#395 How Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport

**David Senra** (0:00)
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What you're actually looking for the whole time is the unfair advantage. No one understood this better than a former Royal Air Force pilot whose first love was airplanes. His name was Colin Chapman. And over more than 20 years, he did more to influence F1 design than any other person in history. This was a man who turned Formula One from a playground for gentlemen mechanics into rocket science. All of it stemmed from his singular purpose in life, which was to extract every ounce of performance from whichever engine he happened to be dealt. What Chapman realized first, and far more dramatically than any of his contemporaries, was that there was more to this racing business than pure horsepower. Engine capacity didn't matter if he couldn't first solve the paradox of making his cars as light as possible while also engineering them to stick to the racetrack. His mantra was simple. Adding power makes you fast on the straights, he said. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere. So he's got several quotes around this mantra of his, that adding power makes you faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere. He would say simplify than add lightness. He also said any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy. So he designed his cars were much more like aircraft, built with just enough material to do the job and not an ounce more. They were rarely the most powerful, but they'd be nimble and efficient and built above all to outrun the competition through superior design. That's just one of many reasons why I think there's so many great parallels for entrepreneurs and company builders. In a book about Formula One, so Chapman's laboratory, we can experiment with all his eccentric ideas, was the Lotus Racing Team, which he founded in 1952 with 25 pounds he borrowed from his girlfriend. He established himself in the North London neighborhood of Hornsey. This is an area where his father ran a pub next to a railway station. It had sustained heavy bombing by the Nazis during World War II and did not seem a likely place to produce an engineering maverick. So the only spot Chapman could find for his first garage was a block of stables full of empty beer crates behind his dad's pub. But as it turned out, a unique set of circumstances was brewing all over Britain at the time that would turn the country into a cradle for high-level motorsport. As the dust settled after World War II, Britain remained in a state of deep deprivation and under a national rationing program. But what it did have in ample numbers was dozens of unused RAF airfields and a supply of war veterans who knew their way around an engine. It was no coincidence that by 1952, when the UK had three permanent racetracks, two of them had been wartime airfields. Chapman grew his engineering ranks by recruiting from the aircraft companies. He had a really interesting insight. What was a race car anyway, if not an upside-down airplane wing? Air flow and weight were everything. This was an era before easy access to wind tunnels. So the Lotus boys had to come up with creative solutions to measure how their inventions minimized drag. For one test, they fitted fins all over a car to see how they flexed at high speeds. And the only way to get a close look at them in real time, one engineer decided, was to strap himself to the hood for a lap and pray he didn't end up as roadkill. Chapman's gang would stop at nothing to be just a little bit quicker, and soon everyone knew it. At least one rival referred to them as that mad lot, a slight that the intensely proud, easily offended Chapman would not have taken well. A short man with a big chip on his shoulder, he devoted much of his life at Lotus to proving people wrong. And so he's going to come up with a series of innovations. They call him the mad scientist of F1. So here's one example. Team Lotus came around to what was known as the mid-engine design, which really meant moving the engine behind the driver from its regular position in front of him. This might not seem so unusual until you remember that the natural order of ground locomotion until that point had always been a horse or a locomotive pulling the rest of the show, not pushing it. Chapman let his imagination run wild. Ideas poured out of him so fast that as soon as they were shuffled into development, Chapman was already on to the next thing. In fact, I read something that was hilarious. His colleagues would nickname him the White Tornado because he was so high energy. Turns out it says that he had manic energy, but he was also, it says his manic energy was boosted by a regime of uppers. So he's on some kind of stimulants. They could make him impossible to work for. I know you believe that what you think I said is what I want, read a sign that he kept on his desk. But are you sure that what you heard is really what I meant? However chaotic the process, Chapman spent the 1960s producing a string of masterpieces, each with its own game changing innovation. Again, I just love the idea that his nickname was the mad scientist of F1. When most cars still used frames where the structure sat on a skeleton of steel tubes, Chapman produced the Lotus 25 It was a single hull and was inspired like everything else he did by airplane design. The central frame of the car was one piece of molded aluminum. In Chapman's internal quest to cut weight from his cars, this was the equivalent of a three-week