How to Build a Car

On my return from the States, I was given various design tasks on March’s Formula Two and Indy cars for 1984, which took me through summer into autumn. With those completed, Robin told me his plans. Or should I say, he told me my plans: I was to join an IndyCar team called Truesports, in order to race engineer their driver Bobby Rahal in the March 84C. Back in the USA.

CHAPTER 13

In 1981, my friend Dave McRobert introduced me to a new pastime: hang-gliding. Dave was going out with a nurse from Bath Hospital, and through her I met another nurse, Amanda.

Throughout 1982 I saw her whenever I could. From Bath, where she lived, to Bicester, a town to the north of Oxford where March was based, was a bit of a slog. I used to travel up and down on my Ducati and stay with her at weekends. In the spring of 1983 we bought a cottage in Pickwick, a little village near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

In the summer of 1983 we were married. My dad gave me his yellow Lotus Elan (GWD 214K) as a wedding present, and we took it on our honeymoon in the South of France before beginning life as a married couple in our Pickwick cottage. Between my dad and I, we did 170,000 miles in that car.

All was great until 1984, when Robin sent me to join Truesports to race engineer for Bobby Rahal in the States. The idea was for Amanda to accompany me. She was a nurse and was officially allowed to work in the States, but when we got there we found that there were no jobs available. The team owner, Jim Trueman, also owned a chain of budget hotels, Red Roof Inns, and he promised to give her a job, which he did, in sales.

I left for Columbus in February. Amanda resigned and joined me around March or April time. But she didn’t make any friends at Red Roof, our rented condo was soulless and she was homesick. Amanda had two very delineated modes: when she was in a good mood – ‘up’ – she was great fun. But when she was down she could be hard work, and I suppose you’d have to say that America brought out that latter side. She was back in Blighty by July.

I consoled myself with the racing, which I enjoyed – especially as I had a lot to learn. I came billed by Robin as ‘a promising young engineer’, replacing their previous, highly experienced engineer, Lee Dykstra. And while I now had some race-engineering experience from Formula Two and GTP, I had no experience of the oval tracks that make up much of the IndyCar circuit.

The ‘ovals’ are more like a rounded rectangle, all four corners often very similar in speed. So if the driver says the car’s understeering (i.e. that it’s tending to under-rotate and carry straight on, what the Americans call ‘push’) then there are all sorts of things you can do to try to solve that: you might add more front wing to increase front downforce; you might soften the front anti-roll bar, so there’s not as much weight transfer across the front tyres; you might change what the Americans call the ‘stagger’, the difference in diameter between the inside rear tyre and the outside rear tyre; you might alter the cross-weight, which is how weight is carried diagonally across the car, analogous to a wobbly bar table. You have all these and more variables, many of them not present on a standard road-racing car, because an oval-track car only has to turn left.

This was a big challenge to get my head round, but we were a close-knit team. Bobby, the team manager Steve Horne and chief mechanic Jimmy Prescott were patient with me as I learnt the ropes and we got to know each other well during the season.

Internal air travel wasn’t common in the States back then, so we’d all jump into one of these vans they called Starcraft, effectively minibuses pimped-out with lots of red velvet. We would travel through the night to the circuits, taking it in turns to drive. You know those old movies where drivers do big steering movements all the time? That’s how you had to drive these Starcraft, because they wouldn’t go in a straight line; as part of the pimping process, they had been fitted with tyres that were far too wide for the rim. Dreadful things but comfortable, which is what you need when you’re driving from track to track across America, although I do feel calling them Starcraft was a bit of an oversell. Those long trips were great fun – apart from the time we drifted into the side of an 18-wheeler truck when one of the guys fell asleep at the wheel.

It helped that I was forging a close relationship with Bobby. I’ve been fortunate enough to develop strong bonds with a few drivers over the years, but it was Bobby who first taught me how valuable that close relationship between race engineer and driver can be. He was able to describe what the car was doing in a language I could then translate into set-up changes.

