Excellent choice! I've always admired car this ever since I helped the McLaren team roll one off the transporter at Long Beach where I first laid eyes on it. It was a giant step forward in safety and chassis stiffness, so vital to handling qualities. A truly great car and milestone. I could argue that the Auto Union preceded the Cooper as a rear engine GP machine, that Gordon Murray used carbon fiber in chassis stiffness panels earlier than the McLaren, and that the Lotus 25 monocoque was long preceded by the Issigonis hillclimb special, the Miller Indy car, the D Jaguar, and many airplanes. But your point is well taken. As a schoolboy I was ecstatic with the Lotus 25, and it is still my sentimental favorite.There's a difference to be made between greatest and most important.
The greatest car would almost certainly be a car deemed successful whereas the most important car could be a car which although not successful itself, was innovative and that innovation was adopted by others like the Tyrrell 020.
You could be here all day listing off the first milestones of whatever to find the most important Grand Prix cars; the Alfa Romeo Monoposto being the first single seater, the Cooper J.A.P. being the first rear-engined Formula One car, the Lotus 25 being the first stressed monocoque and so on.
That being said, I would suggest the McLaren MP4 as a very strong contender. The introduction of carbon fibre monocoques cannot be overstated as being crucial to both driver safety and car design with then-unprecedented levels of strength, rigidity and lightness which today are not only ubiquitous but also underappreciated to those who may not be aware of past car design and manufacturing.
This is what I mean about importance when it comes to innovation. The MP4 was the first Formula One car to have its monocoque totally made from carbon fibre rather than individual parts of a car having carbon fibre stiffening panels.
This about the Cosworth DFV is something we can both agree on 100%. It's one of the reasons I so much like the M23. I agree the Lotus 49 is a strong contender for most important car, very much so. A lot of people obtained them and they raced for many years, including my home town hero Pete Lovely. I drooled over his very closely! One of its most elegant features was the use of the engine as a stressed member. Yet wasn't there another famous F1 car from the 50's that also used the engine as a stressed member?
Several excellent points here which could well be elaborated upon: safety, improving the sport, the quality of the racing, and the weight of the cars. Speaking of the quality of racing, I can't think of an F1 car which which was easier to race and drive in close proximity to on both corners and straights than those preceding the ground effects era and complicated aero regimes that succeeded it. Look at Monza, 1971; packs of cars running tightly together, even side by side around corners and 2, 3 or 4 abreast on the straights. Speaking of the weight, I think it is true that the current cars are the heaviest for at least since the very early fifties, and maybe even heavier. Some of the big 4.5 liter cars like the Talbot-Lago must have been pretty heavy, but exact figures seem hard to come by. Although it is not really relevant to this thread, I must ask if the prevalence of chicanes is as necessary as it seemed at one time?
Formula One cars now are about as heavy as a minimum than the maximum permitted weight of the dieselpunk 1930s.
During the peak years of the European Championship, 1934-38, the maximum weight allowed for a car was 750kg. Contrast that to today where the cars must weight 733kg as a minimum and that's without any fuel and without the driver. Given that fuel is ~100kg and let's say a driver is 75kg a modern F1 car must weight something around 900kg all in, again as a minimum, which is greater than the absolute maximum of the 30s cars which rose to a permitted 850kg in 1939.
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As I've mentioned, to me a contender for "most important" is going to be a milestone in design someway. That's just how I see it. I'd like to suggest another contender:
Williams FW15C
A very modern suggestion in the grand scheme of things, yes, but I submit it for one very good reason; it has a claim to being the most sophisticated Formula One car of all time. Here's a list of the devices it had:
Active suspension
Anti-lock brakes
Traction control
Launch control
Onboard telemetry
Fly-by-wire throttle, brakes and clutch
Pneumatic valve springs
Power steering
Drag reduction system
An automatic transmission with manual resetting
A CVT that was used in testing
The automatic transmission worked where the transmission would work automatically but if a button on the steering wheel was selected, the driver would reset it to semi-automatic the next time he calls for a gear change and the automatic transmission would disengage. Another push of the button would set it again to automatic.
As is well known, the active suspension was so great that it offered unparalleled levels of grip and cornering by the onboard telemetry and sensors by monitoring the road clearance between the car's floor and the track and adjusting the suspension geometry to continuously maintain a desired clearance to enable maximum downforce.
And yes, it really did have a drag reduction system. Another button on the steering wheel would order the active suspension to raise the rear of the car. This reduced drag at the rear and allowed for easier overtaking on straights. It was such a well-designed system that it was pathologically linked to the ECU to raise the rev limiter by 300 rpm to compensate for the reduction in drag and increase in speed when using the system.
