Съжалявам, че е на английски, но нямам време да превеждам, ако някой може, нека го направи! 
Top 10: greatest-ever F1 innovations
By Henry Biggs
June 22 2006
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention and nowhere in motorsport is this more apparent than in Formula One. Throughout the sport’s history, each rule change has been met with ever more creative ways of bending them.
And by and large we’ve all benefited from F1 innovations as advances in safety, electronics, efficiency and handling have filtered down to the cars we drive every day, even if they aren’t quite as exciting. But plenty of examples of the Grand Prix engineers’ dark art have been too weird, impractical or costly to ever help you or I drive down a public road.
BRM H16
The car you use for the daily commute probably doesn’t have a 16-cylinder engine created by mating together two V8s. But given the BRM’s reliability record, that’s probably a good thing. A rule change in 1966 allowed 1.5-litre supercharged or 3.0-litre naturally-aspirated engines to be used. British Racing Motors decided to take their existing V8, and rather than add a blower, stack two of them on top of one another, sharing a common crankshaft. The result was a powerful motor, but it was heavy and gave the car a high centre of gravity as well as being hideously complex. BRM driver Jackie Stewart is alleged to have said the engine would be more use as a ship’s anchor although Lotus took took it on and made it work well enough to give Jim Clark victory at the US Grand Prix, the only one for this engine.
Ferguson P99
Actually, here is a case of technology for the road being applied to Formula One. I say road, but in actual fact field would be more apt as the Ferguson name refers to Harry Ferguson of the famous Massey-Ferguson tractor manufacturers. Ferguson left the company to start up Ferguson Research and in 1960 began development of a four-wheel drive Coventry-Climax F1 car. The car competed in only one World Championship race, the 1961 British Grand Prix, but it proved its worth by winning the non-championship Gold Cup at Oulton Park, driven by Stirling Moss. The front-engined racer was made obsolete by mid-engined designs but Ferguson supplied the system to other manufacturers including Matra, BRM, Lotus and McLaren until the FIA banned it from F1 competition use in 1970.
Lotus gas turbine
The name Colin Chapman comes up again and again in connection with F1 innovations, as much down to his willingness to bend the rules to breaking point as his engineering genius. The Type 56 was actually designed as the Lotus entry in the 1968 Indy 500 and powered by a Pratt & Whitney gas turbine, which sent its 500bhp to all four wheels. Chief driver Jim Clark was enthusiastic but tragically died before competing in it and his replacement Mike Spence was killed in testing. Graham Hill, Art Polland and Joe Leonard entered the race with the latter taking pole and leading throughout until the turbine failed with a few laps to go. The United States Automobile Club shortly afterwards banned four-wheel drive and gas turbines from competition and, despite attempts to modify the car for F1, it proved too heavy and complex.
Tyrell six-wheeler
It could be argued that little distinguishes F1 cars these days other than the colour schemes, but the 1976 Tyrell P34 was unmistakable, thanks to a design that replaced the two normal sized front wheels with four diminutive 10-inch rims while the rear wheels remained standard. The idea was to reduce the frontal area and therefore cut drag but without compromising grip. It clearly worked, the car proving competitive from the start in the hands of Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler, who finished first and second respectively in the Swedish Grand Prix, despite the former insisting the car was, ‘a piece of junk’. The pairing notched up enough points to give Tyrell second place in the constructors’ championship. Goodyear were unwilling to put in a great deal of development time and the following year the car’s best position was 3rd at Belgium and Tyrell finished joint fifth in the championship.
Lotus ground-effect
Having introduced rear-mounted wings to F1 in 1968, Colin Chapman and Lotus engineer Peter Wright took the concept a stage further with the discovery of the ‘ground-effect’ principle. By designing the side pods of the Type 78 as aerofoils, smoothing out the underside of the car and ‘sealing’ it to the road with flexible sideskirts, the air underneath the car was accelerated, creating an area of low pressure and literally sucking the car on to the track, allowing it to corner quicker. Driver Mario Andretti said it handled like, ‘it was painted to the road’. In fact it gave him four wins in 1977 but he lost the world championship to Niki Lauda after five engine failures. For the following year the car was developed into the Type 79, which produced so much downforce it cracked the chassis. Duly strengthened, the 79 ran rings around the rest of the field, taking seven wins and both championships in 1978.
