Ground Effect: The Dirty Trick F1 Had to Ban (AeroNEC · 3) In a wind tunnel in the mid-1970s, a team from Lotus watched something that shouldn’t happen. The tunnel’s moving floor — the belt meant to simulate a road rushing past — peeled up off its rollers and stuck itself to the underside of … Read more
Heriberto Pronello: The Argentine Who Built Ground Effect Before Lotus Did In July 2023, the Brooklands Paddock at the Goodwood Festival of Speed put a 1969 Argentine sports prototype on display alongside two Ferrari 250 GTOs, Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell, Carlos Reutemann’s Brabham, and the six-wheeled Williams that never raced. The crowd voted it “new favourite … Read more
Jim Hall: the Texan who understood the air while everyone else stared at the engine If you walk into the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, you’ll find oil derricks, rock samples and a hall full of dinosaurs. You’ll also find, almost by accident, the most important collection of racing cars built in America. … Read more
Lotus and Colin Chapman: The Engineer Who Proved Light Beats Powerful “Simplify, then add lightness.” If you had to compress the entire philosophy of automotive engineering into five words, those would be it. They weren’t spoken by a professor or a CEO with an MBA. They came from Colin Chapman — a British engineer who … Read more
