F1's 1990s tech boom: tobacco money and more manufacturers

Motorola and Nokia dominated the growing handheld phone industry, there was a new wave of sound growing stateside out of Washington and tobacco was about to truly make its mark in F1.

Formula 1’s golden era arguably came in the 1990s. The Ayrton Senna/Alain Prost rivalry was lingering but would never hit the tumultuous highs (or lows) that it had done in the late ’80s thanks to a concoction of perfect timing and circumstances, the racing was about to undergo a great evolution.

From the cumbersome but attention-demanding cars of the 1950s, the Lotus revolution in the ’60s, the advent of wings then further understanding of ground effect in the 1970s and ’80s, F1’s development rate was rapidly increasing with each decade.

The 1990s would be no different in that respect, though the levels in which engineers took their work was unparalleled and to this day, some of the most sophisticated creations were thought up during this era.

Each technical advance is detailed in a new book, Formula 1 Car by Car 1990-1999 and the June issue of Motor Sport examines the underrated cars of the decade.

The arrival of huge tobacco sponsorships as companies turned to F1 as its advertising avenue of choice opened the door to technical impossibilities.

“I think that certainly within our team, we definitely had a lot more money than we’d had previously,” Pat Symonds explained to Motor Sport.

“In ’94, this would have been pre-Canada, we were absolutely going to win the world championship, nothing could possibly go wrong. I remember talking to members of our board saying ‘You know, we’re obviously going to have a good year financially so we need to think about where we spend our money, we’ve got to look at the future of Formula 1’. Really our decision on that was to build our new wind tunnel. For us, there was that step in what we could spend.”

Symonds was operating in Benetton’s technical ranks and would continue with the outfit during its transformation into Renault F1.

For him, the time period was one of the most exciting to be a part of Formula 1 as the teams and technical staff got to flex their design muscles with the funding now available.

“The technology almost went into reverse because the ’93 car was still the most technically advanced car. I’d say it was probably the most advanced chassis even to today. Okay, the engine was a bit of a dinosaur compared to today, but you know it had the four-wheel steer, active suspension, ABS, all these sorts of things were way ahead of where we were but they were done on a shoestring.

“I’d love to look back at what our budgets were then. I actually used to write a report for Max [Mosely] mostly every year to have sort of a brief overview of what we spent and where we spent it just to put him in touch with things like that. I can’t remember the numbers now but there were several things happening there was more money coming into the sport. From our point of view, it was the Benetton thing but of course, Mercedes were getting on board and later BMW was pouring money into Williams, so you were starting to see the beginning of the manufacturers.”

“Some manufacturers were probably playing ‘alpha’ but the other thing that really was starting to take-off was the understanding of aero”

The development of cars was accelerated as engineers began to fully exploit the growing understanding of aerodynamics. With the extra funds available, engineers and aerodynamicists could be exploratory, ambitious and outside-the-box more often than ever before.

Symonds remembers the rapid progress from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. The advent of CAD design was another crucial step towards what you might consider modern-era F1 car development.

Team’s understanding of ground effect and aerodynamics on a larger scale began to accelerate at some pace during the decade, and the use of computer simulation and design only furthered the possibilities for teams in terms of development scope.

The transition from 2D to 3D design led to some of the most technologically complex cars F1 has ever seen, particularly at Williams as the team started on a development path to its 1993 effort: the FW15C. Complete with an impressive active suspension system that could alter the suspension geometry at a whim on one of the three computers it was connected to at any one time, the ’93 car stands the test of time for being an incredible piece of engineering that helped the team onto one of its five constructor’s titles during the decade.

“Some manufacturers were probably playing alpha but the other thing that really was starting to takeoff was the understanding of aero.

“At Benetton, we opened our wind tunnel right at the end of the ’90s. We’d certainly moved up an awful lot in what we could do in the wind tunnel and interestingly, one of the things that came along was our first rapid prototyping machines at the end of the ’90s. We got our first CAD machines in the ’80s in the ’90s we’re really starting to use them.

“So now we were able to not just design but to manufacture much more complex 3D shapes. We were getting a lot more complex.

“I think also the work we did on the active [suspension] car had definitely moved us forward a massive amount in simulation. Not simulators, we were not into simulators at that time but simulation, a lot more mathematical modelling, etc. I mean it sounds crazy, but we didn’t have much computing power up until the ’90s. So, we were starting to do a lot more classic engineering relevancy to the PAMPs engineering and I think those are the things that really moved to being state of the art.”

Improvements weren’t exclusive to the technological side of things either. The ‘garagista’ era was well and truly finished and even the traditional manufacturers were beginning to modernise. Greater budgets meant better equipment and along with that, the individuals operating them also took a step forward.

The likes of Adrian Newey and Ross Brawn had been around before the boom and were respected for their work though it was during the 1990s that they enhanced their reputations and set themselves apart from a crowd that was growing increasingly intuitive.

The supporting casts that helped create some of F1’s most iconic cars were getting better and better, with greater funds allocated to recruitment rather than purely driver salaries and engine deals.

“When I got into Formula 1, though, there weren’t many professional engineers. Engineers, people with engineering degrees, there were an awful lot of incredibly clever people. They had sort of grown up learning on the track about racing cars. Some of them with an incredible eye for design. There was very little analytical work. And I think that in the ’90s, it was quite unusual but by the end of the ’90s pretty much everyone working in a design office in aerodynamics were professional engineers.