Latest / Rusty's Garage / Ralph Bellamy (Part 1)

Transcript

Ralph Bellamy (Part 1) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:10
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:27
  Imagine working on the design and build of one of the greatest Formula One cars in history, a groundbreaking machine that changed the aerodynamic game.
• 0:36
  My guest today did just that.
• 0:39
  A quietly spoken Aussie who was in the UK during a pioneering period where they achieved amazing things without the multi-million dollar tech, CAD and cutting edge wind tunnels that they have today.
• 0:53
  Ralph Bellamy is still working on race cars, now in his 80s, but these days it's for fun, enjoying that same challenge of engineering solutions.
• 1:02
  If you were at the Bathurst Six Hour, for example, you'd find him working with Beric Linton and Tim Lay, who campaign a BMW in the Australian Production Car Championship.
• 1:12
  If you didn't know, you could walk past him in pit lane without even realising he worked at Lotus during the 1970s, playing an important part of the quantum leap in Formula One, the beginning of what's called the ground effect era.
• 1:27
  Many of the good engineers and designers are like Ralph.
• 1:30
  They tend not to seek the limelight, instead getting immense satisfaction from creating and problem-solving in the background, finding advantage in the rules to build something that gives the team an edge, and quietly smiling in the moment of success, knowing they were an important part of making the tool that, together with the right driver and pit crew, did the job better than everyone else.
• 1:55
  There are some fabulous stories in here from a career that took Ralph all over the world.
• 2:01
  He talks about living and working in Brazil, flying with race drivers.
• 2:05
  They are some hair-raising stories, let me tell you.
• 2:08
  Going to events, sometimes without visas.
• 2:11
  The day that Adrian Newey, who you know today from Red Bull Racing, applied for a job and much more.
• 2:18
  Ralph was there at a time when F1 fatalities were way more common than they thankfully are today.
• 2:25
  His recollections on some of those moments is incredibly moving.
• 2:29
  Years on, you get a sense of just how much it affected him.
• 2:33
  Fittingly, we recorded this chat sitting in a race transporter at Bathurst.
• 2:38
  If you have a love of old race cars, or perhaps your parents have fond memories of this era, I hope you all enjoy it.
• 2:44
  And I know for aspiring engineers that listen, there will be plenty of takeaways for you too.
• 2:50
  Over two hours of convo split into two parts.
• 2:54
  We begin with Ralph's early life growing up in Sydney's north-west, which was very different then to the busy city suburb it's become now.
• 3:06
  In Eastwood, in those days, when I grew up, it was in the Second World War.
• 3:09
  And, of course...
• 3:11
  Parental supervision probably wasn't as tight in those days as it is.
• 3:19
  Eastwood was pretty bushy then.
• 3:22
  So it was just a great place to grow up.
• 3:25
  The war didn't worry us.
• 3:26
  That was just somebody else's problem.
• 3:30
  Were you good at school?
• 3:31
  Where did you go to school?
• 3:33
  And were you sort of embedded in anything you could get your hands on and fabricate or whatever?
• 3:38
  I went to primary school at Eastwood but I think I always had a kind of a mechanical bent.
• 3:49
  I don't know why but you know you repaired your own push bike and all that kind of stuff in those days and that kind of thing so and then I went to Homebush and then when I left school motor bodybuilders, garbage trucks
• 4:04
  dump trucks for the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme.
• 4:07
  Okay.
• 4:07
  I was welding bodies up out of half-inch steel plate.
• 4:12
  Um, and, um, after that, that was about five or six years, I went, complete change of pace, went to work for the CSIRO.
• 4:21
  Okay.
• 4:22
  Designing scientific equipment.
• 4:25
  Okay.
• 4:25
  See, if you're doing an experiment, you can't just go and buy the test equipment.
• 4:33
  you've got to make it.
• 4:34
  And so the CSIRO had a nice workshop and stuff, and the guys would make whatever you drew for them for the scientists to do their experiments with.
• 4:44
  So I worked there for...
• 4:46
  five years I think it was.
• 4:48
  And then my main interest then was in ocean yacht racing.
• 4:52
  And so I did that, sailed out of Sydney Harbour and I did the Hobart in 65.
• 4:59
  I mean I've been lucky enough to work as a reporter on that race and I can vividly recall coming back through the fleet in 98 which was a fatal race for many of them.
• 5:11
  That is a seriously daunting sporting mission.
• 5:15
  What was that like back then?
• 5:17
  You see, in those days, they were cruising boats, really, by today's standards.
• 5:23
  And the boat that I spent a lot of time on was an old catch.
• 5:27
  And you got more sails and stuff to play with on a catch than you got on a sloop.
• 5:32
  But as a sport, it's about the toughest sport you can be in because...
• 5:38
  If it turns to fertilised, you can't go and have a shower and go home.
• 5:42
  You've got to sail the boat.
• 5:44
  And so in that respect, it's tougher than most sports.
• 5:50
  Great thing, great learning or life experience, I would imagine, in all that.
• 5:53
  Can I just come back just to a couple of details in the chapter you've covered off about work and things?
• 6:00
  Firstly, I think you went off to college and studied mechanical engineering.
• 6:03
  You can clarify that for me.
• 6:05
  And the...
• 6:07
  The work that we would see from you in Formula One in later life, even with garbage trucks, you were modifying and improving, weren't you?
• 6:16
  Oh, yes.
• 6:16
  Yeah.
• 6:17
  I mean, you're always trying to do something a bit better than the average runner stuff because that makes it interesting.
• 6:24
  If you're doing the same thing over and over again or just repeating what other people have done, it's not as interesting as if you're doing unique work or trying to do some unique work.
• 6:35
  How did you fix the garbage trucks?
• 6:37
  What did you do?
• 6:38
  Oh, we lowered the chassis so the guys didn't have to throw the bin so high.
• 6:41
  LAUGHTER
• 6:42
  Fantastic.
• 6:43
  The sailing lured you to England, didn't it?
• 6:45
  You wanted to go off and chase there.
• 6:48
  Just tell us a bit about that.
• 6:50
  Well, there was sort of a bit of a natural break and I decided that my girlfriend and I, who was English and is now my wife, we decided we'd go to England because I wanted to do the Fastnet race and some of the big races in Europe.
• 7:06
  Being a bit disorganised, when I got there, I found that they didn't do the fast net every other year.
• 7:13
  And the year that I got there was the year they weren't doing it.
• 7:16
  So I just jacked off a bit in the med and flown on boats and stuff for that year, which was 67.
• 7:24
  Yeah.
• 7:26
  That's around the Mediterranean, that would have been beautiful, was it?
• 7:28
  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
• 7:30
  And I mean, boats are boats down there.
• 7:33
  But then towards the end of the year, having been there for the previous winter, I realised that I really needed to get, I was either going to go skiing with my mates, or I needed to get a job.
• 7:48
  where I was indoors and somebody else was paying the heating bills for the day.
• 7:54
  Now, did you, at this point, either cold call Ron Tornack, or how did you connect with him, and was he the first option?
• 8:04
  He was the one of two options.
• 8:06
  It was either go and work for him or go skiing with my mates.
• 8:09
  LAUGHTER And, but I...
