Men in Sheds

One of the aspects of motor sport that I miss from the era of my youth are the experimental cars produced not by the factories, but by individuals and teams. They added diversity, personality, and interest to the sport. These cars of my youth (1950's - 1970's) made by "men in sheds" showed up, not only at the Indy 500, but in sports cars and even Formula 1. We may think of Ferrari and McLaren as OEM's and constructors now, but they were started by individuals in more modest circumstances at the time.

In the 1966 film "Grand Prix" Pete Aron (James Garner) won the world championship, but it was actually Jack Brabham in his own car powered by the Repco V8 that won that year.

The Repco V8 was based on an Oldsmobile F-85 3.5L aluminum engine. Brabham and the Australian parts company Repco developed the SOHC heads for the Olds block and added a bearing girdle to the bottom-end, put it into a Brabham chassis and went racing. It was not the most powerful engine on the grid, but it turned out to be more reliable than the competition and Brabham won the drivers championship in 1966 and the constructors titles in 1966 and 1967 with it. By the way, the Buick variant of that block was licensed to Rover and was the basis for Rover V8s for decades.

There was apparently something in the atmosphere surrounding the Brabham team. Two of Brabham's drivers went on to build their own cars, found their own teams, and become constructors themselves: Dan Gurney and Bruce McLaren. I feel that if Dan Gurney had stuck with Brabham for one more year (he left after the 1965 season), we might very well have had one more American driving champion in 1966.

If Dan had stuck with Brabham in 1966, we might have never seen the AAR Gurney-Eagles. Dan remains the only American to win a Grand Prix in a car bearing his name as constructor. AAR also produced successful Indy Eagles, and sports cars, culminating in the Eagle-Toyota MkIII GTP of 1992-1993. Dan was the instigator behind the Gurney-Weslake cylinder heads for small-block Ford V8s that were instrumental in the Le Mans wins for JWAE-Gulf Ford GT40s in 1968 and 1969, as well as the Formula 1 Gurney-Weslake V12 engine powering Dan's Eagle F1 car.

When Bruce McLaren left Brabham he built and raced successful formula cars, Indy cars and Can-Am sports cars. McLaren now has become one of the mainstays of Formula 1 and produces sports cars for the road and track, the latest being the MP4-12C. Seeing McLaren today, it is hard to believe how humble the McLaren operation was at the beginning.

The Indianapolis 500 used to be a showcase of one-off and experimental cars. Mickey Thompson always fielded something interesting as did Smokey Yunick, even if they were not terribly successful. I vividly recall Parnelli Jones's 1967 STP turbine car losing the race in the final laps due to a $5.00 part failing. (An aside: Parnelli and his partner Vel Miletich lived in my home town.) This era was very far away from today's spec Dallara DW-12 cars.

One of the most innovative and influential car designers is Jim Hall. His Chaparrals of the 1960's are arguably the beginning of modern automotive aerodynamics.

I doubt that there is any race fan who has not heard of Carroll Shelby. Shelby was not the first to come up with the notion of putting a big engine in a lightweight sports car, but he is arguably the most successful. After driving for Sydney Allard (another man who put a big American V8 in an English sports car) and Aston Martin, Carroll put a Ford V8 into the AC Ace to create the Cobra, founding Shelby American right up the road from my childhood home at the former Lance Reventlow Scarab shop in Venice California (Reventlow was one of the rich men in sheds). The Cobra is still the only American car to win the FIA World Sportscar Championship (in 1965), defeating Ferrari and Porsche.

Many things have contributed to the decline of car/engine diversity and individuality in motor sport. Safety regulations and strict testing are necessary and laudable, but it makes building your own car difficult and expensive. The trend toward cost-controls have encouraged spec cars, effectively preventing one-offs by regulation. Modern materials and production techniques, along with the required crash-testing and certification, not to mention the high costs of wind-tunnel time and engineering, tends to price individuals out of the market. Cars have become much more sophisticated and the people qualified to design and build them are relatively scarce.

I think it would be desirable to bring back "men in sheds" to motor sport. Perhaps not in formula cars or Indy cars, but at least in sports cars. What got me thinking about a way to do this was the Le Mans Garage 56 project and the Deltawing. To reduce development time and lower costs, the basic "tub" was adapted from the Aston Martin AMR-1 (another AMR-1 tub ended up in the Pescarolo LMP1 at Le Mans). This tub had already gone through crash-testing and certification by the FIA, so the Deltawing constructor (Dan Gurney's AAR) didn't have to spend the time and money to re-invent the wheel.

What if there were mass produced, basic safety-cell tubs, tested and certified, that could be incorporated into cars built by men in sheds? This might allow individuals and teams to design their own suspension, bodywork, control systems, and drive trains more readily and save significant time and money in construction, testing and certification. The effect of Moore's Law combined with the ongoing development in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) acting to reduce expensive wind-tunnel time, could herald a new flowering of those wonderful one-off cars that have been missing from the grid for such a long time. This approach would work best in a (currently non-existent) lightweight prototype class that encourages innovation.