Doug Nye: Mastering the elements in motor racing

Those high-def images took me way back to sweating blood (in a car – the legs don’t ache half as much) on matching roads, and to much earlier when we once used to rush home from school as quickly as possible just to catch the Shell Film Unit ‘Coupe des Alpes’ movie – on the 1958 Alpine Rally – being played as a trade test transmission during the run-up to BBC 2. There were the likes of Bernard Consten, Keith Ballisat, Edward Harrison, Peter Harper, Pat Moss and Ann Wisdom slipping and sliding their way over some of these Alpine roads confined today to the occasional Historic ‘raid’ or the deadly serious business of professional Grand Tour cycle racing. If it appeals, you can find the movie today on Youtube.

But one of the things which struck me most when considering the risks the cycle riders were taking, whizzing down the Stelvio at 50-60mph, was the frontal area minimizing riding position that many of the top men now adopt – backside down off the saddle onto the crossbar, rump up, head down, weight way forward over the front wheel and that all-consuming unreal confidence of the top competitive sportsman – “It will hurt all the others when they crash – but not me, because I am too good to hit the scenery”… you get the picture?

That streamlined, low frontal area concept is of course what top racing car designers obsessed about for donkey’s years, before they really came to appreciate the benefits that could accrue from really harnessing the airflow around their moving car, and especially between it and the road surface beneath – instead of trying merely to bullet their way through that resistant fluid.

No sir – essentially racing car aerodynamics concentrated for years upon either punching the smoothest, sleekest, most slippery entry into ambient still air, or upon absolutely minimizing frontal area of the racing car (suspension arms, wheels and tyres combined) – to attack what was understood of drag reduction from a different angle.

Back in the days of regular racing at the Goodwood Motor Circuit the low-powered classes like 500cc Formula 3 and subsequently 1100cc Formula Junior really began to concentrate constructors’ minds upon the sleek air penetration and low frontal area attributes of their creations. 

I was reminded of this the other day by another fortuitous find amongst our old photo files. That’s right, you guessed it, these are the ‘organised’ files in which every print is filed under ‘P’ for ‘Photograph’ – so to be perfectly truthful Serendipity rules whenever one goes image hunting.

The particular photo I found shows one of George Henrotte’s former Chequered Flag racing team’s striking Gemini Mark 4 Formula Junior cars in the FJ race supporting the 1963 RAC TT. Driven by Roy Pike it’s hurtling straight through at the chicane, after another car had demolished much of the barrier and was lying mangled athwart the racing line.

The needle-nosed Gemini had been eagerly awaited when it first appeared, in 1962. But as ‘Autosport’ reported in its FJ Seasonal Survey “The Gemini Mk 4…featured inboard suspension, inboard brakes, side-mounted radiators and a six-speed gearbox. After a few teething troubles the Chequered Flag team encountered more than their fair share of bad luck and consequently, it did not win a major event…” Luck hardly improved for the cars into 1963 when the Geminis were run by George Henrotte, but these startling-looking little spears with their hip-mounted podded radiators each side of the cockpit were a pointer towards what would emerge in 1970 as the Lotus 72 – by that time not a needle but a wedge, its centralized weight distribution benefiting from the radiator siting although like the Gemini the design concept had been dictated quite largely by simple aerodynamic penetration…

Of course, that requirement also applied in spades to another great car twice seen in the 1960s at Goodwood – and that was Donald Campbell’s ‘Bluebird’ CN7 – no less – first shaken down on the circuit in July 1960. It was a big thing – as can be appreciated today when one examines its sleek lines in the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu (highly recommended, of course) – but its seductive Norris brothers-designed envelope had the neatest cross-section they considered possible for their Land Speed Record-breaking purposes.

For Campbell, of course, it all went bad that September on the salt flats at Bonneville when he narrowly survived an almighty crash which gave CN7 a terrible beating. The project was then picked-up and re-financed with both financial and technical input from the Rubery Owen BRM-owning engineering group headed by Sir Alfred Owen.

In 1964 ‘Bluebird’ CN7 – by that time sporting a tall tail fin for enhanced directional stability – would raise the wheel-driven World Land Speed Record to 403.1mph (648.8km/h) on Lake Eyre in South Australia. 

So in the final reckoning it too had proved pretty darned effective at punching its way through the air – just like those crossbar-hugging downhill-hero push-bikers – folded up like paper-clips and running around 50-60mph in this month’s Giro d’Italia… 

Images courtesy of The GP Library