Formula 1 cars in "series" production?

[TimD]

Well, not quite!

But I was reading this morning a piece about the Lotus 16, and how careful study of the appalling Lotus factory records, and magnifying glass examination of contemporary photos, brought some researchers to the conclusion there must have been five chassis that came out of the Lotus works.

Which led me to wonder, what is the Formula 1 car which has had the biggest production run? Presumably it will be one of the cars from the privateer era, as the factories will have been churning out customer cars to sell.

Or was it some design that was entirely run by the works, but was driven exclusively by Andrea de Cesaris....

[Craig]

oi!

Don't you pick on Andrea!!

[Rob29]

Difficult question this,as in the 50s & 60s cars could be F2 on Saturday & F1 on Sunday simply by changing engines.Likewise Intercontinental/Tasman/F.Libre.Cooper,Lotus,Brabham built dozens,but how to count them I will leave to someone with better brains!

[Vitesse]

IIRC there were at least 12 Lotus 49 chassis (although that probably includes at least 2 built for the 68 Tasman series) and possibly more Lotus 72s - come on you chassis beavers ... help us out on this one!

But of course, there is that old chestnut - how many Maserati 250Fs were there???

[Ray Bell]

Of 250Fs there were plenty, with Corktree being the one to expose the real numbers if you can get him to post...

Brabhams would never have made more than about a dozen of any one type in the F1 field, probably the BT23C or the BT11 would be the higher numbers, and you'd have to include Tasman cars, they were almost identical.

No, I don't think there were that many 49s, and the Tasman cars were simply F1 cars with a smaller engine. Some early chassis were rebuilt as 49Bs etc.

Some of the Coopers would be in the running, with F2 and F1 sharing the chassis, engines being swapped... have a look at the grids for some of the 1960 GPs.. they were everywhere... and cheap - alongside a Maserati.

[Vitesse]

Ray:

Having dug around a bit in Doug Nye's History of the GP Car, he records that there were twelve 49s of various sorts:

R1 Original car, debut Dutch GP 1967. Rebuilt as 49T 1968.
R2 As R1. Returned to 49 spec.and loaned to Rob Walker 1968 until R7 was ready.
R3 New car, built up overnight before British GP 1967 after suspension failure on Hill's R2. Later sold to John Love.
R4 New for South Africa 1968. Clark won first time out.
R5 The first 49B - debut Race of Champions 1968.
R6 The second 49B - first driven by Oliver, Belgium 1968. Later sold to Bonnier.
R7 New for Rob Walker, British GP 1968 - Siffert won first time out.
R8 Built as a 49T for Hill 1969. Converted to 49B.
R9 Built new for Rindt 1969. Written off Barcelona in Rindt's crash.
R10 New for Hill, Monaco 1969.
R11 Driven by Andretti, South Africa 1969 then sold to Pete Lovely.
R12 Display car for Ford. Never raced. (???)

So, not quite 12, but nearly!

However, I was wrong about the 72 - there were only nine of those!

Oh, and browsing further - there were 12 McLaren M23s as well.

BT11 - ten built (5 F1, 5 Tasman), plus the two original BT7s

BT23 - F2 car - brain fade Ray?

According to David Hodges, Brabham built 110 of the various BT21 variants, but again these aren't F1 cars.

[fines]

There was actually a thirteenth M23, but that wasn't built by McLaren, instead by BS Fabrications. Plus the converted M25, an ex-F5000 car. Of the twelve Lotus 49 chassis, three were 'recycled', ie there were in fact only nine:

R1 (=R9)
R2 (=R10)
R3
R4
R5 (=R11)
R6
R7
R8
R12

About the 250F, 35 chassis numbers were in circulation, but six of them were rebuilds of A6GCM chassis, and one was never completed as a Maserati, but as the Tec-Mec. That leaves 28, but I don't think you could possibly call that 28 cars of one type. The 1958 car didn't have much in common with the 1954 one, except for the engine, which would be like comparing the Lotus 72 to the 78!

I think the winner must've been a Cooper, but since the logs of this marque are nigh impossible to check, I'll leave the answer open...

__________________
Michael Ferner

[Ray Bell]

There were certainly BT23Cs running in Tasman and Australian Gold Star trim with Repco V8s... no much fade about that! I don't have anything here to check the chassis type numbers readily, but I thought the 23Cs were also used in F1. Then again, there still wouldn't have been many. BT11s won out on numbers because of private entrants...

I feel sure the Coopers would be the winners. The number of some types that came to Australia alone would eclipse the 49s.

[Marshal]

All of the above include significant evolution over a number of years, so they aren't really the same car. I'd have thougth the March 701 was the nearest that an F1 car ever got to series production, weren't there about 10 built in the one year?

[Roger Clark]

How about the Mercedes-Benz W196? The chassis numbers went up to 15

[Vitesse]

March 701 chassis numbers go up to 11, but there were actually twelve, as there were two cars numbered 701/1!

701/1 Works car. A
second tub with this number was built mid-season
701/2 Sold to Tyrrell
701/3 STP team car - written off in Austria
701/4 Sold to Tyrrell
701/5 Works car
701/6 Works car? Later sold to Frank Williams
701/7 Sold to Tyrrell
701/8 Sold to Colin Crabbe
701/9 Sold to Hubert Hahne
701/10 Sold to John Love
701/11 Sold to Mordaunt/Guthrie

And Mercedes? Well, the chassis numbers do go up to 15 but according to Sheldon's book numbers 1 and 11 were never raced. 2 to 8 inclusive were all raced in 1954 and in 1955 every chassis except 1, 7 and 11 was raced at least once! So, theoretically, M-B had anything up to twelve cars ready to race in 1955. Wow!!

