Post here all non technical related topics about Formula One. This includes race results, discussions, testing analysis etc. TV coverage and other personal questions should be in Off topic chat.
Thank You for the interesting footnotes from Felix's Japanese article.
I remember quite well the early Fuji Grand Champion Series with 2L prototypes March, Alpine-Renault, Chevron, Lola and GRD and the accident at the banking in 1974 which leads to its dismissal. Mainly written reports in French and Italian...
The accident Sombrero points out, I guess, is the one happened in 2nd Jun 1974 where Hiroshi Kazato in his Chevron hit Seiichi Suzuki's Lola in a multi-car pile-up right after start, two cars went ablaze and both of them never survived. The fact that Kazato came very close to become the second Japanese driver competing in European series after Tetsu (he had a plan to race in Euro F2 somewhere in 1974 for Chevron along with Tom Price) has shocked Japanese motorsport society, and the notorious Daytona-esque 30deg. banking in Fuji was ditched after accident - the paving quality was very bad (a folklore tells that they paved the banking section in such way that winching up the paving machine from the top of banking) and it made the car hobble around on racing line, which directly or indirectly triggered the fatal accident.
"Gran-Chan" somehow survived the fatality and went on as independent race series, gaining massive popularity in Japan. Later in 1979 single-seater cars were approved and manufacturers turned their eyes to F2 cars, with Fuji-special low-drag cowling simply attached above it. With the introduction of Japanese F3000 C'ship in 1987 the base cars were also shifted to F3000 cars, until the series eventually folded in 1989 as most Japanese fans turned their eyes to Formula car races. The series, throughout its 70s and 80s history, had a close relationship with Japanese F2 (F3000) C'ship driver-wise and constructor-wise, having many of top stack formula drivers of the time incl. Satoru Nakajima taking part. Good old age of Japanese motorsport when everything was still domestic and Japanese F1 GP was nothing but non-existent.
It´s not the 48h rule kicking in yet but Felix asked me to come up with a question to avoid facing the axe...
So with all the fancy driver helps banned now , which team was the first to bring a computer to the Formula 1 paddock? I´m not talking about data aquisition necessarily here .
Name the team and possibly the engineer .
i´m afraid you missed the boat quite consideraby here.
with hindsight I would like to make a clarification here and explicitly not allow electronic time keeping as an answer.
At the start of the 70s Jack Heuer found a nice niche for time keeping equipment for his company and had Clay Regazzoni as one of their Ambassadors who coincidently was a Ferrari driver .Ferrari seemed to have no faith in French time keeping at lemans and so Heuer developped the Centigraph wich could time 5 cars at the same time .
but ... the centigraph for Ferrari is not what I´m looking for...
lol...
good one that .I remember that very well .They used to call him a computer ..funny nobody really did really have access to computers in those days.At school we were working with this:
We only later on had pocket calculators from TexAS Instruments.. Ti28 or something...
So according to the thread Xpensive suggested the answer can possibly be Fittipaldi in 1975 (given Divila recalls correctly)? The Brazilian national team, with no other than Emmo himself got involved, just to burn their brand-new car to the ground at the very first race of the team... Nowadays we even have access to 1/43 model car of that.
Regarding Honda thing, many Japanese sources point out that Honda was the first manufacturer to bring telemetric real-time data acquisition device into F1, it was 1984 or 85 IIRC when Yoshitoshi Sakurai started to get involved in the project. The device was mainly focused on fuel consumption monitoring as it was Honda's headache in their early days of Turbo-ed F1 engines.
