The "Ground Effect" era...what was it all about then?

If you new to Formula One you may have heard reference to something called "ground effect" and how this curious sounding term even had it's own era in Formula One. If you follow F1 news on the web you may also have heard that there were plans in place as recently as December 2012 to revive this technology and bring it back into the sport for the beginning of the 2014 season. So what is it all about then?

When in reference to motorsport, ground effect  refers to using the underside of the car to produce more aerodynamic grip and thus quicker lap times. The details of how this is achieved may seem very confusing to you if you have read snippets about it before but in essence is actually very simple.

To help explain the concept better, we will do a quick recap of how all aerodynamic devices work. Traditionally aerodynamic grip in Formula One has largely been produced by the front and rear wings of the car. As you may remember from school, wings as used on racing cars are like an inverted version of those found on planes. On anything wishing to travel in the sky, the aim of the wings is to produce an upward lifting motion that will overcome gravity and get the vehicle off the ground. In car racing, the wing designed is flipped upside down and is used to produced a downward force, that rather than overcoming gravity assists it in keeping the vehicle on the ground where it belongs.

The basic principles of aerodynamic lift produced by a wing.

The way in which these mysterious forces are achieved is through a very useful property of air, as well as gases in general. This is that as the speed of the flow of gas increases, the pressure of that gas decreases. This is called Bernoulli's principle. In an aircraft the wing is profiled so that the top of it speeds the flow of air around it and slows the flow of the air underneath it. This creates an envelope of air at unequal pressure around the wing, with it being lower above the wing than below it. 

Another property of gases then comes into play, which is that if there is a pressure difference in any particular area of a gas then it will try and equalise itself by the higher pressure air moving into the lower pressure area. Fortunately for aerodynamicists, as the wing sits between these two pressure differences the effect is that high pressure air pushes the wing towards the lower pressure area and creates lift. From this new knowledge it is now clear how an F1 wing works. With the lower area of pressure below the wing, the air tries to force the car into the ground and produces aerodynamic grip as a result.

The classic F1 design of a large wing front and rear to produce downforce.

Two of the big problems with over body wing derived aerodynamic grip if you are car an aerodynamicist in the sport are the facts that this downforce comes at the high price of large amounts of drag, which slow the progress of the car through the air and the fact that F1 regulators have an annoying habit of limiting the dimensions and locations of the wings on the cars for safety purposes.

It was the Lotus team that first began experimenting with novel ways to generate downforce on a car other than the wings in the early 1970's. Using a wind tunnel they came to realise that it was possible to generate previously undreamed of levels of aerodynamic grip by profiling the underside of the car to produce lower air pressures than the top side of the bodywork. Generating grip in this way overcame a lot of the drag restrictions of running wings on the external body work of a car and at the time was not an area covered in the rulebook at all, so offered designers a free hand in their work. The downforce was achieved by profiling the car so it's two sidepods effectively became a pair of big, inverted aeroplane wings.

A drawing showing clearly how the ground effect concept works.

The first car to make it to a race using these principles was the Lotus 78, which made it's debut in 1977. This produced only 75% of the intended level of downforce, but proved the concept with some solid results and  paved the way for the Lotus 79 which refined the concept further. The '79 took American Mario Andretti to the title following year, but the successor car Lotus designed for 1980, the Type 80 was a lemon. Attempts were made to update the '79 but by this point all the other teams had caught them up, leaving Lotus uncompetitive. This was a position they did not really begin to recover from until the end of the ground effect era.

A drawing showing how Lotus first implemented, then refined the ground effect concept.

The "wing car" design at first favoured the privateer teams and their Cosworth DFV V8 engines because these power plants were compact and allowed engineers to sculpt the airflow round the rear of the car more effectively than the likes of Ferrari with their bulky but powerful flat 12 engines. This ensured that the UK based, non manufacturer teams were able to hold the performance advantage over the works teams during the early years of the ground effect era, despite being well down on horsepower.

