The archives: November 2018

Tackling North Wales by Lancia Stratos and RAF Hercules (sort of…) before pondering Formula 1’s current passing problem

I had been to Machynlleth in North Wales before, back in the late 1970s. I remember too-tight restraint belts quite painfully preventing me from holding my breath as skilled rally star Andy Dawson hurled ‘our’ Chequered Flag Lancia Stratos round one of the great classical forest rally stages there.

We spent most of the time at around 45-degrees to our true direction of travel – in yaw as the aviators would put it – and the deafening clatter of flying flints within the wheel arches was only barely drowned out by that raucous Ferrari-based V6 engine bawling away behind our shoulders.

When we reached the end of the stage Andy handed over the car for me to drive him back up the cleared stage. I remember I replied, somewhat ungraciously “Right, yer bugger!” before trying (unsuccessfully) to get him more rattled around than I had been…

Now, late this August, I found myself heading for Machynlleth once again, or rather for the mouth of a valley just adjacent. Only this time I had been entrusted with a very different mode of transport. We weren’t wasting any energy grubbing around on the ground – showering rubble at maybe 70-90mph between the trees. Oh no.

This time I was ripping in over the winding estuary of the River Dyfi at some 210 knots, or just over 240mph…

Granted, we’d crossed the coast at 1,500 feet and I’d just been briefed to take the C130J Hercules four-engined transport – yes, the legendary RAF ‘Herc’ – around the daunting Machynlleth Loop, the military’s famed low-level training route there. Instructor Flt Lt Chris Jones had told me “210 knots, and you’re meant to do it at 350-400 feet on the radio altimeter, which gives us true height above ground, not above sea-level – ’cos here that wouldn’t help you much…” – and he added “You’ll find it all happens pretty quickly” and “I’ll call the turns”.

I’d heard the age-old Herc’s controls are quite heavy. I certainly found them so, a bit like steering an Aston Martin with a slow front puncture. And as I wrestled the classical control column with its pair-of-spectacles grips, and toed the also heavy – yet surprisingly sensitive – rudder pedals, I eased her down through 800 feet, 500 feet, 400 feet and – sure enough – there through the multi-paned windscreen the Welsh mountains were rushing up fast.

“Left a little – there’s the entrance, see?” Chris pointed to a break in the hills, with a rising ridge just at the mouth. “Now right, and into it – try for 350 feet”. Well, I did try…

The clear pale-green figures and symbols on the head-up display screen before me told the tale. I heaved, and pulled, and kicked on rudder, and banked that big old lady left and right, the artificial horizon tipping and slewing in sympathy. Too low – watch the starboard wingtop against that bluff! Cripes, I really nearly clipped the fir trees there. Then Chris was pointing hard left – “Now take this valley, just here…” – and I unwound the starboard bank, dropped the port wing, toed the rudder pedals, pulled back and we were careering into another Welsh defile – height oscillating wildly – 200 feet – pull back, over-correct, 800 feet, crikey this is hard work – but oh what hairy fun…

I think I did reasonably OK. I was certainly doing better than when I’d tried (twice) to land the thing on the threateningly short runway at Gibraltar – sea lying in wait for the optimistic or incompetent, at both ends. I’d settled her into a comfortably stable approach – I was perhaps over-confidently happy with that – only for it all to go awry with escalating over-corrections in the last 200 feet – and I called – perhaps over-dramatically – “Going around” – pulled back, power on, and climbed away… And then just as I banked her into another Welsh valley mouth… I heard the door behind us open and Air Vice Marshal David Cooper enquiring cheerfully “Well, how are we doing then?”

