Ask Nigel Roebuck: January 14

Dear Bryan,

I agree that the nose of the Williams FW26 is not aesthetically pleasing - but then, as far as I'm concerned, the noses of virtually every F1 car for the last umpteen years have also been ugly - I hate the pointed, 'high nose', look, and always have.

However, at the end of the day there is something in what Mario Andretti said a long time ago: "Any car looks beautiful in Victory Lane..." And the signs, thus far, are that the FW26 is a great deal more competitive - out of the box - than its predecessor was. The FW25, let's remember, ultimately evolved into the out-and-out quickest car of 2003.



Dear Alan,

Yep, I was also a little taken aback by the new Williams when I first saw a photo - but I wasn't stunned by it. The nose is certainly...different, but the rest of the car looks conventional enough.

As to the F1 car which shocked me the most when I first saw it, there's no need to think long and hard about that: the Tyrrell P34, which appeared at the beginning of 1976. An unusual shape is one thing - for a car to have two more wheels than you expect quite another!

To my eyes, at least, the P34 - 'the six-wheeler,' as it was always known - was about the least attractive creation ever to appear on a race track, but then efficiency, not elegance, was uppermost in Derek Gardner's mind when he conceived the car.

Although the P34 was drawn up in 1975, the idea had come to Gardner some years earlier. When first the car appeared, the immediate assumption of most was that the primary aim of four tiny front wheels was to reduce the frontal area, in the interests of straightline speed. Not so.

"No," Gardner told me, "the starting point had not been the tiny front wheels. The concept really went back to the 1968 Indy Lotus turbine car, on which I was responsible for the four-wheel drive. In those days, the behaviour of four-wheel drive cars wasn't very well known, and the change in characteristics between throttle on and off caused the car to be particularly nervous."

Gardner reckoned there were fundamental design flaws in the car, but felt he was hardly in a position to venture the opinion to Colin Chapman: "How could I? I was a transmission engineer, and here was arguably the finest chassis constructor of all time. What I did was provide Lotus with centre differentials, which favoured the drive to the rear wheels. That way the amount of upset to the handling was cut down - it was a sort of sneaky way of trying to get round the inbuilt problem..."

By the end of '68, Gardner had concluded that an entirely different concept was called for, and what he came up with was a six-wheeled car, with two of the four front wheels being driven, plus the two at the rear. Lotus were now gone from Indianapolis, so Derek put a proposal to Andy Granatelli, whose STP company had sponsored the turbine cars. It came to nought.

By 1970, Gardner had gone to work for Ken Tyrrell, there to design the very first Tyrrell F1 car, 001. The following season Jackie Stewart won the World Championship in an updated car, 003, and in 1973 took it again, this time with 006.

At the end of that year, though, Stewart's team mate, Francois Cevert, was killed at Watkins Glen, by which time JYS had already decided to retire. Gardner's new design for 1974, 007, was a neat enough car, but the genius and experience of Stewart were gone, and although Jody Scheckter won a couple of races, Tyrrell finished only third in the Constructors Championship. Derek began to give serious thought to 'the unfair advantage'.

"All the top British teams had Ford DFV engines, and Ferrari's flat-12 undoubtedly had more power. It seemed to me that really what we were looking for was another 50 horsepower, but how on earth were we going to get it?

"I went searching through my files, and came up with the proposal I'd sent to Granatelli. I did some calculations, and concluded that if I had a car with four small front wheels, contained within the width of the bodywork, I could reduce the amount of lift generated by normal front wheels, and that in turn would allow me to back off on the front aerodynamics. And, hey presto, the figure I came up with was the equivalent of 40-odd horsepower!

"Eventually I showed it to Ken, who said, 'Good grief! What's this?' But actually it wasn't as difficult to sell him the idea as you might imagine."

Having got the green light to proceed, the next step was to talk Goodyear into manufacturing tyres of this curious size, for what Gardner had in mind was nine-inch diameter front wheels. He anticipated it might not be easy to persuade competitions boss Leo Mehl to agree, but in the event Mehl raised no objections: "The only compromise I had to make was to go to 10-inch wheels, but that was all right."