This situation began to gradually turn on it's head however with the arrival of Renault into Formula One in 1977. The French outfit pioneered the use of smaller, turbocharged V6 units that were even better suited to ground effect designs than the DFV. At first Renault had their hands full just stopping this engine from exploding after a few laps and it wasn't until 1979 that they managed to produce a ground effect car and marry it to an engine that could last a race distance. When Jean-Pierre Jabouille took pole at the 1979 South African GP then pole and victory at the French GP later in the season the writing was on the wall for the privately owned teams.

The Gordini V6 turbo engine mounted in the pre ground effect era Renault RS01.

Ferrari soon followed Renault's lead and by the dawn of the 1980's the initiative was very much with the manufacturer teams again as turbo power was beginning to look like a pre requisite for success. Privateers were faced with the choice of find a manufacturer willing to build them a turbo engine or face being  not competitive even with a ground effect car.

By late 1980 it was a clear case of the "haves" and the "have nots". The privateer teams began pulling all kinds of dirty tricks to level up what they saw as an unlevel playing field such as running their cars underweight. The FIA were also becoming concerned by the whole thing. Cornering speeds were becoming unacceptably high because of the increased downforce offered by ground effect cars. The dawn of the turbo era made it clear that this problem was only going to get worse. In addition to this the "wing cars" had a critical design flaw that could potentially prove fatal in the right circumstances.

If a ground effect car was to hit a kerb, or worse still the wheel of another car, the car would be lifted from the track high enough to break the suction underneath. Suddenly robbed of all of their downforce, these cars could then rapidly become airborne. Indeed the ground effect era saw several spectacular, aerial accidents which culminated in the death of Gilles Villeneuve and the career ending injuries of his Ferrari team mate Didier Pironi during the 1982 season. Something clearly needed to change as Rene Arnoux's accident at the Dutch GP in 1980 demonstrates...

The way the teams had been minimising the risk of loss of suction and increased overall downforce had been to use ultra stiff suspension to keep the cars as level as posible (and the drivers as uncomfortable as possible) and by fitting flexible rubber "skirts" along the edges of the sidepods. This stopped higher pressure air along the side of the car being drawn into the low pressure area underneath it and blunting the suction effect. These skirts moved up and now in relation to the sidepods as the cars went over bumps in the track to keep the seal tight.

The FIA saw this as the weak link of the design and started moves to limit the effectiveness of the "wing cars". For the start of 1981 these sliding skirts were banned and the minimum ride height of the cars raised with a view to reducing cornering speeds. However, the wording of the new regulations stated that the car need only be at this new ride height in the pits. Thus, it didn't take long for Brabham chief designer Gordon Murray to come up a hydraulic suspension system that could raise or lower the car's ride height depending on whether it was in the pits or not.

The 1981 version of the Brabham BT49 was fitted with underhand, but legal suspension.

The rules quickly turned out to be unworkable and a compromise was sought for the remainder of 1981 and the following 1982 season. Skirts were allowed again, but only in a toned down "fixed" version and the ride height restrictions were removed.

From the beginning of 1983 the concept was banned entirely and cars reverted to a flat profiled undertray. This design remained in the rulebook until it too was deemed unsafe after the catastrophic 1994 season. There is something of a parallel between the dark years of 1982 and 1994. Both were set against a backdrop of uncertainty after hastily introduced rule changes designed to eliminate potentially dangerous technology from the sport. Both seasons featured the deaths of two drivers as a partial consequence of these changes.

If ground effect had continued to be allowed in the sport it would no doubt have brought about the earlier implementation of some form of active suspension system amongst the teams. The benefits of such a system were even more stark for ground effect cars than flat bottom ones and Lotus had begun experimenting with such a system as early as 1982. This would have raised the terrifying spectre of active ride ground effect cars running during the very height of the turbo era with all it's monster power excesses...

The ground effect era's most iconic car, the Lotus 79 in action.

