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Post by wilmywood8455 on Aug 21, 2018 13:09:51 GMT -8
Forty years on from Mario Andretti’s 1978 title – the first to be claimed in a Formula 1 car featuring ground effect technology – our tech team of Mark Hughes and Giorgio Piola look at how the technological tour de force that was the Lotus 79 came to be...
The idea of using the underside of a racing car to generate negative pressure and effectively suck the car towards the track had first been exploited in the Can-Am sports cars series in the 1960s. But they were cars with wide, wheel-enclosing, bodywork. Getting the principle to work on a skinny-bodied, open-wheel single seater initially seemed unfeasible. The car which made that breakthrough was the Lotus 78 of 1977, which ushered F1 into the era of ground effect. Forty years ago, the 78’s successor, the Lotus 79, became the first ground effect car to win the world championship, with Mario Andretti at the wheel.
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Post by Buck on Aug 22, 2018 19:13:33 GMT -8
Quite a race car...
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