Truesports had a drawing office, or more accurately a tiny office with an old drawing board, where I’d draw parts to improve the performance of the 84C and then work with Bobby at the racetrack to fine-tune the set-up. At race weekends we’d go out for dinner in the evening and talk about the car. I’d have a think about it overnight and come up with changes ready for the following morning’s session.

So for me it was a nice meeting of the skills in aerodynamics and mechanical design that I’d learnt over previous years, with race engineering, and throughout the season I made some decent changes. The car had an angled engine, specified by its designer, Ralph Bellamy, to help the aerodynamics, but I wasn’t convinced so we changed that to reduce the centre-of-gravity height, while redesigning the rear suspension to improve the aero. It was quite a heavy car, so we put a lot into weight saving.

By the end of the season we were able to give Mario Andretti’s Lola, which had been the class car of the field, a good run for its money, winning a few races in the process. At the same time, my 83G design had gone on to win the 1984 IMSA championship. So with that, and with us having turned this rather clumsy 84 IndyCar into something that was able to rival and beat the Lola, Robin Herd promoted me to chief designer on next year’s IndyCar. I was the grand old age of 25.

CHAPTER 14

It was all change at March. Ralph Bellamy had moved across to work on Formula 3000, designing the March 85B for my old friend Christian Danner (a good car, too. Christian won that debut Formula 3000 season in it). Meanwhile, I started work on the March 85C, which was to be sold to US teams to compete in the 1985 IndyCar season, the first race of which was in April 1985. It was to be my first car designed from scratch.

Now it goes without saying that there are a million and one factors to consider when you’re designing a racing car. Here are just three that cropped up in this instance.

THE TASK

Your job as the chassis designer is to take all the elements – the engine; turbocharger; the radiators for the water, engine oil and gearbox oil; driver; fuel tank; suspension; gearbox; and find an elegant package solution for them – so that you can design the externals into the right aerodynamic shape while having a structurally sound, lightweight solution.

A VISION

As a result of that experience at Fittipaldi and March, I’m one of the few designers with a degree of knowledge in different departments who can move between them. What it gives me is the insight to approach a design from a holistic point of view, avoiding the situation where you see a car where clearly the aerodynamicist and the chief designer were having a row, since you’ve either got nasty mechanical bits sticking out of what was otherwise a clean aerodynamic surface (the structural guys obviously won the battle) or an aerodynamically elegant-looking car that performs poorly because it has the stiffness of a rubber band.

You might see other cars where it looks as if one person’s designed the front end of the car and somebody else did the back end. If there’s one thing I hope to be remembered for it’s that the cars I’ve been overall responsible for look cohesive.

THE DRIVER

Despite the fact that March planned to sell the 85C to whichever team wanted it – indeed, there were well over a dozen of them competing in the 1985 IndyCar championship – it was Bobby for whom the car was tailored and his input that set the handling targets. And what Bobby wanted, mainly, was for the car to be balanced.

Why? Well, if you watch 1970s motor racing you’ll see some drivers driving them like rally cars. Fans and journalists love to see that because it looks dramatic, as though you’re witnessing a tense and skilful struggle between man and machine. Gilles Villeneuve, for example, was a master of the controlled slide – ‘power slides’ they’re sometimes called – and could drive sideways all day. He won the adoration of fans as a result.

What he didn’t win, however, was the championship. And who knows: maybe his propensity for exuberant driving was partially to blame because the problem is that this style puts an enormous amount of energy into the tyres, which are prone to overheating, as well as reducing the effectiveness of the aerodynamics and hence downforce. Or put another way, when you’re going sideways you’re not going forwards. Compare Gilles to Niki Lauda who never let the car get ragged. It was always moving forward. His results speak for themselves.

What all drivers want is a car that stays under control throughout all phases of the corner. You want the car to rotate when you turn the wheel at the entry phase of the corner, but not so much that the car tries to swap ends on you. And then at the exit phase of the corner, you want a car that can put down its power without spinning up the rear tyres or snapping sideways. Give them that and the delicate driver will explore the grip of the car to its limit without allowing it to get out of shape.