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The curse of Frenchmen in Formula One:

Of the twelve Frenchmen to win a Grand Prix since the World Championship began, seven of them have suffered career and/or life threatening injuries or died at the wheel of a Formula One car. This gives French drivers the worst serious injury rate of any competing nation to have more than three race winners, at 58.34%. So who are these unfortunate racers:

F1's first pin up, Francois Cevert.

Francois Cevert (1973 US Grand Prix - Watkins Glen): Cevert was the young, good looking team mate of Jackie Stewart at the Tyrrell F1 team. Cevert was poised to take over the mantle of team leader from the Scotsman after he was due to retire at the end of the 1973 season. The final round of that year's championship was the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in New York State. As usual that season Tyrrell were in the hunt for the race victory, but with Stewart's third and final championship already decided it was Francois alone battling Sweden's Ronnie Peterson for pole position during Saturday morning qualifying.

On a flying lap and heading through the fast "esses" section of the circuit the Frenchman's car was a little too far to the left of the track than ideal. As a consequence of being positioned in this way left his car clipped the kerb and swerved to then right into the track side barriers. It was then pitched back across the track in a spin and into the barriers on the other side of the circuit. The force of the impact as his car hit the Armco on the left hand side of the track cut Cevert's body in half from neck to hip. After his death Jackie Stewart elected to withdraw from the race as a mark of respect and missed what would have been his 100th and final Grand Prix.

Asked later about the causes of the accident, Stewart said it his belief that a contributing factor in the accident had been Cevert's preference to take the "esses" secion of the circuit in third gear rather than his choice of fourth. Taking the corner in fourth, the Scotsman felt counteracted a lot of the nervousness under acceleration that the the short wheelbase Tyrrell suffered from particularly badly through this section of the track. Cevert on the other hand chose to take that chance and benefit from the superior throttle response of running in a lower gear.

Patrick died whilst still on the comeback trail.

Patrick Depailler (Test session at Hockenheim, August 1980): Another Frenchman who made his breakthrough into Formula One with the Tyrrell team, ironically enough as the replacement for the recently deceased Francois Cevert. He stuck with the Ockham, Surrey outfit until 1978 and along with team mate Jody Scheckter famously raced the six wheeled Tyrrell P34 with mixed results. Patrick's career was dogged by bad luck and near misses during this period. He finished second a frustrating eight times before finally claiming his maiden victory at the 1978 Monaco GP. The 1979 season saw a switch to the French Ligier team who were then in the ascendancy with their "ground effect" JS11 chassis.

Sadly for Patrick his season was wrecked after he suffered badly broken legs in a hang gliding accident mid season and he was dropped by the team. He battled back to fitness though and won a race seat at the returning Alfa Romeo team for 1980. His new team's car was quick but unreliable and it was during a late season test session in Germany that a suspension failure sent him into the Armco at the lightening fast Ostkurve. His car became inverted and slid along the top of the barriers for several hundred feet. Patrick suffered massive head injuries and died at the scene.

Turbo pioneer Jean-Pierre Jabouille.

Jean-Pierre Jabouille (1980 Canadian GP - Circuit Gilles Villeneuve): Jean-Pierre's career is synonymous with the development of the turbocharged engine in Formula One. A provision for a turbocharged unit had been written into the rulebook for decades by the time Renault took the plunge with one powering their RS01 chassis when it made it's debut at the 1977 British Grand Prix with Jabouille at the wheel. The newcomer retired on lap 17 after, perhaps predictably it's turbo failed.

In it's early outings the RS01 suffered with not just unreliability but severe and at times almost undriveable turbo lag that was particularly problematic on some of the season's slower circuits. With a lot of hard work from Renault and persistence and patience on the part of Jabouille the car's problems were gradually overcome. By the 1979 season (and particularly so after the introduction of a twin turbo version of the Gordini V6 power plant) at the mid point of the year, Renault's ground effect cars for Jabouille and new team mate Rene Arnoux were now challenging for race victories.

