Never exactly one to kowtow to convention, Patrick Head. But then great race engineers never are.
It’s written in their DNA to kick against established thinking as they search for ‘the next big thing’, the ‘unfair advantage’ – the clever techie breakthrough that might expose another grey area in the rules and exploit it to the maximum.
For over 30 years, such thinking has been the sole motivating factor in Patrick Head’s professional life at Williams Grand Prix Engineering. His contribution to the sport, from the eras of ground effects to turbos to ‘active ride’ and on into these days of ever more restrictive rules, has been immense.
And as he steps away from the F1 frontline to concentrate on the technologies of the future at Williams’ hybrid power offshoot, we acknowledge that contribution with a special celebration of an incredible career in the March issue of Motor Sport – including a mammoth ‘Lunch with’ interview that breaks our record for length. It’s a glorious monster!
Typically, Patrick breaks a few myths in the issue as he reflects on some of the high points of life at Williams. He’s written, especially for us, the definitive account of the ‘gizmo’-laden masterpiece and game-changer, the FW14B in which Nigel Mansell totally dominated Formula 1 during 1992. In terms of technical excellence, those days are considered a ‘golden era’ when Grand Prix racing broke through new boundaries – to the point where the rule-makers had to drag the designers back and ban their clever systems for the good of the sport. But Patrick rejects the ‘halcyon days’ theory.
“There were more freedoms within the regulations in those days but I would not call it a ‘golden period’ for engineers,” he writes (without frills, as you’d expect).
“I have heard the FW14B described as one of the most technologically advanced racing cars ever built but the technologies we see today are of a very high standard right across the field and things like KERS and DRS are still a strong engineering challenge.”
In other words, the idea that F1 was more advanced 20 years ago than it is today is a fallacy. F1 cars in 2012 are created to a tighter rulebook, but they are vastly more sophisticated than they ever have been. Even to the layman’s eye (in other words, mine!), our new photoshoot of FW14B emphasises just how far F1 cars have come, particularly in terms of packaging and aerodynamics.
But even if the current generation of cars are vastly superior pieces of engineering than those of the early 1990s, what cannot be denied is that they are far uglier. As Pat Symonds predicts in our most recent podcast, the 2012 cars won’t be remembered for their aesthetic qualities – as the first sight of the new Caterham F1 confirms (it’s all to do with new regs lowering the noses, but not the front bulkheads, as Pat explains here).
Back in the issue, Patrick also talks about the drivers he’s worked with over the years, and as I highlight in Matters of Moment, his matter-of-fact verdict on Mansell again challenges convention. Let’s just say his view would not have been shared by the late Peter Warr, whose posthumous autobiography is reviewed this month…
From Williams and the analysis of ‘active ride’, we make a seamless shift (geddit?) on to Lotus and the car where the system was pioneered. Andrew Frankel’s piece on Colin Chapman’s final F1 car, the Type 92, is fascinating and complements Patrick’s article perfectly. Firsthand insight from Peter Wright and Tim Densham tells the story of how Chapman once again found inspiration from an idea that would change everything – in this case long after he had departed…
Elsewhere, Nigel Roebuck talks to Martin Brundle about his controversial move from the BBC to Sky – in his words, like going from Manchester United to Manchester City. If you’ve leapt to conclusions about his decision, take the time to read his side of the story. It’s quite revealing.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about this one. Part of me – a big part of me – resents having to pay Rupert Murdoch to watch F1. But I don’t resent having to pay for coverage per se, and I am intrigued by the plans Sky have for a dedicated channel. The BBC has done a great job, but I suspect the ‘evil empire’ is about to come up with a game-changer that is the TV equivalent of active ride…
Looking forward to this issue. I always have thought the FW06 (not the FW07) was one cool looking racing car. Fate would have it that I met Mr. Head while walking in to the Indianapolis Raceway Park for the midget race the night before the Grand Prix and he couldn’t have been nicer to us fans, chatting about Williams things as we strolled in. The podcast with him a while back was one of the best for the great anecdotes and bears listening to again. A true motor racing legend!
Really looking forward to this months issue!! :)
We’ll all miss Patrick, one of GP history’s greatest characters in every respect. I sense that his heart isn’t really in what he says about today’s technical challenges – a case of trying too hard to convince himself, let alone the rest of us. Those challenges haven’t proved sufficient to keep him in the paddock, after all. Of course F1 is more advanced than it was twenty years ago; no-one could doubt that when every bit of a contemporary F1 car looks as intricate as a Swiss watch. But the challenge today is essentially to reach a bar that has been set very high by someone else, rather than to start from scratch and see how far you can jump on a “sky’s the limit” basis. Chapman, I’m sure, would have walked away in sheer boredom years ago. Gordon Murray indeed has; and John Barnard gets more satisfaction today in designing chairs, for heaven’s sake. Adrian Newey remains, but for him the stimulus has been in leaving a top team for an erstwhile middling one and then clawing his way back to the top.
