Not long ago, Gordon Murray told me how glad he was not to be designing Formula 1 cars any more. The thrust of what he was saying was that the rulebook is now so thick that game-changing innovation is simply out of the question.
Back in his day (spanning the end of the 1960s through to the early 1990s) there were rules about weights, dimensions and engine sizes, but little else. Your engine could have as many cylinders as you liked, your gearbox as many ratios. And if you thought of something completely off the wall, like he did with the Brabham BT46B fan car, you could just go and race it. If it looked so good all other designs would be rendered obsolete they’d probably find a way to ban it, but until then you just raced, as did the Brabham which, incidentally and contrary to common perception, was never banned but withdrawn before it could be.
But if your lateral thinking resulted in a car that didn’t set the world on fire, everyone just let you get on with it, no matter how wacky it seemed to be, and in those distant days of glory and Branestawm free-thinking, there was no shortage. Take Gordon’s first go at the BT46 which attempted to replace radiators with surface cooling, or the Arrows A2 ‘doodlebug’, Ligier JS5 ‘teapot’ and March 711 ‘tea tray’. But there was one which, when first revealed late in 1975, went so off-piste some of the journalists present simply didn’t believe what they were looking at was real. It was the Tyrrell Project 34.