Jean-Pierre took a first pole position for both Renault and himself the third round in South Africa that year.
The high altitude of the circuit and the consequent thin atmosphere played into the turbo engine's hands, allowing it to breath where the normally aspirated engines were gasping for air. At the French GP at Dijon Jabouille took pole and won the race to claim his maiden victory. A further pole at the Italian GP, plus two more in 1980 and a second and final win at the Austrian GP the same year were followed by a suspension failure in the Canadian race, the impact from which led to a badly broken leg for the Frenchman, just days after he had signed to race for Ligier in 1981. He never recovered sufficiently from his injuries to be competitive in Formula One again and after four failures to qualify from four attempts for Ligier he left single seat racing behind and enjoyed a successful career in sports and touring car racing during the mid 1980s.

A senseless waste of a career.

Didier Pironi (1982 German GP - Hockenheim): Didier was another driver to rise through the ranks of the state sponsored French motorsport organisation of the 1970s and make it to Formula One. He also followed what would become a well trodden path for Frenchmen in the top tier of motorsport by racing for Tyrrell, making his F1 debut for them at the start of the 1978 season. He showed sufficient speed during his two seasons there to make the step up to the more competitive Ligier outfit who had cracked the ground effect concept the previous year with their JS11 car.

He took his first victory at the 1980 Belgian GP at Zolder and impressed so much during the rest of the season with a raft of podium and points scoring finishes that by 1981 he had been installed as the legendary Gilles Villeneuve's team mate at Ferrari. During his debut season with the Maranello team he generally did not have the outright pace of Villeneuve but was less prone to throwing it off the circuit during races. For 1982 Ferrari had finally cracked ground effect and turbo technology. They had a car that was both fast yet reliable and looked set to dominate. Early in the season however at the San Marino GP and in the midst of a FISA boycott that saw only a small number of cars competing, Pironi and Villeneuve became embroiled in a last lap controversy when Didier overtook Gilles in a move that the Canadian believed went back on an earlier agreement the two had.

Villeneuve was visibly furious on the podium afterwards, vowed never to speak to Pironi again and was killed two weeks later in the last few minutes of Saturday qualifying at Zolder. The fall out from Villeneuve's death as well an incident later in the season in which the Italian, Riccardo Paletti was killed after crashing into the back of Pironi's stalled Ferrari at the start the Canadian GP seemed to adversely affect Didier's mindset. By the time of the German GP Pironi was leading the championship and odds on for the title. The race weekend was affected by heavy rain and despite already being top of the time sheets when the weather struck he continued to lap on the limit purposely during qualifying. Whilst trying to overtake Derek Daly's Williams he did not see Alain Prost's Renault hidden in a cloud of spray.

Ploughing into the back of his countryman's car at high speed caused his car to pitch into a terrifying aerial accident that had many similarities to the one that killed Villeneuve. Pironi stated that the last thing he remembered about the accident was seeing the tree tops around the circuit as his Ferrari pirouetted through the air. It smashed down nose first, badly crushing his legs. Until Pironi's last days he swore blind that the FIA chief medical officer, Professor Syd Watkins had stated that he wanted to amputate his legs to remove him from the wreckage of his accident. In the first volume of his memoirs entitled 'Life at the Limit' Watkins insisted that his never happened and was something Pironi imagined in a delirium of pain and shock.

It took four long years for Pironi to have recovered enough to even drive a Formula One car at speed again. During 1986 he tested for the French AGS and Ligier teams and whilst still quick was also still in a great deal of pain. That coupled with various other factors convinced him to turn his back on single seat racing forever and take up power boat racing instead. He was killed doing this on 23rd August 1987 when his boat hit the wake of an oil tanker and flipped over. He and his crew were all killed instantly. A few weeks later his girlfriend gave birth to twin boys who she named Didier and Gilles in honour of the two Ferrari team mates...

Laffite did more for Ligier than anyone.

