The innovators of Formula 1 have helped to transform life as we know it in the 21st century. So much of the technology we take for granted today, and that’s not restricted to automotive enhancements, has roots in the relentless progress of Grand Prix racing
Progress that we will be recognising in unprecedented fashion when the Goodwood Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard brings together its largest ever celebration to mark the 75th anniversary of F1. And at the very heart of that celebration will be a salute to the greatest minds the world of motorsport has ever seen, the innovators.
F1 has been at the forefront of automotive and technological engineering since its inception in 1946. It began as a quest for power, with the likes of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati each producing ever more powerful engines through the late 1940s and early 1950s, with Alfa eventually breaking through the 400PS barrier with the 159 in 1951.
That growth in power may well have continued into the 1960s, were it not for Charles Cooper and his son John, who from their small garage in Surrey developed a car propelled by a diminutive four-cylinder Coventry-Climax engine producing barely 200PS. It was called the Cooper T43, and remains to this day the most influential innovation in F1 history.
The Cooper Car Company had achieved minimal success through the 1950s as it struggled to keep up with the mighty Italians, but turned up at the 1957 Monaco Grand Prix with the T43 and immediately scored points with Jack Brabham. This was a historic moment, because it was the first time a car had competed in F1 with the engine positioned behind the driver.
A year later Stirling Moss drove a Cooper T43, run by the Rob Walker Racing Team, to a victory at the Argentinian Grand Prix that stunned the F1 paddock. Cooper had honed its lightweight and more nimble mid-engined configuration and the T43 was now a car with the capability to see off the supreme power of Maserati and Ferrari. The final straw came at the next race, when Maurice Trintignant won the Monaco Grand Prix at the wheel of an even more keenly developed Cooper T45, and every manufacturer on the grid, seeing the writing on the wall, was moved to begin developing its own mid-engined cars.
Cooper won the Manufacturers’ Championship in 1959 and 1960, and by 1961, anyone who wanted a hope of succeeding in F1 arrived on the grid with a mid-engined chassis. Even Ferrari, who had been vehemently against the idea, conceded with the development of the ‘sharknose’ 156. The sport of F1 was changed forever.
But Cooper, and the rest of the grid, were caught napping in 1962, when another small British manufacturer arrived with a new surprise package.
Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus had become a prolific member of the F1 paddock, providing cars to numerous entrants and finally achieving its first victory with the rear-engined Lotus 21 in 1961. There was plenty of subsequent interest in Chapman’s next design, the Lotus 24, but what he hadn’t disclosed to his customers was that actually, he had done them all dirty.
While they all turned up with their exciting new Lotus cars, Team Lotus arrived in Zandvoort with a brand-new concept. The Lotus 25 was a remarkable step forward in automotive design, pioneering the monocoque chassis philosophy that remains a fundamental baseline for modern F1 machines.
Translating as ‘single shell', the monocoque structure supported all of the loads without the need for an internal tube frame, which meant substantial gains in not only weight but crucially body rigidity. The Lotus 25 weighed roughly half as much as the 24, and was said to be three times stiffer, which made it much more settled and assured when cornering. It was a dramatic shifting of the goalposts that confirmed Chapman as an innovative force, and brought Team Lotus to the forefront of global motorsport.
Using the ‘62 season as a test bed for this new philosophy, Lotus spent the majority of that year ironing out technical issues stemming from the 25’s ambitious design. Even so, Jim Clark was in contention for the World Championship before he retired from the lead of the final race in South Africa. The following year it was the class of the field, as Clark claimed seven victories and waltzed to his first Drivers’ title.
Almost 20 years later, Lotus pushed the envelope further still with the introduction of the first monocoque constructed from carbon-fibre composite in the Lotus 88 in 1981. The car never raced however, and the McLaren MP4/1 stole the show as the first car to feature a carbon monocoque in a Grand Prix later that season.
Not all innovations catch on, though. Aside from its Championship successes with Jackie Stewart in the early 1970s, Tyrrell is perhaps most famous for the P34, which kickstarted the eye-catching six-wheeler fad that caught the attention of the paddock during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Regulations at that time specified a maximum width for the front wing that meant standard size front tyres would protrude beyond the wing’s profile and inhibit airflow. The idea for a six-wheeled car was centred around the desire to tuck a smaller wheel behind the front wing. Reducing the diameter of the front tyres to just ten inches would result in a substantial loss of front end grip, but designer Derek Gardner addressed that problem by adding an extra axle and effectively doubling front end grip. It was an audacious idea, which introduced several new complexities around the steering and suspension, but drivers Jode Scheckter and Patrick Depailler were said to be pleasantly surprised by how easy the P34 was to drive.
That was reflected in the P34’s immediate impact as a points scoring car at its second attempt in 1976. Its third outing at Monaco yielded a double podium for Tyrrell, and it went one better a race later as Scheckter led home a dominant one-two for the team at the Swedish Grand Prix. Several more podiums followed and Tyrrell eventually ended the season third in the Constructors’ Championship.
