Before we kick this off, let's try and clarify this list a bit. Beauty is a difficult thing to really nail down. One person's vision of trouser-moistening delight may be another's idea of hell itself. One man’s Nico Rosberg Kelly Brook is another man’s Ann Widdecombe. One woman's Nico Rosberg Brad Pitt is another woman's David Cameron. Beauty is a transient, hard-to-define quality that means that more so than usual, there is an enormous great stinking shovelful of subjectivity in the following choices. I've also tried to spread out the choices from throughout different generations of F1 car rather than just pick several from a single season, meaning that some possibly obvious choices are nowhere to be seen. Also, as anyone who has been witness to my drunken dancefloor conquests will attest, I've been fairly loose with the definition of "beautiful", leaving it free to encapsulate the almost-synonyms of "striking", "bold", and "distinctive".
So, apologies for all that, but if you want to give your own choice of car, or simply denigrate my own, or presciently question whether or not somebody who has just spent the last few days of his life judging the relative attractiveness of a bunch of racing cars maybe needs to close down the laptop and get out a bit more, feel free to in the comments section below. Right then, without further ado, on with the list.
1) 1967 Eagle - Weslake
Without meaning to deliberately stir the ire of anyone of an age great enough to remember the 1960's, the grid was a bit "same-y" back then, wasn't it? In a manner of speaking, you could quite rightfully claim that the cars, with the narrow, cigar-shaped bodies connecting to spindly treaded tyres, flimsy-looking rollbars and awkward-looking engine assemblies bolted onto the back were pretty much identikit across the whole grid, with just slightly different colour schemes used to tell them apart. Those who complain that all the cars look the same these days can come across as a little mendacious when considering the large number of similarities between the cars from this older era.
But there are always exceptions to the rule, the one whiskey that actually tastes nice, the one edible product made by KFC, the one attractive ginger, and the one standout car in the sea of 1960's facsimiles was the frankly incredible-looking Eagle-Weslake from Dan Gurney's All American Racers team (yes, USF1, it's been done before). I mean, just look at it. Just look at it. Just look at it. Just look at it. Trying to have sex with a car is undoubtedly a fundamentally weird pastime, but if you caught someone attempting to copulate with an Eagle, you'd really have to let them off. Or join in. Erm, actually, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, if I'm being honest.
Anyway, it may not have been the fastest, the most agile, the best handling of it's peers on the 1967 grid. And it certainly wasn't the most reliable, in 1967 the Eagle cars racked up 15 GP starts in the hands of Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren and Ludovico Scarfiotti, but the team managed just two (two!!!!) finishes, including the team's only win in the 1967 Belgian GP. But then, such faults can be easily overlooked. The pretty ones always come with a bit of extra baggage, that's the way the world works. And yet despite that, they're always worth sticking with because, as soon as they go wrong, and no matter how much they go wrong, one look at them will make you forget why you were angry with them in the first place.
2) 2008 BMW Sauber
Now, hang on, just bear with me on this one. The mandate of an F1 car has always been to go fast, and perhaps nothing looked quite so much as though it had been designed to do exactly that than last year's BMW. While winglets, flick-ups and the like may not be to everyone's visual tastes, they weren't necessarily there to be aesthetically pleasing, but rather to serve a purpose, and the BMW F1.08 was absolutely covered in them. But, in amongst all the chaos and clutter, there was also a strikingly complicated beauty about it.
The car looked as though every part of it had been designed to maximise performance, as if the skin of the car had been divided up into small sections and each square inch of carbon fibre had been given it's own design team. Almost every part of it had some sort of winglet, little flicky bit, horn or other such appendage that was designed to get this car through the air better than it's rivals. True, the other argument for the amount of extra bits and pieces would be that the underlying design was actually a bit rubbish, and the team needed to compensate by throwing bits and bobs at it (c.f. the winglet-free F1.09), but we'll ignore that theory for the interests of this article. If the '67 Eagle caught your eye for it's svelte and slimline shape, the BMW achieved the same thing by being a well-toned bodybuilder, with the final overall style being somewhere between a childhood doodle and a complicated optical illusion.
