F1’s Most Controversial Season? — Exploring the Turmoil of the 1981 Formula 1 Season
One of the few constants in Formula 1 is the presence of controversy. It’s something that’s very much still alive and well today with the increased popularity of the sport, the rise of F1 social media, and questionable decisions by F1 leadership all contributing to its continued existence and prominence.
While the way that controversy and outrage are foregrounded in F1 today may lead some to believe that there has never been a more contentious era for F1 than the present day, this article will suggest that in actuality, you don’t have to dig that far into the past to find a season which produced acrimony, both on and off track, of a whole other level…
The year in question is 1981, and before that season’s cars had even turned a wheel there was already drama, as one of the two main tyre suppliers in F1 at the time announced their departure from the sport at short notice.
It was only in December 1980 that American giant Goodyear announced that they would be withdrawing from Formula 1, and their reasons for doing so have always been somewhat unclear.
The prevailing rumour is that their withdrawal was prompted by the ongoing power struggle (or childish game of one-upmanship when it came to who could be more petty, if you prefer) between FISA (Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile), the sport’s governing body and FOCA, the primarily British Formula One Constructors Association.
Conflict between these two organisations had begun in earnest the previous season, and would prove to be a source of further drama during 1981.
Regardless of their reasons for withdrawal, Goodyear’s absence left a number of teams very much in the lurch, with even prominent teams such as reigning drivers and constructors champions Williams quite literally scrounging for tyres during preseason testing.
Such was the extent of their desperation that teams often had to make do with used sets of Goodyears that they still had knocking around from the previous season in order to get any testing done at all.
It was only at short notice that Michelin, the other main tyre supplier at the time, were cajoled into picking up the teams who were left without a supplier when Goodyear upped sticks, but their eventual agreement at least meant that one significant issue appeared to be sorted by the time the first race came around.
The same could not be said for the other big talking point coming into the season: the 6cm rule.
The 1980 season had seen a marked increase in cornering speeds in Formula 1 as teams really began to nail ground effect aerodynamics, which enabled huge downforce with minimal cost in terms of drag.
This made the cars fantastically exciting to watch, but also incredibly dangerous, as had been proven by the tragic death during 1980 of Patrick Depailler, and likewise by the horrific career-ending injuries suffered by Clay Regazzoni and Jean-Pierre Jabouille after crashing these ground effect cars.
FISA therefore took action, instituting a rule that there must be a gap of at least 6 centimetres between the bottom of the sidepod of any team’s car and the floor. This was aimed at banning the aerodynamic skirts, or similar devices, which were key to the ground effect of the time.
The side skirts were fitted to the bottom of the car’s sidepods, and sealed off the venturi tunnels underneath the car, which enabled the creation of an area of low pressure under the car that effectively sucked it to the track when at speed.
FISA hoped that by disallowing the teams from sealing the gap between the sidepod and the track, the effectiveness of ground effect would be reduced, cars would have less downforce (or at least the downforce that they did have would come at the cost of more drag), and that cornering speeds would be lowered making the kind of high-speed accidents seen in 1980 a thing of the past.
Many of the teams were far from pleased with this rule change, however. While the need to reduce cornering speeds was generally accepted, the primarily British FOCA-aligned teams saw the 6cm rule as another shot in the FISA-FOCA war.
They contended that the effective ban on skirts was intended more to help the FISA-aligned teams become more competitive by moving focus away from aerodynamics than it was to improve safety, as FISA teams had been slower to adopt ground-effect, instead preferring to focus on engine development.
Renault and Ferrari both used 1.5 litre V6 turbocharged engines for 1981, and the Alfa Romeo team ran a powerful V12 compared to the ubiquitous Cosworth DFV V8 run by essentially all of the British teams.
Not only did the British FOCA-aligned teams kick up a fuss about the 6cm rule, some of them actively tried to circumvent it, which of course led to further controversy.
One such team was Lotus, with legendary founder Colin Chapman resurrecting a concept for a twin-chassis F1 car. He envisioned a car with an inner chassis which housed the driver, while a separate outer chassis would be flexibly mounted and therefore able to lower down when the downforce created by the cars wings acted upon it.