• 8:14
  I might have known where they were over at the Waylock Works.
• 8:19
  I'm not sure.
• 8:20
  But, anyway, my wife was working in an office with another girl whose husband was actually the bag tank supplier.
• 8:31
  OK.
• 8:32
  and he'd been to see Ron trying to sell him bag tanks which was pretty hard because Ron just fitted welded aluminium tanks to the brums but he'd come away and Ron must have mentioned to him he was looking for a draftsman and so and I think the girlfriend who wasn't a wife then
• 8:54
  probably worked out that if I went skiing with a mate, she'd probably never see me again.
• 8:59
  So she encouraged me to go and work for Ron.
• 9:01
  So I went and saw him, and I agreed to...
• 9:06
  turn up the next day.
• 9:07
  Next day.
• 9:07
  Next day?
• 9:09
  Yeah.
• 9:09
  You can imagine what it would be like with Ron.
• 9:11
  And so I went over and I said, oh, jeez, have I done the right thing?
• 9:16
  Well, one thing in my life, I do what I say I'm going to do.
• 9:20
  You've got to live by that.
• 9:22
  And so I said I'd go, so I'm going to go.
• 9:25
  And that was the start of it.
• 9:26
  Yeah.
• 9:27
  And literally, you didn't look back, you've been immersed in motor racing basically ever since, haven't you?
• 9:33
  Well, I've done nothing else.
• 9:35
  Just designed, built racing cars and raced them.
• 9:40
  And it's a great life.
• 9:41
  And we want to talk more about the various directions you've gone within the bounds of that.
• 9:45
  Before you left Australia, for example, did you venture out to a Warwick farm or to an Oran park?
• 9:51
  Or were there early race experiences before you left Australia?
• 9:53
  There were actually.
• 9:54
  There's a guy who's still alive in Sydney called Alec Lazic, and some of the motor racing people would probably remember him.
• 10:08
  early 60s, he had a small noter, and I really used to help him with that.
• 10:16
  But I knew absolutely nothing, engineering-wise, about racing cars.
• 10:21
  I mean, it was just him and I playing with this thing, making a muck of it, probably.
• 10:29
  Did you ever steer one yourself?
• 10:31
  Did you ever have a day where there might have been a quiet practice day or a test day or something where you took one for a spin?
• 10:37
  And how did you find that?
• 10:38
  No, no, I'd never done that.
• 10:40
  The only time I ever drove a car in a race was some years later when I was at Team Lotus.
• 10:48
  And they had some sort of an event at Brands Hatch.
• 10:54
  It was sort of a pro-am thing where the team managers or owners
• 10:58
  We're going to drive with the drivers, and Colin didn't want to be bothered going down to do it.
• 11:03
  He said, well, you go and do it.
• 11:05
  So I borrowed a helmet off Ronnie and went down, and they were Ford Escorts of some sort.
• 11:15
  And so I drove in this race against some of the Formula One drivers and some of the team managers, and I spent most of the race trying to catch Bernie and turn him around.
• 11:26
  LAUGHTER
• 11:29
  I wanted to get him going into paddock, which is the corner at the end of the pit straight before it dives down the hill.
• 11:38
  And I thought if I could just give him a tip on the rear corner, I'll spin him down there and liven him up.
• 11:44
  But I could never, he was always just that little bit quicker than me.
• 11:48
  You've bounced across some great names there which we'll cover in a minute, including Ronnie Peterson, Colin Chapman, Bernie Eccleston and so on.
• 11:59
  You mentioned Ron Turanac, right?
• 12:01
  The start of it.
• 12:02
  So he and Sir Jack Brabham, who have very sadly left us now, they were in many ways leading lights for Australians on either side of the pit wall back then, weren't they?
• 12:12
  So what was Ron like as a person to work with for people that perhaps don't know him and how were the early experiences working there?
• 12:21
  Ron was a very straightforward person in his life, a very honest man.
• 12:28
  And one thing you couldn't help but notice was when you work there and you hear the, or in the racing team, you hear what's going on in the office, and so often the check's in the mail.
• 12:45
  With Ron?
• 12:46
  No.
• 12:49
  The bills had come in, the girls would write the checks, put them on his desk, he'd sign them, they'd go out, boom.
• 12:57
  Well, done.
• 12:58
  Done.
• 12:58
  No messing.
• 13:00
  He was absolutely straightforward.
• 13:01
  So honest days work for an honest days pay type thing.
• 13:05
  Absolutely.
• 13:07
  And I think it paid dividends for him as well because if he wanted something from a supplier, he'd get it.
• 13:14
  Yeah.
• 13:16
  But from an engineering point of view, he knew his business, obviously.
• 13:21
  And so I learnt from one of the best guys.
• 13:28
  What did you learn, do you think?
• 13:29
  What were the first race cars you were working on then?
• 13:31
  Well, we started at that time when I went there, they were building the BT25, which is an Indy car, and it was the first monocroc that Ron had tried to make.
• 13:44
  The BT26, which was a Formula One car, and it had a Repco engine in those days.
• 13:51
  Iconic period for Australians connected to the sport.
• 13:56
  Yeah, yeah.
• 13:58
  But B227, 28, 29 and 30.
• 14:05
  30 was a Formula 2 car, 28 was a Formula 3 car.
• 14:09
  So all those cars were on the go when I started there.
• 14:14
  And what involvement were you having because you were new to the team and things like that?
• 14:19
  Well, initially I was just a detailed draftsman drawing whatever Ron Wood had drawn.
• 14:23
  Yeah.
• 14:24
  There were three of us in the drawing office.
• 14:27
  There was Mike Hillman, an English guy, absolute character.
• 14:32
  He was the chief draftsman, and Ted Marley, a Northern Irishman, who did the illustrations.
• 14:39
  Brabham's had a... when you bought a Brabham, you got a parts list.
• 14:43
  You know, like with an exploded drawing.
• 14:45
  Okay.
• 14:46
  And Ted produced that.
• 14:48
  Amazing.
• 14:49
  Can you imagine?
• 14:50
  Yeah.
• 14:50
  This is all pre-computers.
• 14:52
  No, this was hand-drawn exploded drawings of the car as a parts list so that you could order stuff off the parts.
• 15:00
  Amazing.
• 15:01
  How creative could you guys get back then?
• 15:04
  And can you remember some of them?
• 15:05
  I mean, it was in your career...
• 15:09
  some very pivotal moments for for motor racing in a in an engineering or a design sense i mean the the uh explosion if you will of working with wings and then and then later wind tunnels and and so on um but the chance to experiment with that ralph what was that like well you see in formula
• 15:31
  There's always some new thing.
• 15:33
  There's this critical performance area where everybody's working.
• 15:40
  And at that time it was wings.
• 15:42
  We just started to put wings on cars.
• 15:45
  And they were just getting bigger and better and more and we're learning more about it.
• 15:49
  They started off, if you look at some of the photographs, it just looks horrendous with these mounted directly on the rear wing, mounted directly on the rear uprights and stuff like that.
• 15:58
  And you think, ooh, I can't, ooh.
• 16:01
  But so that was interesting and good fun, you know.
