The ultimate Williams track test

Taken from Motor Sport, December 2012

Early September, a couple of days after the Belgian Grand Prix and a few before the Italian at Monza. Christian Horner has just walked into the Silverstone garage, still sporting a healthy tan from Formula 1’s four-week August break, and yet somehow he’s milkier in pallor than we’ve ever seen him. The engineers and mechanics look on edge, too. Red Bull Racing is used to handling the odd bit of pressure, but this is something different. The team’s most valuable asset – perhaps the most coveted in all of grand prix racing – is about to head out on track, putting himself at mortal risk behind the wheel of not one, but two of his own perfectly sculpted, frighteningly rapid, creations.

Adrian Newey is an F1 visionary, the most gifted and influential race car designer of the past 30 years, and the only man to draw, by hand, World Championship winners for three different teams. What he’s not is a racing driver, at least in F1 terms. Sure, he’s quite handy driving historics, as he’ll show later in the month at the Goodwood Revival where he’ll win the TT Celebration for a second time, with Martin Brundle in a Jag E. But in F1 cars, his experience amounts to… not very much. At all. “If I hurt him today, Christian’s going to have my kids’ fingers,” mutters ashen-faced test team manager Tony Burrows.

We sympathise with Tony’s concern. Truly, we do. But after the best part of three years talking about it, we’re just relieved it’s actually happening. As back-to-back tests go, this is special: two grand prix cars, conveniently separated by exactly 20 years, pedalled by a man burning with curiosity to discover exactly how it feels to drive what he drew. Here are the poles of two decades of F1 evolution.

“The team desperately wants its design genius back in one piece”

In the ‘Miami Blue’ corner (or turquoise to you and me), the beautiful little Leyton House CG901, the final car of what in hindsight could be described as Adrian’s three-year audition for greater grand prix glory. And next to it, in royal blue, the outlandish and plain-ugly-in-comparison Red Bull RB6, the car that secured Newey’s unique place in history and made Sebastian Vettel the sport’s youngest world champion in 2010.

Newey takes no time at all to get to grips with the Leyton House, a car of which he remains ferociously proud. Ex-Red Bull driver and now BBC man David Coulthard tracks him in RB6 during the short run in CG901, complimenting Adrian on his commitment. Now Newey has pushed ‘fast-forward’ 20 years and is nestling into the Red Bull. His further commitment in the modern car will leave his friend and team principal Horner praying for it all to be over. He desperately wants his design genius back in one piece.

I’d spent four years in IndyCar and [March co-founder] Robin Herd said, ‘right, we’re now ready to do an F1 car’,” says Newey as he recalls how the adventure began. Japanese businessman Akira Akagi had forged a partnership to take racing car constructor March back into the Big Time. But the team would run under the puzzling guise of Leyton House, Akagi’s lifestyle marketing exercise – based bizarrely on a colour. It wasn’t just the name that was unconventional. But with youthful ‘secret weapon’ Newey and the promising Ivan Capelli in the hotseat, Leyton House was about to play a great F1 cameo, with lasting consequences for the sport.

“In those days F1 was a split formula,” says Adrian. “All the top teams had turbo engines and at the back end of the grid they were 3.5-litre normally aspirated, down on power by about 150hp. At the time the turbo cars were really quite clumsy. People had become lazy in their design – they had so much power that to find more downforce they would just bolt on ever-bigger wings. It was all about containing that power.

Adrian Newey holding concept paper — Newey always has, and still does, create his concepts on paper before they become CFD, and later, reality

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“With our 650hp Judd V8 we had to find the speed from elsewhere, namely from aerodynamic efficiency. So we designed it very much from an aerodynamic perspective, making small compromises in the mechanical packaging to achieve this. And in that way these are the cars that personally I’m most proud of. I think it’s fair to say the approach changed the design direction of F1.”

In 1988, the year of McLaren-Honda near-total domination, Capelli played the plucky underdog, even passing the mighty Ayrton Senna at Estoril, and briefly leading at Suzuka. Remarkably, the 881 outscored the Williams FW12 over the course of the season to be best of the Judd-powered cars, and it also broke new ground, pre-dating Harvey Postlethwaite’s high-nosed Tyrrell 019 by two full years. “The things we did with it, in terms of raising the underside of the chassis to treat the front wing, the nose and the chassis as one aerodynamic device, sculpting the front wing endplates, putting a lot of effort into the diffuser and packaging the car as small and tight as we could, it was all something that spread through the field,” notes Newey.

Mauricio Gugelmin accident 1989 French — Mauricio Gugelmin endures a huge accident at the start of the 1989 French GP at Paul Ricard. He would emerge unharmed an even take the restart in a new March, and set fastest lap

But the following year, the good work began to unravel. Over-ambition, a lack of frontline F1 experience, Akagi’s failing financial security and intra-team politics would all erode the early promise. The CG891 – its initials added in memory of Capelli’s close friend and key Leyton House cog Cesare Gariboldi who’d died in a road accident – failed to live up to expectations. And its 1990 successor, based on the same chassis with new aero, looked to be a flop, too. But a mid-season discovery would change everything, bringing a new meaning to ‘fast food’, as engineer Andy Brown explains later. From the French GP in July 1990, the CG901 became a contender, Capelli leading 45 laps at Paul Ricard having failed to even qualify for the preceding Mexican GP. But it was all too late for Newey. Adrian had already quit the team and would start his new job at Williams the Monday after the British GP.