The outer chassis would in turn have rubbing strips mounted in the place where skirts would have previously gone, which would touch the track only when the car ran at speed, but would successfully clear the 6cm measurement when the car came into the pits to have its ride height checked.
The concept was very clever, though its implementation has been a subject of great debate in the following years, with many positing that the car would in fact have been rather uncompetitive or even outright dangerous as a result of the unconventional design.
Nonetheless, the other teams protested when they caught wind of what Chapman and Lotus were doing, perhaps fearing the potential of the rather ungainly machine as they scrambled to find their own solutions to regain some of the performance they’d lost after the removal of their aerodynamic skirts.
FISA too went to great lengths to ensure the car did not race, overruling the scrutineers at multiple races who initially allowed the car past inspections in order to stop the car from turning a wheel competitively.
Chapman felt he was being targeted and vocally said as much in the media, but he persisted with the concept, revising the design slightly (and also altering his explanation of why the design should be legal, instead claiming that the car actually had no conventional chassis at all instead of two chassis in an attempt to sneak through cracks in the wording of the rulebook) and attempting to enter it once again at the mid-season British Grand Prix.
He also made sure to cosy up to his old friends at the Royal Automobile Club who ran the event in an attempt to persuade them to let the car run. FISA again interceded, threatening to remove the race’s world championship status if the Lotus 88 was allowed to run, which only solidified Chapman’s view that he was unfairly being targeted by FISA — and which was further compounded by the ludicrous black-flag disqualification of Lotus driver Elio de Angelis during the race for the minor offence of failing to obey a yellow flag, which was ordinarily merely met with a reprimand.
Chapman’s persecution also seemed particularly harsh in light of the fact that Lotus was not the only team to circumvent the 6cm rule, and other teams’ implementations ranged from similarly clever and complex, to flagrant and unambiguous cheating which went totally unpunished by the sport’s governing body.
The former, more elaborate implementation of a method to circumvent the 6cm rule was undertaken by the Brabham team at the behest of its star designer Gordon Murray.
Murray devised a hydro-pneumatic suspension system which incorporated a hydraulic cylinder into the Brabham BT49C’s suspension which was compressed by the aerodynamic downforce created by the car’s wings until the car’s rubbing strips, which took the place of skirts, touched the track and sealed off the car’s floor.
The downforce generated by the car then shot up even further as a result of ground effect, which kept the suspension compressed. Once the session was over, the slow cooldown lap meant that the aerodynamic and ground effect downforce which had been forcing hydraulic fluid out of the cylinder in the suspension were dramatically reduced, allowing the hydraulic fluid to gradually return — automatically raising the car back up to clear the 6cm measurement once it reached the pits with no driver input.
The system was ingenious in slipping through the wording of the rulebook, and the furore over Chapman’s more visibly radical Lotus 88 perhaps distracted attention away from the equally clever Brabham solution enough that it slipped through the cracks in the regulations.
It too was eventually protested once discovered, but no argument for its illegality could be made to stick. Once Brabham got the system working properly, they began to absolutely dominate races.
This was at its most striking in Argentina, where Brabham’s number 1 driver Piquet simply drove away from the rest of the field, and even Brabham’s second car — driven by the oft-maligned pay driver Hector Rebaque — likewise charged up the field, passing established big name frontrunners like Carlos Reutemann to run in second place before retiring.
It was at this point that the latter, more blatant contravention of the 6cm rule came into play.
Other teams realised that in order to match Brabham, they too must implement adjustable suspension to enable the car to be jacked up when entering the pits where the 6cm gap between the sidepod and floor was measured, but also allow it to be dropped down to touch the track when out on the circuit to recapture that all-important ground effect downforce.
Brabham’s system was designed in such a way that it would have been extremely difficult to copy for other teams, as it depended on their at-the-time unusual pullrod suspension which Murray had long been champion of.
Other teams therefore simply opted to add a driver-actuated lever to their cockpit which would manually lower the car down using a compressed air bottle, as opposed to Brabham’s more complex and largely passive system.
This was in blatant contravention to the regulations and essentially represented cheating, but it quickly became widespread, and FISA realised that the season would be incredibly uncompetitive without other teams having these kinds of systems.
