The ground-effect wonder behind a generation of F1 stars

The story of the car that came to define half a decade of Formula 3 racing began slowly. The Ralt RT3 was the successor to the successful RT1, and was the late Ron Tauranac's attempt to bring the new-to-Formula 1 ground-effects philosophy to the junior categories, but the Australian was initially too busy working on his Formula 2 machines.

Nelson Piquet had won an F3 title in the UK in 1978 run out of the Ralt factory, and had introduced an unknown Chilean named Eliseo Salazar to Tauranac. Aboard the brand-new RT3, Salazar failed to score a single British F3 point in 1979, so the 1980 season began with no takers in the UK for the car. Then Rob Wilson, who had won a race in 1978 with an RT1, was tempted...

"I'd been offered the Martini drive that Alain Prost had had the year before [when he won the 1979 European title]," says Wilson, "but it was a bit shaky and I'd left everything far too late. I didn't really get myself organised. Ron had had a terrible run with the RT3 and nobody would have one.

"We would chat away, and he said why don't I run it, and that we could do it for next to nothing. A friend of mine, Jack Bonfield, who owned a dental equipment company called Bondent, said he'd get me on the grid, and Ron built up an RT3 for me and said, 'Let's do it'. I believed in Ron and off we went."

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It wasn't an easy time for Wilson's SW Racing team, which missed the opening few rounds: "We suffered overheating. So we cut up a Castrol can at Thruxton to put the oil cooler in the sidepod, and that became the mould for the hole that went there.

"When you look back it was a fantastic car, but in May 1980 the Ralt factory was very quiet. It gradually got better, but we were using the same tyres for three races... It was quite unstable - we had to work on springs, bars, bump rubbers, rideheight. It was an awful lot of work to make this car come right."

By the time of the joint European/British championship race at Silverstone in early September, Wilson was knocking on the door of victories.

"Ron bought a set of tyres for Silverstone and I went out and won [the first heat of a two-part aggregate event]," recalls Wilson. "It just worked - it was a really good car. Then Ron Dennis bought one, Eddie Jordan bought a couple..."

Dennis's purchase of the RT3 was, like Salazar's appearance at Tauranac's workshop, almost accidental. It arose from a chance remark from Dick Bennetts, who had been engineering BMW M1s for Niki Lauda and Hans Stuck for Dennis's Project Four team in the F1-supporting Procar series. P4 was also running Marlboro protege Stefan Johansson in March machinery in British F3 (below), and was gearing up for a takeover of the McLaren F1 team.

Come the start of the 1981 British season, eight of the 18 cars on the grid were RT3s, and over the next four years just one out of 77 British F3 Championship races would be won by a non-RT3

"I was going to leave, and Ron said, 'No, I want you to look at the F3 team', because they weren't having much luck," explains Bennetts.

"I said, 'This is a long shot, but there's a Kiwi guy called Rob Wilson who's quick on occasion in the RT3, and it looks like he's got no money'. Ron took it on board, and the next thing he told me to jump in his car, and we did the 15-minute drive to Ralt in his Porsche.

"The two Rons [Dennis and Tauranac] were in the Portakabin there, and Ron Dennis came out and said, 'You've got what you wanted'. I said, 'What do you mean?' I'd only said it looked quick!"

Project Four began testing the RT3 at Goodwood with Johansson, but the Swede couldn't match the times he recorded with the March. "Every time I went back to the factory Ron Dennis said, 'Are we racing it?' Not yet," says Bennetts. Suddenly there was a breakthrough, when a mega-stiff set-up was tried, and the team procured adjustable Koni dampers in place of the fixed Bilsteins supplied from Ralt: "Stefan just came in smiling."

The team took the RT3 to the final four British F3 rounds, Johansson won them all, and snatched the title from under the noses of Kenny Acheson (in a Murray Taylor Racing March) and works Argo pilot Roberto Guerrero. Come the start of the 1981 British season, eight of the 18 cars on the grid were RT3s, and over the next four years just one out of 77 British F3 Championship races would be won by a non-RT3.

Before even Wilson's and Johansson's successes, the RT3 had become a winner in the German F3 Championship. Bertram Schafer had twice won the title at the wheel of an RT1, but had stepped out of the cockpit to concentrate on running his Bitburg-based squad.