“I’d been in at Leyton House pretty much from the start and although we made mistakes I thought as a team we were moving forwards,” he says. “Had Leyton House continued to have proper funding we could have done a decent job, perhaps – who knows – start to win races. But Akagi was clearly in financial trouble and it was pretty obvious which way it was going, which is why I left when I did. And frankly I’d had a big fall-out with the accountant [Simon Keeble] who Akagi had appointed to run the team, and with whom I got on very badly. You can’t appoint an accountant to run a race team. It’s never going to work.”

Akagi would later be arrested for fraud and the team, back under its March moniker, would fold on the eve of the 1993 season – by which time Newey was being hailed as the new genius of F1.

The first two times I drove on track were both in F1 cars,” says Adrian with a smile. “The first time was an 881 at Vallelunga where we were testing towards the end of the year. Both drivers [Capelli and Mauricio Gugelmin] found the cockpit cramped, which I’ve had a lot of stick for since! Ivan said, ‘you drive it and see what you think’. So I did. I did the outlap, got as far as the final hairpin – and spun coming out. So that was my circuit debut.

“These are the cars I’m most proud of. I think it’s fair to say the approach we used changed the design direction of F1”

“My second time was in a Williams at the end of 1993 where the team organised a day for journalists to drive at Paul Ricard, and Patrick [Head] thought it would be a good idea if he, I and Bernard Dudot from Renault had a play. Unfortunately, it was chucking it down so it was a bit daunting.

“So this is my third time in an F1 car if you discount the Goodwood hillclimb, which is not the same thing. And in preparation for this, I have to admit the guys at work – and Christian primarily – thought it would be a good idea if I tried a single-seater before being let loose in an F1 car. So I went up to Snetterton last week and jumped into one of Jonathan Palmer’s F2 cars. My head was hanging off after about 15 laps, just from not being at all used to driving cars with a significant amount of downforce.”

Adrian Newey and two of his creations at Silverstone — Newey (flanked by David Coulthard) and two of his creations, together for one intriguing day at Silverstone

Matt Howell

Newey’s short on experience, but not in confidence. He looks at home in the car almost immediately, and as you can see from our pictures, his confidence was inspired by its immaculate preparation, thanks to owner Patrick Morgan and his Dawn Treader Performance team. At the Festival of Speed this year, former F3 racer Gary Ward set the fastest time of the weekend in this car. Both Adrian and Coulthard, who also enjoys a few laps during our session, relish the chance to backtrack to a ‘purer’ time when racing cars were made in the right proportions, and weren’t littered with the turning vanes and aero flaps Newey himself must specialise in today.

“It actually felt very comfortable, funnily enough, considering I haven’t driven a car like that,” says Adrian. “Good visibility all round thanks to the low cockpit, which from a safety point of view you could say left the drivers quite exposed. A very tractable engine, and the physical act of driving the car is simple. Obviously it’s Patrick’s car and I didn’t want to take any chances with it, but it felt beautifully balanced: direct steering, good brakes and very little buffeting, which was surprising because I’d had a lot in the F2 car. It just felt like an old glove, which is peculiar given that I’d never driven it before.”

“The Leyton House just felt like an old glove, which is peculiar given that I’d never driven it before”

We were just relieved he’d been able to squeeze into the V-shaped cockpit, given how infamous his Leyton House designs were for their shrink-wrapped proportions. It helps that Newey shows no visible sign of having any hips. “Yes, Ivan and Mauricio did complain about cramped cockpits and the difficulty in changing gear, which we made a lot better on the 891 and the 901,” he admits. Patrick points at a blister bubble on the right flank – a rare aero concession to the drivers and the skin on their knuckles when changing gear. Newey smiles. “For me at my size there was enough cockpit space. I don’t know what they were all moaning about!”

CG901 never won a race, but its importance to Newey and F1 as a whole is obvious if it is compared to the Williams FW14 of 1991.

“Certainly from Leyton House to Williams, it was very much the same aerodynamic philosophy,” says Adrian. “As I joined Williams in July 1990, I had a relatively short time to get on with designing the following year’s car. Basically I brought with me the knowledge in my head – not the drawings – of what would have been the Leyton House 911 had I stayed there.” Note the important clarification within that sentence.

Adrian Newey on test Track — After some preparation in a Formula 2 car, Newey was allowed out to play in his Leyton House for the first time

Matt Howell

“Obviously, Williams had much bigger resources compared to Leyton House, and all the experience, particularly on the mechanical side. But I think it’s fair to say that aerodynamically what we were doing at Leyton House was much more advanced than what they were doing at Williams at the time. So if you sit an FW14 beside a 901 you’ll see more than a passing resemblance.”

With the ‘active’ FW14B of 1992, Newey claimed his first World Championship, with beefy Nigel Mansell strong-arming his way to a dominant drivers’ title. But in defiance of popular belief, Newey believes Williams didn’t use the best active ride system that was available. Again, his experience at Leyton House told him differently.

