Look at the Wheels on That: 6-wheel F1 car
10 May 2007 But nonetheless this freak of a car served the team for two seasons and even won a Grand Prix. With regular LATWOT writer Stuart Milne away, Trackside’s Keith Collantine has stepped in to pick one of his all-time favourite racing cars. The F1 hacks assembled for the launch of the 1976 Tyrrell might have thought they’d seen it all before. But when the covers were pulled back on a racing car with six wheels there was stunned silence. Renowned scribe Denis Jenkinson muttered, “I think I’d better go out and come back in again.” Formula 1 has always been about finding the unfair advantage over your rivals - the stroke of technical genius that puts your team a quantum leap ahead and renders your rivals obsolete. In 1976, British team boss Ken Tyrrell and designer Derek Gardner dreamt up the revolutionary idea of using four small wheels to steer the car rather than two large and aerodynamically inefficient ones. It was a sound idea on paper – but it produced an ugly duckling of a car. The Tyrrell team had won three championships with Jackie Stewart just three years earlier. But new driver Jody Scheckter complained about the P34’s strange handling. Even when he won the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp with it he still wasn’t convinced. Over the course of 1976 and 1977 he would be proved correct. The P34’s Achilles’ heel was the special tiny tyres needed for the 25cm wheels at the front. Tyre supplier Goodyear was too busy concentrating on their normal tyres to make sure Tyrrell’s had the latest compounds. Its engine was the same V8 Ford DFV that powered most other cars on the grid. Originally Tyrrell planned to add a Renault turbo engine to the car, which is why the car originally bore yellow stripes alongside the Tyrrell blue. It would probably have created a fearsome car with enormous power and unpredictable handling – but the deal fell through. The P34 won no further races and was replaced by a more conventional machine in 1978.
Then in the early 1980s Williams produced a six-wheeled test car with four wheels at the back, rather than the front. This proved a masterstroke and it proved instantly quicker than the regular car. But when the sport’s governing body got wind of its results, they introduced a maximum limit of four wheels on Grand Prix cars, banning it on the spot, Had they not, it’s likely that every car on the F1 grid today would have six wheels. At least. Video
Awesome top-down footage of Patrick Depailler racing the Tyrrell P34 around Monte-Carlo. Auto Trader links Jaguar XKR unleashed |
But the concept of six-wheeled racing cars didn’t die with the P34. F1 teams March and even Ferrari dabbled with the concept.Page 1