Compare that triumph of design over simplicity to the new-for-2009 cars, which have been carefully and shamelessly pruned of all their extra design features in an (entirely unsuccessful) effort to get the cars overtaking again. Clearly, F1 cars have always been designed within a framework of rules and guidelines, and they always will be lest we end up racing at 700mph around 16 mile circuits in eight-wheeled V12 bits of mentalness, but compared to the extravagance of design before this season, never has the neutering of the car designer by the regulations looked more obvious than with this season's class of plain jane F1 beasties.
3) 2004 Williams - BMW
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then you might well argue that the beholder who judges the infamous "walrus-nose" Williams to be a thing of beauty is suffering from a fairly serious cataract problem. But, the beauty of this particular design lies not necessarily in the final look of the car, but in the willingness to try something different, and to challenge the accepted ideas of what an F1 car should look like.
For the FW26, gone was they usual tapered long nose of the rest of the grid's designs, replaced by a short-stubby nose complete with twin "tusks" that constituted the front wing mounting. The background of the need for the design was in the team's attempts to integrate their twin-keel suspension into the design of their new car, but in theory the design should have been a good one, even if it had sort of been attempted before.
Alas, the walrus was a complete disaster, undoing all of the hard work by the team in the preceding few seasons which culminated in a serious title challenge for Juan Montoya in 2003, and it was a departure from competitiveness that the team never really recovered from. By the time the teams got to Hungary in the middle of the season, the walrus-nose had been replaced by an altogether more "normal-looking" front end. But the knock-on struggles from wasting so much time trying to make The Walrus work eventually led to BMW leaving them as an engine supplier, and saw Williams plummet down the pecking order for the next few years. The team still haven't mounted a serious attempt for either title since that 2003 season. That'll teach them to try and be revolutionary.
4) 1976 Ferrari
The mid-1970s were not a good time for sexy car design in F1. It was very much the era when designers and engineers were finding their feet with the new vogue term of aerodynamics, and as a result the designs tended to range from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, via what the hell were you thinking you mentalists. As the car chiefs experimented with what was fast and what was patently not, there was rarely a care given to whether or not the finished product necessarily looked any good for the spectator.
One exception was the 1976 Ferrari, made most famous as the car that very nearly killed Niki Lauda in his face-scarring accident at the Nurburgring. The car seemed to be the eye of the chaotic storm that was the mid-1970's grid, angular yet streamlined, and seemingly awkward yet perfectly proportioned.
And it was fast as well. Up until his fateful crash at the Nurburgring, Lauda had finished on the podium of all bar one of the first nine races, winning five of them, and in all probability, had "that crash" not happened, he would have taken the title with relative ease. But, alas, it did happen, and instead it was gadabout James Hunt who took the title in Lauda's place, despite the Austrian only missing two races, in the altogether more traditionally 1970's-esque gawky McLaren M23.
5) 1996 Ferrari (Mark I)
Another car that was beautiful but useless, like an anatomically incorrect Rachel Stevens inflatable doll, was the design for Michael Schumacher's first Ferrari car. The initial concept proved to be so fundamentally useless that a wholesale redesign was introduced midway through the season, featuring an abandonment of the traditional low nose which characterised F1 cars throughout the 1980s and early 1990s in favour of the new raised nose style, pioneered by Tyrrell and then Benetton at the start of the decade, and eventually accepted as the new standard in F1 car design.
Naturally, as was so often the way for pre-Schumacher Ferrari, the Italian team were one of the last to accept that this was the only way of doing things, in much the same way that they refused to accept that a V10 engine was in any way better than their trusty, yet useless, V12s. And so, in 1996, the team turned up with the F310, a low-nosed, sultry figure, that proved to be as adept at winning races as any of their other recent designs had.
Still, Schumacher took victory in Spain thanks to his preternatural skills in the wet, and the good news was that while it was struggling, it at least looked the part, with it's muscular lines and chunky cockpit sides giving it an almost Batmobile-esque quality. Sadly, the design was replaced by a hastily re-planned high-nose Ferrari at the midway point of the season, and like that, the final stand against the weird-looking high noses was over. And the grid was an awful lot less easy to look at as a result.