“Our R&D man Max Nightingale began work on a system in ’89,” he says. “Of course Lotus and Williams had done their active systems very differently. Full active on the Lotus, and a sort of cobbled-up AP system at Williams. At Leyton House we worked on a platform control system, which is purely aimed at trying to control ride-height through speed and downforce variation as opposed to trying to deal with road inputs, and left conventional springs and dampers to deal with those. I believed that was the way forward. Small as we were, we were probably over-ambitious to start an active system. Ironically, it was the system that McLaren went on to use in 1993.

“It was the first research I’d done into active ride, but we continued with the AP-based ‘three-legged’ system at Williams for the 1992 car, which I don’t think was as good as the platform control system. It basically had two front springs and a single rear spring. And then the bump side of the single rear actuator was connected to the rebound side of the front actuator, and that’s what gave you the roll stiffness.

“It provided what we wanted in terms of compensating for downforce, but in the process of hydraulic tripod linkage you compromise the ride a bit, and that was what used to give Riccardo [Patrese] in particular some problems.

“The McLaren system which we’d used on the Leyton House was very simple. You put an actuator under the spring platform, and compensated the spring and tyre squash by extending the actuator. It was the better system. Had active not been banned at the end of 1993 Williams would have ditched the three-legged principle to go to a platform control system, but with the actuators on the pushrod instead of under the spring perch.”

“If Ferrari couldn’t get something to work, they’d get it banned”

Newey’s enthusiasm for the ‘active era’ is obvious. How frustrating was the ban on such devices at the end of 1993? “Very,” he says. “It’s a shame because I think it was a great time, that electronic era, and it wasn’t just active suspension. By the end of ’93 we had four-channel ABS, electronic power steering, traction control, active ride and we had built and run the CVT, which was effectively a DAF Variomatic transmission system. We actually ran it here at Silverstone, it did a few laps. It sounded very weird to hear an engine at near-constant rpm. But that was banned too. Unfortunately it was a case of ‘Ferrari International Aid’. Ferrari and the FIA got together, and it was the usual Ferrari modus operandi: if they couldn’t get something to work they got it banned. They couldn’t get active to work, they certainly wouldn’t have got CVT to work in a short space of time. So as a consequence the whole thing got closed down.”

What he says next on the ‘passive’ FW16 of 1994 is fascinating, in the context of May 1 and the death of Ayrton Senna. The electronics ban hit Williams particularly hard, he says. “It was a big step back for us. We’d been on ‘active’ for two years, at least one year longer than our rivals. We had of course developed the aerodynamics around it, so when we went back we were a bit slow, in truth, to appreciate the problems of having a platform that was moving around a lot more. So the FW16 was aerodynamically unstable, frankly. The sidepods were too long, it would get into this huge floor-stall, and there was no way out of it. If you ran the car high you could avoid the floor-stall, but you lost downforce. If you ran it low it was unstable. It was a bit of pig at the start of the season, and it wasn’t until we shortened the sidepods at Magny-Cours [in July] that we really got it sorted.”

Ayrton Senna and Adrian Newey — Newey with Senna in 1994. The rule changes for that season caused instabilities

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In 1997, as Jacques Villeneuve headed towards Williams’ fourth Newey-inspired drivers’ World Championship in six years, Adrian quit the team for a fresh start at McLaren. When his elegant MP4-13 won the opening race of the new narrow-track era in ’98, the transition from one team to another appeared to be as seamless as the gearshift technology that would be a feature of his McLarens.

“The transition certainly wasn’t easy,” he counters. “To work at McLaren compared to Williams felt very different. Williams is very much Frank and Patrick’s hobby shop, which could be frustrating at times. But it had that sort of homely feel to it, and Patrick was very good to me in the freedom he gave me. McLaren is a little more IBM-like. Not that I’ve worked at IBM, but it feels like a big company that has methods and standards, and this is how you must operate.

“I joined on August 1, 1997 so it was a really tight design schedule for the new car. Through August to October I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week to catch up. The big regulation change was a chance to do something different, which was definitely an advantage. Had I joined with stable regulations for the following year it would have been much more difficult.”

“There was a huge amount of politics at McLaren, and posturing”

His struggles with life under Ron Dennis are well documented. In 2001 he came close to leaving McLaren to join his old friend Bobby Rahal at Jaguar – which would of course eventually become Red Bull – only to pull out late in the day. “In truth, I stayed at McLaren a couple of years too long,” he says. “The 2002 car was decent, but David [Coulthard] only won a single race in it, and it wasn’t a championship winner. I made the judgement mistake of trying to be aggressive with the 2003 car, and that was the MP4-18 that never raced. But there was a lot going on at that time…”

Patrick Morgan, who worked for Ilmor, the company that builds Mercedes’ F1 engines, interjects: “I remember we had 16 different specs of crankshaft at that time, and we were doing a rotary-valve engine that never raced and was banned before it made it into a car. Then there was the ‘M’ engine to support the MP4-17 which was raced in 2002 and ’03, and the ‘P’ which was your low centre of gravity engine for which we drew up that weird connecting rod for you. And then there was the development of the twin-clutch going on at the same time, plus the carbon gearbox…

“Yeah, it was too much,” says Newey. “And the 18 was the result. It was over-ambitious. Ferrari had come up with a great 2002 car [it won all but two of the 17 races], I felt we needed to make a big step, and we made mistakes. Aerodynamically it was unstable for a reason that didn’t show up in the tunnel but showed up quickly on track. Kimi [Räikkönen] had a massive accident in the last turn at Barcelona, just through the car being aerodynamically unstable at low ride-height. We realised what the problem was and we canned the car.