More remarkable even than Goodyear's immediate agreement was that the project remained secret for so long. "In those days," Derek said, "we operated a simple principle, and it's still the most reliable: if you don't want people to know about something, don't tell them!"

Given the need to produce a test car as quickly as possible, the first P34 was very much a bitza, completely new from the roll-over bar forward, but standard 007 at the rear. Once running began, the team did repeated back-to-back tests at Paul Ricard with the standard four-wheel car, and found that the six-wheeler's aerodynamics were, in Gardner's words, "Fairly appalling. The car gained nothing there, but was inherently quicker in other ways, notably on turn-in."

Teething problems are inevitable with any new F1 car, and more than normal might have been expected with so radical a design as P34, but in fact Gardner was pleasantly surprised by the early tests. "They went remarkably well, actually, although there was a problem with the tyres. This was before the days of radials, of course, so if you stiffened up the carcass, in order to control the profile at high speed, you also stiffened up the sidewall - you just couldn't separate them.

"The first time I saw the car, coming down the straight at Silverstone, I was absolutely horrified, because I could see the tyres literally being sucked off the rims! As soon as the driver touched the brakes, they collapsed back down on to the rim, and althought they never lost any pressure, it was a hair-raising thing to witness. Fortunately the drivers couldn't see it..."

The sheer smallness of the front wheels also made it difficult to keep the brakes cool. The temperature of the brakes was not in itself a worry; the problem lay in keeping that heat away from the fluid. "Once you got above a certain temperature, you just lost your brakes. These days, of course, you'd just pepper the whole thing, and force fluid through it, like they do with the touring car brakes, but all we could do was push more and more air through - which, of course, tended to be counter-productive on the aerodynamics. But we coped."

It was this problem which accounted for the accident of Patrick Depailler in P34's first race, the Spanish Grand Prix of 1976. "The pedal just went to the floor," he reported. "If you pump, you can get the pressure back, but I didn't have time..."

What mattered, though, was that Depailler had qualified third, and had been running third, in a car which had never turned a wheel before practice began. Accidents invariably left Patrick unmoved; even as he described this one, he was smiling, convinced that the car had boundless potential.

Scheckter was Depailler's team mate in 1976, and Ronnie Peterson would partner him the following year, but Gardner had especially fond memories of Patrick. "He was always far and away the most committed to the concept. Patrick was an absolutely dedicated racer - to be a racing driver was the only thing he had ever wanted to do. He was wonderful to work with, occasionally a bit...mercurial, but you could forgive that. You always got 100% from him."

Having run only a single P34 at Jarama, Tyrrell brought a second car, for Scheckter, to Zolder. Jody finished fourth there, but it was at Monte Carlo where the cars' turn-in abilities really showed to advantage, with Scheckter and Depailler second and third, beaten only by Niki Lauda's Ferrari.

Anderstorp, only the fourth race for the P34s, went even better. Scheckter took pole position, Mario Andretti alongside him, and after the Lotus driver had retired, he led to the flag, followed in by Depailler. "I'm starting to get used to it now," Jody said. "It turns in very well, and then you get a bit of understeer, which goes towards oversteer when you put the power down. And that's good - that's what you want."

Victory so early in its life seemed to herald a boundless future for the P34, but although it was to score plenty of seconds and thirds thereafter, it was never to win again. At Mosport Depailler fought with James Hunt throughout the race, finishing a semi-comatose second after being sprayed in the face, first by alcohol, then gasoline, when his fuel pressure gauge broke.

At Watkins Glen it was Scheckter's turn to take on Hunt, Jody leading most of the way before being slowed by worsening understeer. And in torrential conditions at Fuji Depailler, battling with Andretti for the lead, had a tyre failure 10 laps from the flag. Often, then, it was a matter of close but no cigar.

In 1977, though, there was not so much as a whiff. By now Scheckter had departed for Wolf, and Ronnie Peterson was in with Depailler. Again, Gardner said, Patrick was the more committed of the two. "I liked Ronnie as a driver, but in terms of feedback he was hopeless, frankly. He got into the car, he drove it - and that was it! His natural way was to drive around a problem, rather than try to solve it.

