Technically legal: F1's most audacious innovations and exploits

But as the Cooper-Climax grew in ambition, the advantages became clear: the engine’s weight was over the driven wheels, there was no driveshaft running the length of the car, the moment of inertia was dramatically reduced, and the whole package could be smaller and lighter than anything the establishment was producing.

Using the Copper-Climax package, Stirling Moss won in Argentina for the private Rob Walker team in 1958, and Maurice Trintignant followed up at Monaco.

Still, the establishment was unimpressed.

Then Jack Brabham, in the Cooper T51, won the 1959 title – the first time the title had ever gone to a rear-engined car.

Ferrari, which had been the most vocal sceptic, had a new car on the drawing board within months.

By 1961, front-engined grand prix cars were extinct. Every F1 car built since has had its engine behind the driver.

The Coopers had not broken any rules: they had simply broken every assumption about how a racing car should be designed.

Outcome: Legal, never challenged. Changed F1 forever.

The Brabham BT46B fan car

Brabham – 1978 Swedish Grand Prix

By 1978, Brabham’s tech chief Gordon Murray had a problem. The season belonged to Colin Chapman‘s Lotus 79, a ground-effect masterpiece that generated downforce by shaping the underbody like an aeroplane wing.

Murray’s BT46, running a flat-12 Alfa Romeo engine that made conventional sidepod tunnels impossible to package, could not follow suit.

He needed a different solution, and he found one by reacquainting himself with a concept the Chaparral sports car had experimented with in the late 1960s: a fan.

The BT46B mounted a large fan at the rear of the car, ostensibly to cool a horizontally-mounted radiator above the engine.

“They wrote me a letter that said, ‘It’s absolutely legal. You can run it until the end of the year”

Murray told the scrutineers that the primary purpose of the device was cooling, not aerodynamics – and they brought an anemometer to the factory to run a test to prove it, with more than 55 percent of the air going through the radiator.

The rest of it, of course, was extracting air from beneath the car and sucking it to the ground with enormous force, with side skirts sealing the floor.

“I have still got the letter from the CSI, the ruling technical body in those days,” Murray wrote in his book One Formula, 50 years of car design. “I had explained already to the scrutineers that more than 50 percent went through the radiator and the rest of it sucked the car down; I wasn’t trying to hide it.

“They got more than 55 percent of the air going through the radiator and wrote me a letter that said, ‘It’s absolutely legal. You can run it until the end of the year, but then we will close the loophole’.”

So as not to demonstrate the car’s true pace, Brabham‘s team owner Bernie Ecclestone had instructed Niki Lauda and John Watson to sandbag in qualifying – a strategy that worked, with the pair lining up third and second on the grid behind Mario Andretti‘s Lotus, giving little indication of what the fan car was truly capable of.

On race day, Lauda drove away from the field to win the Swedish Grand Prix by 34 seconds.

The FIA declared the car legal for the remainder of the season, but it never raced again. Ecclestone, by then FOCA’s executive, feared the political damage to his position if the other teams felt he was exploiting his dual role, and quietly withdrew it.

“It was Bernie that came to me and asked me to withdraw the car because he was being put under massive pressure from Chapman and Tyrrell and the other constructors.” Bernie was just getting powerful in Formula 1, and they said, ‘If you carry on racing that car, that’s the end of the Formula One Constructors’ Association. You can forget it; we are walking away from it,” Murray recalled.

The BT46B retains a 100 percent win record.

Outcome: Legal. Voluntarily withdrawn after one race by Ecclestone. Subsequently, the FIA closed the loophole for 1979.

Lotus 88: Two chassis for the price of one

Team Lotus -1981

Colin Chapman had built his reputation on finding solutions that everyone else considered impossible.

The Lotus 88 was his response to the 1981 regulations that banned sliding skirts and mandated a minimum 60mm ride height – rules designed to limit the ground-effect downforce that Chapman himself had pioneered. Where others simply complied and lost performance, Chapman went looking for a loophole.

The Lotus 88 had two chassis, one nested inside the other. The inner structure carried the driver, engine and gearbox on relatively soft suspension for driver comfort and mechanical grip.

“When you read this, I shall be on my way to watch the progress of the US Space Shuttle”

The outer structure was the aerodynamic shell – sidepods, wings, and bodywork – mounted separately on extremely stiff springs directly to the wheel uprights.

At low speed, the car sat at the required 60mm clearance. At racing speed, the aerodynamic load pressed the outer chassis towards the ground, restoring the ground-effect seal that the regulations were supposed to have eliminated. Chapman argued, with some justification, that there was nothing in the rulebook forbidding it. FISA disagreed.

The Lotus 88’s passage through the 1981 season was a running battle. It was rejected at Long Beach, passed scrutineering in Brazil before being protested away, and failed scrutineering entirely at Argentina.

Chapman made one final attempt with a revised Lotus 88B at the British Grand Prix, which the Royal Automobile Club initially declared legal before FISA intervened and banned it once more.

