How to Build a Car
Christian took the lead. He was good in the wet, and he was leading the race with two laps to go when, to our horror, he drew to a stop. His car had run out of fuel.
I got the blame. Christian ranted that I didn’t know what I was doing (partly true), and that I was useless (objection, your honour), and with emotions running high, before he was in possession of all the facts, Christian fired me as his race engineer.
I would later be absolved – it turned out there was a leak – but the damage was done; our relationship was terminal after that first weekend and it appeared my race engineering was, at the very least, on temporary hold. However, to my everlasting gratitude, and for reasons that I have never understood, Johnny suggested we do a swap, with Ralph engineering Christian, and me learning the ropes with Johnny.
Johnny was a cheerful, curly-haired Venezuelan; a real character. He was already a world champion in motorcycle racing, but after some distressing accidents had moved into racing cars. His plan was to prove himself in Formula Two with the aim of progressing into Formula One. That being the case, taking on an inexperienced race engineer was something of a gamble.
But that’s the kind of chap he was; on one occasion he’d noticed that the silencers on my Ducati were rusty and he used his contacts in Ducati to get me a new set. He just had that in him, and I owe him a great deal for giving me a second chance.
What’s more, he was a great driver, and as the season wore on he won at Thruxton and remained competitive for other races. Meanwhile I concentrated on finding my feet, as well as developing an understanding of Johnny and gradually changing the set-up of the car to suit his driving style.
In its simplified form, the essence of motor racing is to link together as quickly as possible the sequence of corners that form all racing tracks. However, all drivers have subtly different styles and all racing cars have different inherent characteristics; changing the set-up is a process that involves customising the car to the individual driver and finding the best relationship between the car and the style of the driver. This involves tweaking the ‘set-up parameters’ mentioned earlier.
As far as springs went, we worked to a system evolved by Ralph: 1600lbs/in on the front and 1500lbs/in on the rear, which was a fairly stiff set-up that we ran on all three cars.
Until, that was, we got to the seventh race, at Pau in the South of France, a street track. Johnny and I walked the track. ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘this is a bumpy track. I think we need to go soft on the springs; get a bit more compliance in the suspension. What do you think: fit the softer springs now, or wait until after the first session?’
Johnny had faith in me. ‘Straightaway,’ he said.
So I went and had a rummage in the truck, found some soft springs and fitted them, taking it down 200lbs/in each end.
The benefit of doing this, of course, is that the car will absorb the bumps more effectively. With stiff springs on a bumpy track, the car tends to leap from bump to bump, meaning the load on the tyres at the contact patch changes too much, causing the car to continually grip and slide between crest and hollow. If you’ve ever driven an overly stiff road car, you’ll know what I mean. You go over a pothole, get shaken about, the car skitters. However, the extra compliance in the softer springs means that the car will change its attitude more, pitching under braking, rolling more in the corners and sinking more as the downforce comes on with speed. This extra movement of the car upsets the aerodynamics with the downforce, and particularly the distribution of downforce between the front and rear axles, changing more than with a stiffly sprung car. It is all about finding the best compromise for a given car at a given circuit.
Johnny practised with the new springs, felt the suspension was still too stiff and so, with Ralph and Peter oblivious to what I was doing, I went and had a second rummage, found even softer springs and fitted those. And then, just in case Ralph and Peter cottoned on and decided to swap springs on their own cars, I hid the remaining soft ones.
With hindsight, that was a very naughty thing to do. Led astray by the lure of competition, I forgot I was employed by the team, not the driver. But Johnny went on to take pole and win the race, something I will guiltily admit was a hugely satisfying result, given the reflected glow for yours truly, and one that perhaps went some way to repaying Johnny’s trust in adopting me.
Towards the end of the year we had three consecutive races in Italy; in Mugello, northern Italy, then Enna in Sicily and finally back up to Misano, which is on the Adriatic Coast. Flying wasn’t so common in those days; we, the mechanics and I, just drove from race to race, and for three weeks we enjoyed a fabulous tour of Italy. Prior to that I’d never travelled further than Scotland; now here I was taking in the Mediterranean sights. We stayed in Rome one night; we took the ferry across to Sicily. It was fabulous.
