The current generation of F1 cars are the fastest racing cars ever produced. They are lap-time-shredding monsters and I for one like them. Yes they don’t have that visceral, raw quality that the old V10s had, but as an engineering exercise they are second to none.
The problem though is that modern F1 appears to be too sanitised and the cars too easy to drive. They are so efficient, the set-ups so honed through endless simulator time, that a qualifying lap looks easy. One turn of the wheel, no wheel spin, no lurid slides.
The reality of course is that they are not easy to drive, no racing car is. As technology progresses, cars just become more efficient. They’re still on the edge and the skill is just the same as 70 years ago, reaching the edge and keeping it on the edge. I do sometimes wonder if there was an era where the cars were so hard to drive that taking it to the edge took a greater level of skill and risk. Cars which were physically hard to keep on the track, cars which generated the biggest step up in performance from one era to another. I think such an era does exist, the first turbo era.
The first turbo era ran from 1977 to 1988. The engines were only 1.5 litres, but eventually generated up to 3 times more power than the ubiquitous Cosworth DFV, which had dominated for over a decade. Renault pioneered the turbo engine in F1, even though the likes of Porsche, BMW and Offenhauser had used turbos in other disciplines of racing.
The first Renault turbo appeared at the British Grand Prix in 1977 and was quickly dubbed the ‘Yellow Teapot’ due to the amount of times it would come back into the pits steaming. They continued to develop the concept and won their first race at the 1979 French Grand Prix, with driver/engineer Jean-Pierre Jabouille behind the wheel. Soon enough, BMW, Ferrari, Ford, Alfa Romeo, Porsche, Honda, Hart and Motori Moderni were all building turbo charged F1 engines. F1 had become about one thing. Raw power.
To see a turbo-era qualifying lap must have been something special. In 1985 at the British Grand Prix, Keke Rosberg stubbed out his Marlboro, said “let’s do it” to his engineer and climbed into his Williams Honda. There was a tell tale haze of black mist behind the Williams as he left the pits, sign that the boost was off the clock and the waste gates taped up.
As Keke completed the flying lap, blasting through the Woodcote chicane, the car started to slide, he kept his foot planted, leaving thick black lines on the road as he crossed the timing beam. Keke got pole, it was the quickest F1 lap ever recorded, at an average speed of 160.9mph, and he did it all with a slow puncture. Power had overcome even the deflating Goodyear tyre.
It’s difficult to accurately talk horsepower figures with the turbo cars, mainly because nobody really knows how much power they produced. Indeed, the figures I’ve quoted below can differ depending on what you read or who you listen to. Take the Honda for example, which Rosberg used. Honda’s dyno only went up to 1,000bhp, but the V6 (running at 5.5 bar turbo boost pressure) apparently achieved that at 9,500rpm, and they revved them a lot higher in qualifying. The best guess puts the Honda at between 1,200bhp and 1,300bhp. That wasn’t the most powerful engine though.
Some say that real mavericks of the turbo era were BMW. Unlike most of the other manufacturers, BMW didn’t develop a V6, but an inline 4. They even used the engine block from a 316 road car. Early on it produced around 550bhp and it was slotted into the back of Gordon Murray’s neat little Brabham BT51.
A last minute rule change at the end of 1982 meant that all the cars which were in an advanced state of design for 1983 were scrapped. Ground effect skirts were banned, the cars now had to be flat bottomed. Realising the effect this would have on traction, Murray shifted as much weight as he could towards the rear of the car. The car had power as well as traction, it was a great package and it looked stunning. Probably the prettiest turbo car.
Nelson Piquet in the Brabham and Alain Prost in the Renault were fighting it out for the championship in 1983. Then BMW seemed to find more power as the season progressed. They had unearthed a secret fuel used by the Luftwaffe in the second world war. They tried it in testing and not only did it improve the power a lot, but it also proved to be very volatile.
The story goes that a Brabham mechanic was filling the fuel tank one afternoon and some of the fuel landed on his plastic Casio watch strap. Within seconds the watch was on the floor, the fuel had burned through the strap. It’s amazing to think Piquet and team mate Ricardo Patrese drove with this stuff effectively strapped to their backs! By 1986 the BMW was producing 1,350bhp in qualifying. But the BMW wasn’t the most powerful engine either.
F1 turbo engine pioneers Renault had won plenty of races as a manufacturer team by the end of 1985, but no championships. The team pulled out at the end of that year, but Lotus continued to use their engine in 1986 in their achingly gorgeous 98t.
If you get a chance to see a Lotus 98t in action, drop everything and go. Not to hear it on song, but hear it on tick over. It’s a difficult noise to explain, but the ignition blips the throttle when it’s idling, making a ‘barp-barp-barp’ noise which somehow sounds quite menacing. That was typical of the turbo era, even the engines on tick over sounded good. Ayrton Senna used his 98t to devastating effect in 1986 by putting the car on pole for half of the F1 races. Much of this performance was down to the engine, which the Renault engineers estimated was producing 1,560bhp at full boost. I’ll leave it there.