Mika Häkkinen hugs Adrian Newey 1998, Melbourne, Australia — Mika Häkkinen embraces Newey after the first of his eight wins in 1998, in Melbourne, Australia

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“Towards the end of that year I wanted to do a new car to get on top of those problems, but Martin Whitmarsh and some of the other engineers believed the car that didn’t race could be made quicker by putting the twin-clutch gearbox on it and so on. Frankly, I got over-ruled and I should have left then. There was a huge amount of politics at McLaren and a lot of posturing. At that point we raced what became MP4-19, but was in fact the 18 with a different badge on it, and of course it wasn’t a very good car. But the 19B, which made its debut mid-season and won at Spa, that was a big step forward, a decent car. Had we had it from the start of the year we might have been able to challenge for the championship. But it all left a bad taste.”

The 2005 McLaren would be Newey’s last at the team, and again Newey offered innovation in the so-called ‘zero-keel’ suspension configuration. Despite 10 wins shared between Räikkönen and Juan Pablo Montoya, another title to add to those claimed with Mika Häkkinen (with Newey, left) in ’98 and ’99 slipped away. It was time for a new challenge.

“With Red Bull I felt I’d come full circle,” says Newey. “The attraction was it felt like unfinished business from Leyton House. Here I had a chance to join a team more or less from its start, develop with it and get to the point where we could perhaps win races.”

Newey, famously, still works at his drawing board, just as he did at McLaren, at Williams, at Leyton House and March, at Fittipaldi and at Southampton University from where he graduated in 1980.

Adrian Newey and Vettel Red Bull in 2010 — Newey and Vettel following their breakthrough triumph for Red Bull in 2010

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“I’m too much of a dinosaur,” he smiles. “Really since the March days, including the Indycars, I’ve always started the layout of a car by considering the aerodynamics first and then trying to fit the mechanicals around it. I’ve never quite understood how people operate differently. I guess things are changing now because the regulations are so tight and restrictive that to some extent the car does lay itself out for you. But I’ve never really understood how you can have a mechanical department that doesn’t work in a very integrated way with the aerodynamic department. And you see it. You see cars where the aerodynamicist clearly hasn’t communicated with the chief designer, and the thing looks like a camel.

“I graduated in 1980 long before CAD [computer-aided design] was even thought of in motor racing circles. CAD systems started to be used in racing in the very late 1980s, early 1990s. Probably with the exception of mine, all the drawing boards had disappeared from F1 by the mid-90s. It was a quick transition.

“To some extent the drawing board doesn’t matter. For me, it’s just a way of taking your thoughts, putting them down in a medium, developing them using that medium and then if it’s an aerodynamic idea it’s taken off to CAD and the wind tunnel. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I have two or three surfacing guys who scan my drawings and then turn them into solid models. But these days we couldn’t, as a business, accommodate too many people like me because it would simply be too head-count intensive.”

By 2010, 20 years after he’d left Leyton House and his CG901 for Williams, Newey felt his ‘new’ team was ready to win a championship. Success had been far from instantaneous. Even Adrian’s genius would take time to come into effect at a team that, under its previous guise of Jaguar, had been mismanaged so badly.

But now, with the RB6, the team made its breakthrough.

“The RB5 was pretty good,” he says of the car he designed for the new supposedly ‘downforce-lite’ regulations of 2009 – only for Brawn GP and its double diffuser to reset the parameters. “Unfortunately there are no classes in F1, but it was the quickest single-diffuser car. We got into the whole politics of whether a double diffuser was legal or not. But the decision was nothing to do with the technical regulation, it was part of the war between Max Mosley, McLaren and some of the other teams. We got caught up in that.

“The Red Bull feels much less familiar, more alien to drive”

“Anyway, as a team we were too young. Sebastian was very young, Mark [Webber] was doing a great job, but had some bad luck and made some mistakes. And as a team we were making errors all over the place. The car wasn’t reliable, our race strategies weren’t often all that clever. So we needed another year at the front to learn how to do it properly.”

Then in 2010, Vettel and RB6 came good – after more than a few stumbles along the way. “I’ve got good memories of this car. We had a frustrating start with a lot of DNFs through silly things – a wheel nut coming loose in Melbourne, Sebastian getting involved in incidents perhaps through inexperience. But in the second half of the year it all came right.”

Vettel’s late run of form and Fernando Alonso falling foul of Ferrari’s strategy errors at the Abu Dhabi finale took them to that magical title. To show his gratitude, Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz presented Newey with an exceptional gift: the RB6 you see here.

Horner’s relief is palpable as Newey steps away from the car, and the effects of his summer tan are once again noticeable. Now it’s all smiles in the garage. Newey sounded committed through Woodcote, although as a genuinely impressed Coulthard points out, dropping a couple of cogs for the usually seventh-gear Copse is a tell-tale that he’s not quite ready to replace Vettel and become F1’s only modern-day designer-driver just yet.