Where the P34 had been a front runner in 1976, it was virtually an also-ran in '77, and the problem, Gardner said, lay fundamentally with the front tyres. Goodyear had a monopoly by now, and although development of course continued, the tiny fronts for Tyrrell suffered somewhat. "I don't really blame Goodyear, because it was an enormous task, supplying everyone, but they tended to develop the rears and the normal fronts - and our fronts just got sort of left. So we were dealing with developed rears and static fronts, and by 1977 that was beginning to show up. The advantage of the six-wheel concept was going rapidly out of the window."

Attempting to counteract the problem, Gardner designed a wide-track front for the P34 - which necessarily increased drag, negating one of the advantages of the original design. But new, too, for 1977 was more streamlined bodywork, and quite often the car was significantly quicker than anything else through the traps.

"That winter we spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel, developing as near an all-enveloping bodyshape as possible. It worked beautifully, in terms of low drag, but unfortunately it was very heavy because it was made in fibreglass. Later on we had Kevlar bodywork, and that made quite a difference, but by then the writing was on the wall: either something had to be done about the front tyres, or we had to forget the whole thing."

In 1976, Scheckter and Depailler had finished third and fourth in the World Championship, with 49 and 39 points respectively, but the following year Patrick scored only 20, placing eighth, while Peterson's tally was a mere seven. And before the end of the season, following the Italian Grand Prix, Gardner himself had left Tyrrell.

It was a fascinating saga, but I confess I was glad in the end to see the last of the P34. A Grand Prix car really should have four wheels...



Dear Rafael,

Believe it or not, I have been to the Le Mans 24 Hours only twice in my life, in 1965 and '67, right after I left school.

People often ask why my interest in the race is not what it was back then. In part, it is because back then Le Mans was still what Le Mans had always been. The drivers ran across the road to their cars at the start, for one thing; there were no chicanes anywhere, for another; for a third, only two drivers were allowed for each car. And perhaps some clue may be found in the winners of the races I attended. In '65, it was a North American Racing Team Ferrari 275LM, crewed by Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory, and in '67 it was a 7-litre Ford Mk4, driven by Dan Gurney and A.J, Foyt.

There you have it, really. Until the mid-seventies, or thereabouts, I really loved sports car racing. The major factories were involved, most of the top F1 drivers took part, and I think I saw two classic races. In '65, when Rindt and Gregory won, what was remarkable was that they had had a major mechanical problem early on, and then drove absolutely flat out thereafter, figuring either to win or to blow up trying. When the chequered flag came down, that car was literally on its last legs - in fact, Gregory once told me that he doubted it could have done another lap.

As for the '67 race, all I can tell you is that my friend Jabby Crombac, who has seen virtually every Le Mans since the war, reckons that to have been the best ever. Virtually every world-class driver on earth was in that race, from F1, from Indy cars, even from NASCAR. It was essentially a fight between Ford and Ferrari, with such as Chaparral and Porsche also prominently involved. In the end, victory went to the Ford of Gurney and Foyt, at an average speed of over 135mph.

Consider the 'entry' that drew me to Le Mans in '67. Four factory-entered Ford Mk4s, driven by Gurney/Foyt, Bruce McLaren/Mark Donohue, Mario Andretti/Lucien Bianchi, Denny Hulme/Lloyd Ruby, plus three Mk2s, for Ronnie Bucknum/Paul Hawkins, Frank Gardner/Roger McCluskey, Jo Schlesser/Guy Ligier, and a GT40, for Brian Redman/Mike Salmon. There were two of the extraordinary Chaparral 2Fs, one of them driven by Phil Hill/MikeSpence, and a pair of Lola-Aston Martin T70s, one handled by by John Surtees/David Hobbs.

Deep breath... There were a couple of JW Automotive Mirages, for Jacky Ickx/Brian Muir and David Piper/Dick Thompson. Then we get on to the Ferraris, a trio of the gorgeous P4s, for Chris Amon/Nino Vaccarella, Mike Parkes/Lodovico Scarfiotti, Gunther Klass/Peter Sutcliffe, plus the Equipe Nationale Belge car of Willy Mairesse/'Beurlys', and the P3/4s of Richard Attwood/Piers Courage, Pedro Rodriguez/Giancarlo Baghetti, and Jean Guichet/Herbert Muller.