You mention the new Caterham. As you say, there is a lot of emerging chatter about the ugliness of the sunken nosecone/protruding bulkhead layout, but my goodness, it’s desperate stuff really. We’re talking millimetres – the nose as a whole remains fundamentally raised, on which tightly-prescribed basis almost all F1 designs have been not only ugly but damned near indistinguishable for the best part of fifteen years. Indeed, when the first pic of the Caterham leaked, in profile, I thought “take off the paint and I wouldn’t know whether it’s a 2012 Caterham or a 2006 Toyota”.
The irony is that the FIA is well aware of the performance benefits of the raised nose concept and on more than one occasion has sought to restrict it. Most ludicrously, I recall one season where the rules were changed to reduce the gap between the nose and the front wing, but instead of achieving this by lowering the maximum height of the nose, the minimum depth of the wing was raised instead, and thus was missed a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by reducing aero and ameliorating aesthetics at the same time. Now it appears the same opportunity has been missed again. But at the end of the day, frankly, I wouldn’t give two hoots about an ugly F1 car, if it was the result not of a checklist handed down from on high by Charlie Whiting, but of a great designer’s uninhibited genius, as indeed was the raised nose when we first saw it on Dr Postlethwaite’s Tyrrell 019. That was one of the last times – more than twenty years ago – that I ever got a thrill from the first sight of a new F1 car, something that had hitherto been one of the great rituals of the year for any F1 fan as we keenly awaited the new models in our midwinter (or indeed sometimes midsummer) Autosports or Autosprints. Since the screw of prescribed design was tightened, fans, media and the FIA alike have fretted at several extended periods of one-team (or one-entry) dominance, one of which we have lately been seeing. Yet when the rules were more free, teams like Lotus were up and down like yo-yos. Should that not tell the FIA something?
One final thought. The argument for tight rule restrictions has increasingly been one of cost reduction. Very well, but which teams have invariably come out on top in the prescribed-rule era? Ferrari has always had untold wealth at its disposal and yet there were frequent periods in the more free and easy Cosworth era when all that wealth counted for little, up against greatly less pecunious operations that were able to balance things out by giving full rein to their ingenuity, whilst it was in the current age of technical restrictions that Maranello was finally able to make the money (and the tyres) talk for season after season. The focus on Patrick Head reminds us that back in those allegedly ruinous days of less restrictive technical parameters, a team such as Williams was able to go from running an old March out of a carpet warehouse to becoming race winners in the space of two years and world champions in three. Today, even the back-of-the-grid teams have budgets the size of small countries but with little hope of finding a great technical leap that will take them even to the middle of the grid in three years, let alone the front.
That’s a very valid point about budgets and technical restrictions Adrian. I’ve often had the thought that the “big teams” are quite happy to accept tight technical regs if it means the “small teams” can’t threaten their on track dominance and financial earnings. RBR got their hands on Newey, so they’ve had no choice to accept, but they seem to me to be quite happy to keep as many teams as possible making up the numbers, as long as the numbers are there. Unfortunately, it no longer means we’ll see the like of Gordon Murray’s gorgeous mid 70′s Brabhams for a start… There’s something fundamentally wrong with a sport that discourages the likes of Head, Murray and Barnard. If Newey gets bored, what then? So much for an “engineering exercise” if the best engineers aren’t there. I’ll miss Patrick – always a good interview, and one of the last remaining publically recognisable chief engineers, as well as one hell of a character. An increasingly endangered species…
To solve the “nose issue” is quite simple – ban contiguous front wings! IE, a front wing that must attach to the nose, like the early 90s F1 cars, not suspended from it. Multiple benefits will result: lowered nose thereby less spearing danger in a collision, better packaging for the driver,and obviously less downforce – not to mention probably better looking cars.
Hello Lewis, your point is perfectly backed up by something Sir Frank Williams said thirty years ago, reported by Nigel Roebuck in one of this month’s magazine’s excellent articles on Team Willy. It was the time when Frank and the other FOCA constructors were battling Balestre, of course, and he had this to say: “(Balestre’s) going to ban everything, and that bothers me because Grand Prix racing has to be technically interesting. There’s got to be scope for bright kids to come along with new ideas”. Well, JMB’s thinking was beaten off for a while, but thanks to his successors Mosley (ironically) and Todt, he got his way in the end. At least if F1 design had been frozen at a point in time thirty years ago instead of fifteen, the cars would have been better looking….