The car was so advanced but it wasn't without its flaws. Sometimes the computers would mishandle the data it was getting from the sensors and not react in the correct or appropriate way. The weight distribution and DRS made for a car that was twitchy under high-speed braking such as that at Hockenheim. For those reasons it was considered a dangerous car not for what it was, but for what it could do if something onboard went wrong. Because of this, most of what it had was banned immediately for the 1994 season.
Whether the cars of the 2010s are more sophisticated or not is open to debate but with that in mind, the FW15C easily has had a long-time claim to the crown of most sophisticated car because nothing that followed it came close to matching its systems, performance and technology.
It is, or was, the halo and apex of what a Grand Prix car can be.
Not the FW15C itself but this gives an idea as to how the active suspension and DRS worked.
Les Charlatans
While Peugeot’s early v-twins (as used by Norton et al) were reliable and reasonably fast in the ‘Noughts, in the 1910s Peugeot débuted the most technically sophisticated engine designs in the world, first for automobile racing in the burgeoning Grand Prix series, then in a series of remarkable motorcycles. In 1911, Swiss engineer Ernst Henry was commissioned by ‘Les Charlatans’ (Peugeot racing team members Jules Goux, Georges Boillot, and Paul Zuccarelli to draw up a new four-cylinder racing engine from ideas they’d discussed. Henry wasn’t a ‘qualified engineer’ but a draughtsman, with enough experience in motor design already (for boats and cars) to have caught the attention of the Peugeot team drivers.
Ernest Henry at the drawing board
Racing men were no prima donnas back then, but skilled mechanics too, savvy enough to make the models for their dream engine’s foundry castings, as well as machine components from raw metal. The team of Henry and Les Charlatans worked independently of the Peugeot brass (apparently over the usual disagreement – investment in racing vs production), camping out in the Rossel-Peugeot factory in Suresnes (a Paris suburb), where their aircraft engines were tested. Paris was a hotbed of the burgeoning aircraft industry, so most of the car’s engine castings came from local aircraft subcontractors, even though it appears all the design work and pattern making was done by the Charlatans themselves.
1913 Indianapolis 500 winning Peugeot with Jules Goux driving. Goux drove the entire 500 miles without a co-driver, the first driver to do so (1913 was the 3rd running of Indy). The Peugeot L76 was the first wire-wheel car to run Indy (previously ‘military’ spoked wheels were the norm), and finished 13 minutes ahead of the second car, and averaged 76mph in the race
The Peugeot racers even won the Vanderbilt Cup and Grand Prize in 1915 at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition, driven by ‘Dolly’ Resta. American driver Bob Burman purchased a Peugeot racer that year, and sent it to designer Harry Miller and machinist Fred Offenhauser to ‘shrink’ the motor to the new 5-liter limit for the Indy 500. Burman spent $2000 transforming the Peugeot with Miller-designed light alloy cylinder/heads, tubular rods, a pressurized oiling system, stronger crank, and 293 cu” displacement…which coincidentally founded the Miller/Offenhauser engine dynasty. It would not be far wrong to say Ernest Henry’s 1911 design last raced at Indianapolis in 1976…or at least, its direct offspring, bearing a striking resemblance to the original.
Awesome entry.If the Lotus 49 was the one that gave the world the definitive way of mounting a racing car engine (and actually the 43 before that but the 49 still takes the cake), it's still not the most important one even in the Lotus family tree. That honour in my opinion goes to the 72, the car that spelled the end of the front mounted radiators and moved F1 to the modern era of sidepods that has continued ever since. It also evolved perhaps more than any other car in F1 history through the years, filling the gap between the late '60s cigar-shaped machines with treaded tyres and the already distinctively "F1 looking" cars of the '70s.
Lotus 72, Jochen Rindt, 1970.
Lotus 72E, Ronnie Peterson, 1973.
A certain amount of philosophy and history is raised in my mind in response to your interesting post. If I recall the early history of GP racing correctly, it was all about the major global manufacturers of cars organizing national races to show off their wares to a public just then in 1906 getting used to the idea of horseless carriages traveling their country roads. By 1950 when the world championship for drivers of F1 cars was organized, it was more about providing entertainment to war-time impoverished civilians just barely regaining some prosperity. At times in history, innovation and improvement of the breed and car sales was a top line goal of racing. More recently, profitable and socially responsible entertainment has risen higher as the goal. I can see the spec car approach being much the more practical. A cousin the of the kit car M23 featured in the OP, the privately entered Hesketh of Hunt, was able to win the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix.