The Enna race was stinking hot. We all ate watermelon – and all went down with the squits. The theory was that it had been grown in sewage. All I knew was that the whole team was in an awful state for race day, particularly those of us who were working on Johnny’s car – to the point that we managed to get him started and then ran off to sit on the loo for the whole race. If he’d had a problem, he would have had to sort it out himself, because there was nobody in the pits any more!
But apart from that, it was a fabulous season. What’s more, I was learning on the job and proving myself as a race engineer, as the battle between Johnny and his teammate, Corrado, was hard-fought and went right to the wire. And though Corrado won, Johnny’s second place in the championship earned him a spot in Formula One for the following season.
With all that going on, I was also having fun at the drawing board during the week.
CHAPTER 11
My weekday job was on the design side. First, I designed a dry sump for a Chevrolet engine to go in the back of the March sports car, after which I was asked to strengthen the gearbox, which meant spending a week with Hewland in Maidenhead, who made the gearboxes.
Next I was told to draw the bodywork for the 1983 March Can-Am series car, a new design based on an old March Formula One chassis, with a Chevrolet engine in the back and bodywork designed by Max Sardou.
Now, Max Sardou was a ‘name’. A French aerodynamicist of some repute, he’d been commissioned by March to come up with the bodywork shape. He was an eccentric character, with a pallid complexion and long black greasy hair. He always wore a trench coat, even in the middle of summer, and he drove a Citroen DS with the wing mirrors folded flat to reduce drag.
Sardou’s shape for the Can-Am was big and bulbous and apparently designed to ram air into the diffuser. He claimed that the air would flow so fast under the diffuser that it would go sonic and that there would therefore be a sonic boom at the end of the straights! I took one look at it and knew it wouldn’t work. You can’t ram air until you’re supersonic. At Southampton, one of our lab experiments had been on a ramjet, in which we learnt that they do not really work below about mach three.
I went to see Dave Reeves, the production manager at March, scratching my new beard as I outlined the reasons why I didn’t think the design would work.
He looked at me as though I were mad. This was Max Sardou we were talking about. Along with Lotus, Sardou was one of the pioneers of ground effect and fresh from designing an eye-catching underbody for the Lola T600 the previous year.
And I was … well, who was I? Some kid who had worked for Fittipaldi.
So Reeves told me to button it and get on with the draughting, a job that involved taking Sardou’s quarter-scale wind tunnel model shape and blowing it up to full size, as well as working out how to split the shape into separate pieces of bodywork that could be fitted onto the March Formula One chassis.
I must have had brain failure, because I got one of the dimensions wrong – 1in out, I was – but the car was so big that the pattern makers didn’t even notice the mistake. What eventually emerged was something so large and ugly it was nicknamed HMS Budweiser (after the team’s sponsor).
Still, as far as I was concerned it was good experience in how to design bodywork as components, as opposed to aerodynamic shapes. What’s more, it kept me busy until the end of the year, by which time I was wondering, What am I going to be given next?
Rather than be stuck with another Sardou-style monster, I decided to be proactive and find something useful to do myself. The 82G, a sports car for which I had designed the sump as my first task at March, had competed at Le Mans that summer (June 1982) but not done well (DNF, ‘did not finish’). I spent some time looking over it in the evenings and decided there was a lot wrong with it that could be improved, particularly on the aerodynamic side (it, too, was a Max Sardou design).
Mindful of Dave Reeves’ dismissal of my opinion on the Can-Am car, I decided to be brave and go straight to the top with my ideas, so I approached Robin Herd, the incredibly brainy boss of March, one day in the factory. ‘What are your plans for the sports car?’ I asked him.
He frowned and crinkled his eyes. ‘What do you have in mind?’
I said, ‘I’ve had a bit of a look at it and, um, I don’t know if you know, but I did my final-year project on ground-effect aerodynamics applied to a sports car, and based on my findings from that project, I think I could do something with it.’