Hello John, yes I agree that nose and wing should meet in the way that was once the norm, for the multiple benefits you set out, but it isn’t quite as simple a matter as you suggest, although it shouldn’t be much more complicated either. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the FIA did actually act a few years ago to reduce the gap between nose and wing, but achieved it via the absurd method of raising the minimum height of the wing instead of lowering the maximum height of the nose. Simply closing the gap altogether between nose and wing would not be enough in itself to end the blight of raised noses – the height of the nose itself has to be restricted in the regs to the desired degree.
Fortunately, it appears that long-awaited moment may be coming in 2014. Searching around for some explanation of the new 2012 regs which have produced the mini-controversy about the nosecone/bulkhead layout, I found this excellent blog: http://scarbsf1.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/2012-nose-height-regulations/
Now, that blog is technical to a degree beyond my layman’s ken in several respects, but, *if* I understand the following correctly, we are indeed heading to the end of the raised-nose era, or at least the very raised nose era, in 2014: “This reduction in height starts in 2012 with the nose limited to a 55cm height and then in 2014 the nose tip must fit into a zone just 25cm high.” Three cheers if it’s true (or two cheers – 25cm still leaves a small gap) – perhaps someone more technically-minded than me could advise.
When I wrote “three cheers if it’s true”, I should just add that I’m not questioning the veracity of the blog I quoted, merely the accuracy of my own interpretation of it! :)
Hmm, actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder. If those 2014 regs merely ensure that the nose *tip* is steeply declined while everything behind it remains more raised, the result could be a whole batch of cars looking something like the Benetton B190, to my eye one of the most staggeringly ugly vehicles ever to put its wheels on a GP grid.
Damien, maybe you could get Patrick (or failing that, Pat Symonds or Gary Anderson or someone) to do a whole article in the magazine on the ’14 nose regs, then we can see for ourselves in good time!
That’s an interesting quote, Adrian. It’s not escaped my notice that Ben Bowlby’s not gone near F1… When i was a kid of an age where my dreams far exceeded my intellect, i wanted to design cars (amongst other things) and mssrs Head, Murray and Chapman were as much heroes to me as Niki and Ronnie. Then add in the likes of Ducarouge, Postlethwaite, Southgate et al… Now there’s only Newey and Brawn for young dreamers to recognise and emulate as “superstar designers”. A kid can’t look at a car and think “i like the look of designer x’s cars” so easily now, because all F1 cars look fundamentally the same. I wonder how many dreamers like i was had the ability to actually do the job (which i didn’t!), but went to road cars instead? I guess the sport as a whole has evolved to be beyond the whit of one man, although Adrian Newey seems to buck that theory. It’s far more of a team business now because by and large, free thinking is regulated out, and many heads seem to be better than one which is a crying shame.Unless your name’s Newey. You’re bang on about the cars of thirty years ago. Just seen the new Ferrari. Has Luca developed a sense of humour? Surely it’s not actually going to look like that?
Interesting that Patrick Head rates Mansell as being such a great driver and as good as Prost. It goes some way to dispel the myth built in journalistic circles that, from that era, only Senna and Prost are of any consequence and that they were leagues ahead of any of their competitors. Watch any season from that time and you can see Mansell was also right up there. But I suppose having an amusing moustache and coming from Birmingham would inevitably mean your achievements are underplayed against the dashing Brazilian and the…er…dashing Frenchman. Shame.
My copy arrived in my letter box in Sydney yesterday and what a great read. Congratulations Motorsport one of your best editions so far, a real keeper.
This has been a good debate and thanks everyone for all your responses. We are hoping to return to the subject of 2012 nose designs with Pat Symonds but of course he is now a busy man consulting for Marussia. What has intrigued me, looking at the cars at Jerez this week, is that McLaren have not run with the concept of a high nose. I guess it won’t be long before we know who has got it right but certainly the cars are far from pretty at this stage. Frontal area aerodynamics are vital in that they affect the rest of the car rearward from the front wheels. The ugly high noses may be a diversion, they may not be, but at least we are seeing different approaches despite the straitjacket of the regulations as they are today. We have, thus far, seen nothing conclusive at Jerez,
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RW
Just wanted to say, bloody good mag this month, well done guys.