Ultimately, the six-wheeled concept proved to be too complex, too heavy, and too inconsistent to be considered a viable option by the wider grid, and although Williams experimented with its own six-wheeled version of the FW08 in 1982, a six-wheeled car would never race again in F1.
But it wasn’t just the Tyrrell team that was busy trying to break the mould in the late ‘70s, Lotus was at it again in 1977 when it arrived on the grid with a car that would send a shockwave through F1. Having introduced the idea of wings to generate downforce with the Lotus 49 in 1968, Colin Chapman sought to take them away again with a new concept: ground effect.
The idea was inspired by the de Havilland Mosquito fighter bomber, where Chapman attempted to turn his F1 cars into inverted aeroplanes. But rather than simply relying on large front and rear wings to generate downforce, Chapman turned the entire car into a wing, sculpting the underfloor and the sidepods to draw airflow underneath the car to effectively glue it to the ground.
Astonishing performance was the result, and Lotus’ ground effect philosophy initiated a paradigm shift in the design of F1 cars that saw anyone hoping for a chance at victory chasing their own ground effect concepts.
Blown away by the dominance of the Lotus 79 that followed in 1978, the rest of the grid were forced to try and catch up, but it was Brabham that pushed the envelope furthest with arguably the most remarkable car in F1’s 75-year history.
The Brabham BT46B was a masterful piece of engineering. Developed by Gordon Murray at the behest of Bernie Ecclestone, the ‘fan car’ threatened to make a mockery of Grand Prix racing as it annihilated the field in its only outing at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix. Niki Lauda said the team did ‘our best to avoid pole’ as the Brabhams ran on full tanks of fuel in qualifying to avoid what this new car was capable of.
Even as he tried to hide the BT46B’s true potential in the race itself, Lauda, who could take corners at vastly higher speeds than his competitors due to the aerodynamic benefits of the fan, won by a massive margin. The result was met with outrage and concern from the rest of the paddock, and Ecclestone, who had his own ambitions to consider, decided it would be prudent to voluntarily withdraw the BT46B from competition.
While all this was going on, Renault was busy working on its own game-changing innovation. The regulations had for a long time allowed for 3.0-litre naturally aspirated engines, but there was an option for teams to run smaller 1.5-litre turbo or supercharged engines. No-one had taken that avenue until the French manufacturer decided to test the waters with its experimental RS01 in 1977. It made its debut at the British Grand Prix, but was catastrophically unreliable as it retired from 19 of its 26 starts until it was finally replaced midway through the 1979 season.
Renault was right to persevere, because the performance benefit of a turbocharged engine was obvious, if the team could get around the troublesome complexity and inefficiency that rendered it woefully uncompetitive in its early forms. The RS10 was a marked improvement. Although still hamstrung by relentless reliability issues, the long-suffering Jean-Pierre Jabouille scored the first Grand Prix victory for a turbocharged F1 car at the 1979 French Grand Prix.
That was a huge moment that defined the following decade for the sport, as turbocharging became the preferred method of propulsion through the 1980s. Ferrari, Honda, TAG-Porsche, BMW and the rest of the grid returned to F1’s roots as the quest for power resumed in earnest. By 1986, engines were producing in excess of 1,000PS in qualifying modes, the BMW was reported to develop 1,400PS, and the FIA moved to intervene in order to reduce the rapidly escalating speeds and cost of development. Turbo charging was banned from 1989, only to return in 2014.
But as quickly as the FIA could stem the team’s relentless pursuit of performance, the next innovation was being introduced. In 1992, it was Williams that arrived at the first race of the season with a trick up its sleeve.
The FW14B, often recognised as one of the most technologically advanced F1 cars of all time, implemented a brand-new technology called active suspension. A computerised system that could adjust all four corners of the car on the fly to ensure an optimum balance on a corner-by-corner basis. Such was this car’s performance advantage that drivers Nigel Mansell and Ricardo Patrese would regularly be two seconds per lap faster than the rest of the field.
So dominant was the FW14B that the FW15 that was intended to replace it was never used, and active suspension was eventually outlawed ahead of the 1994 season.
The creativity and bravery of F1 car designers have led to many of the world’s most jaw dropping technical innovations. The likes of Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray, Adrian Newey and Ross Brawn have each contributed to the engineering excellence of F1, and that relentless desire to push the boundaries continues apace.
In more recent years, we’ve seen championships decided by extraordinary innovations, the double diffuser caught the sport’s greatest by surprise as Brawn GP completed an unprecedented season in 2009. Red Bull dominated with its own blown diffuser concept through the early 2010s, Mercedes sought to maintain its own run of championships with its dual-axis steering system that aided front tyre warming, and McLaren raised eyebrows with its F-Duct.
F1 will always be a hub of innovation and engineering excellence. In the past 75 years we’ve seen the sport evolve beyond recognition, and we can’t wait to see the timeline of progress laid out in the metal at the 2025 Festival of Speed.
The Festival of Speed takes place from Thursday 10th-Sunday 13th July 2025. Tickets are on sale now.
Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.
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