Adrian Newey in Red Bull RB6 — Hand clutch? Left-foot brake? High cockpit? What is this witchcraft?! Newey heads out for a run in the ‘alien’ Red Bull RB6

Matt Howell

“I have driven a Red Bull a couple of times up the hill at Goodwood, so it’s not the first time,” says Adrian. “You forget how different it feels just sitting there. It’s much more claustrophobic than the Leyton House because the cockpit sides are high, your feet are up in the air and the pedals are different: you’ve got a hand clutch and you have to left-foot brake. It feels much less familiar, more alien. The power delivery is impressive. It’s a big kick in the backside. The Leyton House does that too, but this is even more again. And of course the engine note is completely different to anything you’re used to. But that all fades after a lap; it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it.

“It feels more of a fairground ride. To get to the point where you can slow things down in your own mind to drive that car quickly would take quite a while.” But still, you were totally committed, we say. “Yes,” he replies with that familiar enigmatic smile. “But then again I do know exactly what it should do.” When you’re Adrian Newey, you’ve got a right to have faith in your own work.

Our thanks to Adrian Newey, Patrick Morgan and Dawn Treader Performance, Christian Horner and Red Bull Racing, and Silverstone for their help with this feature.

No House party

Andy Brown is a veteran of Leyton House and worked as engineer to Mauricio Gugelmin. Now a long-time Chip Ganassi Racing team member, he returned to Silverstone to watch Newey drive the CG901 and recalled their days in ‘Miami Blue’

“Looking back on it, we probably tried to grow too quickly, too soon. It was a small band of people in 1988 and based on the success of that year we got carried away and tried to bring everything in-house. We tried to set up our own composite facility and our own wind tunnel, and all of that was going to be based in Brackley.

“The wind tunnel was bigger and faster than anything that had been built up to that time, and we ran into problems that hadn’t been experienced before, with the heat that the [rolling road] belt was generating. It was all moving around. Nowadays they are all water-cooled and made of huge single pieces of metal. Back then they were built in separate sections and with the heat it all moved at different rates. We had some problems with air control as well, and that was creating downwash on the front wing, so we ended up with one for the CG901 that wasn’t big enough.

“The car’s most successful outing of course was the French Grand Prix and if you look at photos it has what we call ‘tea-tray flaps’. In testing at Paul Ricard we realised we didn’t have enough front wing – and the front wing extensions were fabricated from trays from the local McDonald’s! We had real ones made for the race weekend…

“It took us a while to sort everything out. Adrian eventually got on top of things and re-designed the under-wing mid-season. The first half of the year was very difficult and Mauricio didn’t qualify for four races, and Ivan [Capelli] didn’t qualify for two. One of those was the Mexican GP, the one before France. But with the new under-wing for Paul Ricard, there we were running first and second.

“But by that time Adrian had already left. He went a week before that race, so he didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Our team manager Ian Phillips had been instrumental in keeping team spirit alive through the difficult year we had in 1989 and over the winter while we regrouped. But he contracted meningitis when in Brazil at the start of ’90, so he was off the scene and didn’t come back until the end of the year. Simon Keeble, who was an accountant from the City of London and had no idea how to run a race team, was put in charge. He was at loggerheads the whole time with Adrian, who was trying to fix problems and sort things out, which of course takes money – and accountants don’t like that. The politics came to a head and Adrian ended up leaving. Tim Holloway was another member who was the heart and soul of the team, but he followed Adrian out the door because he couldn’t take the politics.

“The heart was basically ripped out of the team there in the middle of 1990.

“I managed to soldier on until the end of the year when it got too much for me – and Ian was fired upon his return! I left to engineer Martin Brundle at Brabham, then moved to the States to work in IndyCar.

“Leyton House promised so much and we had everything in place, when you look at what Adrian has achieved since. Unfortunately the politics wouldn’t let it happen. I remember him as very dedicated, very focused. We worked together first through the March days, from which Leyton House grew. He’d done the 1984 Formula 2 car which was a very nice, tidy little car which I then developed into the 1985 Formula 3000. I remember him in debriefs, how he’d finish with the drivers from whom we’d get information on the biggest issues. After he’d addressed those he’d go through every single item on the set-up sheet. His attention to detail was always extreme.”

The ultimate Williams track test

Taken from Motor Sport, November 2010

Okay. But please ask the announcer to tell the crowd why I’m not waving.” Sir Stirling Moss – the original professional racing driver and at the age of 80 still keenly aware not only of today’s job but also his duties to his public. We’ve brought him together with a special car, a machine with a unique place in racing history, and we want pictures. That means asking him to trail a camera car at a frustrating speed, and not wave until we’ve got our snaps. It’s hard for him – everyone on the banks treasures that wave as a personal greeting and he knows it – but it’s only for one lap. After that, Stirling, go as fast as you want, wave as much as you like. He does, and he does, and the crowd love it.

Stirling Moss gets in P99 at Oulton Park 1961 and 2010 — Twin snapshots, 50 years apart. Moss slides into the P99 chassis at Oulton Park in 1961 and 2010

LAT / Matt Howell

It’s the Gold Cup, now Oulton Park’s major historic meeting, but once a prime Formula 1 race in the days when they weren’t all bound to the championship. And Stirling was the master, winning it five times in four different makes of car. It’s the last of those wins we’re here to applaud, when he jumped into an experimental machine with little racing behind it and pulled off something which remains unique to this day – the only Formula 1 victory in a four-wheel-drive car. Almost 50 years on that vehicle, the Ferguson P99, has returned to Oulton Park, and, thanks to Motor Sport, Sir Stirling is driving it.

