts sounded robust and spaced equally as he brought his speed down, but Lauda's was akin to a machine gun - the speed he shifted at, through each gear, was almost unbelievable.
The complete opposite to Prost's style, who favoured, at least in the turbo era going by AFAVA onboard camera clips, going straight to the required gear via a sustained throttle blip.

One more gearbox related anecdote - a few years ago I was spectating at Oulton at the Gold Cup meet with a family member who used to race pre-'74 FF1600 in the 80s / early 90s, and on came the pre-'74 cars for practice. Peter Eccleston came past and flat shifted from second to third as he went up Clay Hill, out of the Knickerbrook chicane. You could hear the revs sharply rise in between coming out of one cog and meshing into the next inside the Hewland, though his shifts were really quick. 'He used to do that when we raced each other.' said my mum's partner. 'Peter reckoned it was faster than lifting, but you would only do it wrong once...'

Edited by nmansellfan, 22 October 2024 - 22:06.

[chr1s]

Here are a couple of passages from Alain Prost biography you might find interesting, talking about his time at the Winfield driving school

 

Prost: "I'd come from karting where you have an engine which doesn't have a gearbox, I'd obviously driven road cars and just changed gear like any normal driver. I didn't even know what double-de clutching was and in a single-seater you are practically obliged to do that."

 

Michel Hugon: "We used the link section (at Paul Ricard) and you needed second gear there. What he (Prost) did was go from 5th straight to 2nd instead of following the 5th-4th-3rd-2nd sequence, double-de clutching each time.  We didn't double-de clutch at all !

It happened that Richard Dallest, a driver who was in Formula Renault at the time and champion of Europe, was present and Simon (de Lautour, the school instructor)  said to him "How do you double-de clutch?" and Dallest replied, "I never do, with the Hewland gearbox you don't need to..." 

 

Simon de Lautour: "Dallest said, "I can do that", he got into a Renault van but he didn't know how to do it either!  He and they thought it was blipping the throttle as you changed down, not the distinct movements it really is". 

 

This seems to confirm what John said in his post, that double-de clutching in racing terms is not quite the same thing as it is for vintage machinery. 

[JonnyA]

I remember reading somewhere, long ago, that when at McLaren and using a semi-automatic gearbox, Prost had his car programmed to miss out some gears on down-changes. Apparently Senna was quite upset when he found out, as he'd been going down through all the gears.

Can't remember the source, sorry.

[nmansellfan]

Maybe that was Williams Jonny, as Mclaren were still running a H-pattern when Alain left at the end of '89.  I think the FW15C (and maybe a couple of other semi-auto cars in '93 year) had a button that automatically shifted down from a certain gear to another certain gear (6th to 1st for a hairpin for example) with a single button press, but it still went down through each gear as part of that process, at least on the onboards i've seen (doesn't mean that there wasn't such a way to miss gears out though).  I can't remember the year - 2000's sometime? - but eventually fully 'automatic' shifting from one button like this was banned.