THREE MORE MEMORABLE AUSTRIAN GPS
Penske introduced its second new car of the season at the Swedish Grand Prix in 1976. The problem was, the PC4 didn’t look much better than its predecessor in John Watson’s hands. That was before team boss Roger Penske looked at what its rivals were doing and sent designer Geoff Ferris back to the drawing board.
“Roger is the biggest pragmatist I’ve ever encountered in motorsport,” says Watson. “He looked at the Mclaren M23 with Geoff and said, ‘It’s got a conventional nose and a big spacer between the engine and the gearbox. Do it!’
So we ended up with a new front and a seveninch longer wheelbase. It transformed the car.”
Penske was competitive for the remainder of what turned out to be its final season in F1. Watson was on the podium at Paul Ricard and then Brands Hatch (admittedly after James
Hunt was disqualified), and then won the Austrian GP at the Osterreichring after coming out on top in an initial three-way battle with Ronnie Peterson and Jody Scheckter.
Lotus owed its first GP victory in four years in Austria 1982 to the unreliability of the turbopowered cars and five quid’s worth of foam. Elio de Angelis triumphed by a scant 0.050 seconds on a day when he was the best of the Cosworth-powered runners.
The team was convinced its type 91 was something special, according to engineer Tim Densham, even if its results didn’t reflect that confidence. “The car had a porpoising problem and we came to the conclusion that air was leaking into the underbody,” recalls de Angelis’s engineer. “We bought some foamrubber strips to modify the boards that held the skirts.”
“The car behaved itself in qualifying,” says Densham, and de Angelis put it seventh. A return of the porpoising in the warm-up was fixed with new skirts and de Angelis was lead Cossie car when the turbos broke and just held off a charging Keke Rosberg in the Williams. Lotus boss Colin Chapman got to throw his famous corduroy hat in the air one last time before his death later that year.
Torrential rain that delayed the start of the 1975 Austrian GP by an hour turned the race into a lottery. The numbers came up for March driver Vittorio Brambilla who was in the lead when the race was stopped early after 29 laps, though only just. He spun on the straight after taking the chequered flag.
The Italian had made quick progress in his Beta Utensili-sponsored March 761 from eighth on the grid. He took fourth from team-mate Hans Stuck on lap four and moved up to second on lap 15 when both he and James Hunt overtook erstwhile race leader Niki Lauda. Hunt was then powerless to hold off the Italian courtesy of an engine in the back of his Hesketh that had lapsed onto seven cylinders.
“The conditions were terrible – there were rivers of water running across the track,” recalls Stuck. “But the March by that time was actually a good car, unlike when I first joined the team. It was no worse than anything else in the wet.”
Brambilla triumphs – then shunts
De Angelis wins by a whisker from Rosberg
Penske pragmatism took Wattie to victory