Bertram Schafer Racing's first victory with the RT3 in a German championship round had come as early as late May 1980, when Wolfgang Klein triumphed on the Nurburgring Nordschleife in a support race to the circuit's 1000km enduro. Harald Brutschin and Frank Jelinski added further successes, with future Group C star Jelinski claiming the crown. Wilson, however, doesn't remember any transfer of knowledge taking place via Ralt between his exploits and those of the Germans.

Even before that, the RT3 had become a winner in the hotly contested Italian F3 Championship. In late 1979, Carlo Rossi had become the last man to win what we could term a first-class F3 race in an RT1 when, at the wheel of an ancient, ex-Elio de Angelis, 1976-model version, he defeated a field including Piercarlo Ghinzani, Michele Alboreto and Corrado Fabi. Little did he know he would also become the first to win a first-class F3 race in the RT1's successor...

"Trivellato Racing [which had carried Riccardo Patrese to the 1976 European F3 crown] proposed me to race for them in 1980, and Mr [Pino] Trivellato said if I find a good budget we could do Italian and European championship, if I find a little budget we do European, and if I don't find any we can race Italian championship - it was a dream for me!" laughs Rossi (pictured in 1980 at Monaco). "Then in December Mr Trivellato had a [non-fatal] heart attack, and the team didn't race in 1980. Nearly all the places were occupied, and my old team proposed to race with the RT1, but I said no thanks."

The small team of Sergio Leone had acquired a 1979-model RT3, which Italian Ralt importer Luciano Pavesi had run briefly for Roberto Campominosi at the end of the season. "They said if you don't have anything to call them - it was my Christmas gift," continues Rossi. "And that was why I raced the RT3."

While Wilson and Project Four would struggle to get the RT3 up to speed in the UK, the same wasn't necessarily untrue in Italy, except that series had some very slow, twisty circuits on which the RT3's ground-effect could be exploited. Round two, at Varano, allowed Rossi to play perfectly to its strengths.

"It was a quick car on slow tracks," he explains, "and it was so good that I won the race without third gear. There was only a quick S-bend and all the rest of the track was slow, and I was leading when I lost third gear after 10 laps. I had three seconds advantage, and three times per lap I had to go from second to fourth, and with F3 engines then you had only 1200rpm of torque between 4800 and 6000rpm."

That was Rossi's last win in F3. Preparation shortfalls from the small team contributed to accidents, and when the chief mechanic blamed him for breaking the gearbox at Magione that was the last straw. He then focused on moving to F2, which he did with the Alan Docking-run Toleman usually raced by Huub Rothengatter, in a non-championship race at Monza. Rossi would race in F2 in 1981 with Sanremo Racing and in 1982 with Docking again, but had carved out a place in history: his Varano victory, on 30 March 1980, was the first of what would be 208 wins for the RT3 in first-class F3 races.

While Pavesi would import plenty of RT3s to Italy over the following years, Johansson's 1980 British title-winning car had been acquired by a promising Formula Ford graduate and his backer. Jonathan Palmer and West Surrey Engineering chief Mike Cox began testing the car, but without success.

"They'd only run Formula Ford and didn't understand ground-effect," says Bennetts. "Then I went to Goodwood with them to help out, and Jonathan went quicker than Stefan had, and I thought, 'Shit, this bloke's good'. I said, 'Look, this is none of my business, but you've got to get someone to run it'. I was leaving Project Four and heading off to New Zealand to help my mate Dave Oxton [in Formula Pacific], but we did a deal to set up the team for Jonathan."

"He got pole, won and set fastest lap by a country mile, so we just shook hands on a deal for 1983. He seemed a genuine guy, gave us a deposit and went home to Brazil" Dick Bennetts on signing Ayrton Senna

Palmer (pictured at Thruxton) won the 1981 British championship, and a new F3 legend was born with the birth of West Surrey Racing, as Bennetts replaced the 'Engineering' suffix with 'Racing' for 1982. That year the team ran Enrique Mansilla, who'd been a team-mate of Ayrton Senna's at the works Van Diemen Formula Ford 1600 squad in 1981.