Around the circuit the banks are packed. In the pits the track director tells me this may be the biggest crowd the Cheshire track has ever seen; they’ve even had to close the paddock gates.

Run by the HSCC, this huge meeting has drawn 480 cars from buzzing 500s to thundering F5000s, and if the range of races wasn’t enough, The Legend has entered his OSCA in a race called the Stirling Moss Trophy. Everyone wants an autograph or a photo. Every time he moves Moss is attended by a comet tail of fans; when he stops the programmes appear and he signs patiently, nodding and smiling to those who aren’t getting an autograph. If rarity mattered his John Hancock wouldn’t be worth diddley, but that’s not the point. It’s to be able to say ‘I met him’.

There’s a respite for him at the Motor Racing Legends corral, where he’s having a quiet (until I interrupt) coffee with Susie Moss and Jamie Sheldon, who has brought P99 from the Ferguson family museum at Yarmouth, Isle of Wight.

Stirling Moss P99 Gold Cup victory — While not convinced initially, Moss did a lot of running with the P99 and finally proved the technology with a historic Gold Cup victory

Sheldon is grandson of the P99’s progenitor, the creative Irish engineer Harry Ferguson, who built and flew a pioneer aeroplane, reinvented the plough and the tractor, won a lawsuit against Henry Ford and lost $1 million on the toss of a coin (business, not gambling). But though his ‘little grey Fergy’ would at one point comprise three-quarters of all the tractors in Britain, Ferguson himself became increasingly interested in the safety benefits of all-wheel drive for road vehicles.

In 1948 he had backed ‘The Crab’, an all-steering, all-driving race project schemed by fiery racer Freddie Dixon and Tony Rolt, engineer and Le Mans-winning driver. Two years on he founded Harry Ferguson Research, and both men joined him, along with Claude Hill, designer of Aston Martins. And though that sounds like the recipe for a race team, the aim was primarily to bring all-wheel drive safety to the road. By 1959 Ferguson’s prototypes had reached the R5 estate, which with 4WD, Dunlop Maxaret antilock disc brakes and a hatchback was 30 years ahead of any Audi Avant. But at a time when heaters were optional and ‘safety features’ meant padded sun visors, British makers – tiny Jensen apart – flocked to ignore it. 4WD was for Land Rovers only. Ferguson needed a high-profile billboard to demonstrate that, thanks to the crucial viscous coupling apportioning power smoothly front to rear, a Ferguson Formula-equipped car could also be a high-performance machine. And there’s nothing with a higher profile than Formula 1…

“The P99 compared well with its rivals from Cooper and BRM”

With Rolt as technical chief (Dixon had baled out by now) P99 was rapidly readied for the 1961 season. There was nothing unconventional about the racing car side of it: tube frame designed by Hill, all-wishbone suspension, the same Climax four most teams chose for the new 1½ litre formula, though as it was originally designed to the 2.5 rules it could also accept the bigger Climax to run in the short-lived Inter-Continental series. To eliminate bump-steer and joint plunge the lower arms are in line with the driveshafts, hence the high and slightly inelegant spring turrets. Packaging meant the block was canted over and the propshaft pushed the driver off to one side, but many cars had gone that route before in the quest for low seating. Putting the engine up front was more surprising, but it offered the desired 50:50 weight distribution for the 50:50 torque split, and of course the traction of 4WD would negate that advantage of rear engines. Speaking of weight, this was not automatically higher for 4WD: spreading the drive means lighter shafts, while inboard discs mean the shafts take the braking loads, allowing lighter suspension arms. In fact the P99 compared well with its rivals from Cooper and BRM.

Inevitably the 4WD system is bespoke, which might have made things difficult when after a long rest period the time came for restoration in 2004. Luckily the man who tackled the job is looking after it here at Oulton today, and once he’s warmed it up and it’s sitting ticking quietly in the garage waiting for Stirling to arrive, he talks me through the 18-month project.

wet-weather Fairman British GP Aintree 1961 — A wet-weather weapon: Fairman sits in the pits at the British GP at Aintree in 1961, but would be disqualified for a push start

“It hadn’t run since 1969, but there wasn’t much wrong with it,” says Barry Snow. “Fatigue in a couple of driveshafts so we had to make new ones, but otherwise the car today is as it was raced in 1961. Stirling has a waiver to drive it without harnesses or extinguisher.”

Snow’s Calbourne Garage on the island is used to preparing 4WD rally cars, so the one-off transmission did not faze them. Front and rear diffs are identical, just rotated, and the viscous coupling works the same way as today’s ones, except that it contains automatic transmission fluid instead of silicon. Under the driver’s left hand the tall lever controls a five-speed Colotti dog-box. “There are drawings for it in Italian,” says Barry, “but we don’t know if they were drawn at Ferguson and translated for Colotti, or designed in Italy.”