He said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll tell you what. You have a go at it. But I haven’t got any draughtsmen that can help you modify it and there’s no budget for wind tunnel testing.’
That final caveat was a bit of a drag, no pun intended. It meant I’d have to reshape much of the car by eye. Which is what I did. I changed the rear wing, reshaped the nose and added an extension to the underwing at the front. In addition, I redrew the whole lower surface and diffuser – the ground-effect bit, in other words – before I set about taking weight out of it.
The nose supports were heavy, but that’s because they were made from aluminium plates. So I redesigned them in a sandwich structure with aluminium honeycomb between very thin, 0.7mm-thick sheets of aluminium, to make it light but stiff. I lost another kilogram by allowing a little more pressure drop through the water pipes, enabling me to reduce the water-pipe diameter, and I redesigned the heavy, complicated steering column, yielding further savings. And finally I worked with the bodywork laminators to get the bodywork weight down.
In all, I managed to get about 40-odd kilos out of the car, a significant amount, enough to make it about one second faster, while, by redesigning the aerodynamics, I got a lot more downforce out of it. Not only that, but the fact that the downforce was generated centrally – thanks to the redesign of the underwing – meant it would be better balanced, so if the car pitched nose down under braking, or nose up under acceleration, the distribution between the front axle and the rear axle remained more constant. That underwing earned it the nickname ‘lobster claw’, thanks to its distinctive shape. But it did the job.
And that’s what kept me busy throughout most of Christmas 1982 until, one viciously cold January morning in 1983, we took it for a shakedown test at Donington, with Tiff Needell (who later went on to present Top Gear and Fifth Gear) driving.
By now, time was of the essence. The car had been rechristened the 83G for the 1983 season and Robin had sold it to an American, Ken Murray, who as well as owning one of those awful Ferrari Testarossas that Magnum PI used to drive, fancied himself as a bit of a racing driver. Ken had hired three drivers: Randy Lanier, Terry Wolters and Marty Hinze, and entered the team in the 24 Hours of Daytona race, due to take place in early February, less than a month away.
We got to Donington, just me, Tiff and a couple of mechanics, and started running the car, but it was so cold that we couldn’t get an accurate idea of its performance, compounded by the fact that the fan belt on the Chevy engine then broke.
One of the mechanics borrowed Tiff’s car, an Austin Allegro, went and bought a fan belt, came back, and left his car keys in the back of the truck. We carried on, and at least got some valuable miles done. At the end of the day as we were packing up, and saying our goodbyes, I got in my car, a Morris Marina, tried to turn the key but it wouldn’t turn. I gave it a bit more force. Snapped it. Turned out I’d picked up Tiff’s Allegro key.
Double whammy. Neither of us could get home. Luckily, one of the mechanics had a dodgy mate who lived in Derby. He arrived, hotwired both cars, and two hours later we were on our way back down the M1.
But that was it for testing. The car was shipped off to Daytona, and as part of the deal that Robin had struck with Ken, I went too, beginning what was to be a very interesting period in the US.
CHAPTER 12
And so to Daytona, a gruelling 24-hour race, held at the International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. The curtain-opener for the US motor racing season. A legendary meet.
Which on the one hand was great. But on the other, the car wasn’t ready for such a test of endurance. A single shakedown test at Donington does not a finished car make. Not only that, but arriving in the US and linking up with the team, Motorsports Marketing, I soon learnt several slightly dismaying things, none of which gave me any confidence that we were even going to finish Daytona, let alone be competitive.
First, Randy Lanier was an excellent driver. Better, I’m afraid to say, than his co-drivers Terry Wolters, who wore thick Benny Hill glasses that gave him a somewhat comical effect, Marty Hinze, a resident of Daytona Beach whose permanently dilated pupils hinted at a misspent youth that might well have carried on into adulthood, and Ken Murray, who could barely change gear – a wealthy novice who had been allowed to enter himself in the most prestigious sports car race of all after Le Mans.
Second, Motorsports Marketing badly needed a team manager.
