Tuesday 3rd of July 2012
This evening I was lucky enough to attend the FOTA F1 Fans Forum ahead of this week's British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
The forum is free for F1 fans to attend and places were offered on a first come first served booking system via the FOTA website. The venue was a very special one indeed - the Williams F1 Team Factory. Despite the usual awful weather of this summer making the 450 mile round trip something of an endurance test, this was not an event I was going to miss.
This was the first time I had attended the forum and the first time I'd visited an F1 factory. Doors opened at 5pm, with an invite for all fans to look around the Williams collection. What a collection, I'll share some pictures of at a later date.
The forum, hosted by Replay Motorsport supporter Lee McKenzie, was opened by Sir Frank Williams. The second half of which featured a truly entertaining Q&A session by former Williams designer Patrick Head, President of the BRDC & former F1 driver Derek Warwick and ex McLaren driver John Watson.
A number of fantastic tales were told of life in F1 in the 70's and 80's. One that particularly stood out was the arrival of the TAG Turbo cars.
Patrick Head described the moment the new turbo engine components arrived in cardboard boxes from Japan. There was little information with them, so Patrick put together a great list of technical questions to ask the manufacturer. This was of course before email and the internet, communication between the factory and Japan coming through on ticker tape. After sending his list, asking for a whole load of data to help in the design and construction of his new engines, the response came back in the form of 7 words - "Please design it how you see best."
John Watson was the very first F1 driver to test a turbo charged F1 car. This wasn't planned, Nicki Lauda was McLaren's principal driver and had been scheduled to carry out this honour, but in the days leading up to it, he had criticised the team's plans to use the car as soon as possible in the championship, Lauda believing it needed more time to be developed. Bernie Ecclestone didn't necessarily agree with this, so Lauda was removed from the test and John was given the drive. It didn't prove to be a great experience, the turbo proving to be incredibly laggy. When Bernie and Ron Dennis arrived that evening expecting to hear how great their new car was, it fell to John to break the bad news that it was an absolute pup in its present state!
Derek Warwick gave an emotive account of the era he raced. The turbo cars, which were actually too powerful to ever be run flat out on a dyno to measure their power, were calculated at their peak to be in the region of 1400bhp. With such brutal speeds, came tragedies and Derek's family often struggled with his choice of career. The safety of the circuits and the strength of the build of F1 cars now is unrecognisable to that of the 1980's. Yet the cars being raced then were considerably quicker in a straight (ish) line
Warwick described how the majority of each race was spent on the very edge of the car's capability, adding that if it hadn't been, then why were you driving in F1!
Exiting the tunnel at Monaco, the quickest F1 car in 2012 was doing 175mph going into the 1st gear chicane, which now has a huge run off area. In the 80's there was a steel barrier and the chicane could be taken in 3rd or 4th gear depending on conditions. Get it wrong and it was not going to be a good outcome. The turbo charged cars exiting that tunnel were doing 192mph. Now that must have felt well and truly on the edge!
Keep an eye out for further FOTA forums on www.fota.co
Tony
Memory added on July 7, 2012
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