THE WORST CAR I EVER DROVE BLUNDER BUS

Author

admin

Browse pages
Current page

1

Current page

2

Current page

3

Current page

4

Current page

5

Current page

6

Current page

7

Current page

8

Current page

9

Current page

10

Current page

11

Current page

12

Current page

13

Current page

14

Current page

15

Current page

16

Current page

17

Current page

18

Current page

19

Current page

20

Current page

21

Current page

22

Current page

23

Current page

24

Current page

25

Current page

26

Current page

27

Current page

28

Current page

29

Current page

30

Current page

31

Current page

32

Current page

33

Current page

34

Current page

35

Current page

36

Current page

37

Current page

38

Current page

39

Current page

40

Current page

41

Current page

42

Current page

43

Current page

44

Current page

45

Current page

46

Current page

47

Current page

48

Current page

49

Current page

50

Current page

51

Current page

52

Current page

53

Current page

54

Current page

55

Current page

56

Current page

57

Current page

58

Current page

59

Current page

60

Current page

61

Current page

62

Current page

63

Current page

64

Current page

65

Current page

66

Current page

67

Current page

68

Current page

69

Current page

70

Current page

71

Current page

72

Current page

73

Current page

74

Current page

75

Current page

76

Current page

77

Current page

78

Current page

79

Current page

80

Current page

81

Current page

82

Current page

83

Current page

84

Current page

85

Current page

86

Current page

87

Current page

88

Current page

89

Current page

90

Current page

91

Current page

92

Current page

93

Current page

94

Current page

95

Current page

96

Current page

97

Current page

98

Current page

99

Current page

100

Current page

101

Current page

102

Current page

103

Current page

104

Current page

105

Current page

106

Current page

107

Current page

108

Current page

109

Current page

110

Current page

111

Current page

112

Current page

113

Current page

114

Current page

115

Current page

116

Current page

117

Current page

118

Current page

119

Current page

120

Current page

121

Current page

122

Current page

123

Current page

124

Current page

125

Current page

126

Current page

127

Current page

128

Current page

129

Current page

130

Current page

131

Current page

132

Current page

133

Current page

134

Current page

135

Current page

136

Current page

137

Current page

138

Current page

139

Current page

140

THE WORST CAR I EVER DROVE BLUNDER BUS

JOHN WATSON McLAREN M28 McLAREN’S FIRST ATTEMPT AT A GROUND EFFECT CAR WAS SLOW, TRICKY AND FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED IN DESIGN.JOHN WATSON WAS NOT A FAN IN 1978 I WAS STILI DRIVING FOR BRABFIAM, AS

team-mate to Nilci Lauda but was already thinking of moving on for 1979. There was a little incident on the eve of the French Grand Prix which probably sealed things.This was the first race after the fan car had been withdrawn andl’d taken pole with the conventional BT46. I was vefy proud of that and feeling good. But after the race-day warm-up Bernie (Ecclestone) asked if I’d be prepared to let Niki win if we were running 1-2 near the end. There was no contractual obligation for me to do this and I was astounded, confused and just didn’t know how to handle it. So I just answered honestly and said “No”. I think it was at this point Bernie just thought “right, you’re out.” He decided to invest in the future by taking on Nelson Piquet for 1979.

Through the tragic circumstances of Ronnie Peterson’s fatal accident, I ended up at McLaren for -79. Ronnie had been due to switch to McLaren from Lotus for the season but after his accident at Monza, the team sought me out as the one to take them into a new era. Suddenly,! seemed perfectly poised to take my career on to a new level. McLaren, though they’d not had a great 1978, were still very much one of the top teams with a fantastic history of success. It was a dream opportunity. I was going there as number one with all the attention on me. And they had a new car, their first ground effect machine, the M28… In fact, it was a lemon, its performance so bad that it left McLaren fighting for its commercial life; it damaged my reputation too. With hindsight it’s

easy to see why the great McLaren team suddenly floundered, but at the time I was just bewildered.

I drove the car for the first time at the back end of 78 at Silverstone and couldn’t believe how bad it was. I was lapping about 7sec slower than I’d done in the Brabham BT45 a year and a half earlier. It just felt bog slow, everywhere on the straights, round the comers and was extremely difficult to drive. It did one thing at one speed and something totallY different at another speed.

Eventually we got it going around Silverstone in a time comparable to the Brabham-Alfa from the 77 British Grand Prix and we began thinking that maybe around Silverstone there wasn’t a great deal of difference between a ground effect car and a conventional one. Which was a mistake. Then we took the car out to Watkins Glen in November. After a few laps we had a small problem and they took it back into the pit garage. We then

discovered the similarity between an M28 and Concorde. When put on it; axle stands, the nose drooped! Alistair Caldwell who was in charge of the test said, “Ern… I think we’d better stop and take it home.” There was just no torsional strength in the car at all a paper bag was more rigid.

They did a lot of work at the factory to give it some rigidity, but that made it honendously overweight. Virtually everything about the car was wrong. They’d designed it to take maximum advantage of the length and width regulations to give it as big a venturi area as possible, which fundamentally was a good thing. To the same end, they made the monocoque very slim so they could give more space to the sidepods. But add to this a huge fuel tank, giving big sectional changes, and an aluminium honeycomb structure and you have the recipe for the torsional problems. But it was badly wrong aerodynamically too with the centre of pressure moving about all over the place. As the season went on they tried different wheelbases which just upset the weight distribution; they were trying to rectify an aerodynamic problem by traditional mechanical means. It was real scattergun engineering. To understand how it could happen, you have to consider that McLaren had had a lot of success with conventional cars. Before the ground effect era you could expect to find perhaps half a second per season from things like suspension geometry and they were fantastic at that stuff, the meticulous development work. But ground effect required a different approach. Suddenly downforce was everything and you had to throw the old benchmarks away. They were impressed that it may have had twice the down force of an M26 or whatever. But that meant nothing. The design team just didn’t have the vision to see the potential of ground effect

Those able to approach it in a more abstract way, without reference to what had been possible before, were those who flourished people like Patrick Head, Gerard Ducarouge and Gordon Murray. That sort of aerodynamic expertise was just not in McLaren at that time. So while Ducarouge’s Ligier blew everyone’s doors off, then Patrick’s FVV07 appeared, we messed about with geometries and wheelbases and weren’t even beginning to attack the problem.

We weren’t alone though. At the beginning of the season it was only Ligier who had a properly conceived ground effects car ready and in Argentina I managed to finish third. But it wasn’t long before we tumbled down and by May, with big pressure from Marlboro, it was decided we were flogging a dead horse and plans began for the M29 basically McLaren’s version of the Williams FW07 except not as good, though much better than the M28.

But it was largely as a result of these failures that Marlboro could push through the merger with Ron Dennis which led to the birth of McLaren as it is today. So I guess it wasn’t in vain, though it felt it at the time.

The sadistic side of me surfaces sometimes when I look at the M28 in the Donington Collection and I shudder at the thought of a Schumacher-type front-end impact. It would have fokled up. I understand that Ron is currently having an M28 restored, but I won’t be first in the queue to try it.