F1 in America: The Grand Prix stars who dominated the Brickyard and how F1 changed the Indy 500 forever

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Both have top speeds of around 235mph, depending on the tracks and aero setting they are run in, although F1 cars are generally considered to be more nimble on the streets and circuits.

But that close resemblance wasn’t always the case… In fact, its roots go back to the pioneering work of triple world champion Jack Brabham and designer Ron Tauranac, who were persuaded in November 1960 by Indycar racer Rodger Ward to testing his low-key T53 Cooper F1 car at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, ‘the Brickyard,’ en route to the US Grand Prix at Riverside.

Large front-engined Indianapolis roadsters of the day were allowed to use 2.8-litre supercharged or 4.2-litre normally aspirated engines, while Jack only had 2.5-litres at his disposal. But he lapped at 144.8 mph, less than 3 mph behind polesitter Eddie Sachs’ Dean Van Lines Ewing roadster.

Wealthy American sports car racer Jim Kimberley of Kleenex fame sponsored Jack’s entry in the 1961 race, in a slightly modified T53 powered by a modified 2.7-liter Climax four. He raced up to fourth despite a huge power deficit, helped by the speed of his agile machine through all four turns.

The taciturn Australian was delighted with a solid ninth despite the team’s inexperience with refueling and yellow flags. He may not have seemed so at the time, but the mold had been broken.

Rear-engined cars were not unknown at Indy, but the speed of Jack’s underpowered little car put the Establishment in the lead, and they didn’t like the position.

READ MORE: Jim Clark – What made him so good?

Colin Chapman was responsible for influencing the radical change, partnering with Ford and installing its 4.2-litre V8 engine in his Lotus 29 in 1963.

Only a bit of dubious politicking from the race stewards prevented the great Jim Clark from winning for the first time when the establishment closed ranks to ignore an oil leak on Parnelli Jones’ Watson roadster, who won a narrow and controversial victory over what what the Americans had come to call the “fun car”.

The writing was on the concrete walls of the Speedway, however, and after Clark led the 1964 race before his Lotus 34’s rear suspension failed, Chapman saw the Scotsman walk in the 1965 event.

From then on, whether the traditionalists liked it or not, roadsters—those beautiful front-engined monsters with angled bus steering wheels and blown-out Offenhauser engines—were dead. Nothing but a rear-engined car has won the 500 since.

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In 1966, the British F1 team rose again. Jackie Stewart could have won, Jim Clark possibly did – Jackie’s engine gave out near the end and there remains controversy as to whether there was a scoring error as the timers failed one of Clark’s laps after he survived not one , but two 360-degree turns, and at the end, it was Graham Hill in a Lola T90 who entered Victory Lane.

There, sipping the traditional winner’s drink and Jimmy sneaking up to ask if he could have made it himself, Graham brushed his Dick Dastardly mustache and evenly replied to his close friend: “No way, mate. I drank the milk.

F1 drivers at the time loved Indy, for a very good reason. The money was fabulous. Jimmy had walked away with $166,621 (about $1.5 million today) of the million-dollar prize fund in 1965.

Jochen Rindt was never a fan of all the regulations imposed on rookie drivers by USAC officials, but when he compared what he could earn from success in a 500-mile race (even if qualifying lasted a month) to his $20,000 advance from Cooper in 1967, was ridiculous.

READ MORE: Remembering Rindt: Why the Austrian runner is still so revered, 50 years after his death

So it was no surprise that, in addition to US-born regulars like Gurney and Mario Andretti, other F1 drivers like Clark, Hill, Stewart, Brabham, Rindt and Denny Hulme were strongly drawn to all that bread. Gasoline Alley. Even John Surtees was tempted to test drive his Honda RA301 there in 1968 when, oddly enough, it was one of the first cars to run the Speedway with a rear wing.

Chapman kept coming back to Indy after 1966. His wedge-turbine-powered Lotus 56 in 1968 demonstrated just how neatly such an engine could be packaged into a four-wheel-drive car, but while it was much sleeker than Jones’ 1967 STP Paxton Turbocar. , he was so fated.

