My question comes after watching this video of a 1927 Bugatti race car doing the hill climb at Goodwood Festival of Speed. One can’t help but notice that compared to a modern open-wheel race car, this thing has a narrow track, high center of mass, and skinny tires.
I assume tire technology took a while to develop to the point where wide, flat tread surfaces were possible, but ISTM the basic physics of vehicle handling were already well understood, so I’m not clear on what technological obstacles would have prevented a wider track and a lower CoM.
one big factor was the physical size of the engines. manufacturing technologies were pretty crude in the old days, so if you wanted to make more horsepower you made the engine bigger. Thus why the FIAT “Beast of Turin” has a 28 liter engine.
the '70s and '80s ushered in the era of small displacement engines which revved into the stratosphere to make big power. when you’re getting 1,000 hp from a 1.5 liter engine, you can make it small and mount it slow.
plus, that was when the engine/transaxle became “stressed” members as part of the car’s structure.
Is that a Bugatti Type 35? I’m not sure how you could make it lower and still fit the same engine, steering components, etc. As for track width, if you use the same body/suspension and just extend the axles to make the track wider, it would increase the stress on the axles. If you made the body & frame wider, it would increase air resistance and weight.
I think they developed a bit earlier than you list. I campaigned a Tojeiro Formula 2 in the mid 1970s. It started life as a 1962 Formula Junior. John Tojeiro was the designer of the AC Ace, he is thought of as the “grandfather of the Cobra”.
It had a rear Hewland transaxle with inboard brakes. The original tires were narrow 15". In my upgrades I used low profile 13" Super Vee tires. It was very low, with the new tires my butt was only an inch off the ground.
I really think it took the development of wide profile tires to require anything more sophisticated. And the original suspension worked fine with the new tires with the addition of small front and rear anti-sway bars.
Here is my old car in its early days with the narrow tires:
I think it might also be a case of so many technologies combined in one piece of equipment, that all had so much room for advancement. It might make the overall levels of advancement seem slow. Especially from a purely visual aspect of hindsight.
So many advancements on early racers might not be obviously visible. Racing tests reliability of components driven to their limits. Not crashing helps win races. At some point the overall engineering of the vehicles may have then allowed/forced the racers to then develop the more visible things. Better perfect handling of vehicles that could now go fast for a whole race.
To get a thorough answer to this question you might well need to know what regulations were in place also. There are plenty of innovations that could be permitted in any given category of racing that are not, for various reasons.
I was going to mention this aspect as well. The regulations quite often temper the pace of innovation. It’s not that the technology doesn’t exist, it’s just not allowed on the track. A good example is NASCAR, where the cars could routinely hit more than 250 mph but don’t because of the limits of the track, where those speeds start to become unsafe for the spectators moreso than the drivers. Obligatory link.
The day where you see 300 mph F1 is possible now, but you’re probably not going to see it until a track is purpose built just for such a thing.
Colin Chapman is probably the single person most responsible for the look of modern F1 cars, taking various ideas and putting them into a race package, and that includes far more extensive use of aerodynamics.
Famously he was quoted as stating that the perfect race car was one that was so close to the edge of technology that it would win a race and then break down having just crossed the line - so that gives an idea of just how far he was prepared to push the limits,
He was also well known for pushing the limits of regulations, if it was not specifically banned then he would test it, if it was banned he would try find another solution that offered the same effect.
They won’t be because there is a regulation which doesn’t permit straights longer than c. a mile. And even if one is made, a chicane will likely be built on it somewhere.
[The longest straight I believe is on Spa Francorchamps, c. 1.5 miles, but that likely got grandfathered in, and there is the Eau Rouge kink in the middle of it anyway]
I’m speculating a little, but I’m going with the addition of aerodynamics to a car’s performance package. I remember a segment (from an old, televised, Goodwood event, actually) that the Chaparrel team was the trend-setter as they fought to use aerodynamics to advantage. They (Speedchannel) specifically commented on the shape and style of the cars changing at this time. This fits-in with what **casdave **is alluding to.
I would also dispute Machine Elf’s working assumption that the basic physics of vehicle handling were well understood. The GP era cars were working with different engineering solutions, and their understanding of vehicle handling was different as a result. For example, early Grand Prix era cars ran narrow tires because they worked well with the engineering limitations they faced at the time – e.g., relatively low horsepower engines, bias ply instead of radial tires, and suspension systems designed for those factors.
And as others have noted, regulations are probably the biggest determinants of how open-wheel cars are designed. Even in F1, chassis constructors have always been hemmed in by regulations dictating the external dimensions and engineering limitations of the cars (hence the “formula” in formula 1). Without these regulations, open wheel cars likely would not be open wheel at all given that this design is aerodynamically dirty. An F1 constructor designing a clean sheet design without regulations would probably end up with a close-wheel, closed-cockpit car that uses ground effect and large wheels fitted with low profile tires for better suspension management, instead of the open-wheel, open-cockpit cars with tiny 13-inch wheels we see in F1 today.
Chapman started the mid-rear-engined revolution by making the engine/gearbox combination a structural member of the chassis, something that has continued to this day. The engine doesn’t just sit on a frame, it is integral to the car.
Why that took so long is pretty simple. It was a combination of inertia on the part of the constructors and a belief that having the engine in front was safer. Remember, back then the drivers didn’t even wear seat belts, believing that it was better to be thrown from the car than it was to burn to death in a collision. Putting the engine behind the driver was shocking, because the heaviest part of the car was going to crush the driver in an impact, etc. There were also engineering developments that made it feasible, and it saved a tremendous amount of weight which was something Chapman was passionate about.
That said, a mid-rear-engined car handles very differently than a front-engined car due to the lower polar moment of inertia. Lots of drivers couldn’t make the transition from one to the other. But it proved itself to be the superior race setup over time in open-wheel racing, so it became the standard.
