The First Of The Losers

[Andrea_Moda_Rules]

By the way, didn't Pironi break his legs, not lose them? I thought he was back in F1 in later years before dying in offshore powerboat racing.

Not sure if you know but just to clarify, He Tested F1 cars with a view to returning to racing, cannot recall the team, might of been Ligier, but was killed sadly before he could return.

 

[KekeTheKing]

Excellent work TBY, very interesting read.

I have a question about Ronnie Peterson that some of you guys might be able to help with. Did he actually have the pace to beat Andretti in 1978?

I've heard it claimed many times that Ronnie was the quicker driver, and that Mario was given the chance to take the title in 78 because he had helped develop the Lotus in 1976-77 while Peterson had left to race for Tyrrell. It seems to me that James Hunt never missed an opportunity to put down Mario and say that Ronnie was the one that should have won in 1978. His comments during the 1984 German GP sum up his feelings on the situation quite succinctly.

I don't really have an opinion on the 1978 Lotus situation, but a quick check of the qualifying results doesn't really back up the notion that Peterson was the faster driver that was forced to play second fiddle to Andretti simply because of a contractual obligation. I realize that in those days qualifying wasn't as important as it is today, and that if a driver was genuinely faster in the race, he was most likely going to find a way past. But the fact still remains that Mario dominated Ronnie 11-3 in qualifying throughout the 78 season.

1978 Qualifying Results

R1 - ARG: MA - Pole, RP - P3; Mario 1-0
R2 - BRA: RP - Pole, MA - P3; Even 1-1
R3 - RSA: MA - P2, RP - P12; Mario 2-1
R4 - USW: MA - P4, RP - P6; Mario 3-1
R5 - MON: MA - P4, RP - P7; Mario 4-1
R6 - BEL: MA - Pole, RP - P7; Mario 5-1
R7 - SPA: MA - Pole, RP - P2; Mario 6-1
R8 - SWE: MA - Pole, RP - P4; Mario 7-1
R9 - FRA: MA - P2, RP - P5; Mario 8-1
R10 - GBR: RP - Pole, MA - P2; Mario 8-2
R11 - GER: MA - Pole, RP - P2; Mario 9-2
R12 - AUS: RP - Pole, MA - P2; Mario 9-3
R13 - NED: MA - Pole, RP - P2; Mario 10-3
R14 - ITA: MA - Pole, RP - P5; Mario 11-3

Andretti - 6 Poles, Avg. Start = 1.85
Peterson - 3 Poles, Avg. Start = 4.14

Their race results aren't much different, Andretti winning 9-3 before Italy, but many people casually chalk that up to the fact that Ronnie was the contracted No. 2 driver, dutifully trailing Mario home as he was instructed to do. But a closer examination there shows that he finished just one spot behind him on four occasions, albeit four wins, but only two of those would seem to have been possible "team order" finishes.

Unfortunately, 1978 full race footage is pretty rare, or I might have been able to answer this myself, but is there anecdotal evidence from the 78 season that suggests Peterson was faster that year, and that Andretti was only able to win because he was the No. 1 driver by contract agreement? There must be a reason that so many people say that Ronnie was quicker and that Mario was basically handed the title. Or was it because James Hunt (among others) consistently perpetuated this notion over the years?

I look forward to hearing from those that lived through and watched the 1978 season unfold.

 

[cider_and_toast]

As far as I've ever understood it, Ronnie was a quick driver on his day but lacked the ability to set his car up with anything like the understanding that Mario brought to the game. Having spent the bulk of his career up to that point, racing in both the US and F1 Mario was credited with being the first driver to introduce set up techniques such as altering tyre pressures and wheel stagger. Those skills were essential to understand in oval racing but hadn't really been seen in F1 before. The 78 and latterly the 79 were extremely sensitive to minor changes in balance and Mario was extremely skilled in dialling the car in. One example of Mario's involvement in setting up the car was on the driver adjustable anti-roll bars added at Mario's request to the 78.

