Founded in the year nineteen twenty-four February 1980

allow 430 b.h.p.,” he asserted, “give motor racing a good
image and give a better feedback to the development of
more economical passenger cars”.
Duckworth is continuing to campaign for his
formula. “But most people running motorsport can’t see
past the ends of their noses.”
Meanwhile. Cosworth are soldiering on to keep the
DFV abreast of the current situation “We hope that the
unreliability of the turbo Renault will allow the DFV to
win a share of the races. Other people running 1.5-litre
turbos are likely to be beset by the problems that come
with them.
FORMULA ONE
TREND OF DESIGN
Radiators
SINCE THE first racing car was designed the radiator
has been a tiresome necessity, and Gottlieb Daimler set
us all on the wrong path by water-cooling his first V-twin
engine. If water-cooling of the cylinder heads and barrels
of the first internal combustion engines had not been
invented, who knows where we would be now. At first
the radiator was hung anywhere that was convenient
and was nothing more than a rectangular cooling
element, quite useless as regards power production or
car performance, but a necessary evil. In the vintage
years it settled in a conventional position at the front of
the car and took definite shape according to the whim
of the designer. Indeed, the designers used it as a sort of
trade mark with which to stamp their complete design.
You could easily distinguish one car from another by the
radiator shape, from the horse-shoe of Bugatti, through
the Gothic arch of Bentley to the square-rigged elegance
of Rolls-Royce.
On the racing cars of the thirties it returned to being
a simple cooling clement hidden away inside a nose
cowling, with the designer’s imprint being shown in the
shape of the opening in the cowl that allowed air to pass
through the radiator block. In the fifties the decorative
grilles began to disappear and functional openings led
to functional cooling elements and further thought was
given to what happened to the air after it had passed
through the radiator.
In recent years, with the detail study of air-flow in
and around racing cars, radiator has become an integral
part of the overall design of the car, its positioning and
size being an important pan in the layout of a Formula
One car of today. Over the years there have been people
who have been very conscious of the importance of
the radiator, not from its ability to dissipate the waste
heat from the engine, whether it be from the oil or the
water, but from its effect on the rest of the car. It is a
known aerodynamic fact that an opening in front of a
vehicle spoils the air-flow for the rest of the vehicle and
many years ago Renault and others put their radiators
behind the front-mounted engine, to permit of a smooth
bonnet line. Fred Dixon went to the trouble of counting
the number of holes in the radiator matrix of his Riley
and working out the actual cross-sectional area of all
the holes. He then cowled in the radiator, making sure
that the cowl fitted tight to the radiator so that all the
air that went through the hole in the front went through
the matrix, and this allowed him to have a very small
slot in the lower part of the cowling, which proved more
than adequate at speed. When Reid Railton designed the
Bluebird which attained 300 m.p.h. his radiator was fed
by a narrow slot in the front, and for a limited period
of time this slot could be closed by a flap. to present an
unbroken frontal area to the air. In his brilliant Railton-
Mobil-Special which attained 400 m.p.h. he did away
with radiators altogether and used a vast ice-tank to
dissipate the heat from the two Napier Lion engines.
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