Jacques Laffite (1986 British GP - Brands Hatch): Jacques spent the majority of his career in Formula One with the Ligier team, but also had a couple of spells with the British Williams team. Unfortunately for him however, both of these spells fell during periods in which Williams were far from consistent title challengers and were rarely even in the hunt for race wins. His best days as a racing driver were with Guy Ligier's team, where he took six of their nine all time Formula One race victories. His best season in the sport was in 1979 at the wheel of the ground effect JS11 with it's distinctive "teapot" style air intake.

Laffite and Ligier won that year's opening two rounds in Argentina and Brazil, but thereafter unreliability and the rest of the field overhauling the JS11's early performance advantage saw him fall back to fourth in the championship by the season's end. This was an overall result Jacques was able to equal in 1980 and 1981, taking one win the first year and two the second. A title challenge was again undermined by unreliability both years and after a disastrous 1982 he went back for a second spell at Williams after driving for the outfit in their infancy for a couple of years starting in 1974.

Two further years followed with the team from Didcot, but points were few and far between. A final spell at Ligier beginning in 1985 seemed to signal a return to form for both team and driver as Laffite took three third place finishes that season as well as two further ones by the time the 1986 British GP at Brands Hatch came around. Going into the race weekend he was tied with Graham Hill as the driver with the most F1 starts at that point in time. However, at the start of the race Jacques' car was pitched head first into the barriers by an accident on the first lap. The Ligier was the last car in the field to still be made from aluminium rather than the much stronger carbon fibre. The front end of his car was completely crushed during the impact and Laffite sustained multiple serious leg injuries. It took nearly an hour to free the Frenchman from the wreckage. In his forties at the time of the crash it signaled the end of his time as an F1 driver. He later raced in touring cars and became a commentator on French television.

Jean Alesi was dogged by bad luck and timing in his career.

Jean Alesi (Test session at Ferrari's Mugello after the first round of the 1994 season): Jean was yet another French F1 race winner to begin his career with the Tyrrell team. His first race was at the mid season French GP of 1989 behind the wheel of the Dr. Harvey Postlethwaite designed Tyrrell 018 chassis. Steady improvement from both driver and team during Jean's first year in the sport led to a couple of respectable fourth placed finishes which laid the ground work for his spectacular performances at the beginning of the 1990 season.

At the opening race of the year and driving the old 018 chassis, Alesi shocked everyone by taking on the mighty Ayrton Senna and Mclaren, slugging it out and trading places over a number of laps round the American street circuit. He eventually finished second to the great Brazilian and did so again three races later in Monaco. His early season form was enough to put him on the radar or all the top teams, despite a combination of poor reliability and insufficient development of the car due to lack of funds causing the Tyrrell's performances to fall away. He almost signed for Williams during this period and it is one of the great "what if" moments in Formula One of how Alesi's career may have panned out if he had chosen to join them at what would have proved exactly the right time, just as they began their domination of the sport through the early to mid 1990's.

As it was he followed his heart and signed for Ferrari for the beginning of the 1991 season at precisely the wrong time, just as the team from Maranello's performance hit an all time low. He struggled on gamely driving a succession of awful cars but was dogged by the appalling reliability of the machinery at his disposal, often losing out on points scoring finishes as a result. An improvement came for the start of the 1994 season with the return of John Barnard to Ferrari who redesigned the car from the ground up. After one round of the season Jean badly hurt his neck during a testing accident at Ferrari's Mugello circuit that could have ended his career in single seaters and saw him miss rounds two and three at Aida and Imola. He was back for Monaco and while Ferrari's improvement in form saw team mate Gerhard Berger win that year's accident hit German GP at Hockenheim, Jean had to wait until the following year for his one and only GP win at the Canadian round.

For once it was he who profited from the bad luck of others and managed to cross the finishing line in first place before running out of petrol on the slowing down lap. Having weathered the worst of Ferrari's early 1990's slump he was shown the door along with Berger to make way for the Schumacher juggernaut arriving at the Prancing Horse. He saw out the remainder of his career to largely diminishing returns with Bennetton, Sauber, Prost and finally in 2001 spending the last five rounds of the championship with the Jordan team after swithing to them mid season from Prost F1 before leaving Formula One for good.

