If only they would listen to Gordon by Maurice Hamilton
Formula One’s rule makers need to hear what Gordon Murray has to say
“Current Formula One cars? I think they’re ugly.” Gordon Murray, the man responsible for the Brabham BT44B, one of the most striking Grand Prix cars of all time, doesn’t hold back. He never has.
Unexpectedly nding the lanky South African at a motoring dinner brightened one of the many interminable functions at this time of year. Murray was present at the Black Tie evening in the RAC Club in London’s Pall Mall to receive an award for his work as a true visionary in automotive design and engineering. These days, he may be engrossed in urban mobility, but that does not mean Gordon has lost his feel for something that moves a bit faster.
As we caught up on recent F1 events, I took the opportunity to ask for his thoughts on the design changes due to be inflicted on F1 for 2017.
“Completely wrong,” was the immediate response. “Working on the front and rear wings is placing the emphasis on the wrong part of the car. They should be focusing on the middle. The wings create too big a percentage of the downforce and that does not work well with the way they design circuits these days.
“For some reason, they insist on having a medium-speed corner leading onto the straight. That’s where the driver wants to be getting on the power and lining himself up to overtake. But with the current cars, if you get close to the guy in front, you lose downforce and balance, and start getting understeer, which means you never get close enough to slipstream down the straight, pull out and pass.”
As technical director at Brabham from 1969 to 1986, Murray witnessed the arrival of ground effect, courtesy of Colin Chapman and the Lotus 78, followed by the championship-dominating Lotus 79. Murray capitalised on it by designing the winning Brabham for Nelson Piquet in 1981, until a at-bottom rule negated the creation of downforce in the sidepods and beneath the car (a rule more or less still in effect today). It’s purpose was to curb cornering speeds; an ironic step given that the changes for 2017 are designed to do the opposite.
“With so much emphasis on downforce front and rear, the balance of the car becomes critical, particularly when the front is affected by the dirty wash from the car ahead,” says Murray. “The easy solution is to give designers a lot more freedom in the middle of the car. If you had a venturi section like we used to have, you would be able to make 80 or 90% of the downforce in the middle of the car. It would have the aesthetic side effect of designers producing side pods of different lengths and shapes, which would get us away from today’s cars looking the same.”
As you may have guessed from my previous columns, Murray has my full attention when he talks about a dislike of the current ludicrously complex front wings stretching the full width of the car.
“The number of times you see a driver get close to the car in front and then damage his wing is ridiculous,” says Murray. “Because downforce is so important, the man-hours spent in the wind tunnel designing these wings is completely out of proportion. God knows how much it costs.”
When he said, “I could design the front wing you need right here,” I apologised tongue-in-cheek for not having a notepad and pen in my dinner jacket pocket. “Don’t need them,” he grinned. “It’s easy. You would make it straight, keep it small and allow only two or three elements. Simple. Much, much cheaper. And you get better racing.”
Warming to his theme, Murray then attacked the 13-inch F1 wheels that bear no relation to the wheels on our road cars. “They talk about F1 technology going into road cars,” scoffed Murray. “That’s not the case with wheels and tyres. The wheels should be 18-inch with low-pro le tyres. It’s ridiculous to produce a high-performance machine capable of 320 km/h and then expect to package the brakes inside a 13-inch rim. It’s hugely expensive for no good reason.”
Away from the track, Murray was responsible for the Mclaren F1, the world’s most advanced supercar at its launch in 1992. Here, I suggested, was an example of the link between F1 and road-car aerodynamics.
“There was a link in that case, but the truth is that aerodynamics don’t feed into road cars beyond high-end sportscars,” says Murray. “That’s as meaningless as claiming the green element of F1 is relevant to road cars. The place to test that sort of thing is in endurance racing at Le Mans. F1 is a sprint. Or, at least, it should be.”
Murray talked more sense in ve minutes than F1’s gurus have managed in ve years.