• 16:06
  There's always been, when you look back over the history of motorsport, kind of this tie or connection to aircraft manufacture, if you will, and a lot of things have filtered our way from that.
• 16:19
  So how did the wing experimentation, can you remember some of that stuff and the conversations around it and how it all kind of kicked off?
• 16:26
  Well, yeah.
• 16:28
  There was a guy called Ray Jessup who worked at British Aircraft, which was just down the road, because they were building in the middle of the old Brooklands racetrack, there was an aircraft factory.
• 16:45
  The Brooklands racetrack, they knocked a hole in it, but they were building VC-10s there, and they used to fly them out.
• 16:54
  Wow.
• 16:54
  And you'd hear them when you could tell one was ready to go, because they'd do taxi runs and stuff.
• 17:01
  And then you'd hear them give it the big one, and out they'd go.
• 17:05
  And they'd be empty, there'd be no seats or nothing in them, because they'd have to be light as to get out.
• 17:10
  But they used to fly them over to another airfield and fit them out.
• 17:14
  And...
• 17:17
  So were you knocking about with people over there and learning a few things?
• 17:19
  No, no, no, no.
• 17:21
  It's just Ray was our good one bloke who knew which way up to put a wing, really, and sort of thing.
• 17:28
  So, and we just...
• 17:32
  Learn by experiments.
• 17:35
  Yeah.
• 17:35
  Did stuff go wrong and when it went wrong, what went wrong?
• 17:38
  Well, if you remember there were some wing failures at Barcelona and some rear wings blew off the lotus and stuff like that.
• 17:48
  So yeah, some people had a more character building learning curve than the rest of us.
• 17:55
  For drivers, you know, you talk about working in the office there and things, but invariably there will be, you know, you end up working with drivers.
• 18:04
  Who were some of the first that you came across and what were they like?
• 18:08
  We didn't have a lot to do with drivers because, you see, the Brabham organisation was in two parts.
• 18:17
  One was Motor Racing Development, where I worked, which was the way Locke works, which was some old World War II buildings and a portacabin down beside the canal.
• 18:28
  We just built cars for the public and we also built the Formula One cars and the IndyCar there.
• 18:37
  Jack himself worked out of a workshop down in Guildford, and that was called the Brabham Racing Organisation, and that's where the racing team ran from.
• 18:47
  Okay.
• 18:49
  So we were a bit sheltered.
• 18:52
  I mean, there were drivers that had come through, like Derek Bell and I think Wyn Rint...
• 18:59
  drove, yeah, Jochen, he came through and we just saw him, but we were just irks in the drawing office, really Okay, okay What about Sir Jack?
• 19:07
  I mean, you know, triple world champion very high stature in Australian sport not just motor racing, what was he like?
• 19:15
  He was good I mean, he he
• 19:22
  was straightforward, but...
• 19:25
  I mean, to me, Jack was a bit of a bandit.
• 19:30
  Okay.
• 19:32
  He had to be.
• 19:34
  And you had to be a strong character, and he was.
• 19:38
  But with me, we were just mates.
• 19:41
  I mean, it was an easy, comfortable relationship.
• 19:45
  He didn't ponce around like, I'm Jack Bradman, or anything like that.
• 19:50
  He enjoyed the engineering.
• 19:52
  Yes.
• 19:53
  Some of the stuff he did.
• 19:58
  At home I've got a gear that he had made, which was for the first gear in the gearbox.
• 20:07
  Yeah.
• 20:08
  And it meant it had a one-way drive in it.
• 20:15
  And so...
• 20:17
  With this gear in the box, when you started the engine, the car was in gear and would go.
• 20:23
  Whoa.
• 20:25
  But he used it at Monaco.
• 20:28
  Yeah.
• 20:28
  So that he, all he had to do was pull it into neutral, and he was in first gear.
• 20:37
  Wow.
• 20:38
  So the box, the Hulam box, left and down was first.
• 20:45
  Straight ahead was reverse.
• 20:47
  So you had to go across the gate to second, third, fourth, fifth.
• 20:53
  Yep.
• 20:53
  So by not having to go far left and back in to get into first, he was just rowing the thing through an H. I'm with you.
• 21:03
  I'm with you.
• 21:04
  You see what I mean?
• 21:05
  Yes.
• 21:05
  And so if he came into a corner, he'd be braking.
• 21:09
  He just had to knock it into neutral.
• 21:12
  And then when he wanted to pick up second, after he accelerated out, he just pulled into second, third, fourth, fifth.
• 21:21
  That's the sort of thing that he did.
• 21:24
  And I...
• 21:29
  believe that one of the reasons why he had a long career in a dangerous, in those days it was bloody dangerous sport.
• 21:42
  I mean, I've been to a few races where drivers have been killed and stuff and it's not funny.
• 21:49
  And, but I think the difference was that
• 21:55
  Most of the other drivers were wealthy young men, or wealthy fathers or whatever.
• 22:04
  They came of an era where if you want to go racing, you bought yourself a 250F Maserati and you just got in it and drove as fast as you could.
• 22:14
  If they want to go faster, they have to try harder.
• 22:18
  If Jack wanted to go faster, he'd make the car better.
• 22:22
  because up here in his head he knew ways he could sense what the car was doing he wouldn't try harder he'd make the car go harder and that's why i believe he had the longevity he lived through a very very dangerous era
• 22:40
  Can we talk a bit about that if you're comfortable?
• 22:42
  I mean, whether it was the circuits or the safety, I mean, we now in motor racing benefit so much from sadly what happened back then because, you know, they were learnings.
• 22:57
  When did the danger of that game first really sink in for you?
• 23:03
  Oh, I guess...
• 23:07
  You realise that people were having accidents in cars and getting hurt.
• 23:12
  I can't remember a particular instance.
• 23:16
  You talked before about drivers...
• 23:19
  I can remember being at Zandvoort when Roger Williamson crashed and the thing caught fire and he got burnt.
• 23:29
  Also, what was his name, the young bloke that drove for Frank.
• 23:39
  one of the English nobility, I can't think of his name for the minute, he, I think again at Zanvoort, I think, he got killed there.
• 23:50
  So, you know, and then, of course, I hadn't been working long in the Brabham office when, I think, what is it, Ron or Jack came in and said, Jimmy's been killed.
• 24:03
  Sure.
• 24:04
  Jimmy Clark, we're talking about him.
• 24:06
  Yeah.
• 24:06
  He was sort of a...
• 24:09
  This was one of Jack's major competitors, the guy that would be hardest for him to beat.
• 24:16
  And we just thought, shit, Jimmy's got killed.
• 24:20
  And he was at the time sort of thought upon as a, I mean, if you draw a parallel with modern era, either a Senna or maybe a Lewis Hamilton, he was immensely talented.
• 24:29
  He was.
• 24:30
  Oh, hugely talented.
• 24:31
  And he had a great relationship with Colin.
• 24:35
  So they worked together.
• 24:37
  And when you get a relationship like that, you get an improved performance because it's like two brains trying to solve all the problems.
• 24:47
  Yeah.
• 24:48
  Chemistry between people in that regard is such an important thing.
• 24:51
  How big a learning was that for you, working with people, getting the most out of them?
• 24:55
  You'd come from, you know, that mechanical engineering study at college in Australia, but people is where it often really excels, isn't it?