The Lotus 88 never started a grand prix.

Chapman, furious, wrote an open letter in which he was critical of both his rivals and FISA.

“When you read this, I shall be on my way to watch the progress of the US Space Shuttle, an achievement of human mankind which will refresh my mind from what I have been subjected to in the last four weeks,” Chapman wrote.

FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre threatened to fine him $100,000 for writing it. Chapman hired the former Nixon defence attorney Robert Hinerfeld to appeal the FIA ruling. He lost.

Chapman died the following year, and many who knew him believed the experience had broken something in his relationship with the sport he had done more than anyone to create.

Outcome: Banned before it raced. The FIA’s ruling was disputed by many technical experts. Chapman appealed to the FIA Court of Appeal in Paris and lost.

The ‘water-cooled brakes’ weight trick

Brabham, Williams, Lotus, McLaren – 1982

By 1982, the turbocharged engines of Renault and Ferrari were producing something close to 600 horsepower in race trim. The Cosworth DFV that powered most of the field was producing around 500.

The FOCA teams, led by Ecclestone, were running out of ways to keep up – but they noticed something in the regulations.

Cars were required to meet the minimum weight of 580kg after a race, with the stipulation that cooling fluids could be replenished beforehand. The turbo teams, with their complex cooling systems, topped up around 10kg of fluid. The normally aspirated teams had considerably more scope.

The solution, widely adopted across the FOCA pitlane, was the installation of a water tank – ostensibly for brake cooling.

Pipes ran vaguely in the direction of the brakes. The tank held up to 40 litres of water at the start of the race, bringing the cars up to the minimum weight.

Within a few laps, the water had been jettisoned. The cars then raced as much as 40 to 50kg underweight for the entire grand prix. At the finish, the tanks were refilled before scrutineering.

For a car that was already at the minimum weight, every kilogram saved is worth roughly 0.03 seconds per lap. Forty kilograms was therefore worth a theoretical 1.2 seconds per lap – an advantage that made the turbo power deficit irrelevant.

Nelson Piquet won in Brazil, Keke Rosberg was second in a Williams. Renault and Ferrari protested and the two drivers were disqualified.

After seven weeks, the FIA upheld the disqualification and rewrote the regulations to require weighing before fluid replenishment.

Brabham, Williams, Lotus, McLaren and most other FOCA teams boycotted the San Marino Grand Prix in protest – though four teams broke ranks – leaving only 14 cars on the grid. The FIA didn’t blink.

Outcome: Piquet and Rosberg disqualified from the 1982 Brazilian GP. The regulation was clarified from Belgium onwards. The teams boycotted San Marino.

McLaren’s ‘fiddle brake’

McLaren – 1997-1998

The idea came to Steve Nichols, McLaren’s chief designer, while he was lying in the bath at his parents’ house at Christmas 1996.

The team’s cars had been set up with considerable understeer to protect the skinny rear tyres of the era, but that understeer cost them time on corner entry.

What if, Nichols thought, you could put a rear brake on in the corners to rotate the car into the apex – without it being an electronic system, which would be illegal under the driver aids ban?

The solution was elegant in its simplicity: an additional master cylinder and a length of brake hose connected to one rear calliper.

A third pedal in the footwell allowed the driver to apply braking force to a single rear wheel, generating a yaw moment that effectively steered the car without realigning the wheels.

“We called it brake-steer, which was unfortunate when we tried to argue that it wasn’t anything to do with steering”

“I remember Alain Prost, who had a team at the time, saying we’ve got to ban this because it will cost millions in development,” Nichols explained. “And it was fifty quid’s worth of parts that we already had in the truck!”

The team cleared it with the FIA and began racing it at the Canadian Grand Prix in 1997. Mika Häkkinen and David Coulthard adapted to it immediately.

The system was exposed when photographer Darren Heath noticed the rear brake discs under acceleration out of corners in Austria – something that only made sense if one wheel was being braked while the other was under power.

At the following race, both McLarens retired on the main straight, and Heath manoeuvred his camera into Coulthard’s cockpit to photograph the three-pedal layout.

Ferrari protested the system at the second race of 1998 in Brazil. The stewards banned it on the grounds that it constituted four-wheel steering.

“We called it brake-steer, which was unfortunate when we tried to argue that it wasn’t anything to do with steering,” recalled Tim Goss, the chief test team engineer at the time.

“It was a bad choice of name from ourselves. Then Ross Brawn coined the term ‘fiddle-brake’, which is used by cross-country trial cars for a handbrake that works on each of the rear wheels to try and turn the car.”

McLaren argued furiously that it wasn’t realigning anything. The team still won both championships that year.

Outcome: Banned at the 1998 Brazilian Grand Prix. McLaren won both championships anyway. The concept anticipated torque vectoring, now standard in performance road cars.