Bobby was no exception. IndyCars are heavy, which means they can be lazy when it comes to changing direction in corners. What’s more, the circuits differ greatly and can be very bumpy, so we needed a car that would maintain its balance over a range of ride-heights. If we could achieve this then Bobby’s delicate style would result in a very fast package. On the flipside, Bobby would struggle to extract time from a poorly balanced car that required a more flamboyant style.

We granted his wishes by working on the suspension, and on making the aerodynamics deliver in order to keep the car stable. We also designed the cockpit around his size, because he’s a tall guy. When you consider that we were working in the days before data recorders or simulation packages, the driver’s input was essential. After all, other than driver feedback all you had in those days was your own experience, instinct and …

THE WIND TUNNEL

My old friend the wind tunnel. I used the one at Southampton right up until 1990, which means that including student years I spent about 13 years in that wind tunnel. That’s almost a quarter of my life used in five-day periods of stooping, squatting and kneeling over in a 7ft-wide, 5ft-high tube.

Our models were quarter-scale, made out of wood and aluminium, with moving suspension to allow the wheels to go up and down, but no springs or dampers and no internals. The floor of the tunnel was a conveyor belt. But although the tyres touched the ground, the model didn’t rest on them. It was in fact hung from a strut on the ceiling. We used a turn buckle to vary the ride-height, and having done that we’d do a run, blow air over the model, about 10 minutes’ worth of that, then stop the run, go into the tunnel, stoop over, take a set of spanners, adjust the ride-height and do another one. During the run we would measure the downforce, drag and the ‘pitching moment’, which allows us to calculate how the load is distributed between the front and rear axles.

LEAD TIMES

Typically, what takes longest is the central monocoque and gearbox casing – everything hangs off those two components. The rear suspension hangs off the gearbox casing, while the nose, front suspension, radiators and most of the bodywork hang off the monocoque, which itself contains the driver and fuel tank. So you need to have a pretty good idea of what the whole car will look like by the time you release the drawings for the monocoque and the transmission casing. Because they are the components that take the longest to make, to establish their release dates you simply work back from when the car is first scheduled to run.

You can keep working on the details after you’ve done that, so you might finish the front wing sometime later. Something like the driver’s mirrors get released a few days before D-Day, because they don’t take long to make.

At March, most of the car was made in-house, which for a production company where profit is important was crucial. The gearbox casing was made to our design, sent out to a foundry to cast and then machined by another company, but the monocoque, for instance, was made in-house, as well as all the suspension.

Because all the components were drawn by hand, it was difficult to check every last thing to make sure the components were going to assemble correctly, and we had occasional disasters when the first prototype car was being built: something wouldn’t fit, for example, or a suspension member would go through a piece of bodywork. Nowadays, with everything drawn on computer, it is easy to fully assemble the car in the virtual world and check for such howlers before anything is actually made.

Work on the 85C began in August 1984, when I was pulling double-duty, wearing one hat as race engineer for Bobby in the States, and another doing design and wind tunnel work on the 85C in the UK. As a result it had a compressed aero programme and design time. Never good.

THE CHOICE

There’s always a trade-off between making something strong and making it aerodynamic. For instance, to make the chassis stiff, you want a wide rim to the cockpit where the driver sits, and so I made the rim width 2in, which on the one hand gave a stiff chassis, but on the other presented a large and not very aerodynamically sympathetic opening to the top of the cockpit. Research 12 months later for its successor, the 86C, showed this to be a much bigger penalty than I had expected: with the compressed design time, I’d had to make a judgement without the time to evaluate it in the tunnel. It was the wrong call.

BRAINWAVES

I was lucky enough to fly business class as I began the commute in August between the US racetracks and March in Bicester, but the seats were upholstered in that squeaky leather that’s supposed to be the height of luxury but is in fact slippery and uncomfortable, so for the return night flights I’d down a couple of whiskey and sodas and then wander through to economy.