What next? Oh yes, the factory Porsches, crewed by Jo Siffert/Hans Hermann, Jochen Rindt/Gerhard Mitter, Rolf Stommelen/Jochen Neerpasch, and Vic Elford/Ben Pon. The works Matras were handled by Jean-Pierre Beltoise/Johnny Servoz-Gavin and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud/Henri Pescarolo, and the Alpine by Gerard Larrousse/Patrick Depailler.

Some line-up, right? I was just out of school, and money was tight. I allowed myself a single 'foreign' trip to a race each year, and thereafter preferred to spend my minimal cash on going to a Grand Prix somewhere. And when teams like Ferrari turned their back on sports car racing, together with the 'major' drivers, so, I am afraid did I.

All that said, I am well aware that Le Mans - like Indianapolis - is a 'happening', rather than merely a race, and I know, too, that thousands of people go to these races who would never contemplate going to any others. A few years ago, I happened to be in France at the time of the 'twinning' of the Brooklands and Le Mans museums, got an invitation to go, and accepted. I hadn't been to the place for 30 years or so, and was struck by the incredible changes to it - there were no chicanes when I had last attended a race there, remember, and not much in the way of guardrails, for that matter.

For all that, though, I was struck, too, by the ambience of Le Mans, and probably one day - when I've given up travelling to Grands Prix every fortnight - I'll go again.



Dear Robb,

Simple answer: I was delighted to learn that Jonathan Palmer's company had bought the four circuits. All right, JP may not have been the world's greatest F1 driver (although he was certainly no slouch), but he has many times shown himself to be a hell of a good businessman, and I'm sure that if anyone can revive the fortunes of Oulton, Cadwell, Brands and Snetterton (to put them in my order of preference!), it is he.

What pleases me most is that Jonathan has stressed his intention to ensure that these places continue as race circuits. For years and years, after all, there had been rumours that Brands and Oulton, in particular, would ultimately be sold off as upmarket housing estates, and having seen that happen to a track like Riverside, I hated the idea of it here in the UK.

That said, JP has also made it very clear that this is a business venture, that the circuits have to be viable, and unless more people start going to race meetings again, it may be that ultimately he and his partners will have to abandon their ambitions. I have always liked Jonathan, and wish him the very best in this venture - as should anyone else who loves motor racing.



Dear Richard,

I really don't know what the hell to say about the future of Jordan. To be frank, I think most people in the paddock feel the same as I do on this subject - we're getting towards saturation point.

After finally reaching the big league in the late '90s, EJ had personally become an extremely rich man, and there were always those who suggested that his wealth was perhaps a little disproportionate to his team's achievements. Jordan Grand Prix was always high on razzmatazz - rock and roll, celebrity guests, flashy car launches, and so on - but while this made the team very popular in some quarters, rival team owners were known to wonder if perhaps there was rather too much emphasis on the trivial, and not enough on what mattered: winning.

Then, a couple of years ago, the world changed. There was a widespread economic downturn, exacerbated by the horrible events of September 11, and suddenly the future wasn't so rosy, after all. EJ, I remember, held an impromptu press conference at Imola in 2002, announcing that the time had come to tighten belts, etc. To that end, the company was considerably trimmed, and everyone applauded Eddie's response to his new situation.

Since then, though, the team seems to have been involved in one confrontation after another, with drivers, engine suppliers, sponsors, other team owners...and without doubt the most damaging of all was Jordan's disastrous legal action against Vodafone last year, which cost the company a great deal of money it could ill afford, and which did no good at all to EJ's personal reputation - or to his team's attractiveness to other potential sponsors.

In the long term, I'm tempted to say, yes, the team's only real hope looks to be a buy-out by Abramovich or someone like him, but always the word is that potential buyers insist a condition of sale is that EJ himself stand aside - and that, apparently, he is not willing to do.