Oliver's career never recaptured it's early momentum.

Olivier Panis (1997 Canadian GP - Circuit Gilles Villeneuve): Olivier made his Formula One debut for the Ligier team in 1994 and proved outstandingly consistent, finishing 15 out of the 16 races that season. To cap this superb debut year he even managed to finish second and ahead of team mate Eric Bernard at the demolition derby esque German GP which saw most of the field eliminated during a huge multiple car pile up on the first lap. That and two other points scoring finishes was good for 11th overall in the championship. The following year he improved further on this, placing 8th overall.

In 1995 he took another second place at the season finale Australian GP, despite finishing two laps down on race winner Damon Hill. He also scored two fourth places, one fifth and one sixth. 1996 did not prove to be as successful overall, however he did achieve the crowning glory of his career by winning the Monaco Grand Prix. Despite starting 14th  he carved a path through the field in wet/dry conditions and was running in a fine third place before mechanical gremlins eliminated first Damon Hill then Jean Alesi late in the race. This proved to be Ligier's last and Panis' only race win in Formula One though. However, at the end of the season the team fell into the ownership of Alain Prost and the following year racing under the Prost F1 name looked set to continue the largely upward curve of his career to date.

A series of fantastic points scoring drives early in the season including two podiums bode well, but then he broke both his legs in a head on smash with the wall during the Canadian GP. He missed seven races of the season, but was fit enough to return with three races to spare. His form never quite matched that which he enjoyed prior to his accident sadly and in 1998 he failed to score a single point. There were signs of a recovery in 1999 as his qualifying performances improved (peaking with third on the grid for the French GP) but points scoring finishes remained few and far between. Still he had shown enough to get the attention of some of the bigger teams again and was offered a test with both Williams and Mclaren.

He opted for Mclaren and gave a good account of himself, but eventually had to settle for a drive with the erratic BAR team. He stayed with them through their metamorphosis into the Toyota works team, but a succession of substandard cars made it impossible to know if his form had ever truly reached it's pre accident levels. His final season in F1 was in 2004. Since then he has busied himself as Toyota's test driver and in other formulas of motorsport, but left behind a career that failed to reach the heights that it might have...

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The Williams FW16

The Williams FW16 will forever be remembered as the car that Ayrton Senna crashed and died in during the 1994 San Marino GP at the Imola circuit near the Italian city of Bologna. An accident at the start of the race when Pedro Lamy's Lotus ploughed into the back of JJ Lehto's stalled Bennetton on the grid spread debris all across the track and brought out the safety car. 1994 was the first season in which a safety car had been used and compared to the vehicles used in modern day F1 those used at the start of this season were under powered and out of their depth trying to keep a field of F1 drivers behind them. They simply could not complete a lap fast enough to stop the tyres of the race cars behind them from becoming dangerously cold.

The aftermath of Senna's accident on lap 7 of the 1994 San Marino GP.

Whilst the exact causes of Senna's accident will never be known it has been speculated that the low temperatures of his tyres after several laps behind the safety car had caused the air pressure inside them to drop so much that this had lowered the FW16's ride height to extremely low levels. When combined with the flat undertray of that generation of Formula One cars and their titanium skid blocks this made the chances that the car might bottom out, or slide along on it's undertray rather than its wheels excessively high. When a car travel along on it's undertray in this fashion control of the vehicle becomes next to impossible and a car's steering momentarily redundant.

It has been suggested that Senna, in his desperation to keep his new rival Michael Schumacher behind him in his better handling Bennetton-Ford had been taking a potentially faster line through the flat out Tamburello kink but one that required driving over a large and destabilising bump in the track to do so. When Senna's Williams clipped this bump it caused his vehicle to spear violently off to the right and slam into the outside wall to the right of the track on lap 7 of the race, the second lap after the restart.

Ayrton Senna being hounded by Michael Schumacher after the safety car period at the beginning ended and shortly before he crashed to his death.

