Gary Anderson: 'I wish I'd designed... Lotus 79'

The Lotus 79, the first real ground effect car was a very, very good package, the first realisation that aerodynamics were becoming crucial and that you could make ground effects work. Everybody then began rushing around cutting and shutting existing designs. But of course you can’t add ground effect if it’s not in the existing concept.

When the 79 arrived, everybody was panicked into producing their own skirted ground effect car, not having realised what the 78 was pointing to the year before. Lotus had a year of investigation before anyone twigged, and it’s the same today. A lot of people have something which next year will make them much better. By the time someone picks it up, they’re behind. If we’re not now looking at the 2002 car, we’re behind, because the 2001 car is already under way and, good or bad, we’re committed to it.

Peter Wright was very involved with the 79; hats off to him and Chapman, that they were prepared to do something so radical. I’ve always appreciated designers like Gordon Murray, for instance, who do something different. You need real confidence for that. Of course it’s a bit limiting now because of the regulations. The envelope is set for you; everybody ends up with almost identical designs and only detail differences. It gets pretty boring just altering the radius on the leading edge of a wing.

I was at McLaren when the 79 was revealed; we were at Ricard testing, and Teddy Mayer and I had a chat that night and decided that unless we did something fast we’d get left behind. We revised an M26 to give us a reasonable step forward, but really it needed to have been done as a concept package; there were too many compromises with the tanks at the side etc. But with the manpower we had, there was no question of a new car in mid-season. It was an interesting time; who was going to pick the ball up quickest?

That’s when Brabham came up with the fan car; if you didn’t have a ground-effect concept, what else could you do? I was actually at Brabham for a day and a half during its development. I had been there before, but when I returned the way the company had changed didn’t suit me so I went back to McLaren. At the time, they had built this device with surface-cooling on the side of the monococque, which Niki Lauda drove, but it didn’t work. First they ran with radiators in the nose, and then someone suggested they fitted a radiator with a fan at the back of the monocoque, and the fan got bigger and the radiator got smaller and the skirts arrived…

So Gordon’s defence that it was an auxiliary cooling device wasn’t a complete fabrication. The feeling in the pitlane was it was a brilliant solution. At McLaren we soon had one specced-out with twin fans; it would probably never have left the pit-road, but by the time people had laughed at the Brabham, saw it racing and winning and began to think how to better it, it was banned. Although a lot of effort had gone in to it, I believe that was the right thing to do, because everybody would have had a bigger and better one in a short time. And because Bernie ran Brabham, it was possible to ban it; if it had been Lotus or McLaren it would have been more difficult, but Bernie was prepared to accept it. He’d shown what could happen, and was happy enough to have that notch on his bedpost.