The 'practical joke' that won a GP - and the other six-wheeled cars that F1 banned

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The semi-centenary of the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix is almost upon us, for on June 13 it will be exactly 50 years since Formula 1 staged one of its most eccentric and therefore most memorable races. Eccentric? Memorable? Yes and yes, unquestionably so, for the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix was, is, and always will be the only F1 grand prix won in a six-wheeled car, and that alone guarantees its place in motor sport folklore.

Yet the significance of the race extends beyond its mere peculiarity, for the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34 was a bold innovation, conceived by Derek Gardner, one of 1970s F1’s most gifted designers; was raced to that one famous victory by Jody Scheckter, one of the era’s toughest competitors; and was fielded by Ken Tyrrell’s eponymous F1 team, one of F1’s greatest ever independent outfits. Now, half a century later, the mind’s-eye vision of Scheckter’s navy-blue six-wheeler crossing the finish line at Anderstorp, that weird yet wonderful circuit in southern Sweden, remains one of the most enduring motor sport images any time, any place, anywhere, and a reminder of a period during which F1 still allowed brilliant designers and engineers to challenge accepted orthodoxies in ways that today seem almost unimaginable.

The P34 raised eyebrows long before it would ever turn a wheel – for, when Tyrrell unveiled it to the press at the Hilton Hotel, Heathrow, in September 1975, a number of the assembled journalists assumed that they were witnessing an elaborate practical joke. It was not an entirely unreasonable assumption, because Uncle Ken possessed a mischievous streak, and the sight of an F1 car sporting six wheels instead of the customary four was genuinely startling for all who first laid eyes on it.

Yet there was nothing frivolous about Gardner’s thinking. If tyre contact patches generated grip, he figured, then six contact patches ought to generate more grip than four. At the same time he recognised that conventional front wheels contributed significantly to aerodynamic drag, so replacing two large front wheels with four smaller ones would offer the tantalising prospect of reducing drag at the same time as increasing grip. It was a splendid example of lateral thinking, the sort of idea that could only have emerged in an era when F1’s rulebook still left room for genuine innovation and when designers and engineers were encouraged to ask not only how to make their cars faster but also whether the accepted assumptions of car design were genuinely immutable.

Remarkably, it worked: not everywhere, not all the time, and not quite as predictably as Tyrrell and Gardner had hoped, but sufficiently well to prove that the concept was no mere flight of fancy. Throughout 1976 the car showed flashes of serious pace – at Anderstorp, obviously, and also at Monaco, Paul Ricard, Silverstone, Nürburgring, Mosport, and Watkins Glen.

Scheckter ended the 1976 F1 season having scored more points than Patrick Depailler, his Tyrrell team-mate, and it was Jody who had stood atop the podium in Sweden; yet, despite all that, he was and remained deeply unconvinced by the six-wheeled concept. A gritty character, often po-faced, pragmatic by nature, and rarely therefore inclined towards romanticism where F1 cars were concerned, as the season unfolded he began to complain about the car, finally telling Tyrrell and Gardner that it was “a piece of junk”.

Depailler, possessed of a naturally sunny disposition that contrasted sharply with Scheckter’s more taciturn outlook, was instinctively more willing to embrace the six-wheeler’s quirkiness. Whereas Scheckter fled to Wolf for 1977, Depailler remained with Tyrrell, but the 1977-spec P34 had evolved into a bulkier and, to my eyes, less elegant version of the small, lithe, and nimble original. Alongside Depailler was Tyrrell’s new recruit, one of the most naturally gifted drivers of his generation, Ronnie Peterson, whose attitude to the car more closely resembled Scheckter’s, and in terms of competitiveness 1977 duly turned out to be the least impressive season of SuperSwede’s F1 career.

In truth, it was a poor season all round. Whereas Jody and Patrick had finished third and fourth in the 1976 F1 drivers’ world championship, Patrick and Ronnie could manage only eighth and 14th in 1977. By the end of that season the writing was on the wall, and in 1978 Tyrrell campaigned a conventional four-wheeled car, the 008, designed not by Gardner but by Maurice Philippe. No six-wheeled car would ever again be raced in a world championship-status F1 grand prix, and now none ever will, because in 1983 the FIA’s F1 regulations mandated a maximum of four wheels, which stipulation remains in place 43 years later.

But F1’s six-wheeled odyssey does not end there because, although the Tyrrell P34 was the only six-wheeled car ever to race at F1 world championship level, it was not necessarily the most interesting six-wheeled F1 concept, for two later projects, one developed by March in 1977 and another by Williams in 1981 and 1982, jointly represented a more promising technical direction. Unlike the Tyrrell, which placed its two additional wheels at the front, both March and Williams opted for four driven wheels at the rear.