• 25:04
  Well, you see...
• 25:07
  If you're going to do the work that I do, you have to be a competitor.
• 25:12
  You want to compete.
• 25:14
  And so it makes sense that you form a kind of a bit of a bond with your driver.
• 25:22
  And you also have to speak the same language.
• 25:28
  I'm not talking about English and French and German.
• 25:32
  I mean, how you describe things.
• 25:35
  You've got to be on the same page how you describe what the car's doing.
• 25:40
  And it's a rewarding relationship.
• 25:44
  It can be a very rewarding relationship.
• 25:47
  And I've been lucky enough to enjoy that sort of relationship with lots of guys for years.
• 25:54
  There's a good story, if you don't mind sharing, it's quite funny, about you and Ronnie Peterson.
• 25:59
  And he was, I think, struggling at one point.
• 26:01
  And he was talking about oversteer, wasn't he?
• 26:04
  You had to get on the same page as to what he really meant.
• 26:07
  This was a wild weekend.
• 26:09
  Oh, shit.
• 26:11
  For the first time, we had four Lotus 72s at the track.
• 26:18
  for Emerson two for Emerson, two for Ronnie and Ronnie had a cold and I think he was taking some medication for his cold but anyway and
• 26:33
  He's out on the track and he's coming in.
• 26:35
  He's saying I've got oversteer, I've got oversteer and I'm working away trying to solve this oversteer he's got.
• 26:40
  And we're getting nowhere.
• 26:42
  And I said Ronnie, just tell me in detail what's going on.
• 26:46
  And he said well, when I come to the corner, it won't go in so I have to chuck it in.
• 26:52
  And then as soon as I try and get on the power it oversteers.
• 26:56
  I said Ronnie, you haven't got oversteer, you've got understeer.
• 27:06
  Fantastic.
• 27:06
  You've rattled off two great names there.
• 27:09
  Can we explore that a little bit?
• 27:11
  What was Ronnie like to work with and what sort of impact?
• 27:13
  Ronnie was a really good friend of mine.
• 27:18
  He was the nicest bloke.
• 27:20
  One of the things you've got to understand about sportsmen, individual sportsmen in a lot of cases are not the nicest people.
• 27:32
  Like if they play golf or tennis or...
• 27:35
  They're not team players.
• 27:37
  And racing drivers can be like that.
• 27:42
  And you saw, like, Senna and Prost and the relationship they had and stuff like that.
• 27:47
  But Ronnie never had a mean bone in his body.
• 27:50
  He was just the loveliest, loveliest person.
• 27:52
  And quick.
• 27:54
  Unbelievably quick.
• 27:55
  I mean, I remember the first time anybody ever took Woodcut Flat onto the pit straight at Silverstone.
• 28:05
  We were out there, and, of course, we were testing.
• 28:08
  And...
• 28:10
  You go testing, it's got to be quiet, and you hear this car coming up from, you know, it's still, and you're listening, it doesn't button off, and he'd come round the corner, and the tires were howling, and he just came through flat, and he'd go...
• 28:30
  Oh, he was just great.
• 28:32
  And when, unfortunately, he got killed, and he got killed in one of my cars, and I was working in Brazil for Emerson.
• 28:42
  I couldn't work for a fortnight.
• 28:44
  Is that right?
• 28:44
  I was buggered.
• 28:46
  And in some ways,
• 28:49
  That's when racing stopped being quite so much fun.
• 28:55
  Did it?
• 28:56
  I just, it got to be more like a job and less fun.
• 29:01
  But the work I do now here, let's say, with Berwick for a number of years, that's fun.
• 29:07
  We go racing for fun.
• 29:08
  And I've got that enjoyment back.
• 29:11
  Again.
• 29:11
  But yeah, Ronnie was just special for me.
• 29:16
  We'll come back to Berwick and to Tim Lay and the crew here at the Bath of Six Hour as we continue our conversation.
• 29:22
  Before we get to Emerson, I just want to touch on something that you mentioned there.
• 29:27
  Sometimes with these drivers, you can see it in their eyes, can't you?
• 29:30
  I mean, it's almost like they'd run over their grandmother to win.
• 29:33
  And I have this odd appreciation for that because I think where you were going with your comment a moment ago, you actually need a bit of that, don't you?
• 29:41
  You need... Yeah, I'm not criticising it.
• 29:43
  No, not at all.
• 29:43
  Not at all.
• 29:44
  That's how you've got to be.
• 29:45
  Be, yeah.
• 29:46
  And, I mean, in some ways it even comes through to the engineer.
• 29:50
  Yeah.
• 29:51
  I mean, I...
• 29:52
  Are you a competitive person like that?
• 29:54
  Yes.
• 29:55
  Are you?
• 29:56
  Yes, I am.
• 29:57
  I still am.
• 29:57
  I still love to win.
• 29:59
  I like, there's nothing better from an engineer than walking onto the grid to see your guy off and he's on the front row and you look back and you think, look at them thonkers back there.
• 30:13
  So yes, I'm competitive.
• 30:14
  I love it.
• 30:15
  Emerson Fittipaldi, you would go and work for him and live in Brazil, and we'll cover that chapter soon.
• 30:20
  But in that period there with Ronnie, I mean, it was a great period in the 70s.
• 30:26
  What was he like?
• 30:27
  Ronnie.
• 30:28
  I'm talking about Emerson.
• 30:30
  Emerson was good, yeah.
• 30:31
  Talented and really good.
• 30:34
  Good driver.
• 30:37
  And he had a lot of great feel for the car.
• 30:43
  He was a good development driver.
• 30:44
  He was good and he was a nice person.
• 30:46
  Tougher than Ronnie, but... And I think...
• 30:55
  When, later on in his career, when we got to wing cars, and you've talked to Alan Jones, who won a world championship.
• 31:04
  Now, Alan was the sort of guy who would respond well to one of those wing cars.
• 31:11
  Okay.
• 31:13
  Whereas Emerson wasn't.
• 31:14
  Emerson, to my way of thinking, wanted to feel and drive the car through the corner.
• 31:20
  Mm-hmm.
• 31:21
  and respond to what the car was doing.
• 31:23
  Those cars were just total commitment, and Alan had that.
• 31:28
  And he just hurled it in, and you just hope that you came out, having avoided the accident, you just arranged for yourself.
• 31:38
  You just had... Those cars were so quick through the corner.
• 31:41
  There was no...
• 31:43
  changing anything plus the fact that the steering was so heavy because they had so much downforce that you couldn't turn the steering wheel in the corner anyway i see we'll talk just before we move on to sort of the whole notion of aerodynamics and the impact that wings had on on aspects of the cars because you know um you mentioned bernie eccleston
• 32:07
  Various people have talked about him in the podcast chats that I've had, and I've interviewed him once or twice.
• 32:12
  He's one of the most daunting human beings I've met.
• 32:15
  You've got to get out of bed very early to try and be sharper than Bernie.
• 32:19
  He's a great chess player.
• 32:20
  What was he like to be with?
• 32:21
  Well, you're going to love this.
• 32:28
  When I went to work for Bernie,
• 32:31
  was in the beginning of 1972, and it was the late and great Jack Bradman that put me into Bernie's clutches.