They therefore announced at the Monaco round that they would allow all teams to have a lever to lower the ride height of the car going forward, in spite of it being expressly prohibited by the regulations teams were given at the start of the year.
By the midpoint of the season every team therefore had a system to lower the car, meaning ground effect was back in the sport. This form of ground effect came with added jeopardy compared to the variety seen in 1980 and the late 70s though.
Occasionally, the system to raise the car back up after a lap would fail, which in qualifying meant the deletion of any laps set on that run. In the view of many fans, drivers and pundits, this essentially reduced these sessions to a farce where, especially with the limited running permitted by very tight tyre allocations, a driver’s grid position was determined more by the functionality of his suspension mechanism than it was by talent, bravery and the quality of their car.
Likewise the cars had to have extremely hard suspension for the small rubbing strips which had taken the place of skirts to work properly, providing a bone-shaking ride for the drivers, and also causing accidents as the stiffly-sprung cars would be unsettled by bumps and kerbs which previously would have posed no danger.
Colin Chapman in particular was furious that the ride height levers had been allowed after his Lotus 88’s debut had been quashed, and in typical understated fashion, set up his Lotus 87s (a design quickly thrown together to replace the Lotus 88) so that they rode comically high off the ground before the hydraulic lever was pulled as a form of protest.
Gordon Murray too, who’d seen the advantages of his careful skirting of the rules negated by this allowance, was similarly incensed, and as his own protest added a completely non-functional lever to the cockpit of the Brabham labelled “FIA cheat”.
Despite these protests, the ride height levers remained legal until the end of the season, when the 6-centimetre rule was quietly discarded, bringing ground effect back in full force for 1982.
The drama in 1981 went far beyond merely the technical side of the sport though.
While the tyres and the regulations were both sources of dispute, so too were the races themselves. Perhaps the most prominent race which was a source of great contention was the South African Grand Prix, which was scheduled to be the opening round of the 1981 season.
However, if you look at any rundown of the season, it is unlikely to feature the South African race, and that is because at short notice, FISA demanded on a date change which was not acceptable to the race’s organisers, and the event was therefore dropped from the 1981 calendar mere weeks before the race was due to be held.
This did not stop the race from going ahead though, and it was run as a non-championship round with the FISA-aligned continental teams not taking part, and the teams that did running 1980-spec cars with full skirts and ground effect.
The race was won by Carlos Reutemann, with Nelson Piquet second and Elio de Angelis third. This is a detail that is worth remembering in light of other events of the season…
One particular low point in terms of the races was Belgium, which proved to be both a shambolic and unfortunately tragic event.
The weekend started in the worst possible way, with Osella mechanic Giovanni Amadeo falling off the pitwall in the notoriously narrow Zolder pitlane into the path of Reutemann’s Williams during practice, with Reutemann being powerless to avoid hitting him.
The resultant accident lead to injuries which would sadly prove fatal, but these already tragic circumstances were worsened by the fact that further incidents were to follow.
Come the race, the mechanics and several of the drivers understandably staged a protest against the inadequate safety precautions at the circuit, with the aim of preventing the race from going ahead.
However, the green flag to start the race was shown as normal leaving several cars sitting on the grid with no drivers due to their involvement in the protest.
The resulting chaos caused some drivers to fill into the wrong grid slot when the formation lap was eventually completed, and others then turned their engines off expecting the start to be aborted and the cars to be sent on a second formation lap to resolve the carnage.
It soon became clear however that the organisers were going ahead with the race as normal, despite several cars not having their engines running, which resulted in a mad dash to get all the engines fired before the race started.
One mechanic, Dave Luckett, sprinted to start the engine of Riccardo Patrese’s Arrows when the lights which started the race suddenly went out, and an unsighted Siegfried Stohr in the second Arrows plowed into Luckett who was stood behind Patrese’s car.
Fortunately, this time the injuries were not fatal, but the accident, which was shown in full on the television broadcast of the race, represented another horrendous dereliction of safety procedures by the race organisers which was especially unforgivable given the fact that one fatal accident had already occurred on that weekend.
As much of a black mark as these events were against the season, it would be unfair to say that controversy and drama are the only things worth remembering the 1981 season for though, as at many times the racing was fantastic.