[Roger Clark]

Originally posted by Vitesse

And Mercedes? Well, the chassis numbers do go up to 15 but according to Sheldon's book numbers 1 and 11 were never raced. 2 to 8 inclusive were all raced in 1954 and in 1955 every chassis except 1, 7 and 11 was raced at least once! So, theoretically, M-B had anything up to twelve cars ready to race in 1955. Wow!!

Apparantly they took eight cars to their last race, the 1955 Italian GP.

[Ray Bell]

Didn't a streamliner come down overnight on the special high speed transporter for Moss to drive after he tried Fangio's in practice?

They had them race-ready all right, and an article in a contemporary magazine makes this point, that while some were undergoing maintenance, there were plenty of cars race-ready - or close enough to be so in a big hurry.

[Vitesse]

Roger and Ray:
Right and right! There were indeed eight W196s at Monza and I turned up this in Setright's Grand Prix Car 1954-66:

"Mercedes-Benz ... had settled on three alternative wheelbases for their cars and the medium and shorter versions were taken to the Nurburgring in July 1955 for comparative trials. The differences resulting from the apparently minute changes of 2.5 inches are astonishing: the times of four different drivers show that the shortest car was faster but more difficult to drive than the medium-wheelbase version. At a time when the fastest recorded lap of the Ring had been 9min 43.2sec (87.5mph) in a Mercedes-Benz W163 driven by Lang in practice for the 1939 German Grand Prix, Fangio, Moss and Kling, the principal team drivers for 1955, and engineer Uhlenhaut drove the two cars with the following results:

wheelbase: 87.5 inches 85 inches
Fangio 9min 38.8 sec 9min 33.3 sec (=88.6mph)
Moss 9min 41.2 9min 35.7
Kling 9min 47.0 9min 49.0
Uhlenhaut 9min 51.8 9min 55.6

Note how both Fangio and Moss were 5.5 seconds faster in the 85-inch car, while Kling and Uhlenhaut were slower.

As a result of these tests it had been decided that the long-wheelbase car was too cumbrous for road circuits and that although the 85-inch version was fastest it was too hard to drive, involving the pilots in strain that was too severe to endure throughout the the three hours involved in a full-length Grand Prix. Accordingly the car with medium wheelbase and inboard brakes was chosen as the basic road-racing vehicle. At Monza, however, Fangio was given one of the long-wheelbase cars to try with the aerodynamic body that had not been seen in competition since the Italian Grand Prix of the previous year; for although unofficial practice had revealed that the medium-length chassis with full streamlining would be a good combination, it was found that the old original long-chassis car was undoubtedly best for handling on the banking, especially after an experimental extended nose had been added to prevent a tendency for the front end to lift at high speed.

Moss having found the streamliner very much to his liking on this circuit, he was provided with one, within two days. This was typical of the organization and power of the Mercedes-Benz racing division; their high-speed transporter was despatched post-haste from Monza back to Stuttgart, where it collected another long-chassis car, one that had not been used since Monza 1954, and brought it down to the Italian circuit, while another chassis was made and fitted with one of the 1954 bodies. So by the time the race began, the Mercedes team were fielding Fangio in a new long-chassis streamlined car with inboard brakes, Moss in a similar one with bodywork from the previous year, slightly higher and marginally inferior in shape, Kling in a new unstreamlined car with inboard brakes, and Taruffi as a guest in a medium-length car with the brakes outboard."

However, this just throws up another mystery or eight: if Sheldon is to be believed, Fangio was in W196-2, one of the 1954 streamliners, Moss was in W196-9 (a car never raced before), Kling was in W196-6 (a 1954 car) and Taruffi in W196-15 (another new car). Sheldon gives T-cars as W196-10 (Kling), W196-12 (Moss), W196-13 (Fangio) and W196-14 (Taruffi).
Presumably the truth lies in there somewhere, but if Sheldon's chassis numbers are correct, then Setright's car allocations are all wrong or if Setright's allocations are right, then Sheldon's chassis numbers are all wrong! Confused? I certainly am!!

Nevertheless, whatever the truth behind this, it proves two things:
1 Mercedes organization was superb.
2 Uhlenhaut was, as occasionally stated, a bloody good driver if he could get a W196 round the Ring only 13 seconds slower than Fangio and 11 seconds slower than Moss. There was no German GP in 1955, but Uhlenhaut's time would have got him second place on the grid in 1954 and 14th in 1957 (practice in 1956 was wet, so no comparison).

[Roger Clark]

It's not quite true to say that W196-6 had not been used before,as Fangio drove it in open-wheeled, 3-litre form in the Formula Libre Buenos Aires GP. It was presumably this car that was fitted with streamlined bodywork at short notice for Moss. This comes from michael Riedner's book "THe LAst of the silver Arrows" and may explain why some say that Moss' car was new. Riedner gives the same chassis numbers as Sheldon, which may mean they had the same source.

Denis Jenkinson in Motor Sport said that Kling and Fangio had new cars.

[allenbrown]

If you count Lotus 49s, 49B and 49C as the same cars, then the longst run would probably be the Brabham BT49/B/C/D which ran up to BT49D/18.

See BT49, BT49C and BT49D on OldRacingCars.com.

Allen