Thus my first task was to have a sit-down with Ken after his first practice drive in the car and persuade him that he’d have a far better, more enjoyable and less stressful time leaving the driving to others. Also, that I should be his team manager.
He agreed on both counts and thus, at the grand old age of 24, I was running the car as well as making tactical decisions for the team.
The American mechanics weren’t great but I had Ray Eades and another mechanic from March along with me, and we got to work on the car, hoping to get some reliability into it, but with no great expectations for its performance.
Sure enough, we kept breaking down in practice, the work list getting longer far faster than we could tick items off. We stayed up all night getting it ready for qualifying, but still with various problems we qualified an underwhelming fifteenth. We worked through a second night, meaning that by the time the race began we had already been up for the best part of 48 hours – not ideal preparation for a 24-hour race, but we didn’t expect the car to run for too long.
It began. Now, in those days, you didn’t have a televised timing system. Instead the teams relied on wives and girlfriends to write down car numbers as they passed the pits and hence keep a lap check. The good ones were amazing. Unfortunately, the girls we had weren’t the good ones, and by an hour into the race we had no idea of our standing.
Not that I was too worried. My goal was simply to keep running for as long as possible at a pace that didn’t massively stress the engine, gearbox, brakes and so forth, to keep Randy Lanier in it as much as possible and Terry Wolters out of it during the night, because he couldn’t see.
I’d never done anything like it before. Of course I’d race engineered for Johnny, but I hadn’t run a car to the extent that I was making all the strategy decisions in a long race. Formula Two races were short sprint events. Add to that the fact that I was really tired.
About four hours in, I was helping Randy get out of the car and Terry get in. Because Randy was shorter, he had a seat insert that I yanked out of the car ready for Terry. I yanked it too hard, it left my grasp, took off like a Frisbee and landed on the roof of the pit building. I spent about 10 minutes after the pit-stop clambering up rather precariously to retrieve the spacer and get it ready for Marty, who was up next.
Later, around midnight, with the car running well, I staggered exhaustedly to the loo. Daytona, like Indianapolis, has a vertical tower showing all the car positions, and as I passed on my way to the toilet block, I glanced up to see that P1 was car 88.
It didn’t sink in at first. I was swaying in front of the urinal when suddenly it hit me: 88 – shit, that’s us. We’re leading.
Hot-footing it back to the pit lane I found I wasn’t mistaken. We had taken the lead at around the 12-hour mark. All the other cars were having problems, but we’d just kept pounding around, and it was only with about an hour to go that the heavens opened and our engine started misfiring, which cost us time. Without that we might have won, but as it was we finished second – second in the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona race. Quite a result.
I nearly lost my chance to celebrate the result. Absolutely knackered, but elated, we finally left the circuit in the hire car, which was a Chevy of some description. Ray, the mechanic, was driving and we headed back to the hotel with me asleep in the front and the other Englishman asleep in the back. But, like Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ray fell asleep too. We were at the traffic lights. His foot must have come off the brake in drive, resulting in the car rolling forward into the middle of the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. As awakenings go it was scary, the car spinning, glass flying everywhere.
We lived. No broken bones. And it was certainly a memorable weekend. The result did not go unnoticed by Robin Herd, who immediately saw the sales potential, leading him to giving me a budget to develop it further.
Enter Al Holbert. An American driver who’d had a lot of success in minor categories, Al was connected with Porsche, and what he wanted was a Porsche engine in the March chassis instead of the Chevy.
In the meantime, Al wanted to compete at the second race of the IMSA season, the Grand Prix of Miami on 27 February and less than a month away. So as a stopgap while we started work on the Porsche installation, he ordered a second Chevy-engined car from Robin.
By now we had funds for wind tunnel research and were able to take a suitably updated version of Sardous’ original 25 per cent scale model to the Southampton tunnel in order to develop a high-downforce kit for the car (where I was pleased to see that my original ‘aero-by-eye’ approach did not feature any howling mistakes). With those changes made, Al Holbert took the modified car and won easily at Miami.
