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6 wheel F1 car

coronet340

coronet340

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I had no idea they ever made a car like this. I was watching the movie Rush and this car was in a few scenes. Its funky lookin to say the least. Any of you older fella's remember this car? Seems like steering would be a lot tougher.

tyrrell-inline.jpg
 
Haha, sure I remember the elf car. That was back in the early 80's I guess, right? Yeah, when I was a kid I loved that car just for its strangeness. I had a matchbox car of that I think.
 
They were built in 1976 & 1977. The above pic is of the 1977 car. It was called the Tyrell P34.

It wasn't the only one with more than 4 wheels. Williams, March & Ferrari experimented with wheeled cars, but most of them had the 4 wheels at the back.
 
Sure I remember those. The reasoning behind the design was that more but smaller tires would give a lower frontal profile for better streamlining, and improved cornering with more contact patch as well as more brake area.

The design had some success but was limited by the new tire design not getting proper development (Goodyear wasn't that interested since there wasn't much of a market for them), extra weight on the double front suspension, and before the bugs could get ironed out and the competition got clobbered the F1 rules changed to limit the maximum number of wheels on a car to four.

Similar fun and innovation in that era also included the Brabham BT46 'Fan Car', which had a large engine turned fan that sucked out all the air under the car, effectively gluing it to the ground and greatly increasing cornering ability without needing wings that slowed down top speeds. The car would visibly squat lower when the engine was revved in the pits. The driver, Niki Lauda, actually complained that it cornered so well that the increased lateral forces left him fatigued by the end of the race. Even on oily, slippery surfaces the car stayed on the rails. Another design outlawed before the end of the 1978 season.
 
All very cool information!! I am new to the F1 scene so this is all news to me.

Photon - That fan car sounds pretty awesome. I'll try and find some tape on it.

The cars these days don't look like they have too much leeway except front nose design that is still highly regulated on height.
 
Take a look at this one, coronet340https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09z0VEH0QDM
 
I also remember this car. Tamiya built a great model of it. The construction of this car may have marked the end of Tyrrell being a major factor in F-1. Just a few years before this, Jackie Stewart won the World's Championship for them (1973.) While Tyrrell was working on the 6-wheeled car, Colin Chapman was working on cars that would lead to the term "ground effects" being a common part of racing vocabularies around the world. Newp
 
coronet340 said:
I had no idea they ever made a car like this. I was watching the movie Rush and this car was in a few scenes. Its funky lookin to say the least. Any of you older fella's remember this car? Seems like steering would be a lot tougher.

View attachment 188240
Click to expand...

:iamwithstupid: I saw them running at Laguna Seca recently, not that car thou, even at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Vintage races, it's Fugly little sucker, ran well there thou... I remember seeing them back in the late 70's IIRC too... I quit even following F1 in the 90's...
 
I do remember that car! I even had an RC model of that car. That reminds me, I may still have that RC model....I'll have to check and see.
 
I havent seen anything like the formula car before. This is the first thing with dual steer tires Ive ever seen, great in the mud!
 

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here's a time line of that car
 

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here's another F1 6 wheeler William 1982
 

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barnfind said:
I havent seen anything like the formula car before. This is the first thing with dual steer tires Ive ever seen, great in the mud!
Click to expand...

Our coil tubing trucks are like that. Every time I see it I just think about how much work it must be to drive a 125,000+ pound rig with 7000 tires.
 
I did a term paper in college on these for an English class - wrote it in as non-technical terms as I could so anyone could read it and understand it - complete with illustrations - the 'bitch' that graded it, wrote that it was written about a 5th grade intelligence level - I asker her if I'd wrote it like I wanted to and she couldn't understand it, would she still gave me a poor grade on that as well.... It was harder to translate it into a user friendly dialogue than it was to just leave it alone....

Tamiya model cars also made a model of these - I built one of those too -

Seems to me, the first race that these appeared in, they finished 1st and 2nd place - I could be wrong on that, but if not 1st and 2nd, they placed well.

One of the neatest things I've seen in Formula One was a V-10 Renault engine on a dyno - sitting there turning 11k RPM, just purring along - the headers were glowing bright red from the heat - and it wasn't even breathing hard - sounded like a mad hornet! LOL
 
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