No seatbelts and aluminium fuel tanks: how F1 cars have changed over 75 years
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Three-quarters of a century ago, a new era of motorsport roared into life on a former RAF airfield in the English countryside. This weekend, Formula 1 returns to Silverstone — the birthplace of the championship — for a landmark celebration of speed, innovation and endurance.
The drivers lining up today possess the same nerve and precision as those early trailblazers who took the grid in 1950. But the machines they command are almost unrecognisable — transformed by decades of engineering evolution, safety advances and growing environmental scrutiny.
As F1 marks its 75th anniversary, the Financial Times examines the sport’s dramatic transformation — from postwar improvisation to cutting-edge global spectacle — through the shifting landscape of car design and regulation.
The postwar beginnings
F1 was created by the Federation International de l’Automobile (FIA) to restart international motorsport after the hiatus of the second world war. It was by no means the beginning of motorsport; cars were raced soon after the invention of the internal combustion engine. The first “Grand Prix” took place in France in 1906 and the racing calendar began to grow after the end of the first world war, during the 1920s with the first Monaco Grand Prix taking place in 1929.
By the mid-1930s motor racing had become so popular in Europe that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime used it as a propaganda tool for German technology, backing the dominant Mercedes and Auto Union factory teams.
The first F1 Grand Prix that took place in 1950, featured 21 cars on the grid; one more than will line up this weekend at Silverstone. But these were mostly prewar machines, which had been dusted off to compete in the new world championship.
The Alfa Romeo that won the first F1 race and the 1950 world championship featured a 1.5 litre eight cylinder, supercharged engine, generating 350bhp. Like rival cars, it had drum brakes and no seatbelt and the engine was mounted in front, with a long driveshaft that passed between the driver’s legs to a differential, which powered the rear wheel drive. The aluminium fuel tank was in the back.
The engine remained in the front, and the sport was dominated by Italian and German teams, until 1958 when British engineer John Cooper came up with the first big design innovation by moving it to the back. Although Ferrari won that year’s championship with a front-engined car, Cooper’s car secured top spot the following season and convinced all the teams to switch to the rear-engine design.
The Cooper design made the cars lighter and more nimble, powered by a 2.5 litre, four cylinder engine with just 240bhp. They still had no seatbelts.
“When you look at the logic of having the engine behind the driver and the gearbox bolted directly to the engine, rather than have an engine at the front and a gearbox and differential at the back, the layout of a rear-engined car is so much simpler and more logical,” says Sir Patrick Head, one of the most successful British designers and technical leaders in F1 history. “Also with the engine behind the driver, particularly when they started laying the driver back in the early 1960s, you had a much smaller frontal area for drag.”
Innovative British teams such as Lotus, BRM, McLaren, Brabham and Williams came to the fore as the cars evolved into the 1970s. Seatbelts were introduced as aerodynamic wings appeared, which created downforce and greatly increased cornering speeds.
Unfortunately, the safety of the cars was not commensurately improved. There were many fatalities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including some of the sport’s biggest names at the time such as Jim Clark and Jochen Rindt. This prompted the FIA to focus on rule changes to improve safety.
The fuel tanks were still made of aluminium, which were the reason for some deadly fiery crashes. So in the late 1970s new rules brought in aerospace-style bag tanks, made from Kevlar reinforced with rubber, which were less prone to rupture in a heavy impact.
Carbon composites drive greater safety
The next significant revolution in F1 design and safety came in 1981, when McLaren innovated by replacing its aluminium chassis with a carbon composite one. The idea was that composites, when layered, are stronger and lighter than aluminium and give the chassis stiffness. John Watson gave McLaren’s carbon car its first victory in the British GP at Silverstone the same year.
But initially not everyone was won over. “In the early days the carbon was very brittle — it just exploded,” says Head. “I wasn’t convinced about carbon being the way to go from a safety point of view. I don’t think even they [McLaren] had any real understanding how it would stand up in a big accident. Then John Watson had a massive accident at Monza, where the engine broke off the back, but the monocoque stood up very well. From that moment on composite as a chassis structure became accepted.” And it has been mandated as the default material in the F1 rules ever since.
That 1981 McLaren weighed 585kg and was powered by a 3.0-litre eight-cylinder engine, generating 510bhp.
The F1 regulations have changed many times since then, with increasingly complex aerodynamics the dominant factor in car performance. The FIA has continued to evolve safety measures as the speeds increased, with stricter crash testing and more robust driver protection.
In 2014 the FIA sought to make the sport more environmentally sustainable and mandated highly efficient 1.6 litre V6 hybrid turbo engines producing more than 1,000bhp. With the gradual increase in safety features, the weight of F1 cars has crept up to 800kg, making them bigger and less nimble.
The 2022 introduction of “ground effect” aerodynamics addressed a long-standing issue in F1. Since the late 1990s, overtaking had become increasingly difficult, leading to less thrilling races and a decline in the sport’s appeal.
Ground effect works by reducing the air pressure under the car, sucking it on to the track. That makes the latest generation of F1 cars less reliant for downforce and performance on the front and rear wings than their predecessors.
This was achieved by a redesign of the underside of the car to force the air through a narrowing channel to create the so-called Venturi effect, allowing one car to follow another closely through corners without losing performance in the turbulent wake of the one in front.
Current F1 cars are extremely complex: each car is fitted with more than 300 sensors, measuring more than 4,000 parameters. The car transmits more than 3 gigabytes of telemetry data during a race that engineers analyse in real time to look for performance gains.
As the cars have become more sophisticated, staffing levels have grown with more skilled technicians needed to build and run each team’s two cars every season.
Even as recently as the early 1980s, a team would typically have one designer, two other engineers plus a handful of mechanics and support staff. Now an F1 team has up to 1,000 employees. There are well over 100 staff working in the design offices of teams such as McLaren or Red Bull Racing.
The one thing that has not changed is the main metric by which success in F1 has always been measured: lap time. The teams today may have infinitely more power, data and tools at their disposal to chase fractions of a second than the pioneers of the 1950s, but the stopwatch never lies.
Graphics and illustrations by Ian Bott and Bob Haslett
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