• 32:43
  And so he had no money.
• 32:50
  Oh, I don't know how much money he had.
• 32:53
  He drove a Rolls Royce, but that didn't mean much in Bernie's.
• 32:57
  But he didn't have money to spend on the Bradman team.
• 33:02
  And everybody thinks about Bernie now as a billionaire and all that kind of stuff.
• 33:06
  That's the Bernie that everybody knows now.
• 33:09
  Well, in 1972, I don't know how much money he had, but he didn't spend it on the cards.
• 33:14
  Okay.
• 33:15
  That's all I can tell you.
• 33:17
  Right.
• 33:18
  And...
• 33:20
  So it was a character building year.
• 33:23
  The best part of it was that Graham was driving.
• 33:26
  And I'd known Graham over the years, but I got to know him really well.
• 33:32
  And I just loved Graham.
• 33:34
  He was just the greatest bloke to work with.
• 33:36
  He was unhappily, he was at the end of his career then, and he was slowed down.
• 33:40
  But that was the best part of the year, really.
• 33:43
  Talk about Graham Hill, who obviously, you know, sadly passed away in a plane crash.
• 33:49
  And his son, Damon, would go on to win the world championship in the mid-90s, which was quite cool.
• 33:54
  Again, in the manner you talked about, you know, like...
• 34:00
  He was one of the greats of the game and very strong at Monaco and places like that, wasn't he?
• 34:05
  Going back to Bernie, he is smart as.
• 34:10
  Mental arithmetic.
• 34:12
  Yeah.
• 34:15
  He could work out percentages and stuff in his head like that.
• 34:20
  Always two steps ahead, wasn't he?
• 34:22
  He never really forgave me for leaving him and going to work for Team Lotus.
• 34:30
  We had a normal relationship, but we were never going to be mates after that.
• 34:39
  The advent of wings, which we talked a little bit about earlier and the experimentation around that and so on, that's changed the cars.
• 34:47
  I mean, you talked about Jonesy and even the way that you drove them, but it also changed the pressure on componentry, didn't it?
• 34:53
  Oh, yeah.
• 34:57
  They reckon that the good thing about wings was it made it...
• 35:01
  better for the sport because you could race the cars in the wet more.
• 35:11
  In other words, you get to a point where there's so much water on the track that you can't even have a race.
• 35:17
  Before you had wings, that point arrived a lot sooner.
• 35:23
  You'd just start aquaplaning.
• 35:24
  And so that helped.
• 35:28
  Over the years, the wings themselves certainly put greater loads on the cars.
• 35:36
  But what really put huge loads on the cars was when I designed a wing car and people started running wing cars and the real grip went up.
• 35:51
  And none of us understood how strong you had to make the car to cope with that.
• 35:58
  What sort of things were braking then?
• 36:00
  wasn't so much things were breaking, the things didn't handle as well.
• 36:05
  It wasn't, the structure wasn't, you didn't have the structural integrity.
• 36:09
  At the end of the day, you're trying to keep control of the contact patch.
• 36:13
  And it was all evolving and there was a sort of strange thing happened.
• 36:21
  At the start of, it must have been about...
• 36:26
  87, maybe, 88, maybe 89.
• 36:34
  Everybody gathered for the first Grand Prix of the year down in South America.
• 36:40
  And suddenly the French car with the feet driving it was...
• 36:49
  quicker than anybody else, and nobody expected that.
• 36:52
  And the designer was a guy called Gerard Duccarouge.
• 36:57
  He'd come from Matra to work for Ligier, and they'd been running a V12 engine.
• 37:06
  And somebody had said to Duccarouge, hey, you're now going to put a Cosworth in there.
• 37:14
  you've got to understand the Cosworth vibrates and it's not like a V12, it's all balanced and smooth.
• 37:19
  The Cosworth shakes sideways due to the flat plane crank and so your engine mountings have got to be maybe a bit more butch than what you've had before.
• 37:31
  Okay.
• 37:32
  And so Girard must have made the rear bulkhead in that whole area really super strong.
• 37:41
  And
• 37:43
  It paid off because that was the only car that was strong enough in that area.
• 37:49
  All the rest of us, and people were copying everything they could see on that car because, oh yeah, they did not know.
• 37:57
  And Gerard did not know.
• 37:59
  I talked to him.
• 37:59
  He said, I don't know why it's so quick.
• 38:02
  But we were all under-engineered.
• 38:14
  Isn't it oddly convenient that Greg Rust, also known as Rusty, works in the automotive industry where Rust is something automotive folks have to deal with?
• 38:24
  Talk about good branding.
• 38:27
  You're naturally leading to the chapter with Colin Chapman and you guys did some incredible things there in that period.
• 38:35
  What was your first meeting with him?
• 38:36
  When was the first overture to come and play at Lotus?
• 38:39
  I think Peter Wall got in touch with me and went up and had an interview.
• 38:43
  And I remember talking to Graham and that they'd do race the champions at the end of the year.
• 38:48
  And he said, oh, he said, are you going to go and work for Colin?
• 38:51
  I said, yeah.
• 38:52
  He said, oh, that's good.
• 38:53
  He said, that's where you should go.
• 38:55
  Yeah.
• 38:56
  Because he realized that Bernie wasn't spending any money on the cars.
• 38:59
  And that Graham believed I had the skill to be the Lotus chief designer.
• 39:06
  So away we went.
• 39:09
  He's a legendary figure in the history of the sport.
• 39:13
  I gather, like you, a competitive human being, what were your first recollections of him and working there?
• 39:20
  Well, I don't have a first recollection, but Colin was...
• 39:27
  I...
• 39:30
  a leader of men, an entrepreneur, a salesman.
• 39:35
  But as far as I was concerned, he wasn't as good an engineer as he is made out to be.
• 39:44
  But he had more than enough talents to counter that.
• 39:49
  I mean, he didn't have to be a good engineer to get where he got to.
• 39:51
  Yeah.
• 39:52
  But he had ideas.
• 39:54
  He understood the engineering.
• 39:56
  And let's say his engineering lacked on execution rather than ideas.
• 40:03
  Okay.
• 40:05
  So he had the ideas.
• 40:07
  But he had people like Len Terry and Maurice Philippe who preceded me to do that, to detail stuff for him.
• 40:18
  And I got on well with him.
• 40:21
  Personally, Colin and I had a really good relationship.
• 40:25
  You worked on some iconic cars, mate, that people will fondly remember in the black and gold JPS colours.
• 40:33
  And you were leading to this in our conversation before about a...
• 40:39
  a groundbreaking really development in the cars, in the area of the floor and ground effects and so on.
• 40:46
  So there'll be probably a couple of questions in this phase.
• 40:53
  Were you guys together, I think, was it Peter Wright, I think you guys, were you, was there a light bulb moment for you when you started thinking about this?
• 41:00
  How did that come to pass?
• 41:01
  Well, August holidays in Ibiza, Colin had a villa and my in-laws had a villa in Ibiza.
• 41:12
  So Colin came, Colin and Hazel came around to have lunch with us and Colin said, hey, I've got to make a new car.
