OT: 1967 Watkins Glen F1 Video

[cegerer]

Some cool footage here. 20Mb, 4+ minutes.

http://www.lumitronics.ws/uploads/videos/watkins_glen_1967.avi

[masraum]

Awesome, thanks for the heads up!! The sound is fantastic! Does anyone know where you can get more old footage like this? I love this old stuff, unfortunately it's really hard to find.

I would love to have a car like that, I'd never be able to drive one with those motors, I'm sure, but maybe something detuned, but with a small bore v-8 or something.

I never really paid them much attention until I got Grand Prix Legends, but they are amazing.

[cegerer]

Those guys were nuts - hi-speed caskets, basically!

BTW Steve, I included a CD with a whole bunch of Porsche video with your LeMan DVD.

[greglepore]

Steve-GPL rocks, even if I do suck. The Lime Rock Mountain circuit is amazing, if you haven't downloaded it yet.

I did find a trick that I think folks are exploiting-if you run it on a really fast machine-say 1.4 ghz, without the patch for that, the "driving on ice" feeling totally goes away-its like you're suddenly in a Lotus 78.

I've sort of given it up, as when I was an addict it was a huge time drain, but even so, it still blows me away. Now, if we could just get a 20+ car online start without all the carnage on lap 1...

[jluetjen]

Geez Curt, how did you find that or do you know how to read Finnish or whatever the www.lumitronics.com web site is written in. I tried snooping around to see if they had any other videos. Once I got the DivX player downloaded it played great.

It's funny how different the DFV era cars sounded from today. In those days they were considered to be "high-strung", high reving engines with a red line at an incredible 9800 RPM. Now you can buy a Honda S2000 that will easily rev past the DFV.

Steve, what you described is the engine Repco-Brabham motor that Sir Jack used to win the F1 World Championship in 1966. He took F85 Olds block (also later used for the Triumph TR8, Morgon 8, Rovers 3500, etc.) and converted it from push-rod to SOHC. They designed a new head (it fit on both sides) based on the Cosworth SCA design, used the SCA's cam design and designed a roller chain system for driving the cams. They milled away unneeded material in the V of the block and welded a aluminum plate in to seal that area. They used the stock 3.50 inch bore and destroked the engine to 2.375 inches. The rods were from a British Daimler V8 and were the right length for the destroked crank. The crank was designed as a flat plane (180 degree) unit like the later DFV and Waynes Ferrari 308 rather then the 90 degree design like most American V8s. He topped it off with Lucas Fuel Injection and slide throttles. The total package was 300 lbs (without the flywheel) and started out making 285 HP at 7500 RPM and later 298 HP. While not the most powerful engine, it made enough power and was reliable and ready to go when Jack was.

The other extreme of the complexity spectrum was the competing BRM H-16. Picture two stacked flat-8's with two cranks and everything. It could make 380 HP at 10500 RPM -- if you could keep it together. It also weighed a whopping 520 lbs!!! (in a class where the car's weight might be 1100 lbs.) You can guess why Jack's Brabham won the championship and BRM didn't.

The Gurney-Weslake engine (seen in Dan Gurney's eagle running at the front in the beginning of the video) was a pretty slick engine and was the first unit (BTW with Cosworth's design input) to use a narrow valve angle 4 valve cylinder head design. It weighed 390 lbs and put out 364 HP at 9500 RPM. Unfortunately it was hobbled by an incorrectly detail-designed (kinked) intake port. (This was not a Cosworth goof BTW.) I suspect that because of money they never fixed the problem. On a good day it made a couple less then 400 HP.

There were a number of other interesting engines, but they were all trumped by the Cosworth DFV V8 run by Clark and Hill in the video. The DFV had similar heads to the Eagle-Weslake, but they got the intakes right. This is pretty much the same head design used on today's 4 valve engines, both street and race. The DFV was a svelte (for the time) 358 lbs and made 408 HP at 9000 RPM to begin with. By 1968 they were up to 423 HP at 9900 RPM. Near the end of its career (over 12 years later) it was up to 480 HP at 10500. Cars using other engines didn't stand a chance.

