THE GROUND BENEATH THE WING

Wings press a car down from above. Colin Chapman’s next idea was to pull it down from below. Lotus’s aerodynamicist Peter Wright found in the wind tunnel that a properly shaped underbody was sucked toward the road as speed rose; sliding skirts then sealed the low-pressure zone beneath the Lotus 78, trapping the effect.[112] Mario Andretti said the car felt as if it were painted to the road.[112]

The 78 won five races and six poles in 1977, but five engine failures cost Andretti the title to Niki Lauda.[112] The 1978 Lotus 79 perfected the idea — it debuted at the Belgian Grand Prix by taking pole by more than a second, a margin that looked like a misprint.[113] In it, Andretti would not be denied again.

Ground effect set off an arms race of wonderful strangeness. Gordon Murray’s Brabham BT46B “fan car” won the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix with Lauda by some 34 seconds, a huge fan at the back sucking it to the road.[170] Brabham argued the fan’s main job was engine cooling, not downforce; the stewards deemed the car legal, and the governing body agreed.[170] Yet it never raced again — withdrawn voluntarily, reportedly so Bernie Ecclestone would not alienate the privateer teams behind his growing power base.[170] Two years earlier, the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34, with four small front wheels, had scored the only Grand Prix win by a six-wheeled car at the same Swedish track.[171] The rulebook had not yet learned to say no.

And then the season turned black. At the 1978 Italian Grand Prix the starter lit the green light before the field had settled, funnelling cars at the first chicane into a nine-car pile-up that set Ronnie Peterson’s Lotus alight.[115] James Hunt, Clay Regazzoni and Patrick Depailler dragged Peterson from the burning car before serious burns took hold, but medical help took some twenty minutes to arrive.[115] Peterson — Andretti’s teammate — had suffered around 27 fractures, and died the next morning from a fat embolism that triggered kidney failure.[172] Riccardo Patrese was charged with manslaughter and the race director with the premature start; both were acquitted in 1981.[172]

Andretti clinched the 1978 World Championship at the very race that killed his teammate, the celebration swallowed by grief.[173] He remains, to this day, the last American to win the Formula One World Championship.[174]

The idea Lotus loosed under the car reshaped the sport — and then frightened it. After a run of severe accidents, ground effect was effectively outlawed for 1983, when flat undersides became mandatory.[80] The downforce had come from the ground. So, in the end, had the danger.