A new RT3 was acquired, but Mansilla smashed it up in testing at Goodwood, leading to the ex-Johansson/Palmer warhorse to be dragged out again for the start of the season, while the new one was repaired. Mansilla took time to find his feet, but ended up fighting for the championship with Tommy Byrne, who was being run by Bennetts' good friend and fellow Kiwi Murray Taylor.

"He kept saying the car was oversteering," says Bennetts of Mansilla, "and I got so fed up. When I went to watch him at Oulton Park, he actually had massive understeer, but he would crank the lock on, and then it would bite and he'd get oversteer. 'Right, get
out of the car'. We made changes to wing angles, springs, and he got back in. After that he was smiling."

Senna, who in 1982 had cleaned up in European and British FF2000, didn't rate Mansilla, but knew Byrne was a proper talent, and that was why he beat a path to Bennetts' door.

"He felt our car must be very good," continues Bennetts. "We did a test at Snetterton just before the TV race at Thruxton [a televised, non-championship race run in November], and he just flew. He got pole, won and set fastest lap by a country mile, so we just shook hands on a deal for 1983. He seemed a genuine guy, gave us a deposit and went home to Brazil."

Meantime, an engine war had broken out in F3. The Toyota block, built by the Pedrazani brothers at the Novamotor company in Italy, had dominated F3 since 1974, but now Novamotor was supplying Alfa Romeo powerplants and these were flooding the Italian market. At the same time, a loyal Ralt customer from Denmark named John Nielsen had been cleaning up in the F3-level, Volkswagen-powered European Formula Super Vee Championship, winning the 1979 title in an RT1, and the 1980 and 1981 crowns in an RT5 (the Super Vee nomenclature for the RT3).

"That led to John Judd from Engine Developments to say, 'We've won this championship three times now - I think I can make an F3 engine from this Volkswagen Golf engine [the same block as the Super Vee] for you,'" relates Nielsen. "I went to Volkswagen Motorsport, and said, 'John can do the engines, can you do the running costs?' They said yes, and we won the German F3 Championship."

What's more, that was with the exact same chassis as had been successful for Nielsen in RT5 guise in 1981.

"The Toyota Novamotor was four-valve and top-heavy," adds Nielsen. "The VW was tiny and had a low centre of gravity. That's why we could jump in and break that domain."

Judd also supplied powerplants to David Price Racing, which was running Martin Brundle in British F3. As Byrne (pictured) and Mansilla fought for the title, Brundle was the form man by the end of the season. What's more, DPR had expanded into French F3, and won that.

The RT3's reputation in France had begun when Wilson's 1980 car was acquired by the relatively unfancied Alain Abdel for 1981, and he sprung a surprise by twice beating the dominant Martinis, at Dijon and the Le Mans Bugatti circuit. One of those Martini pilots was Pierre Petit, and he knew he wanted an RT3 for 1982.

"We'd been running a March in Europe in 1981 for Philippe Colonna," says future Stewart F1 luminary Andy Miller, who was then engineering at DPR. "Suddenly Dave [Price] says, 'I've got this Frenchman who wants to run in the French championship'. The first time we met, we did a seat-fit at Paul Ricard on the Wednesday before the first round, did a test on the Thursday, and then won the first race [by 15 seconds from Michel Ferte in the works Martini].

"We ended up supplying Ralt skirts to all the Martini teams - we used to take bundles of them over! We hadn't done any running on the Michelin [control tyres], and it was gamble, but it worked" Andy Miller

"The French were telling Pierre, 'No way will an English team do you any favours'. But he put it on pole by one and a half seconds. They had a gentlemen's agreement not to run skirts there, and the RT3's were one of Ron Tauranac's simple ideas: shim steel with a rubbing strip.

"We said we were running those skirts, and we ended up supplying Ralt skirts to all the Martini teams - we used to take bundles of them over! We hadn't done any running on the Michelin [control tyres], and it was gamble, but it worked."

Petit started the season with the Toyota, switched to the VW at Price's behest, and won the championship.

DPR planned to take Brundle to European F3 for 1983, but the Norfolk driver was dropped by BP. At the time, BP ran a kind of Red Bull Junior equivalent scheme for talented UK drivers, and had been seduced by the FF2000 form of Calvin Fish, who had been the closest thing to a rival for Senna in FF2000. DPR therefore ran Fish in British F3 in 1983, Price helped Brundle sort out a mega-cheap deal with Eddie Jordan Racing, and the classic Senna-Brundle season was born.