(The above is summarized from "Classic Racing Engines" by Ludvigsen. A must-have book in my library!)

[greglepore]

John, you NEED GPL- you get a sense for all of the above-particularly in the case of the Brabham, which has decent power, but the chasis dynamics are something, shall we say, different. The Lotus give you an appreciation for what a genius Clark was-the suspension is amazing, but its a razor's edge thing the whole time, and, like a 911, it can only be really driven on the throttle.

[masraum]

Curt, thanks tons, I can't wait. Hopefully I'll get it before I go to my parents later this week, but if not it'll give me something to do when I get back.

John, there for a minute I thought you were spouting all of that info off of the top of your head. Sounds like a great book, I'll have to put it on the short-list of things to get (that list gets longer everyday, I can't wait for IT to rebound)

Greg, I have never had the time to devote to it to get it down well enough to race online. I have mostly done lots of practice and racing on my own. I can get pretty decent times, but I don't have the time to devote to develop any consistency. It is an amazing game though, especially once you update the graphics to current standards and add a couple of tracks. The guys who are really good at the game amaze me.

Wow, I just watched the video again. It was so much better this time since my home pc is much more powerful than my work pc. At work the sound got gradually farther out of sync with the video, and my sound card and speakers are better here. I got yelled at because I had the volume too high.

[jluetjen]

Greg. I've already got GPL (as well as about 40 or 50 tracks that I hardly have time to drive on). My favorite track as of the last time I played (about 2 months ago) is the Isle of Man TT. I rarely get more then 10 to 15 minutes before my daughters come over and start hanging around. About 5 minutes after that the older (6 year old) one is driving around Monaco and I've been sent away so as to not distract her.

BTW, here is some data on Porsche's 3 liter 908 motor. It had a bore of 3.35 and a stroke of 2.6 inches (the same 66 mm stroke as the early 911 motors). It put out about 320 HP initially and more then 350 HP at 8400 RPM in later versions and eventually almost 370 HP. All up the motor weighed 392 lbs, but it could race for up to 24 hours which the DFV's never really did reliably until the mid-70's.

[cegerer]

I like that white car that spun. Is that a Honda? Anyway, that thing takes off like a little rocket and with a great sound!

[jluetjen]

I can't let Curt get the last word here, so here's a link to a number of cool DFV incar videos as well as a link to the start-up of one of the red Ferrari's that shown briefly in the video. I know that I've posted it before, but it's one of my all time favorite video clips. BTW, you need to turn it up to at least 11 to get the real feel of it!

There's also a cool DVD that's available from Amazon titled "The Worlds Greatest F1 Cars" that includes almost an entire vintage GP race at the new 'Ring in one of the Tyrell 6 wheelers. The driver is pretty good and keeping up with later F1 cars, but alas it all comes apart when he gets hit while passing a backmarker. A great way to spend a Christmas Amazon gift certificate.

[}{arlequin]

I'm having difficulty playing the video although the Windows media player pipes the sound in. That's probably making things worse, b/c the sounds only make me want to SEE it even more. What kind of player/program should I be using?

[masraum]

you need the divx codec, You want the "standard divx codec" which is not in the chart, it's just a link underneath the chart.

[jluetjen]

Here's another site with some cool vintage F1 videos. Unfortunately a lot of them (most?) are videos of tragedies. But there are a few good ones too like the 1979 duel between Villeneuve and Arnoux and a couple of Nurburgring videos.

[Z-man]

Nice video!! Thanks for posting!

[jluetjen]

The Dutch takes a little effort to decipher, but you should be able to find a number of interesting tidbits here too. There is a pretty cool sound file from the BRM V16 just after the second title. It sure does sound like the car has some issues.