Senna sustained two separate head injuries in the accident, either of which would have been fatal on their own. The first was when a piece of the suspension from the front right hand wheel of his car was pitched backwards during the impact and pierced the front of his skull. The second was a severe fracture of the rear of the skull, caused by his head being flung backwards against the bodywork of his car during the crash.

Various theories of a snapped steering column, broken rear suspension and Senna himself blacking out at the wheel have all been discounted with the evidence available, leaving only a series of coincidental occurrences happening simultaneously to a driver under extreme pressure and in a badly handling car as the remaining possible causes of the accident.

The field gathered before the chicane at the end of the lap after the red flag had been shown following Senna's accident.

But how did Williams, the team who's car had been the class of the field since at least mid 1991 manage to build such a beast of a chassis that even the great Ayrton Senna was having trouble controlling it? The answer to this lies in the banning of what had been Williams F1 team's trump card, their untouchable active suspension system. Using a series of sensors and a real time adjustable hydraulic damper system the team had been able to build a car they could keep perfectly level and stable no matter what it was doing on a race track. Braking, accelerating, turning and going over bumps in the track surface in a car with passive suspension all cause an F1 chassis to pitch, yaw or jolt. This movement of the car will cause it's downforce generating surfaces to be in a sub optimal position and thus provide less grip. A car with active suspension could effectively dial out this movement and keep the car perfectly stable at all times.

When Williams first introduced the system in the FW14B the car was up to two seconds a lap faster than it's nearest rival at any given circuit, but this advantage was steadily eroded as other teams developed their own active suspension systems. At the beginning of 1993 the rules were changed reducing the permitted width of the rear wheels from 18 inches to 15 inches. When the successor to the FW14B, the FW15C was introduced this rule change, along with moving some of the active suspension components at the rear of the car to improve aerodynamic performance upset the vehicle's weight distribution and thus handling. According to Alain Prost this made the it much more difficult to drive on the limit than people realised. Williams were only able to get away with this unpredictable handling profile because the car's inherent speed was sufficient that it need not be driven on the limit very often.

A model  of the Williams FW14B displaying the detailing of the front end active suspension on the vehicle.

When this speed advantage was taken away after the banning of active suspension for the start of the 1994 F1 season it exposed how difficult a car the Williams had become to drive on the limit. This nervousness was compounded by a design flaw in the cars front suspension design that was not detected and corrected until the Imola '94 weekend itself. The team were also at the disadvantage of having to learn how to run their cars on passive, or spring based suspension again after a longer period of running active suspension full time than any other team. This naturally meant that more had changed in the general design of the Williams car over this longer period, making any previous data they had to go on about traditional suspension setups less relevant.

After Senna's fatal accident sweeping rule ranges were introduced to the permitted designs of F1 cars in order to slow them down, but also to make them more stable. The FIA had forced through the banning of active suspension too quickly for such a fundamental piece of technology and the mad scramble that ensued by teams to switch back to passive suspension had created a field of edgey, difficult to drive cars.

Partly in response to trying to maximise performance under the new regulations being progressively introduced during mid 1994 and partly to try and address the nervous handling of the FW16 a substantially updated version of the car was introduced at the German GP weekend, dubbed the FW16B. This updated design featured shorter sidepods in order to accommodate larger barge boards in front of them. These were required to try and recover some of the downforce lost after the banning of trailing endplates running behind the front wheels from the front wings following from the Spanish GP onwards.

The heavily modified FW16B been driven by Damon Hill late in the 1994 season.

The car also featured a longer wheel base to try and add some stability to it's handling. Damon Hill once again proved his worth as driver who excelled at developing a car along with a team and by the time the run in to the 1994 title showdown had begun, Williams once again had a car that was the class of the field. A final, never raced version entitled FW16C was built for use at the beginning of the team's 1994 winter test program. It was used to evaluate the new three litre engine built by Renault for the 1995 season in accordance with FIA rules reducing engine capacity down from the previous 3.5 litre limit from the beginning of '95 onwards.

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