The advantages were potentially enormous. Four driven wheels at the rear offered prodigious improvements to traction, particularly when transmitting the ever-increasing power outputs that F1 engines were beginning to produce in the late 1970s and, in particular, the early 1980s. At the same time, by fitting smaller rear wheels and tyres than the fat rear gumballs used on conventional 1970s and 1980s F1 cars, the March and Williams designers were able to reduce aerodynamic drag by a greater margin than Gardner had ever been able to achieve with the P34, simply because the huge rear tyres fitted to conventional F1 cars in the 1970s and 1980s generated a surprisingly high proportion of their overall drag coefficients – about 40 per cent according to Williams’ technical director Patrick Head. In other words, and in simple terms, the March and Williams designers were chasing exactly the same prize as Gardner had pursued with the Tyrrell – more grip and less drag – albeit approaching the problem from the opposite end of their cars.

The March project remains one of my favourite technical curiosities in the entire history of motor sport. Officially designated the March 2-4-0 – a moniker that sounded more like a 19th-century steam locomotive than a 20th-century F1 car, for the designation was indeed borrowed from the standard terminology for the bogie configurations of railway rolling stock – it was never raced in an F1 grand prix. Quite a few motor sport historians will tell you that, in lieu of an F1 career for the March 2-4-0, hillclimbing legend Roy Lane campaigned one with a degree of success in the 1979 British Hillclimb Championship.

However, as is often the case with such stories, the truth is a little more nuanced and, to my mind, even more interesting. Lane actually bought an ex-works March 771, a conventional four-wheeled F1 car, then borrowed from March a 2-4-0 transmission and four-wheel-drive assembly which he fitted to his 771 in his modest Warwickshire workshop. The resulting machine was therefore part F1 car, part experimental engineering exercise, and part home-built bitsa special, which makes its performance all the more admirable. During the 1979 British Hillclimb Championship season, Lane campaigned it to excellent effect, winning at Wiscombe Park and recording strong results at Prescott, Harewood, Fintray, Craigantlet, Bouley Bay, and Shelsley Walsh.

If you will allow me a short diversion, I would like to record that I have always loved the British Hillclimb Championship for its combination of technical ingenuity, fierce but fair competition, and unapologetically old-school chumminess. Over the years I have attended quite a few rounds of that venerable series, which was inaugurated way back in 1947, although sadly none during the 1979 season, and I have enjoyed many memorable days at Prescott, Harewood, Wiscombe Park, Shelsley Walsh, Loton Park, and Gurston Down. There is a warmth to those meetings that is difficult to replicate elsewhere in motor sport. As for Lane, who won 91 times in a long British Hillclimb Championship career – which total places him third on the all-time win list behind Scott Moran and Martin Groves – I got to know him quite well over the years, I always found him to be a thoroughly lovely man – modest, engaging, generous with his time, and entirely devoid of ego despite his considerable achievements – and I was genuinely saddened when he died quite suddenly of peritonitis in October 2009.

The six-wheeled Williams deserves as much recognition as does the March six-wheeler — or perhaps even more. Produced in two versions, first the FW07D then the FW08D, like the March 2-4-0 it featured four driven rear wheels and two undriven front wheels. However, it was a more rigorously integrated design than was the March, and as a result it was a faster car. Indeed, a decade after the concept of six wheels had been rendered obsolete from an F1 regulatory point of view, Jonathan Palmer broke the Goodwood course record in an FW08D during the 1994 Festival of Speed. Palmer’s blitzkrieg run demonstrated publicly that the additional traction provided by four driven rear wheels was immense, and that the aerodynamic benefit of smaller rear tyres had reduced drag significantly. Had the FIA not intervened in 1983, one cannot help wondering how far such F1 concepts might have evolved by now.

But intervene the FIA did, and with that intervention the March 2-4-0, the Williams FW07D, and the Williams FW08D were rendered stillborn, the result of which is that, half a century later, we are forced wryly to concede that the six-wheeled cars that had the greatest competitive potential never raced in F1 at all. By contrast the six-wheeled car that did race in F1, and indeed won in F1, was the sole exemplar of the less promising of the two possible six-wheeled concepts.

To finish, let us go back to where we kicked off our remarkable tale, to Anderstorp, and to the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix, because there is one more irony at the heart of it. For all the attention subsequently lavished on Tyrrell’s revolutionary triumph, the event was not initially shaping up to be a six-wheeled fairytale, for the first 45 laps were dominated not by Scheckter in his Tyrrell P34 but by Mario Andretti in his Lotus 77.

That Lotus had been something of a disappointment during the early part of the 1976 F1 season – Andretti had initially dubbed it “a dog” – but at Anderstorp it appeared suddenly transformed. Mario qualified it on the front row, led at the start, set the fastest lap as early as the 11th tour, and continued to drive magnificently thereafter, controlling the race with poise and authority and holding a commanding lead over Scheckter in second place.

In the pits, Lotus boss Colin Chapman was becoming even more agitated than he usually was when a victory for his team seemed to be imminent, because the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix was Team Lotus’s 200th world championship-status F1 grand prix, and a victory would therefore represent not only a welcome and overdue sporting success – Lotus’s first win since Monza 1974 – but also an important symbolic milestone. Instead, on lap 46, midway through Turn 2, Stands Bend, the Cosworth DFV V8 behind Andretti’s back suddenly exploded in a cloud of combustive smoke and human despair, and with it disappeared what had seemed the most likely outcome of the afternoon.