Jackie Stewart

Good call, I agree that Steward is one of the best Thinking Drivers... I would also add Lauda and Clark.. Today its hard to say... Schumacher yes, but because of stuff he did early on not lately...

 

i like your post but an curious...where is clark?

 

I am not sure about Clark.
But my tendency is to think he was an emotional driver in the British( Scotish) "stiff upper lip" kind of way. Kind of contrary terms, but there you are.

 

I would place Clark with the emotion of Senna and the head of Schumacher. Although everyone says Senna was an emotional Driver, he made very few errors in his driving, Monaco 88 comes to mind, but not much else. If anything, MS made more stupid mistakes. Not to take anything away from MS, who IMHO was great.

 

What about Lauda?

 

Yes, there was that movie narrated by Stacy Keach about F1 (One by One?)in the early Seventies. Some scenes show what a great relationship there was between Jackie and Helen, and how Jackie and F. Cevert got along great. I can certainly see why Jackie retired after Cevert's accident.

 

Paul, he was going to retire nevertheless, but Cevert's accident just put it into perspective. He did 99 GP's and won 27 Races. The film was "The Quick and the Dead".

 

Stewart deserves to be in the Top 10 GP/F1 list of all time. His smoothness and speed is legendary. Yes, he was a thinking driver capable of winning at the slowest possible speed but he could be a tiger if needed - I remember reading about him winning Nurburgring in the late 60s on a wet and foggy day by a tremendous margin of 4 minutes over Hill. He drove with a bandaged hand that day.

The 70s were the Stewart era for sure like the 90s were the Schumacher era, the 80s the Prost and Senna era and so on. I read somewhere that Fittipaldi and Peterson were perhaps the quickest drivers in the 70s but Stewart was the best.

Its the Jackie Stewart of today that I have a problem with. His Mother Superior like commentary makes me cringe every time he opens his mouth.

I liked his book. V cool! And he made Captain Slow drive well too

 

I think you are mistaken.
Moving the fuel tank behind the driver changed the center of gravity to much further back, made the car safer because the drivers no longer sat on/in the fuel, and also improved rear traction, which the turbocars needed so badly.

Aerodynamics had something to do with it, but that wasn't the main reason.

Porsche had the same problem with the 956 - lots of foot/leg injuries, which forced them to come out with the 962.

 

Thanks T. I Googled the film and your right; apparently it came out originally as One by One but the name was changed to "The Quick and the Dead"...it has some footage of Pryce's horrific accident in 1977 which was as bad as, if not worse than, poor Cevert's..

 

It wasn't the injuries that made Porsche change to the 962, it was the IMSA rules which mandated the drivers feet at or behind the centerline of the front wheels. All Porsche did to the 956 was add 12 cm between the door and the back of the front wheel arch. The big change that helped with foot well injuries was the change to the floor of the car which went from flat aluminum to a honeycomb structure substantially stiffening the floor.

 

You are talking in double-speak - it's the same thing I said = Why did IMSA mandate the change ? To help lessen driver foot/leg injuries.

I sure do miss those years of racing, that was great stuff.
The stories of JLP buying cars and motors with suitcases of CASH are legendary.

 

The first car with all the fuel in a single cell behind the driver was the 1978 Lotus 79, and Chapman did that to free up the whole of the sidepods for ground-effects on a narrow chassis.

Then everyone copied that layout.........and the turbos needed more fuel (because to get 900bhp from a turbo instead of 450bhp from a Cosworth DFV you need twice the fuel!) so the fuel tanks pushed the driver as far forward as the designers dared, and then got very high too.

Then the skirts and ground effect venturis were banned, but turbos needed the whole sidepod volume for rads, intercoolers, and the turbos themselves; and the limited underbody aero still worked best with a narrow chassis too.

The driver got moved back by safety regs in F1, and the fuel capacity was limited steadily downwards, so the last turbo F1s in 1988 were actually pretty elegant.

As to the 962; the IMSA rules were always different to those for the WEC (Group C) because they didn't want Porsche to dominate and drive everyone else away, so they were limited to a single turbocharger (two in Group C) as well as the footbox rule. Porsche then went and built the 962 for IMSA anyway.

And Jackie Stewart? Brilliant driver - dominated F3 in 1964, won his 3rd F1 race (Silverstone May 1965), beating the reigning WDC; the best all-round driver from Clark's death until his own retirement - as fast as Rindt or Peterson but a better thinker and more consistent.

Would have done even better if not for missing 2 GPs in 1968 with a broken wrist, and having a duodenal ulcer for part of 1972 (and being stuck in the BRM H16 in 1967!).


Paul M