Driving the INFAMOUS 6-WHEELED F1 car! | Tyrrell P34 I Formula 1 | Ben Collins I 4K

foreign [Music] p34 six-wheeler from 1976 as you can tell I'm in a really noisy background on topmost look at the massive rear wing possibly not as effective as you look at a modern Formula One car you'll see a lot more dive planes a lot more aggressive aerodynamics have got into it but this is how they did in the 70s and it was still working massive rear tires DFE Ford engine they're pumping out a lot of power these engines were in almost everything back in the day very noisy and the exciting part is the front end of this car if you look how narrow it is that's because Formula One regulations change for 76 season and they narrowed the front Wing to 1.5 meters and Derek Gardner had a great idea he thought right rather than have the front wheels poking outside the aerodynamics making all that dirty air I'm going to make this car faster in a straight line by shrouding two smaller Wheels behind the front wing and that's what you've got tiny little front wheels tucked in here behind this front Wing this flicks the air over those Wheels because the front wheels make so much dirty air there's a really clean way of doing it they Reckoning about 45 horsepower and about six or seven miles an hour in Australia that's what they needed to catch the winning Ferrari in the hands of Nikki louder Patrick De palier was a hooligan of the first order one of my favorite Formula One drivers from the 80s he was an absolute Savage behind the wheel and his Onboard video is a legendary this is him shredding Monaco in the p34 and look at the understand all four front wheels skidding and he cures up by Smashing the gas pedal that's how they race him back there just balls to the wall so these four wheels do the turning steering wheel is only connected to the front axle and there's a little relay system that connects the front wheels to the second set of front wheels which also do some turning but not at the same rate as the furthest forward there's a slight overlap there's an offset in these front tires as well so they're not even lined up exactly in line they're slightly off so they've very cleverly got a little biasing system in the front axle that feeds more braking power into these tires than this one as long as you get fantastic braking stability in a straight line at least until you start turning the wheel then things get a bit dicey it's very clever engineering and it really was way ahead of its time and a lot of the other teams at least three Williams Ferrari dabbled with six wheel cars they tried four at the rear but the front wheel option was almost certainly the winner aerodynamics grip 60 more contact patch out of using these four as opposed to two bigger Wheels it's hard to wrap your head around that but that's what the engineers told me and I believe them you can see this because with the kits off you can see how cramped it is um particularly this roll bar which is where your shins should be so I just want to set myself up in this car like an armchair let's try and get my leg angle right so I can get my legs underneath the roll bar so I can use the brakes and the throttle which is an important part of using a Formula One car in subsequent years this was built in 1975 racing 76 and in 77 they moved the roll bar I'm sore because um the likes of Jody Schechter said enough of that just put it somewhere sensible but it's um yeah I'll find out in a minute what it feels like you're driving it but actually quite upright my hair's gonna be sticking out in the wind so I'm going to feel 180 miles an hour coming straight at me in this incredible uh dfv engine to be pumping out it's Max revs 10 000 RPM I'm allowed to use nine and a half which is practically all of it almost 500 horsepower just um just an amazing it just feels like a big scaled up toy you look at these tiny little wheels but all the refined detail that they built into this car with a little bit of modern engineering to make it a little bit safer which is always nice but yeah what a thing look at it absolutely amazing [Music] bloody hell well there we go in 1975 the same year I was born football just [Music] sitting in the most extraordinary position or maybe or something I mean missile but I am used to I'm On Track as well with different camera let's say a lot faster car that I had as a kid with my scalextric said with honest steel if you're a competitor IAL official team sets louder the championship James Hunt the Titanic battle this was an amazing designs [Music] in F1 to change and every regulations doubling their number so that's why we brought forth from Fields what is happening tragic [Music] [Music] but everybody's starting to get a little bit more home in this machine but it is so out there indifferent to anything I've driven before oh there you go well the engine tick over is not uh particularly high on this so revs have just dropped off the engine's cut itself out but that's fine there's just no steering lock on this at all this car is hilarious it's a pretty eclectic collection but I mean we're spanning pretty much all the years up to 2008 so you're looking at a 30-year spread and got others being this one steel brakes uh the funny thing with this car because it's got four front wheels I was wondering about how the brake bias would work so in a racing car you can adjust how much braking you have on the front versus the rear and the rears are massive so actually you probably want quite a lot of braking on the back end so that'll make a bit tail happy but you've got four tires at the front working to stop you but when the weight transfers forwards it mostly goes to the ones closest to where I'm sitting so this first row of Wheels they get the benefit of the weight and that gives it the braking grip so the ones at the front get starved of grip to some extent so they've actually got a system that bleeds some of the pressure off the front so it kind of gauges it and automatically adjusts to gives you less breaking bite on the very front wheels but those ones do so they're the ones do the real turning so your steering wheel is attached to the furthest front wheels so that does the majority of it and then there's a little sprocket system that also turns the ones behind it but the all steering wheel is directly connected to the front tires what's amazing on track is that it's actually quite seamless turn the wheel honestly you're not that aware that you're turning four tires instead of two partly probably because I can't see them because they're buried under this enormous piece of Bodywork anyway it's a ride I've been seeing this car for five minutes under that we're fly contemplating how the hell these guys raced in a car that was this uncomfortable of course it turned on me during that time I felt attacking what they would have been feeling and that is my case to get a feel for them this thing's really like it's just such a problem it's been in this thing up enough to take them fully because the cops here was putting that [Applause] the highway all right it's slightly uncomfortable panel position hard to heal itself [Music] [Applause] V8 [Music] 900 . there's no power interesting shutters and shimmies through the chassis then perplexing the difference making the car unsafe I'm in a tight hair thing and yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 400. [Applause] look in the rears a bit oh yeah [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Applause] that was the kind of drive that you wish would never end except my shins that were relieved to be separated from the roll bar it's an amazing insight into the Practical engineering of the 70s everything physically connected working in Harmony and feeding it back to the driver by return it's not the kind of car that drives itself you have to manhandle it to extract the performance or the limit under braking to make the most of what the little and the large tires have to offer an aggressive driving style to pitch those fat rear tires into a slip angle generate cornering course it's left me with a huge respect for the drivers who work the wheel of these beasts but lap after lap across multiple Seasons because they really were on the limit and having to constantly think about the right way to drive the turtle these days F1 Tech is so much harder to read the aerodynamics are incredibly subtle even though the cars are enormous whereas this Tyrell just screams its beaches at you because it's so radically different to anything else there probably won't be anything that ever comes close to this car in terms of Reinventing the wheel but as they say the past is history the future's a mystery so maybe there's somebody out there who's already working on the next mind-blowing project thanks for watching and see you on the next mission [Music] thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: Ben Collins Drives

Views: 690,717

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Id: tttLc5VU9uQ

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023