THE 1978 RIVALS
Poor Ferrari. Poor Mauro Forghieri. The 1978 F1 season was looking like an easy stroll to a couple more titles. After all, Ferrari and its genius engineer spent most of the mid-’70s winning with the very sound 312 series of cars. Niki Lauda secured the drivers’ titles in ’75 and the manufacturers’ crown went to Maranello for three consecutive years ’75 to ’77.
Surely ’78 would be more of the same, particularly given the Scuderia could hardly be accused of resting on its laurels. The compact, elegant and potent T3 may have retained the 312 series’ trademark flat-12 engine (on borrowed time as aerodynamics prepared to take a quantum leap) but the car’s monocoque, suspension and bodywork were all new.
Then, with the 79, Lotus re-invented the wheel, and every conventional rival – even very good ones like the 312 T3 – were, like cavalry against black powder, made obsolete. The T3 was more powerful than the 79 and a fine car; responsive to set-up work and reliable. But its underbody aerodynamics were rudimentary and its levels of downforce only incrementally better than what had gone before.
But building on the 78, the 79 was a car engineered not around innovative suspension or a monster engine but around the source of its otherworldly speed: a couple of vast venturi tunnels along its entire underside. The narrowat-the-sump DFV V8 engine, the compromised rear suspension – everything else had to fit around the ground-effect aerodynamics that elevated the Lotus (and the sport) onto a new plane. Mario Andretti duly won the title with six wins; his team-mate Ronnie Peterson, who died after an accident in the Italian Grand Prix, was posthumously awarded second place.