• 41:20
  So he had some ideas that he wanted this car to achieve aerodynamically, which was wrong, but it doesn't matter.
• 41:32
  Just conceptually?
• 41:33
  Yeah.
• 41:34
  So I said, yeah, fine.
• 41:36
  So he said, I want you to come down.
• 41:40
  Ketteringham Hall, on your own, nobody else.
• 41:46
  And so I said, well...
• 41:51
  Colin, to achieve what you want, we're going to have to go to the wind tunnel and do some serious wind tunnel work.
• 42:01
  And Peter Wright was working in the Lotus Group, and he was doing plastics development,
• 42:11
  where he was working was making the mould tools for the cars and the boats, because Colin was into boats then.
• 42:21
  And so I said, can I have Peter to help me with this?
• 42:25
  And he said, yep, you're going to have Peter to help you with this.
• 42:28
  And so Peter and I sat down and decided what we'd do.
• 42:34
  So,
• 42:37
  In a way, it kind of harked back to my work at the CSIRO.
• 42:41
  Wow.
• 42:42
  To building test equipment.
• 42:47
  And Peter said, what we're going to do, we've got to go to the wind tunnel at Imperial College, because they've got a moving floor there.
• 42:55
  and that'll be, that'll give us better work.
• 42:58
  And so I said, okay, well, we'll make some quarter-scale stuff and we'll go to the Imperial College.
• 43:05
  So Peter booked all that.
• 43:08
  So I made a model of the 72.
• 43:13
  a model of what we thought the new car might look like.
• 43:19
  But we needed to do some development work, particularly around the front of the car.
• 43:25
  In those days there were two solutions to the front.
• 43:29
  One was to have a wing, like a classic front wing.
• 43:32
  The other was to have like a big rounded nose.
• 43:37
  and they seemed to be pretty much equally successful because some cars had the big Rihanna nose, some cars had front wings so we wanted to try that out and we ran first thing we had a problem we went down there on a Monday and
• 44:04
  the wind tunnel wasn't working.
• 44:06
  So it wasn't until about the Wednesday or Thursday we actually got to do any work.
• 44:10
  So we ran the model of the Lotus 72 to give us a base, ran the model of what we thought might work and didn't do much at all.
• 44:22
  So then we started to look at just how the front nose worked, whether a big bin or whether a wing was better.
• 44:36
  And I had my little quarter scale wing, which was, you know, you can imagine a quarter scale, I mean it was a tiny little wooden wing.
• 44:46
  And I had it mounted on the wind tunnel and we could heave it up and down and change the angle of it and stuff.
• 44:57
  And when we dropped it down near the belt, the load went up.
• 45:03
  And I'm, because Peter ran the tunnel, and I was the mechanic, if you like.
• 45:10
  And I'm looking, and I could see the belt sucking up towards the bottom of this wing.
• 45:17
  I said, hey Peter, come and look at this.
• 45:21
  the belt's whizzing around and there's a sort of a suction box underneath to hold the belt down.
• 45:26
  But the suction in this little venturi under this wing, which was about, must have been about an inch and a half cord, a tiny little piece of wood.
• 45:37
  And you could see the belt starting to pull up.
• 45:41
  We thought, bloody hell, what's going on there?
• 45:45
  And we thought, well, yeah, okay, there's a message there.
• 45:50
  So up until that time, the conventional wisdom was that you had to keep the wings high
• 46:07
  out of ground effect.
• 46:10
  It sort of came something to do with light aircraft and stuff like that.
• 46:15
  Anyway, you look at all the cars of the previous, that era, all the front wings are always mounted high on the nose.
• 46:24
  They're not mounted on the bottom of the nose, they're all mounted high because you had to keep it out of ground effect.
• 46:32
  No.
• 46:33
  Why do we have to do that?
• 46:35
  No.
• 46:36
  There's something else going on here.
• 46:38
  Now, Peter had had a dabble with thinking about a wing car kind of thing.
• 46:47
  But the wing always would have been high.
• 46:50
  and how do you get that in?
• 46:53
  I wanted to put a wing...
• 46:56
  I knew that from wind tunnel work, just on big wind tunnels with the whole car, that you could crank the front wing up and down, and you get more downforce, but no more drag, because it's in front of the front wheels.
• 47:10
  And I always thought, well, what we ought to do is put a wing in front of the rear wheel, and it'll be just as good.
• 47:16
  We'll get some more downforce.
• 47:21
  So Peter and I are kind of thinking, well the wing doesn't have to be in there.
• 47:28
  Because I'm thinking, how am I going to put a wing on the side of a Cosworth engine up high in front of the rear wheel?
• 47:35
  And I think, it's too messy, it's not going to work.
• 47:44
  That was the end of the week.
• 47:45
  So I went back to Norfolk, and we had a meeting on a Sunday morning at Ketteringham Hall, and it was Colin, Tony Rudd, Peter Wall, Peter Wright and myself.
• 47:58
  And I explained to Colin that
• 48:03
  We'd seen this and we wanted to try and pursue this because it...
• 48:11
  I still got the piece of paper at home out of the pad where I sketched what I was trying to tell him.
• 48:19
  Because he could not understand how this worked initially and we had to explain it to him.
• 48:26
  and the penny dropped.
• 48:27
  And then once, typical Colin, once the penny dropped he was away.
• 48:31
  I still got a bit of paper with my drawing and then there's Collins sketching on top of it.
• 48:38
  And so we went back on a Monday and because people at Imperial College said you can have another week to make up for what you lost.
• 48:47
  So we cut ourselves up, sort of a wing to put on the side and put it on.
• 48:55
  was better and we were fiddling around and um we're starting to get the model was starting to get a bit worn by this time um and uh we're getting inconsistent results and obviously because i was a slothful mechanic i was putting these wings on the side at different heights and angles and that was making inconsistent peter
• 49:25
  He said, what we need to do is to put a side skirt on.
• 49:29
  So he put just a bit of cardboard on the side.
• 49:36
  The bloody forces went sky high with it.
• 49:38
  Shit.
• 49:38
  Okay.
• 49:39
  That's it.
• 49:41
  So I thought, this has got to make the best Indy car you ever saw in your life.
• 49:48
  Yeah.
• 49:48
  because that's just consistently high speed.
• 49:51
  I went 4 in 1 car, it was a bit different.
• 49:54
  And a speedway car, the track's flat, dealing with kerbs or anything like that.
• 49:59
  But anyway, we knew then where we had to go.
• 50:05
  So the two things that came out of that, which neither Peter or I knew before we went in there, was A,
• 50:14
  you had to get near the ground, B you had to have a skirt.
• 50:19
  And that's why whatever Peter did in the past didn't work and why I never did what I sort of thought I wanted to do.
• 50:27
  But the two of us together
• 50:31
  solved the problem and started.
• 50:34
  From that time on, every other car was just obsolete.
• 50:37
  It was revolutionary.
• 50:38
  I mean, if you look in the modern, as you know, in the modern era of Formula One now, I mean, every team's got either its own very expensive wind tunnel or access to one.
• 50:48
  You guys were pioneering here, weren't you?
• 50:50
  And the college kindly.
• 50:53
  Well, you see, Imperial College had this wind tunnel
• 50:58
  which was a quarter-scale wind tunnel.