The British, Canadian and French Grands Prix in particular stand out as brilliant motor races.
In France though, much of the focus was on one thing — the return of Goodyear to the sport. After their sudden withdrawal from F1 in December of 1980, Goodyear had sat on the sidelines while some of their former customers begged for their return.
Unable to pass up the marketing opportunities of F1 any longer, Goodyear agreed to make a comeback, on the proviso that they only supply top teams.
In this case those teams were Williams and Brabham, who welcomed Goodyear back as they believed that, as a French company, Michelin’s first priority would always be Renault and Ligier, and that they would get better treatment from Goodyear instead.
Michelin responded by initially saying that they would drop support for the teams who they had been persuaded to support at short notice before the season’s start, and instead focus only on their long-term contracted teams.
While some teams managed to persuade Michelin to reconsider and continue providing them with tyres, others were left once again scrounging for other teams’ scraps as they had done in preseason testing. A tyre war, and its concomitant acrimony were now back in F1.
The tyre situation proved significant almost immediately as the French Grand Prix was red flagged near the end of the race, which meant a sprint-style restart for the last 22 laps.
Michelin had special soft compound tyres for their teams which proved perfectly suited to the restart conditions, while Goodyear, having been out of the development race, had only tyres designed to last the full race distance, leaving their teams largely hopeless on the restart.
Indeed, at the flag — 5 of the 6 point scoring positions were occupied by Michelin-runners, with only Piquet clinging on to third in his Goodyear-shod Brabham as the young Alain Prost won his first F1 race for Renault.
Likewise at the fourteenth round in Canada, the tyre war proved crucial. The race was held in torrential rain, as had become fairly common at the Circuit Île-Notre Dame as a result of the race’s date of late September.
Here, Michelin’s radial wet tyres proved to be miles ahead of the Goodyear tyres, with all 4 of the top positions occupied by cars using rubber from the Clermont-Ferrand firm.
Notably outside the points was Carlos Reutemann, who had seen the championship lead which he had steadily built up and held since the third race of the season gradually whittled away until it stood at just one point coming out of this penultimate race of the season.
The scene was thus set for a blockbuster showdown at the final race, albeit in the rather unglamorous location of the Caesar’s Palace casino car park in Las Vegas.
Reutemann’s run to lead the championship had not been without controversy itself, with the most notable incident being his disobeying of team orders from Williams instructing him to let teammate Jones pass at the second (official) round of the season in Brazil.
However, given Jones’ subsequent lack of midseason form (which saw a run of 4 races without scoring a point, though admittedly this was somewhat influenced by poor luck), together with the consistent campaign strung together by Reutemann, most viewed this as forgivable.
Indeed, ‘Lole’ as he was known to his friends, seemed to confirm his place as champion-elect by taking pole position ahead of his teammate for the final race, and he seemed to be within touching distance of the title.
At the start however, Jones got ahead, and Reutemann began a gradual and painful-to-watch slide out of the points, while primary rival Piquet cruised home to take 5th place, two points, and the championship with it.
There was sympathy for Reutemann, but with no reported mechanical issues on the car, and his reputation (particularly among the British press) of being a somewhat temperamental driver, many wrote off Reutemann’s poor performance as being simply the result of the intense pressure of a last-race title clash.
However, in subsequent years, alternative explanations for Reutemann’s slide down the field have come to light.
In an interview with one Bernie Ecclestone, who was the team principal of the Brabham team which took Piquet to the title in 1981, he implied that he had paid off Reutemann’s masseur to “favour Piquet instead” before the race, and that this had contributed to the latter’s victory in the championship.
Obviously, this conjures up images of all kinds of potential foul play, which is only further soured when considering the race in South Africa way back in February of that year, which Reutemann had won convincingly.
If counted, that result would have given Reutemann the title, regardless of his performance in Las Vegas, and it was only the squabbling between F1’s governing body, and the Formula One Constructors Association, led by Ecclestone, which led to it not being part of the championship.
That was the 1981 season. A true rollercoaster of a year featuring brilliant racing and incredible innovation, yet marred by tragedy, petty squabbling, dodgy dealing and iffy rule changes.
The real question is though — does it get much more Formula 1 than that?