It wasn’t just horsepower numbers which were impressive. The cars started breaking speed trap records too. For example, at Monaco in 1986, Nelson Piquet apparently was clocked at 192mph as he left the tunnel and hit the brakes for the chicane. At the Italian Grand Prix that same year, Gerhard Berger was clocked at 218mph in his Benetton BMW.
Imagine being a young driver coming into F1 at the time, like British F3 champion Johnny Dumfries? He would have been used to racing with less than 200bhp, then would have stepped up to F1 with an extra 1,000bhp to deal with. In an F3 car coming out of Clearways at Brands Hatch, Johnny would’ve hit maybe 125mph past the finish line. Stefan Johansson’s Formula 1 Ferrari was timed at 185mph at the same spot in 1986. Then down to the fastest part of the circuit, Pilgrims Drop into Hawthorns, Johnny’s F3 car might be nudging 140mph. Nelson Piquet’s Brabham BMW was clocked at 199mph there in 1985.
To this day the drivers from the 1980s get misty eyed when talking about the turbo cars. Gerhard Berger says Monaco qualifying in the Benetton BMW in 1986 was the biggest kick of his career. The first time Gerhard tested an F1 car was at Zandvort for ATS, again with the BMW turbo engine. He laughs as he says “I wasn’t driving the car, it was driving me”.
He hadn’t a clue where to brake into the first corner called ‘Tarzan’. He just wasn’t used to arriving at it so quickly. He walked down there and watched where the quick guys were braking, he memorised the spot and on his first flying lap hit the brakes, it worked and team boss Gunther Schmidt commented that he was braking nice and deep into the corner. Not exactly the simulator based training the modern drivers get.
When Elio de Angelis was killed in testing in 1986, Derek Warwick took over his seat at Brabham. Derek had spent half of the season driving 700bhp Jaguar sportscars and was asked how the transition had been between the two. Derek simply replied “the power of the BMW engine in qualifying was”, he paused, struggling to think of an adjective, “amazing, incredible”.
Even experienced drivers like Jackie Stewart were amazed. When he tested the 1988 Lotus Honda, he commented on the incredible power from the turbo engine, even if by then the turbo boost pressure had been reduced to 2.5 bar. Jackie said the power “cracked on” and was not progressive. He said everything came in with a “movement and a jerk”, not what he was used to, balancing Tyrrell Cosworths on the throttle. Stewart also tested the 1986 Benetton Ford, he liked that more and promptly smashed the Oulton Park lap record.
The cars of course had a manual gearbox with a clutch pedal, something we’ve not seen in F1 now for over 25 years. Due to the ferocious power, the drivers simply struggled to change gear quick enough before the engine hit the rev-limiter. It wasn’t uncommon to see flames out of the exhausts as the limiter kicked in, normally with a cracking noise. The drivers struggled to use full throttle too, mainly because they would get wheel spin up to fourth gear.
As the cars generated more and more power, they started sprouting larger rear wings. The power of the engine simply overcame the drag, but were still lively though. The Curva Grande at Monza, simply an ‘acceleration zone’ these days, was “terrifying” according to Martin Brundle. Often the drivers would hit the throttle as soon as they came off the brakes into a corner, so long was the turbo lag that it would sometimes take seconds for all the power to come in. If they got it wrong it would end up in a big drift on the corner exit.
Reliability was an issue for such a stressed engine, but other parts were under pressure too. After qualifying sessions the engines and gearboxes were replaced. Because the gearbox was so susceptible to failing, drivers with that mechanical sympathy and the ability to match engine revs to the road speed during gear changes excelled. Drivers like Alain Prost and Michele Alboreto. There were also tales of solid steel driveshafts twisting and warping due to the torque of the engine. Rear tyres often lasted a handful of laps before they were blistered, with so much heat going through them that the compound literally boiled.
The technological advancement in this era was considerable, notwithstanding the development of the turbo engine itself. Renault had a blown diffuser, long before Red Bull used it to such devastating effect over 15 years later. Renault also tried cooling the fuel to such a degree that it reduced in mass (but not weight). This was so they could literally get more fuel into the tank. Engine Control Unit (ECU) technology progressed rapidly, both to improve power and drivability of the engine, but also to improve fuel consumption.
Fuel consumption was probably the biggest complaint about this era. It was commonplace to see drivers weaving on the last lap, trying to slosh what was left of the fuel into the engine. Many a race was lost on the last lap due to a dry tank. Some drivers were better at managing fuel more than others. Keke Rosberg, who was perhaps the archetypal turbo era driver, wasn’t great at it. Clive James once said “if Keke Rosberg has a fuel gauge, he doesn’t know where it is” as he frequently ran dry in 1986. He was the opposite of Alain Prost who race after race judged it to perfection and received the nickname ‘the professor’!
Whereas I love all motorsport, from all eras, I do think that modern F1 should take a glance over its shoulder from time to time to see where it came from. The modern cars are technological marvels, they’re extremely fast, but they are lacking something.
They’re not snarling, fire spewing monsters. I would love for the drivers to be more gladitorial, saying what they like, finishing a race looking like they’ve been through it. I look at the modern cars and think ‘yeah I could do that’, even though I couldn’t. I look at the footage from the 1980s and I know I couldn’t do that, and actually I wouldn’t want to do that. That was the turbo era.
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