Peterson was never very good at setting up cars and most of the time Lotus tended to go with the information provided by their lead driver and then just stick that on to Ronnie's car and let him go with it. If you ever get the chance to see a documentary called "If you're not winning you're not trying" which is a fly on the wall look at Lotus' 1973 year, you will see Peter Warr and Colin Chapman discussing doing this on several occasions.

There is no doubt that Ronnie had the ability to ring the neck of a car when he needed to however (and Siffert_Fan has posted this in this thread and in the one hit wonders thread) I don't think Ronnie was good enough to beat either of his Lotus Team Mates.

I believe the issue surrounding his contract with Lotus for 78 and status within the team was the fact that during his first spell at Lotus there weren't any team orders. That was clear when Ronnie won the 1973 Italian GP by 0.8 secs from Filttipaldi. Emmo needed to win the race in order to maintain his slim chance of retaining the world title and this was helped by the fact that Stewart had a puncture and had to recover from as far back as 16th. Peterson also walked away from Lotus after the first race of the 1976 season which didn't impress Chapman so when Ronnie was re-hired for 1978 it was on the clear understanding that he was the number 2 driver.

Having said that, the only real difference during the 78 season between the two was that Mario got to debut the type 79 in Belgium while Ronnie had to wait one race for his car to be ready. At Monza where Ronnie tragically died he was using the 78 for the first time since Belgium because he'd crashed in 79 in practice.

James Hunt was a great friend of Ronnie's and was always effected by his death. Hunt for his whole life blamed the crash on a poor start by Ricardo Patrese and he never had a nice world to say about the Italian during his commentating career in fact some of it was border line libellous by today's standards. Hunt was one of the cars that collided with Peterson's, and one of the first drivers out of his car to rush over to Ronnie and help pull him clear. That was pretty much the moment where Hunt knew he didn't want to be an F1 driver anymore. I think that would explain his comments about Mario and Ronnie at Lotus.

 

[Speshal]

Cracking read

:thumb:

 

[Muddytalker]

Slightly

... I've got Gerald Donaldson's Villeneuve biography on order from Amazon so if I learn any more I'll add it in to the mix.

I have to say I'm amazed you don't have this already. Too young to appreciate his exploits at the time (to me he was always holding faster cars up, rather than dragging unwieldy cars up to places they shouldn't be), this book was previewed in Autosport before it's release. Having read the previews, I bugged old man Muddy into ordering it for me, and finished it within days, reading it whenever I could between school lessons/sleeping/eating. The book is superb, and doesn't just glam up his posthumous image, it's very much a 'warts and all' story, and shows him in some 'interesting' lights, including how he was with his family.

And his legend is much more than a couple of '81 races; It's beating the whole field by 9 seconds per lap (some say 11) at Watkins Glen in wet qualifying, it's keeping pace with the race leaders on his debut in a 3rd McLaren, it's being a multiple snowmobile World Champion before his car-racing career fully took hold, and not to mention kicking James Hunt's backside at a Formula Atlantic event.

And it's for images like this

(I think this last one is coming out of the right turn Casino Square)

 

[KekeTheKing]

James Hunt was a great friend of Ronnie's and was always effected by his death. Hunt for his whole life blamed the crash on a poor start by Ricardo Patrese and he never had a nice world to say about the Italian during his commentating career in fact some of it was border line libellous by today's standards. Hunt was one of the cars that collided with Peterson's, and one of the first drivers out of his car to rush over to Ronnie and help pull him clear. That was pretty much the moment where Hunt knew he didn't want to be an F1 driver anymore. I think that would explain his comments about Mario and Ronnie at Lotus.

Thanks for your reply c_a_t, and I think your ultimate conclusion about Hunt's views on the 1978 season is spot on. James certainly never shied away from ripping Patrese, and I can't help but feel that he considered himself somewhat responsible for the tragedy at Monza.

As for Hunt's comments about Andretti, they certainly weren't strangers on the circuit, and James famously retired after an incident at Zandvoort between the two.

A couple years later, Mario tried the same maneuver at Tarzan and James was forced to admit that the move could be made, provided the driver being overtaken gave enough room.