Barry says the ’box is easier on the palm than many dog-boxes, yet this was the item that spoilt the car’s debut. Ferguson handed the car to Rob Walker’s team, under the charge of Alf Francis. “This made good sense,” says Tony Rolt’s son Stuart, later to be marketing director of Ferguson Developments. “My father had a long connection with Rob – he’d raced Rob’s Connaughts – and Stirling was regarded as a very intellectual driver. It was a business move: Ferguson was an enthusiast [he had raced in his youth] but P99 was a serious business proposition, and Rob and Alf and Stirling were the right people to exploit it.”

In fact Jack Fairman raced it first, in 2.5-litre form in the British Empire Trophy at Silverstone. Moss practiced it, but chose to race his Cooper T53, saying he didn’t believe the P99 could win. Struggling with the gearchange, Jack had a grassy off and retired. Nothing daunted, the team entered it for the British GP at Aintree, and this time Ferguson’s vision started to become clear. It rained torrentially in practice, and in the novel machine Moss set fastest time, even ahead of the very rapid Ferraris with their wailing V6s. There just might be something in this 4WD. However, for the race Moss stuck with Walker’s Lotus. Good choice: splashing past the front-row Ferraris of Richie Ginther and Phil Hill in another downpour, Moss was hunting down von Trips for the lead when a brake pipe burst. Sprinting to the pits he took over the P99 from Fairman, running low down with electrical gremlins, and set off praying for more rain. Instead it was the Clerk of the Course who dampened his hopes: Jack had had a push-start earlier, and now the car was black-flagged. An ignominious end to the last front-engined outing in a championship grand prix.

Fergusson p99 engine — Its Coventry Climax heart was nothing unconventional, but was highly effective

Matt Howell

I won’t bring up that DNF right now as Stirling and his cloud of followers arrive in the pit. The fans cluster at the door, but the pitlane is packed too: marshals, mechanics, drivers, press people all want to get close to a living legend. After his lift accident walking is clearly an effort, and Moss sinks thankfully into a canvas chair for his briefing, nodding briefly before his request about the waving. Then with a bit of help he’s settling in the car, helmet, goggles, gloves all correct. Sir Stirling Moss is in his element.

Clack of gear lever, brief nod to crew, Climax barks, and for the first time in 49 years four driven wheels launch him down the Oulton Park pitlane.

To many at Oulton back then it was a puzzling choice: a front-engined car when that tide had clearly turned; twice the running gear soaking up power; the same motor as half the grid. Why would a great like Moss – by then into his second decade of racing and if anything more competitive – take that risk?

“Curiosity,” says his then-manager Ken Gregory. “He was always looking for a technical advantage, even though he didn’t need it. And because Rob asked him to.”

Moss expands: “Tony Rolt was a friend of Rob’s, as everyone was, and he lent it to us as an experiment, just to see if it worked. I did a lot of experimenting and a lot of it didn’t pay off, but I was always interested to try new things.”

Moss was so keen to add to his Gold Cup shelf that he had some frantic travel plans: he was entered in the Tour de France which finished on the same day, so he intended to leave the tour the day before, take a helicopter from Corsica to Nice, then fly to London and on to Manchester. In the end he did not do the Tour, so was able to have dinner with his one-time Jaguar team-mate Rolt the night before.

Sir Stirling. Moss 2010 driving Ferguson P99 — Hands on the wheel, Sir Stirling. Moss resists waving to the crowds just long enough to secure the tracking shots

Although neither the Ferrari nor Porsche teams attended, the Gold Cup grid included Clark, Brabham, McLaren, Surtees, Brooks, Ireland and Graham Hill. This was by no means a second-rank event. Propitiously, Cheshire offered up a damp weekend and Stirling claimed a confident second place on the grid alongside McLaren, with Clark and Hill just behind. But that gearbox almost stymied him – he could not get bottom gear when the starter raised the flag and as the bellow of F1 engines echoed round the landscaped park the P99 limped away in second. Once on the move, though, who needs bottom gear? Stirling began to pull back the six places he’d dropped. On the damp surface the Ferguson system gave him the edge, and by lap six Moss had taken the lead from Clark. Though the track began to dry, Moss took the flag 46sec ahead of Jack Brabham (Clark having had a suspension failure) and set a new F1 lap record. It was special even for Moss, who collected £250, the Gold Cup and the Lookers Cup for FTD. Suddenly car makers were calling Ferguson. Sadly Harry Ferguson did not see his vision vindicated: he had died only months before the great event.

“You had to drive it in an unconventional way. The P99 is very neutral. You just aim where you want to go”

The cheers that day can’t have been louder than they are today as Moss crests Deer Leap and enters the pitlane. Roger Dobson should know – he was present on both occasions. In 1961 he was chief pit marshal. “I thought I’d done a good job keeping people out of the pits, but when Moss came back in suddenly there were hundreds around him. Everyone hoped he’d win, against the odds as it were, and we all thought this was the forerunner of the future.”

As he kills the engine and removes his goggles Moss is again swamped, but this time after another polished performance at the mike it’s back to his OSCA for his race. He’s sharing with Ian Nuthall, but up against Chevy V8s and Jaguar power their 1500ccs were never going to go far. After the prize-giving, when he collects a class trophy and comments on the crowd – “Do we get a cut of the gate?” – it’s time for our download.

