Quoting TheCracker's pictures posted from the
Good, Bad & Ugly thread:
I think both Williams and March have tested 4WD cars in the past but both of these were 6 wheeled cars!
*snip*
Metar's Ferrari 312T6
The Williams six-wheeler was never raced, for a very simple reason: It didn't bring any benefits. The car was just as fast as the four-wheel cars, with the extra weight and complexity negating the advantages in aerodynamics gained from more smaller wheels.
(I removed the March, since it was actually raced in F1 for a while, and then continued to become a successful hillclimb car)
The
Ferrari 312T6 was a six-wheeled version of the race-winning regular 312T
2, Lauda's almost-championship-winning car in 1976. In the off-season between '75 and '76, Lauda tested the about-to-debut 312T2, an evolution of the '75 double-title winner, as well as the 312T
6 special version. Again, this proved to be only averagely successful, but Lauda, unlike teammate Clay Regazzoni, liked the car, claiming that, while only as fast as the regular version, it has more potential, and it better to drive. He continued testing it during the '76 season, and was considering driving it in '77 - but the crash shelved that project.
Also never raced, the championship-winning
Williams FW15C was mated to a CVT transmission. The car, oddly running full-revs into the tight hairpins of Silverstone, was shelved after the FIA banned CVTs, and added a minimum-gears clause.
The concept, however, was effective. Test-driver David Coulthard (the very same!) drove it about a second per lap quicker than average qualifying-times of those days. And that's with a regular engine: Engines, since the dawn of history, are designed in an attempt to produce as much torque and power over the widest possible range. CVT-optimized engines can have a powerband as narrow as 100rpms, and hence achieve far greater power in that speed. And lest we forget, that optimum power is mated all the time to the perfect gear-ratio for the conditions...
