My tyres were shot and when it started raining again, I lost all grip and was lucky not to hit the wall.” “I didn’t think we were going to make it. “We reduced the fuel mix and the revs and I started coasting through the corners to stay off the power,” said Salo of his radical zero-stop strategy. The 025 was underpowered thanks to using the Ford ED customer engine and struggled with Goodyear tyres that were difficult to switch on.įeb 24 : S5 E8: Prost Grand Prix’s first F1 season – 1997īut it was fundamentally a good car and in the hands of Mika Salo it had its day of days in the 1997 Monaco Grand Prix, running without a pitstop and finishing fifth in the wet. It only became more unsightly once it sprouted X-wings early in the season.īut as Mike Gascoyne, then deputy technical director working under the legendary Harvey Postlethwaite, said of the car: ‘not a beauty, but it worked’. The Tyrrell 025 of 1997 was one of the most curiously angular cars of the 1990s, with its single-pillar front wing support and pointy nose. Whether Mercedes perseveres with the zero-sidepod concept in 2023 remains to be seen – especially with Williams already having ditched its similar design.īut whatever happens, the W13 will live long in the memory as one of the most curious cars of recent times. “We’ve been able to apply those improvements to the current package. If the drivers talk about bouncing now it’s because they have a little bit in one corner at one point, it’s almost noticeable by its absence. “The sidepods are probably a bit of a distraction from the overall issues we’ve had to fix. “It has been useful to see this narrow-bodywork car can perform well in races,” he said. The W13 has struggled with porpoising and bouncing, but this can’t be blamed on the sidepod concept.Īs trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin points out, Mercedes has made big strides during 2022 while retaining the narrow sidepods. It makes for a bizarre looking car that looks ever more strange the closer you get to it thanks to the shrink-wrap effect at the front of the sidepods. This is thanks to the curious shape of the front part of the sidepods, necessitated by the need for a consistent radius of the bodywork to satisfy the regulations. The zero-sidepod design of the Mercedes W13 created one of the oddest-looking F1 cars of the 21st century. That commenced a great run in which Toleman scored in all the season’s remaining races and edged up to ninth in the constructors’ championship, just behind the vastly more established Tyrrell and Lotus teams. Heading to the Dutch Grand Prix in August – round 12 of 15 – drivers Derek Warwick and Bruno Giacomelli had only finished two races each.īut fourth for Warwick at Zandvoort gave Toleman (the forerunner of what’s now Alpine) its first F1 points after nearly three seasons of trying. While controversial, the design was legal and rivals rushed to copy it.Īnd it helped Toleman to vastly improved form in 1983, albeit with results limited by poor reliability. With the width of the bodywork more restricted behind the rear axle, the wider forward part of the rear wing was designed to work with the narrower rear part to produce more downforce. And all because Rory Byrne, then still building a reputation that would make him one of the most celebrated designers in F1 history, hit upon what was then a unique double aerofoil design. There have been some extraordinary rear wing designs in F1 over the years, but none beat the Toleman T183G. Rule changes outlawed it for the following year, with Lotus testing a conventional nose in practice for the 2014 United States Grand Prix ahead of a full switch in 2015. Yet the twin tusk nose itself did work as hoped. The Lotus E22 proved to be an inconsistent, overly-sensitive and uncompetitive car. “Obviously, it is a different structure to a standard nose and it did take quite a lot of iterations to get it to a point where we were happy and it went through the crash test.” “The one thing that is difficult with the nose is that it is quite hard to structurally develop and crash test it,” said Nick Chester, Lotus’s technical director at the time. This was in order to satisfy the regulations that demanded a single nose tip.īoth tusks acted as a crash structure, but it was a struggle to pass the crash tests. The tusk on the right side from the driver’s perspective was just over five centimetres longer than the other. In order to make it legal, the tusk lengths were offset. 2014 was the peak of F1’s weird nose era, and usually it’s the angular, borderline obscene Caterham CT05 that is remembered.īut it was the Lotus team that produced the most bizarre interpretation of the regulations with its infamous twin-tusk design.īy splitting the nose in two, the objective was to allow cleaner airflow between the tusks to the centre of the car by reducing the aerodynamic blockage created by a conventional central nose tip.
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