Meantime, we were working at installing the Porsche engine, which was no easy task. The March chassis was not designed to accept a turbocharged engine and was conceived around a normally aspirated V8 Chevrolet. We now had to put a flat six turbocharged Porsche engine complete with gearbox into it. The difference is that a normally aspirated engine draws air from the surrounding atmosphere without any additional pressurisation of that incoming air. The vast majority of petrol-engine road cars are normally aspirated. A turbocharged engine, on the other hand, uses a device to compress the air coming into the engine, making it denser. This denser air is then mixed with a correspondingly increased amount of fuel to give more chemical energy to the charge in the combustion chamber when the spark plug ignites it. For instance, if the turbocharger boosts the charge air to two times atmospheric pressure then the engine will give approximately twice the power of a normally aspirated engine.
So, I went over to Porsche to discuss the installation, but they were very unhelpful and wouldn’t give us any drawings or advice – nothing. Al got an engine and gearbox unit sent to March, so we carefully measured it up and created our own drawings of it, then redesigned the back of the chassis and the rear suspension to suit.
By May it was ready and flown straight to Charlotte, a racetrack in North Carolina for two days of testing, and then its first race. I flew out with it and met Al and his team for the first time.
Charlotte in the summer is a hot dustbowl of a place and initial testing immediately revealed an Achilles’ heel in the installation: the charge air cooler, which cools the very hot air exiting the turbo compressor, was not doing its job. The ducting I had designed was clearly not working, with the result that the charge air entering the engine was way above Porsche’s limit, causing concerns over reliability and costing us power.
For qualifying, Al turned up the boost for one lap and took a gratifying pole, but we all knew the race would expose us. In the event, Al drove brilliantly, keeping the boost as low as he could while maintaining just enough pace to lead from flag to flag.
Post-race, Al invited me back to stay at his house and use his workshops (next to his Porsche dealership in Philadelphia) in order to find a solution.
During the wind tunnel tests we had done a run with the model painted in Flow Vis paint. This is a solution made from a fluorescent powder (originally used to track water flow in sewers) mixed into a witch’s brew of paraffin and oil. When the wind blows over this, it forms streaks, with the paraffin evaporating to reveal patterns that indicate the direction and strength of the air flow over the body surface. Fortunately I had brought with me the photographs from the test and, looking carefully again, I noticed that the flow on the sides of the body (where I had positioned the duct inlet) looked weak while that on the top of the engine cover behind the roof looked strong.
So, working with Al’s mechanics, we cut out the back of the roof and engine cover and created a new set of ducting to feed the cooler from above (instead of below). It was a little risky, as the time to the next race, at Lime Rock, was short, and we had no spare roof of the original design, so it was a one-way ticket as far as the next race was concerned.
Lime Rock is a tight, bumpy little track set in picturesque woodlands in Connecticut, not quite as hot as Charlotte but the slow tight nature would make it every bit as demanding on charge air cooling requirements. So it was quite some relief that not only were we straightaway the pacesetters in first practice but also the charge temperature was now well within Porsche’s limits. The car ran like clockwork all weekend and Al duly took pole.
Al went on to win every remaining race of the season and hence the championship, an amazing year from a humble start.
Our championship win drew to a close that chapter of my career, as Al moved to IndyCar for the following season. However, a tragic postscript is that he died in 1988. He was piloting his Piper aircraft in Ohio and had just taken off when a door came open and the plane started behaving erratically. Rather heroically, Al managed to steer the Piper away from some houses, no doubt saving many lives before it crashed, killing him instantly. He was just 41.
I was devastated to hear of it. Al was a good friend and a great driver, and to live that month in America as his guest and travel the country with him was a tremendous experience. For that, and for his being so good to me, I’m eternally grateful.
It’s funny. I had difficulty making myself understood in America. My Midlands accent, developed at college, would get in the way of simple things like ordering breakfast. Those tiny things aside, I was aware how fortunate I was to be gathering so much experience at such an early age: Europe with Formula Two and the United States with IMSA (International Motor Sports Association). I was seeing the world and I loved that aspect of the job.