 

[cider_and_toast]

Great stuff Keke.

Just goes to show that the Type 81 that Andretti was driving there could be a good car on it's day. It's hard to imagine just how quickly Lotus fell behind the others after 1978. The trouble was, Chapman was trying to be too clever by this time in his life.

Mario described the Lotus Type 81 during the 1980 season as "A great car for 1979"

 

[KekeTheKing]

The Type 81 never really looked like a Lotus in my opinion. When I first got to watch these videos from the late 70's - early 80's, the Essex liveried Lotus never really caught my eye.

After these beauties,

I thought the Type 81 looked like a pig.

 

[FB]

This is turning into a bit of a "Lotus Love Fest" which is going to get one of our members a bit over excited. Back to you corner CaT with a damp flannel That said I couldn't resist posting this pic of the most ridiculous and, at the same time, one of the most incredible F1 machines ever. The twin chassis Lotus 88 (this is the B version) - and it's almost in the right colours!

I remember reading at the time it was banned one of the other team managers said to Colin Chapman "Problem is Colin if they allow it we will all have to build one and then it will be banned" - nothing much changes does it?

 

[cider_and_toast]

Blimey, we really should be trying to keep this thread on topic but I can't pass up the opportunity.



Yep, the Type 81 isn't a looker by any stretch of the imagination but if you look closely you can see under all that blue and silver paint the body of a type 79. When it was designed the project team called it the 79X. Lotus lost its way so badly with type 80 which failed to distribute its under body loading properly and suffered from really bad porpoising, where the centre of pressure under the car would fly backwards and forwards as the skirts broke contact with the ground. The car was complex to produce and lacked the tortional stiffness required to handle the downforce it could generate.

For 1980 they went on a "Back to Basics" approach and hence the Type 81 which as I said was known in the Lotus workshops as the Type 79X.

As for the type 88, that's a whole new thread right there. Suffice to say that when it was conceived and tested as the Type 86 it was probably legal however, after a rule clarification from FISA regarding the now famous "Aero parts must remain inmobile in relation to the entirely sprung part of the car, that is have no degree of movement", the car was on the wrong side of legal. There were so many factors surrounding the Type 88 that it wasn't just to do with the design. It was also being held up as an example by Ballastere in his attempts to reign in the power of the teams. Each time the car was presented for scrutineering (Long Beach, Brazil and Argentina in 88 form and GBR in 88B form) the car was cleared to race but then protested by almost every team on the grid. In GBR it was cleared to race under protest with the chairman of the RAC telling FISA to do their worst. FISA did, they told the RAC that if they allowed the 88B to run then the race would loose its championship status which would cost a bucket load of money so reluctantly they had to back down.

As far as I've been able to work out, the car was a disaster anyway. Trying to find official test times for any of the 3 occasions when the Type 88 and the Type 88B actually turned a wheel for real is quite difficult.

As an aside, the Type 86 (the test hack for the 88 to prove concept) ran in secret in mid 1980 at Donnington. Word leaked out in the press about Colin Chapman's new car and that it may not have a suspension system (it would be more like a go-kart). Ferrari immediately protested a car that had never even run in anger and asked FISA to insert in to the rules that all F1 cars must have a suspension system. A rule that remains in the regulations today. Of course the 88 had a conventional suspension under all that carbon fibre but I expect Lotus were laughing themselves silly at the time.

I can't find it at the moment but Chapman wrote a letter to FISA which basically exploded at the way the sport was being run. The gist of the final paragraph was something like "If F1 doesn't clean up its act it will descend into a quagmire of plagiarism and petty rule interpretation run by people for whom the word sport has no meaning"

Sound familiar ??

 

[Matthew Little]

A superb read TBY

When I have more time I'll sit down with a cup of coffee and go through it again.

To get this written in such a short space of time after c_a_t's thread is nothing short of miraculous.

Agreed.

 

[Brogan]

Yet more gold from the archive.

It's also worth doing a search on thread title for "Constructors Who Have Won in F1" and "F1 History" for a couple of series of great articles by teabagyokel