Rumor and innuendo are two of the biggest forces that drive any sorts of innovation in racing. One team hears that another is going to do something and since that idea is pretty radical and they had not thought of it before, the team on the “hearing” end of the rumor snaps into action to see if they can figure out the advantage the other team is trying to gain. This video is a perfect study of that theory and it even borders on the ridiculous because what you are going to see is the Williams F1 team remove the suspension from their car and send it out on the track for a test session. All because they heard that a team had developed an F1 car that had no suspension and was going to be faster than theirs.
The fascinating thing for us in watching this video was seeing how the screws wrenched, how quaint (by today’s standards) the whole thing is, and how the driver talks about the experience of driving the bone shaking car around the course. In the very polite British way he says, “If you could only put suspension on the seat….” and that really cracked us up. As you would expect, taking the suspension components off of a Formula One car that was designed to have them really did not air the team in making the car faster. It did help them essentially destroy the bottom of the car and the transmission apparently.
We wonder if wholesale craziness like this goes on today in racing of it is has all been reduced to incremental stuff. Instead of running a car with no suspension, they just try stiffer springs rates, etc. That question goes for all the different forms of motorsports out there. Is anyone actually heading off to a closed track to do stuff like this or has that ship long sailed? We thought this as a great watch for the pure strangeness and the fact that the camera crew got full access to the car and garage. Neat stuff.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE A WILLIAMS F1 CAR HIT THE TRACK WITH EFFECTIVELY NO SUSPENSION AT ALL –
Ouch! – the driver had no balls or kidneys after half a lap….