• 51:00
  So it was like... We're sitting on a lounge here, so what are you...
• 51:07
  The tunnel was about as wide as this, where we are.
• 51:10
  So it's about, what, four feet, five feet?
• 51:12
  Yeah.
• 51:12
  Five feet by about four feet high.
• 51:16
  So you're in there, crouch down.
• 51:19
  The belt was about three-quarters of a metre wide and about...
• 51:25
  two metres long running on rollers.
• 51:29
  And...
• 51:30
  So what was the college using it for and how did you...
• 51:36
  They'd... One of the experimenters there, one of the professors or whatever he was, had done a series of experiments on, I think, the pressures around a rolling wheel.
• 51:49
  Why you want to do that, I don't know.
• 51:52
  And so that's why they put this moving floor in.
• 51:55
  And that made the difference.
• 51:59
  We would have never found this without the moving floor.
• 52:04
  And so...
• 52:06
  as far as I know at that time there was only a wind tunnel around that had a moving floor.
• 52:12
  So, and typically a wind tunnel like that would only be used by the students for a limited part of the year and maybe one of the professors would use it for months for a series of experiments and most of the time it would lie idle.
• 52:31
  I've got to tell you where it is.
• 52:33
  It's at the back of the Albert Hall
• 52:38
  Right behind Albert Hall.
• 52:40
  And the road runs parallel to the main road that goes past Albert Hall.
• 52:46
  And so you're up on about the second or third floor and you look down on the street and it's all in a room, a big, big room.
• 52:58
  So it wasn't a particularly big tunnel.
• 53:02
  And I'm thinking, the cost of this room, I mean, if this was hotel rooms or what it could earn.
• 53:09
  Yes.
• 53:09
  Yeah.
• 53:10
  Here we've got it.
• 53:11
  Diesel.
• 53:12
  Siddled around him.
• 53:13
  And in the afternoon you could see the...
• 53:17
  the people coming to go to the Albert Hall, the promenaders, and they'd park their cars down there, and they'd have their afternoon tea and stuff, and we'd be doing our stuff in the wind tunnel.
• 53:27
  But, um, and so, over the years, of course, suddenly, when...
• 53:35
  It must have taken probably a year, but once the penny dropped with the other people, this was the busiest wind tunnel in the world.
• 53:44
  They talk now, Ralph, about translation between what you learn in the wind tunnel and what really happens on track.
• 53:51
  And I know as the evolution of this car happened, you wanted to move weight back and you played with, I think, the positioning of radiators and stuff like that.
• 54:01
  But did it immediately translate to something successful on track or were there still things that needed tuning in the real world?
• 54:12
  Well, this car was a breakaway from really what Chapman had done before because, first of all, it was designed to have outboard front brakes, which they'd converted the 77, which is a dreadful car, but they'd converted that to outboard brakes and proved that that worked.
• 54:34
  And so the good thing with Colin...
• 54:40
  was that he said to me, do you want to build this car, this wing car?
• 54:49
  I said, yes.
• 54:50
  He said, okay.
• 54:53
  Now, he could have said, no, let's...
• 54:58
  do something a bit half way or...
• 55:01
  But he was all in.
• 55:02
  But he said, okay, do it.
• 55:05
  And I owe him for that.
• 55:07
  I mean, he was still in some ways to work with at times, but I really owe him for that because he gave me the opportunity.
• 55:19
  And you see,
• 55:22
  In my position, or as a chief designer, you're limited by the budget you've got and the people and the support you get and the people you've got within the organisation to execute the job.
• 55:40
  And Colin provided all that and gave me the opportunity to be, at that time, the best in the world.
• 55:48
  Do they become something that you have a connection to?
• 55:50
  Like, do you look back on that car now and go, that's enormously special what you did there?
• 55:54
  Or is it just a tool and they evolve every year and you want the next best thing?
• 55:59
  How do you... That car was special.
• 56:02
  Very.
• 56:03
  There was a lot more to it than just the wings.
• 56:05
  Was there?
• 56:06
  Yeah.
• 56:06
  Because typical Colin, to get the weight distribution right,
• 56:12
  We were starting to put a bell housing in between the engine and the gearbox about 10 inches long.
• 56:19
  And Colin looked at it and he's thinking that's a waste of space.
• 56:24
  And he said, what we should do there is put the oil tank there.
• 56:31
  Yeah?
• 56:32
  So, actually the first 78, the oil tank was in front of the engine down in the back of the monocoque.
• 56:40
  The subsequent ones had a bell housing oil tank, and that was the first ever bell housing oil tank that I drew, with a coaxial clutch release.
• 56:53
  like they have now on all the cars.
• 56:55
  But I had to design my own.
• 56:58
  Wow.
• 56:59
  Um, I think I'd heard, I think a Saab.
• 57:05
  Somebody mentioned one time that Saab had something like that.
• 57:07
  Okay.
• 57:09
  And I thought, well, that makes sense.
• 57:12
  Sense.
• 57:12
  Instead of having an external cylinder and a lever and stuff.
• 57:17
  And so it had to work.
• 57:21
  If it hadn't worked,
• 57:23
  we'd have been in trouble because there was no other clutch release available and so the car had that and I
• 57:38
  We'd had trouble... Colin had trouble with a car that I had nothing to do with, which was a 77, with, like, stiction in the suspension.
• 57:49
  So I put little needle bearings in all of the joints to make it run freely, and that was a bit of a mission in its own.
• 57:59
  Um...
• 58:01
  So it was...
• 58:03
  There were...
• 58:05
  The cooling system...
• 58:10
  thinking we're going to put the radiators because we needed wings on the side and clear shot at them.
• 58:17
  We don't want to kind of have radiators up the front.
• 58:20
  So Tony Rudd actually said, well, the mosquito
• 58:26
  World War II aeroplane has the radiators in the wing.
• 58:31
  I said, ah, yeah we can do that.
• 58:33
  So the radiator in that's put in the front of the wings, which is what every body has now.
• 58:40
  So you look at everything that's out there now and it's just an evolution of what I did back in a long time ago.
• 58:51
  I mean, you must be, you should be enormously proud of those hallmarks, mate.
• 58:57
  Well, I tell you what's given me a chuckle.
• 58:59
  Go.
• 58:59
  Porpoising.
• 59:01
  Tell me why.
• 59:02
  We're talking 2022 cars now, and this is the problem du jour of the moment.
• 59:06
  Go.
• 59:07
  Why is it giving you a chuckle?
• 59:09
  Because it had been there, done that.
• 59:11
  Done that, yeah.
• 59:12
  Because, of course, once we started to get high levels of downforce, what did we get?
• 59:17
  We got a pharmacy.
• 59:19
  And so we had to deal with it in the day.
• 59:22
  How did you cure it then?
• 59:23
  Well, stronger...
• 59:25
  You had to be very careful of the structure so the structure wasn't moving in any way.
• 59:30
  Everything has to be stiff.
• 59:33
  And so much stiffer springs.
• 59:37
  Because if you're going to have an aero package relying on road clearance and stuff,
• 59:45
  You can't have that varying by much.