It was time to end our unexpected jolly on one of the RAF Brize Norton simulators – and to thank our RAF hosts for the day. And in this, the RAF’s centenary year, if you should feel moved to make a contribution to the Royal Air Force Association charity – which does so much, and indeed with such imagination, to assist serving personnel and their patient families – please just don’t hesitate. They really do a terrific job for those people who fly for us…

BACK ON FIRMER ground, I have an image in my head of slimline wingless Formula 1 cars with visible body language – supple long-stroke suspensions permitting them to pitch and squat and roll to a degree plainly recognisable by any enthusiast spectator leaning on the trackside fence. Perhaps this has become one of the main attractions for the crowds thronging to Historic racing – although a number of prominent preparers have deployed their essentially fraudulent wiles to restrict such period-original freedom and adapt it to modern billiard-table surfaces, right-angled circuit corners, and a new generation of keen young hired-gun drivers who only appreciate cars as rigidly sprung as the proverbial tea tray.

The image in my mind recalls the leaders in the 1964 French GP at Rouen-les-Essarts rushing round that last left-handed downhill curve before the Nouveau Monde hairpin at the bottom of the out-leg hill, and happening upon Phil Hill in his works Cooper, set to be lapped.

In the midst of all this heeling and rolling from the cars as they entered the braking area and pitched abruptly nose-down as they anchored up, Phil let the leading car – Dan Gurney’s Brabham, if memory serves – lance past to lap him on the right, before deftly changing sides, angling through between the passing cars to the right-side of the road – the inside line – to allow his next pursuer to pass him on the left. All three then bumped right-handed over the Nouveau Monde stone setts (now there is a classical road circuit reason for the cars having supple suspensions) to accelerate away out of the hairpin, up the back leg of the course – none having lost serious time…

Twenty-two years ago – in the 1996 British GP at Silverstone –Damon Hill became the victim of a loosening front-left wheel nut, which spun away his chances of a home win in the Williams-Renault FW18. That left Damon’s team-mate Jacques Villeneuve to waltz away with a win untroubled until after the race, when an unlovely Benetton team protest was lodged with the stewards, challenging the legality of the FW18’s front-wing endplates. The protest concerned a rule intended to prevent tyre damage to other cars, under which the top and forward edges “of the lateral extremities of any bodywork forward of the front wheels” had to be at least 10mm thick, with a 5mm radius.

This protest set Patrick Head and Adrian Newey of Williams absolutely seething, since the wings in question had gone unchanged (and unchallenged) since the season’s outset in Melbourne months before. The suspicion was that Flavio Briatore of Benetton had been put up to protest as a Ferrari-inspired reaction to Williams having just protested the Maranello team’s barge boards as used in the French GP. Welcome to ‘modern’ Formula 1… indeed.

But what really set the FIA to much-publicised pontificating was the marked lack of overtaking during that British GP. There had to be changes, they said, in the technical rules to improve the situation. President Max Mosley admitted it took “imaginative camera work” to make the action appear exciting on TV while the paying spectators were receiving poor value for the ticket price they had paid.

In that race, when third-placed Mika Hakkinen in his latest McLaren-Mercedes MP4/11 had come rushing up behind the slow Sauber-Fords of Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Johnny Herbert, he had no chance of seeing either of them do a Phil Hill to clear his path. Instead his own car lost two seconds per lap in the Saubers’ joint turbulence.

Max Mosley told the press: “We are considering proposed changes to the aerodynamics in order that the traditional technique can be revived whereby a faster driver can get close enough to the car in front coming through a corner so as to have a chance of executing a serious overtaking manouevre by the end of the following straight”. He continued: “There is also the question of opening out braking distances to enhance the possibility of passing…”.

One assumes that today’s DRS system was part-spawned by those deliberations of the FIA – but right now – 22 years later – on most Grand Prix circuits, do we see much improvement? In the past we have had perfectly workable F1 regulations, which worked for teams and drivers and TV coverage – and trackside spectators alike.

In entertainment terms – can there really be a problem in revisiting some of them? A cure for many of current F1’s perceived ills might well lie in reviving a few tech regs from the not too distant past.

Doug Nye is the UK’s most eminent motor racing historian and has been writing authoritatively about the sport since the 1960