Thank Frankel It's Friday – The Truth Behind Tyrrell's Six‑Wheel Wonder

The misunderstanding arises from what most people suppose to be the reason for those four tiny front wheels – namely to reduce the car’s frontal area and therefore improve its aerodynamic efficiency. A superficially plausible explanation perhaps, but one that fails to stand much scrutiny. Even with conventional front wheels, the frontal area of such cars is always determined by the much larger rear tyres. Instead the car was born out of frustration: in the mid-1970s a team like Tyrrell had no choice but to use the same engine, gearbox and tyres as almost every other competitor on the grid. Its designer Derek Gardner needed an idea that would give Tyrrell something no other team had, and the six-wheeler was it.

There were, in fact, a few reasons why six wheels appeared to made sense – and none of them had anything to do with frontal area. What Gardner wanted instead was front-end grip. First and perhaps most obviously, four small contact patches puts more rubber on the road than two larger ones. For the same reason four little disc brakes provides a larger swept area than a pair of standard rotors. But the clincher was the fact that a wheel and tyre exposed to a moving flow of air will generate a force at right angles to its cylindrical axis, and the size of that force is directly related to the size of the wheel and tyre. Put simply, the smaller the front wheels, the less lift they generated, therefore the more grip they provided.

There were issues of course and greater mechanical complexity being just one of them. Unsprung weight increased too but the real problem was that on bumpy 1970s tracks the two front axles would lock at different times and the moment that happened the driver had to lift, thereby negating the potential braking advantage. The two drivers left to wrestle with it were Patrick Depailler who loved the car, and Jody Scheckter who did not. He once described it to me as a pile of rubbish – except he didn’t say rubbish.

Maybe, but if so it was a quick pile of rubbish. I think many will remember Jody won the Swedish Grand Prix that year, fewer that Depailler was second, or that they came second again in Monaco, France, Germany, Canada, the USA and Japan. In a season only ever remembered for the titanic tussle between Ferrari’s Niki Lauda and McLaren’s eventual champion James Hunt, no-one now recalls that Tyrrell ended up just three points behind McLaren in the Constructor’s Championship, despite the fact that the P34 didn’t even make its debut until the fourth race of the season.

So 1977 should have been the year of the P34. Back then instead of fielding all-new designs each year, F1 cars often took a season or three to mature: McLaren’s M23 had first raced in 1973, Ferrari’s 312T in 1975. Except that’s not what happened. The great and very cruel irony of the P34 is that it was undone by the very thing it had been born to provide: front end grip. In 1976 Goodyear had been a willing partner in developing a 10-inch slick to clothe those tiny front wheels, but thereafter concentrated on improving rubber the whole grid could use. So while everyone else’s front tyres moved on, Tyrrell’s stood still. Tyrrell tried to compensate by moving radiators and widening the front track but to no avail: having scored 71 points in 1976, and despite the genius that was Ronnie Peterson being drafted in to replace a disillusioned Scheckter, Tyrrell’s once revolutionary car amassed just 27 the following year, ten podium places one year dissolving to just one the next. Project 34 was over.

Images courtesy of LAT