Brabham - Technical Innovation

Technical Innovation

Brabham was considered a technically conservative team in the 1960s, chiefly because it persevered with traditional "spaceframe" cars long after Lotus introduced lighter, stiffer "monocoque" chassis to Formula One in 1962. Chief designer Tauranac reasoned that monocoques of the time were not usefully stiffer than well designed spaceframe chassis, and were harder to repair and less suitable for MRD’s customers. His "old fashioned" cars won the Brabham team the 1966 and 1967 championships, and were competitive in Formula One until rule changes forced a move to monocoques in 1970.

Despite the perceived conservatism, in 1963 Brabham was the first Formula One team to use a wind tunnel to hone their designs to reduce drag and stop the cars lifting off the ground at speed. The practice only became the norm in the early 1980s, and is possibly the most important factor in the design of modern cars. Towards the end of the 1960s, teams began to exploit aerodynamic downforce to push the cars' tyres down harder on the track and enable them to maintain faster speeds through high-speed corners. At the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix, Brabham were the first, alongside Ferrari, to introduce full width rear wings to this effect.

The team's most fertile period of technical innovation came in the 1970s and 1980s when Gordon Murray became technical director. During 1976, the team introduced "carbon-carbon brakes" to Formula One, which promised reduced "unsprung weight" and better stopping performance due to carbon's greater coefficient of friction. The initial versions used carbon-carbon composite brake pads and a steel disc faced with carbon "pucks". The technology was not reliable at first; in 1976, Carlos Pace crashed at 180 mph (290 km/h) at the Österreichring circuit after heat build-up in the brakes boiled the brake fluid, leaving him with no way of stopping the car. By 1979, Brabham had developed an effective carbon-carbon braking system, combining structural carbon discs with carbon brake pads. By the late 1980s, carbon brakes were used by all competitors in almost all top level motor sports.

Although Brabham experimented with airdams and underbody skirts in the mid 1970s, the team, like the rest of the field, did not immediately understand Lotus' development of a ground effect car in 1977. The Brabham BT46B "Fan car" of 1978, generated enormous downforce with a fan, which sucked air from beneath the car, although its claimed use was for engine cooling. The car only raced once in the Formula One World Championship—Niki Lauda winning the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix—before a loophole in the regulations was closed by the FIA.

Although in 1979 Murray was the first to use lightweight "carbon fibre composite" panels to stiffen Brabham's aluminium alloy monocoques, he echoed his predecessor Tauranac in being the last to switch to the new fully composite monocoques. Murray was reluctant to build the entire chassis from composite materials until he understood their behaviour in a crash, an understanding achieved in part through an instrumented crash test of a BT49 chassis. The team did not follow McLaren's 1981 MP4/1 with their own fully composite chassis until the "lowline" BT55 in 1986, the last team to do so. This technology is now used in all top level single seater racing cars.

For the 1981 season the FIA introduced a 6 cm (2.4 in) minimum ride height for the cars, intended to slow them in corners by limiting the downforce created by aerodynamic ground effect. Gordon Murray devised a "hydropneumatic suspension" system for the BT49C, which allowed the car to settle to a much lower ride height at speed. Brabham were accused of cheating by other teams, although Murray believes that the system met the letter of the regulations. No action was taken against the team and others soon produced systems with similar effects.

At the 1982 British Grand Prix, Brabham reintroduced the idea of re-fuelling and changing the car's tyres during the race, unseen since the 1957 Formula One season, to allow their drivers to sprint away at the start of races on a light fuel load and soft tyres. After studying techniques used at the Indianapolis 500 and in NASCAR racing in the United States, the team were able to refuel and re-tyre the car in 14 seconds in tests ahead of the race. In 1982 Murray felt the tactic did little more than "get our sponsors noticed at races we had no chance of winning", but in 1983 the team made good use of the tactic. Refuelling was banned for 1984, and did not reappear until the 1994 season (until it was banned again in 2010 as a part of cost cutting measures), but tyre changes have remained part of Formula One.