Brabham fan car
Having witnessed what ground-effect could do for cornering speeds, Gordon Murray, who would later design the awesome McLaren F1, decided to take the principle one step further. Because the Brabham BT46 used an Alfa Romeo flat-12, it couldn’t use Venturi Tunnels to naturally speed up air flow beneath the car, so Murray got round this by simply installing a large engine-driven fan under the rear wing. This literally sucked it down onto the road, even in the pits the car visibly squatted when drivers blipped the throttle. F1 regulations banned ‘movable aerodynamic devices’ so Murray claimed the fan was simply for cooling purposes. On its debut at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix the car won easily in the hands of Niki Lauda and the other teams were in uproar. Mario Andretti said it was like being behind, ‘a bloody great vacuum cleaner. It throws muck and rubbish at you at a hell of a rate’. The car was declared legal but Brabham owner Bernie Ecclestone decided to voluntarily withdraw it.
Turbocharging
Renault ushered in the turbo era of Formula One in 1977 with the RS01, powered by a 1.5-litre Gordini V6. It entered just one car in the last five races of the year but failed to finish any of them, earning the car the nickname of ‘yellow teapot’. It wasn’t until near the close of the 1978 season that the car finished a race and earned Renault its first F1 points. However with a new ground-effect car for 1979, Jean-Pierre Jabouille took pole and won the French Grand Prix, the first for a turbocharged car. The ability of turbochargers to squeeze vast amounts of horsepower from tiny engines had been proven and the technology was swiftly adopted by other teams. In 1983 Brabham became the first to win a championship in a turbocharged car. The technology reached a peak in 1986, helping extract 1300bhp from tiny 1.5-litre, four-cylinder engines before being banned the following year.
Lotus twin-chassis
By 1981 ground-effect cars were so efficient that drivers were experiencing massive G-forces in corners and may have contributed to the death of Patrick Depailler in 1980. He is thought to have blacked out at Hockenheim’s fast Ostkurve. Movable side-skirts were banned and a minimum ground clearance of 60mm introduced. Brabham tried to get round this by using hydraulic suspension which lowered the car once it had left the pits but the rock-hard ride buffeted the driver too much. Colin Chapman came up with a typically inventive solution; he created the Type 88 with two chassis and designed entirely on ground-effect principles. A softly-sprung inner one cushioned the driver and delicate mechanicals while an ultra-stiff outer one kept the car flat and level to the ground. Predictably the other teams howled in protest and the Type 88 was promptly banned.
Sponsorship
As you can probably tell by now, Colin Chapman has arguably done more to date than anyone to shape the way F1 cars not just perform but also how they look. F1 cars had historically tended to run in national or team colours and funding came from major companies such as Shell, BP and Firestone. With the withdrawal of their support, the FIA had no choice but to allow unrestricted sponsorship to help meet soaring costs. Never one to miss a trick, Chapman signed up Imperial Tobacco, so at the Jarama Grand Prix in May 1968 the Lotus Type 49 appeared in the red, white and gold colours of the Gold Leaf tobacco brand, beginning an association between racing and smoking which would last decades. The Type 49 was also the first car to introduce wings to F1 on Graham Hill’s car at Monaco the same year.
Active everything
Formula One has always represented the technological pinnacle of motorsport and the Williams FW14, designed by the legendary pairing of Patrick Head and Adrian Newey, is arguably the most sophisticated of all time. Powered by a 3.5-litre Renault V10, the car managed to pack into a tiny space a staggering amount of technology. It featured computer-controlled active suspension to adjust the attitude of the car and optimise aerodynamics at all points on the circuit, traction control to eliminate wheelspin, a semi-automatic gearbox as pioneered by Ferrari in 1989 and anti-lock brakes. Nigel Mansell and team-mate Riccardo Patrese won seven races between them, the 1991 championship went to McLaren. The following year Mansell and the FW14 simply destroyed everyone, taking nine wins. Concerns over ever increasing speeds and costs led the FIA to ban most driver aids for the 1994 season.
JIm Clark on pole at the US Grand Prix in the BRM H16
Ferguson P99 in the pits at the British Grand Prix at Aintree
Lotus Gas turbine being demonstrated at the 2000 Indy 500
Tyrell P34
Lotus Type 79
Brabham BT46B with its fan covered by a dustbin lid!
Renault RS01 being driven by Jean-Pierre Jabouille
Dennis and Margaret Thatcher inspect the Lotus Type 88
Lotus Type 49
Nigel Mansell in his Williams FW14 in the tunnel at the Monaco Grand Prix
Източник: http://cars.uk.msn.com/news/top_ten_art ... tid=580071