6) 1979 Arrows A2
If the mid 1970s were a plethora of wildly different and baffling designs, the late 1970s and early 1980s were no less hard on the eye. The ground-effect era saw heavy-looking, clunky and rigid cars race around tracks at ever more improbable speeds and with ever less reassuring safety margins. But in amongst the clunky, box-shaped horrors of the grid around the turn of the decade (including the very Marmite features of the 1979 Ferrari 312T4, which to my eye looks like it has an Alien-style mouth-inside-a-mouth), there was the A2 Arrows, which had a reassuringly futuristic feel to it. But a futuristic feel in the same way that something like Space 1999 had a futuristic feel. Less iPhones and wireless internet and more spandex bodysuits and implausible spaceships.
The "Buzz Bomb", as the A2 was charmingly referred to upon it's launch looked something like the car you imagine Captain Kirk drives on his weekends off from fighting Klingons on the starboard bow. The design aimed to maximise the use of ground effect, with the front wing gone in favour of suspension-covering winglets meaning that the low pressure under the car was maximised and the whole machine was sucked down onto the road as a consequence of it's design.
Sadly, it what is becoming a recurring theme of this list, the ambitious design didn't really work, with the car producing masses of downforce, but in a really inconsistant way. Any bump in the road or raised bit of kerbing wildly altered the grip the lumbering machine had, and drivers Riccardo Patrese and Jochen Mass were regularly scared senseless by the utterly uncontrollable handling of the A2. In the end, the whole design was reworked into something more traditional after a season of misery, and the A2 was mothballed, meaning it will never survive to be able to help Captain Kirk complete the commuter run.
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Maserati 250F
1961 Ferrari sharknose
1967 Lotus 49
Lotus 72
Jordan 191
Benetton B195
Mclaren MP4 19B
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and lolola at car sex
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Oh, and that's seven.
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Had more than enough time to admire the #2 car in close detail as it trickled past ... And I wasn't even counting! Plus I forgot the Mercedes W196 (1955) and Ferrari 641 (1990) ... I could go on all day.
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lists like these are never complete...
Brabham-BMW BT55 (1986) - the ultra-low Gordon Murray design that didn't quite work out the way the team had hoped - the engine had to be tilted (just 18 degrees from horizontal, in fact) and that got them into all kinds of trouble with that beast of an engine. Also, the drivers had to virtually lay down in it, perhaps even more than in F1 cars nowadays. Many of the BT55's concepts were then applied in the design of the 1988 Mclaren MP4/4, with rather more success.
Lotus-Renault 98T (1986) - the last of the JPS Loti, and arguably the prettiest, especially with Senna's bright yellow helmet sticking out of it.
Ligier-Matra JS5 (1976) - the car that took the mid-70s tall-airbox trend to a whole new level.
Ferrari 312B (1970) - the first Ferrari with the 12-cilinder boxer engine (a layout they would keep using until 1980) and very very pretty indeed.
Other suggestions:
- The 1995 Ferrari rather than the 1996 one (also being the last Ferrari with a V12 and bearing the traditional 27 and 28 starting numbers, although that's not really the point here)
- The 1991 Jordan as mentioned above
- The 1986 AGS JS21C - extremely bulky and cobbled together from an F3000 chassis, some Renault leftovers and an underpowered, unreliable ex-Minardi engine. By seven blokes. In a village garage.
- The 2006 Super Aguri SA05, for being based on a car that hadn't been much cop four years earlier.
Still, good on you for including the Arrows A2 in the list
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It may or may not please you to hear that the Lotus and the 312B made my shortlist! Sadly the lure of the Walrus proved too strong for me to find room for them.
Still, maybe I'll revisit this category over the boring F1-less winter months, and try and do a Six of the Best...Yet More Beautiful F1 Cars.
I probably shouldn't mention that the Ligier 'Smurfmobile' is on a provisional list I've got for an ugly F1 cars feature...
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