The X-wings

Tyrrell (1997), Ferrari, Jordan, Sauber, Prost (1998)

Harvey Postlethwaite was one of F1’s most gifted designers, which made it doubly impressive that his final trick at Tyrrell – a team in financial freefall and months away from being sold off – was so resourceful.

The F1 regulations were, as ever, highly prescriptive about where aerodynamic devices could be placed on a car. Above the driver’s head, however, they were notably quiet.

Postlethwaite looked at the rules, then looked at the space either side of the cockpit, and had an idea.

Two upright pylons were installed on the Tyrrell 025, rising from the sidepods around the cockpit area , each topped with a small horizontal wing surface. The regulations permitted bodywork in that region. The FIA confirmed they were legal.

The wings generated meaningful downforce and were particularly effective at high-downforce circuits.

They were grotesquely ugly, but in a cash-strapped team with no capacity to develop a conventional aero package, they added downforce essentially for free.

Jos Verstappen‘s were painted yellow; Mika Salo‘s orange, so mechanics could distinguish them in the garage.

By 1998, the designs had spread. Ferrari ran them on both Michael Schumacher‘s and Eddie Irvine‘s cars at San Marino. Jordan had its own version. Sauber and Prost followed suit.

And then a Sauber X-wing was torn off by a refuelling hose during a pitstop.

The FIA banned them after the San Marino Grand Prix, citing safety concerns.

Most observers suspected the aesthetic objection was at least as significant.

Outcome: Banned after the 1998 San Marino Grand Prix on safety grounds after four races in which multiple teams had adopted them.

Red Bull’s hidden onboard camera

Red Bull – 2014

Adrian Newey does not like things on the outside of his cars that do not need to be there.

When the FIA mandated that all cars carry onboard cameras in specific positions for television purposes, most designers resigned themselves to the aerodynamic penalty and mounted the camera pods in the regulation locations, accepting the drag they caused.

Newey read the regulations more carefully. The rules specified that cameras had to be fitted in defined positions, and that mountings must not be fixed on the carbon structure of the chassis – but they said nothing about whether the cameras had to be mounted externally.

The loophole was narrow but it was there. Red Bull mounted the cameras inside the nose of the RB10, cutting apertures in the bodywork just large enough for the lens to see out.

The camera housing, instead of protruding into the airflow and creating drag, was entirely contained within the car’s aerodynamic surfaces.

The small aerodynamic benefit was real, and sufficiently irritating to rivals that multiple teams raised it with the FIA. Formula One Management was also unhappy: the arrangement produced poor-quality footage and eliminated the broadcast camera angles it relied upon.

Red Bull ran the design for five races at the start of 2014, with tweaks made for the Spanish Grand Prix, before the FIA informed the team ahead of Monaco that it did not consider the arrangement to comply with the rules.

There was no penalty for the races already run. Newey’s interpretation of the regulations was not unreasonable, and the design had not been flagged as illegal at the time.

The camera mountings were revised. The cars ran conventionally thereafter.

The episode was a characteristic piece of Newey thinking: a small gain, found in the white space between two clauses of a technical document, exploited for as long as the FIA would allow.

Outcome: Allowed for five races in 2014. The FIA ruled it non-compliant ahead of Monaco, partly at the urging of FOM. Red Bull reverted to conventional camera mounts.

Renault’s mass damper

Renault – 2005-2006

The problem that Renault’s R&D department was trying to solve sounds almost too mundane to produce a championship-winning innovation.

Its car had a tendency to bounce as a result of the extreme front spring stiffness required to keep the front wing in its ideal position. The bounce unsettled the aerodynamics and cost laptime. The solution that Dr. Robin Tuluie’s team in Renault’s R&D department arrived at had been used on skyscrapers to prevent earthquake damage for decades: a tuned mass damper.

The device was almost absurdly simple. A weight – initially around 10kg, tuned differently for each circuit – was enclosed in a tube with springs on either side, mounted in the nosecone.

When the car pitched at its natural frequency, the weight moved in the opposite direction, cancelling the oscillation. That way, the front wing stayed planted. The downforce became consistent.

Fernando Alonso, who had been fighting the car through slow corners, found it transformed.

The team had cleared the device with the FIA before racing it, and introduced it towards the end of the 2005 season, building a championship lead that Alonso converted into a title. By 2006, Renault had extended the concept to the rear of the car as well.

Most of the field had followed suit by 2006 – including Ferrari, Honda and Red Bull – when the FIA issued a technical bulletin ahead of the German Grand Prix declaring the device illegal.

The Hockenheim stewards, however, ruled it legal when Renault presented the car for scrutineering. The FIA then took the unusual step of appealing its own stewards’ ruling, and the International Court of Appeal banned the mass damper approximately a month later – ahead of the Turkish Grand Prix – classifying it as a moveable aerodynamic device on the grounds that it stabilised the front wing.

Renault lost an estimated three tenths of a second per lap. Alonso still won the championship, but by a considerably smaller margin.

Outcome: Banned by the FIA International Court of Appeal in August 2006, ahead of the Turkish Grand Prix.