• 59:47
  So it's got to be you got to control the heave of the car and so you've got to go to stiffer springs and so Yeah, and much more rebound damping so the thing can't bounce up and stuff and so these people get on top of it but and I
• 1:00:11
  I would imagine that with all the wind tunnel technology that they can bring to bear now, they're getting forces much higher than what we ever could because nobody did CFD and all that sort of stuff in those days.
• 1:00:25
  And you went to the wind tunnel, you tried a few aero combinations, and then the worst aspect of the wind car era was the skirt boxes.
• 1:00:38
  Oh, they were a nightmare.
• 1:00:41
  Because you had to have a side plate to stop you getting in underneath.
• 1:00:46
  And so skirts, sliding boards in the side of the car.
• 1:00:52
  They required a lot of maintenance, I think, didn't they?
• 1:00:54
  High maintenance.
• 1:00:54
  Yeah.
• 1:00:56
  Never mind the engine man, never mind the gearbox man, yet the skirt man.
• 1:01:01
  He was the gun.
• 1:01:04
  And after every session, the whole thing had to come off, get all the dirt and sand and grit and rubbish out of it so it would move smoothly, and because it had to move smoothly because it was very stuck up.
• 1:01:17
  So, it's a good man.
• 1:01:19
  It's a good man.
• 1:01:19
  I know, I think in the Fittipaldi team chapter, you worked on a solution for that, a very, very clever one.
• 1:01:25
  Can we wrap up Lotus with a couple of questions here?
• 1:01:28
  Firstly, when that car debuted, I mean, it's a game where the pit lane, lots of prying eyes, lots of people look at the opposition and what they're up to.
• 1:01:39
  What was the reaction from everyone when you turned up with this revolutionary car?
• 1:01:45
  Well, first of all, I wasn't there.
• 1:01:48
  Colin promoted me sideways into the road car factory.
• 1:01:53
  We're digressing here for a second.
• 1:01:54
  I think if I'm right here, you spoke with a colleague in Peter Windsor and it was to do with the brilliant work we've just talked about and he wrote an article and Colin got mad, didn't he?
• 1:02:06
  Oh yeah, but Colin never said a word to me.
• 1:02:10
  Never, as far as our relationship was concerned, it was just no change.
• 1:02:16
  Never said a word.
• 1:02:18
  Tony Rudd told me that he went through the roof when he read the article.
• 1:02:21
  What was it?
• 1:02:22
  I mean, the article just factually recounted your work on it, I think.
• 1:02:26
  Just said that I'd, I just said I'd designed the car.
• 1:02:29
  And, I mean, all my predecessors, like,
• 1:02:36
  Len Terry and Maurice Philippe, they designed the cars.
• 1:02:40
  Yes.
• 1:02:42
  So, yeah.
• 1:02:43
  And...
• 1:02:45
  So you didn't see the debut, you got moved sideways to the road car operation didn't you?
• 1:02:49
  And he agreed to let me go to a couple of races and I remember going to Zolder and the charade at that track on that weekend was the diff and so the blokes had the gearbox apart
• 1:03:09
  I remember one of the mechanics scuttling across from where we were working the cars to the truck carrying the diff wrapped up in rags and stuff and it surprised me how long it took for people to cotton on?
• 1:03:23
  to cotton on.
• 1:03:24
  Wow!
• 1:03:24
  For me, the car was planned to run at Monza the first car initially and we weren't really ready but
• 1:03:37
  And then the plan was maybe to take it to the USGP in Canada at the end of the year.
• 1:03:43
  But by that time, we'd been testing, and Colin knew what the potential was.
• 1:03:51
  And so he decided then to keep it under wraps.
• 1:03:55
  And even unlike Team Lotus, where they had a big hoop-dee-doo launch at the Albert Hall or somewhere, somewhere trivial like that,
• 1:04:06
  He sort of did it semi-secretly, didn't he?
• 1:04:07
  He just had a few diggers up to Hethel a couple of days before Christmas, and that was when Peter Windsor came up, and they were just allowed to walk around the car on the floor and stuff like that.
• 1:04:23
  He realised that he didn't want people to have the winter to copy it.
• 1:04:30
  Yeah, of course.
• 1:04:31
  As you would.
• 1:04:31
  But then, the following year, people never twigged what it was all about.
• 1:04:37
  Amazing.
• 1:04:38
  And it surprised me.
• 1:04:39
  I just thought, they're bonkers.
• 1:04:41
  And at the end of that year, I can remember Tyrell's built a new car.
• 1:04:47
  And it was just a big, flat-bottom car.
• 1:04:49
  And I thought, Jesus...
• 1:04:52
  Can't they see what's in front of their eyes?
• 1:04:53
  Eyes?
• 1:04:53
  Yeah.
• 1:04:54
  No.
• 1:04:55
  Wow.
• 1:04:56
  Amazing.
• 1:04:58
  I'm joining the dots here, and I may not be doing it right, Ralph.
• 1:05:00
  So was it Mario Andretti then, and what was the driver reaction to this?
• 1:05:04
  Yeah.
• 1:05:07
  Well, I mean, they enjoyed the car.
• 1:05:12
  Because Mario had joined the team the year before and drove this other thing.
• 1:05:18
  And I think he, kind of vague idea, he might have even won the, once we put the outboard front brakes on it, it worked halfway decent.
• 1:05:29
  I think he might have even won the Japanese Grand Prix at the end of the year.
• 1:05:33
  I can't remember.
• 1:05:35
  I wasn't there, but anyway.
• 1:05:37
  So, and Mario liked the car.
• 1:05:43
  And, of course, Ronnie joined him and they enjoyed the car.
• 1:05:48
  Yeah.
• 1:05:50
  They were a formidable combination.
• 1:05:53
  I can remember that race at Zolder.
• 1:05:58
  Oh no, it wasn't Ronnie.
• 1:06:00
  It was Gunnar Nielsen.
• 1:06:03
  Gunnar and Mario drove the car the first year.
• 1:06:09
  And that race I went to at Zolda, Mario was on pole or something, but it was wet.
• 1:06:15
  And he chucked the car away, and I thought, oh, Jesus.
• 1:06:18
  And anyway, good old Gunnar came through from somewhere and won the race for us.
• 1:06:24
  But Ian happily died of cancer over the following winter, yeah.
• 1:06:38
  Hope you're enjoying my podcast with respected Aussie engineer Ralph Bellamy.
• 1:06:42
  I find in these convos I'm always learning something.
• 1:06:46
  So apologies for those who are a step ahead in the story, but I have this philosophy of letting the guest share it in their own words and to try and make it for everyone, not just those of us who are diehard supporters.
• 1:06:59
  That's a nice way of me saying not sorry.
• 1:07:02
  Now, if you are on a long drive, part two is good to go in the Rusty's Garage library right now, or you can queue it up for your train trip or your journey tomorrow.
• 1:07:11
  I'd love your feedback too, so feel free to leave a review or get in touch on socials.
• 1:07:16
  We continue with more on the Lotus chapter in that second part, some clever solutions they devised, living in Brazil and working with the legendary Emerson Fittipaldi, when a young Adrian Newey sent his resume in, some hair-raising stories of flying to racetracks and the move to work in racing back down under.
• 1:07:43
  Listener