God knows how airlines like Pan Am and TWA made any money in those days. Half the time you’d have the flight almost to yourself. Sure enough, I’d find three or four seats together and lie across those.

I remember one particular flight over the Irish Sea and the pilot announcing that there was a technical problem. We were going to have to circle over the sea, dump our fuel, then return to Heathrow. Of course that meant a delay back at Heathrow, the bottom line being that by the time we did eventually touch down at JFK in New York it was almost midnight.

There I had to bribe the hire company 20 dollars to stay open (‘We’re closed.’ ‘Says here you close at midnight.’ ‘We’re closed.’) and give me a car, and then I set off, map balanced on my lap, aiming to get to New Jersey across the Washington Bridge. Except, of course, I got hopelessly lost and ended up in the Bronx.

The Bronx in 1985 wasn’t at all how it was portrayed in the films of the period like Death Wish 3 and The Exterminator. Oh no. It was much, much worse. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that anybody needing to film post-apocalyptic scenes in 1985 needed only to set up shop in the Bronx. The ingredients were all there, burnt-out – and still-burning – cars, roaming gangs of sinister-looking miscreants, derelict buildings, shuttered-up shops and shadowy alleyways.

For a lost Englishman, one who but a few hours ago was secretly bemoaning the slippery leather in business class, it was quite a culture shock. So you can imagine my relief when I spotted a cop car pulled over at the side of the road. I drew to a halt, got out and went to ask for assistance.

As I did so, however, I registered what I’d missed before. The cop car had pulled in behind another car, its boot open. The driver of that car stood with his legs splayed and hands across the roof, being frisked.

The cop heard me approach and whether he came to the conclusion that I was the guy’s accomplice or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that he span round, pulled his gun, dropped to one knee and yelled, ‘Freeze’.

I did as I was told, swallowing jagged glass at the same time. On the one hand there was a certain novelty at being in such a cinematic situation. On the other, I was scared shitless.

I mustered my very best English-gentleman voice. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, I can see that you’re busy. But I was just wondering if you might be able to direct me to New Jersey.’

His answer? ‘Beat it, pal.’

Once again, I did as I was told, cursing myself for having got lost and then making the mistake of stopping. But mistakes happen when you’re as exhausted as I was at that time. As I’ve said, I was on a fairly unremitting schedule.

Even so, I did a lot of work on flights. Being on a plane has the distinct advantage of freeing you from distractions and pressure. I look back at my ideas now and I can pinpoint which ones I did over the Atlantic.

And what of the March 85C? Well, the great news for me as a designer is that it won the championship that year. Possibly the competition was a little weak, but it was still the first car for which I had been totally responsible, and despite the compressed design cycle, it had won!

The sad news for me as a race engineer was that it was won by a team called Penske, not Bobby, the very driver around whom I had designed the car.

The other highlight of the year was that, as well as the championship, it won the Indy 500.

And the Indy 500 of that year was a humdinger.

CHAPTER 15

The Indy 500 is the centrepiece of the championship and a gargantuan sporting event in its own right. Taking place at the legendary 2½-mile Super Speedway oval track at Indianapolis, in economic terms it’s bigger than the Super Bowl, which is partly a result of the huge numbers that attend on the race day itself, and partly because it takes place over three weeks of practice, testing and qualifying before the race itself. ‘The Month of May’, they call it.

As an engineer, you come up with a shopping list of things you’d like to try in terms of Indy 500 set-up. A common mistake was to set up the car with too much understeer, so the driver would go through the corner flat-out without lifting the throttle but he’d lose too much speed because the front tyres would scrub across the track and that action would create drag and slow it down.

Equally, if the car was too nervous at the rear the driver would have to lift the throttle or risk losing the rear and so, again, you’d end up losing speed.

So trying to get the balance of the car just right was crucial at Indy, and a difficult thing to keep right throughout the month. Often in the early days of testing building up to qualifying week, you’d find some teams and drivers starting with very quick times but slowing down as the track rubbered in and the weather warmed up.