BRM racer Mike Spence was killed in a 56 during a test on 7 May 1968, and Hill and Joe Leonard’s cars suffered fuel pump failure just as they were posing for a win that later went to one of the derivatives of Gurney’s F1 and designed by Len Terry. Eagles led by Bobby Unser.

Dan was never destined to win the great race on home soil, but Mario scored his only success in 1969, followed for the next two years by Al Unser Snr’s Lola T152/153-derived Johnny Lightning Colt.

READ MORE: The story of the American racer who was the only driver feared by the legendary Jim Clark

Then, in 1971, McLaren’s F1 designer Gordon Coppuck cleverly exploited the rules about rear wings (which had to be part of the bodywork). The result was a huge increase in speeds as Peter Revson took pole position at 178.696 mph in his M16, compared to Unser’s 170.221 figure in 1970.

McLaren had to wait a year before Mark Donohue won Roger Penske’s M16B, but Johnny Rutherford would drive a works M16C/D to victory in 1974 and an M16E to victory in 1976.

In 1978, Al Snr’s third win, in Eric Broadley’s Lola T500, spelled the death knell for the legendary Offenhauser four-cylinder engine and ushered in further influence in F1 as it was powered by the version Indy’s turbocharged of Keith Duckworth’s famous Cosworth DFV V8, the DFX. .

That engine would win the next nine 500s until it was replaced by Mario Illien’s Ilmor Chevrolet V8 in 1988. John Barnard designed the Chaparral 2K with which Rutherford took a third win in 1980, and then Robin Herd’s March Engineering firm saw its 83C, 84C, 85C and 86C Cosworth-powered racers take over the events from 1983 to 1986 courtesy of Tom Sneva, Rick Mears, Danny (spin-and-win) Sullivan and Bobby Rahal, before that dominance came to an end.

READ MORE: The story of America’s lesser-known Grand Prix winner

Al Snr took a ripped 86C-DFX out of showroom retirement to his record-breaking fourth win in 1987, and Lola’s final success came in 1990 with Arie Luyendyk in a T90/00-Chevrolet.

Meanwhile, some of the Penske cars were built in the UK at Poole in Dorset by mechanics who had worked on their short-lived F1 team in 1976; they won the 1989 race in a PC18 driven by former world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, who repeated in a PC22 in 1993.

By then, pioneering work by Barnard and Ron Dennis at McLaren in 1980/81 had seen adaptations of their carbon fiber composite chassis become increasingly popular on the American scene, further marking the influence of F1.

British-made Reynard-Fords won in 1995, with future world champion Jacques Villeneuve, and in 1996 with Buddy Lazier.

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Luyendyk would win again in 1997 in a British G-Force GF01-Oldsmobile, future F1 racer Juan Pablo Montoya won the 2000 race in a GF05.

His 2015 success in a Dallara DW12-Honda capped with wins for former F1 designer Gianpaolo Dallara’s cars by Britain’s Dan Wheldon, in 2005 and 2011, and Dario Franchitti in 2007, 2010 and 2012.

As Dallara designs became the mandatory chassis for Indycar, three former F1 racers made their mark.

Marussia-Manor exile Alex Rossi won for the first time in a DW12-Honda in 2016, Super Aguri refugee Takuma Sato won in similar cars in 2017 and 2020, and former Sauber driver Marcus Ericsson won in similar cars in 2017 and 2020. he triumphed in one of the 500 miles last year.

But while F1 racers like Romain Grosjean follow in the fading footsteps of Eddie Cheever, Derek Daly, Jim Crawford, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell and Fernando Alonso to rebuild their Indycar careers, along with Christian Lundgaard, Callum Illott and Conor Daly who lost Their shot at F1, reigning race winners Alex Palou and Pato O’Ward harbor dreams of making their own crossing of the Atlantic, in the opposite direction.