juice cleanse. There was one thing that Chapman was prepared to add to his car before anyone else, and it came from his lifelong struggle to round up enough money to go racing. In this case, it was a sponsored paint job. I can't believe this guy also invented the sponsored paint job in F1 for nearly two decades. So they had been racing F1 for two decades up until this point. And before Chapman had the idea to sell that paint job, to sell space on his cars, two sponsors, F1 cars were simply painted according to the nationality of the racing team. It may seem trivial to you and I today, but at the time, this was a shocking break from tradition, which is obviously one of the main points of what I want to talk to you about today and every single person in a profile is the fact that they just came in, they studied how everybody else was doing things, said, Hey, you know what? I have other, I have different ideas. I'm going to pursue a different way of doing things. They're all very entrepreneurial. And so when he talked about inventing the sponsored paint job, he just thought it was very pragmatic. He's like, I'm going to go race on Sunday and I'm going to go sell on Monday. And all the money coming into the team, then he could then use for more inventions. So it says not only did the deal fill the team's coffers, it also kicked off a 40 year spell of unbroken association between F1 and the tobacco industry. Now here's the crazy thing. He sold the first sponsored paint job was to I think Golden Leaf Tobacco. It was $85,000 or 85,000 pounds for a year. Over the next few decades, the tobacco industry alone is going to pour 4.5 billion into F1. All that started because Chapman was just looking for a way to pay the bills for his racing team so he could just invent more. The new source of income was enough to keep the lights on a little longer in the Lotus garage, where Chapman continued to live up to his reputation as F1's resident mad scientist. Like all mad scientists, he insisted he wasn't mad, simply misunderstood, in particular by the ever-expanding Formula One rulebook. In his mind, the whole set of regulations should have been able to fit on the back of an envelope. This is what his proposal was. Pick the maximum capacity of the engines, choose the type of fuel, and specify that the resulting car has to fit in a box so long, so wide, and so high. Then we can really get down to making a car. Not that the regulation slowed him down much. Chapman was so relentless in his pursuit of an edge that his own drivers began to wonder if the part of the car that he cared least about was the one strapped into the cockpit. Tragedy was such a regular occurrence in Formula One at the time that two dozen drivers were killed in the first 15 years of the series alone. Three had been at the wheel of one of Chapman's cars. So in his private memos, he actually grappled with this ethical line between pushing boundaries and protecting lives, and he was writing notes to himself. It says, a racing car has only one objective, to win motor races. If it does not, it is nothing but a waste of time and money. It does not matter how safe it is. If it doesn't consistently win, it is nothing. Brutally frank, these words lay bare Chapman's competitive creed. He compared a Formula One driver to a mountaineer. Each knew the risks of the climb. The danger was part of the pursuit. And one of his drivers had an accident before he winds up having a fatal accident, and he writes Chapman a letter. This guy named Joakim Rint. And part of the thing he says is honestly, your cars are so quick that we could still be competitive with a few extra pounds used to make the weakest parts stronger. Please give my suggestion some thought. I can only drive a car in which I have some confidence, and I feel the point of no confidence is quite near. 16 months later, Rint was dead. A brake shaft in his car failed at the Italian Grand Prix. He hurtled through a poorly installed crash barrier where the impact caused his own seatbelt to slit his throat. The Italian authorities charged Chapman with manslaughter since he was the man responsible for the car. He was acquitted six years later. One of Chapman's rivals said that man should have his own private graveyard. In 1977, Chapman was reinvigorated by an eruption of fresh ideas, and if he got this idea right, the car would feel like it was cornering on rails. Chapman laid out all of his thinking in a rambling 27-page memo to the Lotus R&D department. The crux of it was an insight that no one else had fully considered yet, and the idea they refer to as ground effects is generating downforce but from underneath the car. Chapman wondered what if he could add to that effect from underneath the car. The concept worked so dramatically that when Mario Andretti asked if he could try it out at a Grand Prix in late 1976, so they had started building the prototype in 1975, it was going to be ready for 77 Halfway through the 76 season, Chapman had it ready, so his driver is like, hey, let's use it right now. Chapman responded with a firm no, because he didn't want the other teams seeing what fresh hell he was about to unleash on them. Once Andretti finally got behind the wheel, he said that the Lotus 78 might as well have been painted to the road. That season, Chapman's latest creation was by far the quickest, most advanced car on the grid. The next year's car was even better. Mario Andretti said the Lotus 79 was the closest thing that he'd ever driven to perfect. He won the championship. The celebration was muted. Andretti's