There were so many variables. So many different things to try on the car that I’d come up with a list of the key things and then attempt to work through them each day. But despite the track being open from 10am to 6pm, productivity in testing was frustratingly slow. For example:

10.00: First run of the day. Installation run, go out, do two warm-up laps, engine cover off, check for oil leaks, etc.

10.20: First proper run of four timed laps on new tyres. Come in. Bobby complaining of poor car balance. Check the all-important stagger (difference in diameter of the rear tyres), find it is wrong and adjust it.

11.00: Run again for four timed laps. Come in. Bobby now happy that car balance is as expected based on previous day. Car now low on fuel. Hitch car up to quad bike and tow car to ‘Gasoline Alley’ to refuel (we were not allowed to refuel in the pit lane for safety reasons); sit in queue at fuel station. Get car back in pit lane and make the set-up change I had prepared on my list for the day.

12.20: Go out, full course yellow thrown because a car has broken down and dropped oil before Bobby has done a lap.

13.10: Finally get out and do four timed lap runs to try to evaluate change. But by now ambient and track temperatures have increased considerably, so we are not sure if it is better or worse. Decide to revert to start-of-day set-up to check; what is known as an A-B-A test.

13.50: Run again on base set-up.

So, at a little after 2pm, four hours after the track opened, we have evaluated precisely one change.

I couldn’t get over just how big Indy 500 was, and not just on the day itself, but the build-up to it as well. The grandstand alone has a capacity of upwards of a quarter of a million, with in-field seating raising the attendance to about 400,000 on race day – making it the most-attended single day of sport anywhere on earth. But even knowing that fact doesn’t quite prepare you for the size. It is huge. Vast. They had a campsite called the Snake Pit, which was rammed for the entire three weeks, and going in there one night was almost as much of an eye-opener as getting lost in the Bronx. Hard rock blasting out. Motorbikes revving. Massive, ZZ Top-looking blokes wandering around with a beer in one hand and a girl in the other. I remember seeing a girl standing on top of a VW camper van advertising blowjobs for $5, and nobody – well, nobody but me – batting an eyelid. I overheard a TV crew interviewing one of the campers, a rather grizzled, lived-in guy in an oily denim jacket. ‘How long have you been coming?’ they asked him.

‘I’ve been coming here for the last twenty years; haven’t missed one yet,’ he said proudly.

‘Oh, that’s fantastic, and what do you think of it?’

‘Well it’s just the best goddamn event in the whole of the USA.’

‘What do you think of the cars then?’

He paused, thinking. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s the damnedest thing. Twenty years, I ain’t seen one yet.’

He was just there to party.

Race day was quite something. We had to get up early in order to steal a march on the quarter of a million people also trying to get into the circuit. At 7am a cannon went off to signal the gates at the two opposite ends of the oval opening and punters began flooding in. Watching it, we saw two cars collide as they met in the middle. It was pandemonium.

Everybody took their seats. I remember our team manager, Steve Horne, tripping over the low wall, falling flat on his face in the pits and earning a standing ovation from the grandstand, a reminder of just how much attention was focused on us. And, of course, with it being one of the biggest sporting events in the world, there was all the American pomp and ceremony that goes with it. Jets flying past, pom-pom girls, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

That particular year, it looked as though the March 85C was a little quicker than the Lola, which was its nearest rival.

As the race developed it became a tight battle between the two cars. Mario Andretti in the Lola had the lead but Danny Sullivan in the Penske-run March had a performance advantage.

Danny got up to second and was on Mario’s tail, but couldn’t find a way to overtake. Finally he tried to get past on the inside, but Mario, being the experienced old fox that he is, wasn’t making it easy.

The apron is where the banking angle changes, so you get this change in camber of the track, which unbalances the car as it crosses. What Mario did was force Danny down onto the apron, which was aggressive but legitimate. Danny was halfway past Mario when the camber changed and he lost the rear and spun – ending up directly in front of Mario. Mario managed to brake and avoid him, and for a moment you could see Danny spinning in a cloud of tyre smoke with Mario just behind him, no doubt grinning in his helmet.