Jordan being Jordan, he'd also sorted an engine deal that Bennetts didn't cotton on to for some time. While Senna was using the Toyota Novamotor engine, maintained by Nicholson McLaren, Brundle's powerplants were going straight back to Italy for rebuilds.

"We won nine races in a row," says Bennetts, "and I just kept thinking the bubble's got to burst. EJ still denies to this day that he had an advantage, but we sent our engines back to Italy before the last race and cor, what a difference it made.

"Ayrton could speak good Italian, so he stayed there for a week watching it get rebuilt, and he just blitzed Martin at the final round, and then he won Macau. It was like a different engine."

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Fish won just once for DPR, when Senna and Brundle collided at Oulton, but the team continued its French form, this time with Francois Hesnault. "He was a really nice guy," says Miller. "We were very fast, we should have won it."

Still, Hesnault was runner-up and springboarded into F1 with Ligier for 1984, when DPR planned a British campaign with BP's latest protege Johnny Dumfries. This was perhaps the ultimate RT3, a car Price says mated a new chassis at the rear to an older one at the front.

"We put a Coke-bottle shape on the back," says Miller. "We were confident to do quite a bit to the car. Mo Gomm [ace fabricator] did our monocoques for us, and we made our own fancy wings."

Dumfries (pictured) dominated the British championship, and came so close to winning the European too. Pierluigi Martini, driving for Pavesi's team, had become the first - and only - RT3 driver to claim the European crown, in 1983, and runner-up was Nielsen.

"After we won the German championship, I said to Volkswagen, 'It's time you employ me, and they did,'" says Nielsen. "Suddenly I was a professional racing driver with a salary and all the rest of it!"

Nielsen was on the European F3 grid again in 1984, with Adrian Campos in a sister RT3, but a massive accident in the Monaco GP support race meant a long recuperation. In order to keep the team going, Nielsen asked Bertram Schafer, whose German F3 team was now running as the Volkswagen Motorsport squad in the domestic series, to take over his operation.

When Nielsen returned, he triumphed in the Macau GP, and then "I felt I could still get to F1, and I moved into F3000 with Ralt. I handed the whole team over to Bertram and he continued running it."

"It was a very straight, very honest car. Nothing tricky, nothing special, a good package. It reacted to changes in the right way" Gerhard Berger

Another leading contender in European F3 was Gerhard Berger. While Nielsen had won the German F3 title in 1982, Berger was third in a Martini run by Josef Kaufmann Racing. "But the car to have was a Ralt," he says.

The Austrian's mentor Helmut Marko would run him in European F3 in 1983, and they acquired the car Mansilla (and Senna once) had raced in 1982: "We were short of money, and we discussed this successful car. Dick Bennetts was always a guarantee for quality."

While Senna won in Macau, Berger finished on the podium and then went to Trivellato Racing for 1984. "It was a good team and I decided with Helmut it was a good step to make," adds Berger.

By the end of that season, Berger was in F1 - another Ralt RT3 graduate had made it. And, with the scrapping of ground-effect for 1985, the RT3 would soon become obsolete. Some raced on in converted format into the new season, but its successor, the RT30, plus competition from Reynard and Dallara would phase out the car that had dominated for half a decade.

"It was a very straight, very honest car," remembers Berger. "Nothing tricky, nothing special, a good package. It reacted to changes in the right way."

Nielsen adds: "We would go over there always and build the new cars at the Ralt factory. I lived in a caravan outside the factory in New Haw for 10 days, and before we went over to the continent we would test at Goodwood, Silverstone, Snetterton... wherever was available."

"It was an easy car, it wasn't complicated at all," recalls Miller. "It was very much plug-in-and-play. I'm pretty sure it was the period where you sent mechanics to the Ralt factory, you saw who helped build your car, and you stole them to run it for you!"

"Ron built a good car," says Bennetts, "but everything was bracket on bracket to make it cheap. He believed in buying right-angle aluminium extrusions, and you'd cut your fingers on everything. We called it the Ralt Rash.

"It just had good downforce, it was quite economical to run it. It was a great car."