Lotus teammate Ronnie Peterson had been involved in a fiery crash at the start of the race and died that night. It was the fifth fatality of a Lotus driver. That tragic championship would be Chapman's last, but his worst decisions still lay ahead. This is the part of the story where John DeLorean makes an appearance. DeLorean was a smooth-talking former General Motors executive. DeLorean approached Chapman with a couple of proposals in the late 1970s. He had a scheme to build DeLorean cars in Northern Ireland by using grants from the British government. With the UK facing mass unemployment, the government signed up to the tune of tens of millions of pounds, completely unaware that DeLorean's company was a financial house of cards. Lotus would help design the chassis for a fee of $17 million. Only none of that money ever found its way to Lotus for developing the car, so British prosecutors had been tipped off to this whole arrangement. They alleged that DeLorean had pocketed $8.5 million of the government fee, while Chapman had taken $8 million for himself. In the fall of 1982, DeLorean was arrested in a sting operation while attempting to buy 220 kilograms of cocaine with the attempt to distribute. In England, Chapman could feel the walls closing in. Weeks later, wrought by stress, he died of a heart attack. Chapman, potentially facing a decade in prison, was only 54 years old. One story that circulated at the time that he actually faked his own death, even with six driver's titles, seven Constructure Championships, and a half a dozen revolutionary designs, a stage heart attack, and subsequent disappearance was one bit of engineering beyond the talents of Colin Chapman. His legacy was generations of engineers who made it their life's purpose to bend every rule in Formula One in the name of going faster. Their diligence, sharpened by relentless competition, would put the sport on the cutting edge of automotive creativity. Prototypes went from their sleep-deprived brains straight on to the tarmac in a matter of weeks. If they could imagine it and it wasn't expressly forbidden, then they raced it for as long as they could until it was legislated out of existence. To anyone who had ever raced, the men responsible for pushing the boundaries of Formula One were certifiable geniuses. That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Formula, How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Re-engineered F1 into the world's fastest growing sport and is written by Joshua Robinson and Johnathan Clegg. I was not expecting at all to do this episode this week. In fact, I'm working on two other Founder episodes at the same time. But I was talking to Peter Attia. Peter Attia is a doctor, he's a podcaster, now he's a best-selling author, but he's also completely obsessed with Formula One and has been for a long time. I told him I just got into the sport, and so he gave me this book recommendation, and then he gave me another documentary that I watched twice. I'll link both down below the documentary. You can actually watch it for free on YouTube. It's called One. But once I started this book and I started listening to the audiobook first, I listened to the audiobook twice actually before I read the book, the reason I knew I had to do an episode is because I was completely compelled. I could not put this book down. And so instead of focusing on just a single individual like I normally do, I picked out three people. There's probably eight, ten different interesting people that I could do episodes on alone. But I picked out three people I just want to give you like short profiles on and pull out some of the most unique ideas I have. And what I said earlier is why these people are so fascinating to me. They came into something that had already existed. They looked at what everybody else was doing, their modus operandi, their way of doing things. Like, well, I have my own ideas and I'm going to spend a lot of my life energy and my time and my money and my resources to seeing these ideas come to fruition. So Colin Chapman was the mad scientist where he's focused on actually building the car and the next person I want to talk to you about, his nickname is F1 Supremo. This is Bernie Ecclestone. Bernie made more money off of F1 than anybody else. And so his innovation is actually in the business. How do you promote this very unique sport? And then how do you make it into a business? Because when he comes into it, most of the people are losing money racing. There is no sustainable business model. It was very fractured. And I think he just got a ton of really interesting ideas on how to actually build the business of F1. So it says, Bernie Ecclestone had a lot of reasons to admire Enzo Ferrari. When he first entered the sport in 1970 as a sharp used car dealer who turned himself into a driver agent, Ecclestone knew that Enzo had been a force to be reckoned with for nearly 20 years. Not only did Enzo wield tremendous influence over the direction of Formula One, but Enzo learned that there was more to this whole racing game than winning races. As Ferrari understood that image matter, that a veneer of class mattered, and more than anything getting your way mattered, the sport is on the table, Enzo once told Bernie, and the business is underneath it. These were values that Ecclestone had understood instinctively since the school playground, when he sold cookies and buns at a markup, having just bought them from the local bakery with the money from his newspaper route. As a kid, he knew he had a scrap for every penny.