MHowell042 — The gearbox was a bit of a sticking point, but proved adequate. High suspension mounts were used to keep lower arms and driveshafts aligned

Matt Howell

Ferguson-P99 blueprint sketch — The layout of the powertrain demanded the driver be moved off-centre, allowing space for the gearbox and rear driveshaft to pass through the middle of the car, achieving four-wheel drive

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he says. “People all the way round. Oulton’s changed quite a bit, though. Not at all as I remember it. I don’t recall Old Hall being a double apex, and the hairpin seems to have shifted.” After 50 years that mental map is still in the neural filing system. And the car?

“Exactly as I remembered it. That soft wheel, very comfortable. Hardly even noticed the driving position was offset. It all felt in good nick, the engine felt as strong as before though I didn’t push it, of course.”

“Everyone hoped Moss would win.We all thought this was the future”

And when he was pushing it, back in ’61? At the time he was quoted as saying he had never driven a car that did things so well but was so difficult to cope with.

“You had to drive it in an unconventional way,” he says now. “In a rear-engined car you’re moving the apex along, aiming ahead of where you want to be, but the P99 is very neutral. You just aim where you want to go.”

Today was sunny, and this was only a demo. But when conditions were bad…

“It was incredible in the wet. I could overtake on the outside of corners. I remember passing Phil Hill at Aintree and having time to thank him, it was so relaxed. And it has phenomenally good braking. I’ll tell you what, if I were a rich collector I’d buy it to take along to races with my Cooper or whatever and just have it ready in the paddock in case it was a wet race.”

Stirling Moss win the Gold Cup 961 — That magic moment, complete with signature wave, as Moss takes the Gold Cup win clear of the field in 1961

LAT

In Pit 3 Barry and his crew begin to pack away the P99 ready for a long haul home. (Moss in his 1961 diary recorded managing Oulton to London in just over three hours. Not so very likely in 2010…) The car’s next stop will be an auction, the first time it’s ever been sold. It’s been loaned out, though: despite the Gold Cup win there was no swathe of 4WD GP cars for 1962, but in ’63 Graham Hill took it to Australia and New Zealand fitted with a 2.5 Climax. At Lakeside it rained and Hill took second, and while the Australian GP at Warwick Farm was less successful Hill later persuaded BRM to begin a 4WD research programme. It concluded there was little to gain in F1 (though the 4WD BRM, the P67, would later win the British hillclimb title), but other teams had become interested and when a range of F1 4WD machines appeared in 1969 they all relied on FF technology. Racer and hillclimber Peter Westbury borrowed P99 and used it in 2.5-litre form to win the 1964 British Hillclimb Championship, as well as tackling Brighton Speed Trials and even some drag racing in it. Running it for three seasons he was a convert and went on to build 4WD racing cars, but the F1 experiment, which involved McLaren, Lotus, Matra and Cosworth, was rapidly side-stepped by wings, improving tyres, and finally a ban. So that came to nothing – except that Ferguson loaned an engineer to Matra who impressed Jackie Stewart and Ken Tyrrell. His name was Derek Gardner. P99, now just an interesting relic, spent many years on loan to the Donington Collection before returning to the family firm for restoration.

“It was rallying that boosted 4WD, and much of it had Ferguson’s name on it”

But if all-wheel drive did not sweep the board in Europe, it did have a flare of success across the Atlantic. In August 1963 Ferguson sent P99 to Indy, where under the eye of Andy Granatelli, Fairman and Bobby Marshman drove it. Looking for a way to harness over 700hp of Novi V8 power, Granatelli was impressed enough to commission a new car, the P104. Or to anyone who devoured Scalextric catalogues, the Indy Novi Ferguson. Neither it nor its US-built successor achieved much at Indy, but Granatelli pushed on and for a while 4WD, especially combined with gas turbine power, looked like the future. But two very near-misses – STP Paxton in ’67 and Lotus 56 the year after – prompted the Indy powers to strangle turbines, particularly suited to 4WD with their double-ended drive and no gearbox, as a way of outlawing all-wheel drive. The best a 4WD machine would achieve was third in 1969, though ironically it was a Lola with Hewland, not Ferguson transmission.

Stirling Moss Oulton Park 2010 Ferguson P99 — Exactly how he remembered it, the car that is. Oulton Park may have changed across five decades, but the P99 remained a constant

Matt Howell

However, Harry Ferguson’s dream is finally visible. He was not the first to essay a 4WD racing car – Bugatti, Miller, Porsche and Mercedes had all dabbled. But while Jensen’s bold FF made a brief impact among road cars in 1966, it was rallying which finally boosted 4WD into the performance arena, and much of that boost had Ferguson’s name on it. We barely notice that all-wheel drive is available in a compact hatch and standard in Bentleys and Lamborghinis, and it is no longer permissible to sell a car in Europe without ABS – though Moss raced the Ferguson with the system switched off, preferring to rely on foot-brain feedback.

If the P99 did not in the end start a revolution, Stirling’s remarkable ability to get the most out of any car he drove and the unique victory he scored with it kept the bubble afloat until the market was ready. Fifty years ago the Oulton Park crowds thought they were seeing the future of racing; in fact the Ferguson P99 was pointing towards the future of road cars.

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