From Williams F1 Team
Patrick Head, the director of engineering of the Williams Formula 1 team talks about the design of the six-wheel FW07D that never raced.
Prior to the 1982 World Championship, the team designed, fabricated and tested a six-wheel F1 car. “When the flat-bottomed cars came in, engine power suddenly took on much greater significance and that favoured the turbos from Renault, Ferrari and BMW. We didn’t have a turbo in those days. We’d had a brief discussion with BMW about using theirs, but thought it too pricey so relied on the Cosworth DFV that we’d had in 1979, with less than 500 horsepower,” Head recalls “We had to think of others ways in which to increase our straight-line speed and we focused on reducing the frontal area. In those days the rear wheels were enormous and caused a large proportion of our aerodynamic drag. The lift-to-drag ratio on our FW08 was about 7.5 and Frank Dernie came up with a quarter-scale model of the six-wheeler, which used four front wheels at the back, with a lift-to-drag ratio of about 12.5. So, clearly, the idea had a lot of potential,” he added. “We produced a test car, which was a converted FW07 chassis. This first iteration of the six-wheeler was called the FW07D and it used four Goodyear front tyres at the rear. The car ran only once because we then updated an FW08 chassis to accommodate four wheels at the back and called it the FW08B.”
Australian Alan Jones tested the FW07D during the winter of 1981-82, along with the team's new recruit Keke Rosberg, Nico’s father who tested the FW08B.
“We were all intrigued to see if we could balance a car that had such a large contact patch at the rear and we quickly discovered that we could. I remember (test driver) Jonathan Palmer telling me that he couldn’t really tell that there were four wheels at the back, although the traction out of slow corners was phenomenal,” Head continues. “The FW08B had no handling problems as such – it didn’t understeer like a pig, as many people expected – but there was so much hardware on the car that it was bl**dy heavy. It was going to be a huge challenge to get it down to a reasonable weight. “The car was about 250mm longer than a standard FW08 and all four rear wheels were driven. There was a differential between the two front wheels and the two rear wheels, but there was no diff between the front pair and the rear pair,” Head explains. “In the end, the six-wheeler was banned after someone in a FOCA meeting said it would drive up costs and cause chaos during pit stops. The regulations were changed to say a car could only have four wheels, of which only two could be driven. “After that, we had no option other than to pursue the turbo route with Honda. It was clear that horsepower was the order of the day,” Head concluded.
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