I would love this book as I've only ever seen Americans leave F1 without much success eg Scott Speed, Michael Andretti, Bobby Rahal, USF1 so am interested to know about the good olde days
Here goes, a few from my personal archives.....
Cool
A F1 car lifting off the gas brakes harder than if you stood as hard as you could on the brakes of your road car
You can play tunes with an F1 engine, here is God Save the Queen on a Renault V10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEqlNU30Tg
Informative
Honda designed a F1 car without a steering wheel but used levers either side of the driver. The test drivers felt it a very natural way to drive and it went almost as quick as a car with a steering wheel
Benetton designed and used a qualifying 12 lap only special qualifying car for one year before the rules banned the use. To save weight normal conventional design limits were ignored. Like, after paint you could see daylight through pin holes in the bodywork and the paint with no primer was 30% of the weight of each panel, the magnesium forged wheels had a rim thickness of 1.9mm, the engine heads were magnesium and would warp too much to be used after one qualifying session, the exhaust primaries were 0.4mm thick inconel
Funny
A Porsche 993 Turbo driven on a wet circuit by a normal driver is not as quick as a Renault Laguna 1.8 diesel station wagon with 3 passengers when driven by an F1 driver
The same chief designer created a super secret innovative brake pedal, he tested the concept using girls from the team who he asked to grip his pointy finger with their naked toes. Needless to say the idea never made it to the car and he never worked in an F1 team again
The design leadership of one dominating world championship winning car was helped along by the consumption of large amounts of cannabis joints and Jack Daniels
Rumour has it that when Montoya injured himself playing tennis while he drove for McLaren he was having a MX jump competition against Kimi out in the desert. Kimi won 15-love