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and most of the bodywork hang off the monocoque, which itself contains the driver and fuel tank. So you need to have a pretty good idea of what the whole car will look like by the time you release the drawings for the monocoque and the transmission casing. Because they are the components that take the longest to make, to establish their release dates you simply work back from when the car is first scheduled to run.

      You can keep working on the details after you’ve done that, so you might finish the front wing sometime later. Something like the driver’s mirrors get released a few days before D-Day, because they don’t take long to make.

      At March, most of the car was made in-house, which for a production company where profit is important was crucial. The gearbox casing was made to our design, sent out to a foundry to cast and then machined by another company, but the monocoque, for instance, was made in-house, as well as all the suspension.

      Because all the components were drawn by hand, it was difficult to check every last thing to make sure the components were going to assemble correctly, and we had occasional disasters when the first prototype car was being built: something wouldn’t fit, for example, or a suspension member would go through a piece of bodywork. Nowadays, with everything drawn on computer, it is easy to fully assemble the car in the virtual world and check for such howlers before anything is actually made.

      Work on the 85C began in August 1984, when I was pulling double-duty, wearing one hat as race engineer for Bobby in the States, and another doing design and wind tunnel work on the 85C in the UK. As a result it had a compressed aero programme and design time. Never good.

      THE CHOICE

      There’s always a trade-off between making something strong and making it aerodynamic. For instance, to make the chassis stiff, you want a wide rim to the cockpit where the driver sits, and so I made the rim width 2in, which on the one hand gave a stiff chassis, but on the other presented a large and not very aerodynamically sympathetic opening to the top of the cockpit. Research 12 months later for its successor, the 86C, showed this to be a much bigger penalty than I had expected: with the compressed design time, I’d had to make a judgement without the time to evaluate it in the tunnel. It was the wrong call.

      BRAINWAVES

      I was lucky enough to fly business class as I began the commute in August between the US racetracks and March in Bicester, but the seats were upholstered in that squeaky leather that’s supposed to be the height of luxury but is in fact slippery and uncomfortable, so for the return night flights I’d down a couple of whiskey and sodas and then wander through to economy.

      God knows how airlines like Pan Am and TWA made any money in those days. Half the time you’d have the flight almost to yourself. Sure enough, I’d find three or four seats together and lie across those.

      I remember one particular flight over the Irish Sea and the pilot announcing that there was a technical problem. We were going to have to circle over the sea, dump our fuel, then return to Heathrow. Of course that meant a delay back at Heathrow, the bottom line being that by the time we did eventually touch down at JFK in New York it was almost midnight.

      There I had to bribe the hire company 20 dollars to stay open (‘We’re closed.’ ‘Says here you close at midnight.’ ‘We’re closed.’) and give me a car, and then I set off, map balanced on my lap, aiming to get to New Jersey across the Washington Bridge. Except, of course, I got hopelessly lost and ended up in the Bronx.

      The Bronx in 1985 wasn’t at all how it was portrayed in the films of the period like Death Wish 3 and The Exterminator. Oh no. It was much, much worse. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that anybody needing to film post-apocalyptic scenes in 1985 needed only to set up shop in the Bronx. The ingredients were all there, burnt-out – and still-burning – cars, roaming gangs of sinister-looking miscreants, derelict buildings, shuttered-up shops and shadowy alleyways.

      For a lost Englishman, one who but a few hours ago was secretly bemoaning the slippery leather in business class, it was quite a culture shock. So you can imagine my relief when I spotted a cop car pulled over at the side of the road. I drew to a halt, got out and went to ask for assistance.

      As I did so, however, I registered what I’d missed before. The cop car had pulled in behind another car, its boot open. The driver of that car stood with his legs splayed and hands across the roof, being frisked.

      The cop heard me approach and whether he came to the conclusion that I was the guy’s accomplice or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that he span round, pulled his gun, dropped to one knee and yelled, ‘Freeze’.

      I did as I was told, swallowing jagged glass at the same time. On the one hand there was a certain novelty at being in such a cinematic situation. On the other, I was scared shitless.

      I mustered my very best English-gentleman voice. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, I can see that you’re busy. But I was just wondering if you might be able to direct me to New Jersey.’

      His answer? ‘Beat it, pal.’

      Once again, I did as I was told, cursing myself for having got lost and then making the mistake of stopping. But mistakes happen when you’re as exhausted as I was at that time. As I’ve said, I was on a fairly unremitting schedule.

      Even so, I did a lot of work on flights. Being on a plane has the distinct advantage of freeing you from distractions and pressure. I look back at my ideas now and I can pinpoint which ones I did over the Atlantic.

      And what of the March 85C? Well, the great news for me as a designer is that it won the championship that year. Possibly the competition was a little weak, but it was still the first car for which I had been totally responsible, and despite the compressed design cycle, it had won!

      The sad news for me as a race engineer was that it was won by a team called Penske, not Bobby, the very driver around whom I had designed the car.

      The other highlight of the year was that, as well as the championship, it won the Indy 500.

      And the Indy 500 of that year was a humdinger.

CHAPTER 15

      The Indy 500 is the centrepiece of the championship and a gargantuan sporting event in its own right. Taking place at the legendary 2½-mile Super Speedway oval track at Indianapolis, in economic terms it’s bigger than the Super Bowl, which is partly a result of the huge numbers that attend on the race day itself, and partly because it takes place over three weeks of practice, testing and qualifying before the race itself. ‘The Month of May’, they call it.

      As an engineer, you come up with a shopping list of things you’d like to try in terms of Indy 500 set-up. A common mistake was to set up the car with too much understeer, so the driver would go through the corner flat-out without lifting the throttle but he’d lose too much speed because the front tyres would scrub across the track and that action would create drag and slow it down.

      Equally, if the car was too nervous at the rear the driver would have to lift the throttle or risk losing the rear and so, again, you’d end up losing speed.

      So trying to get the balance of the car just right was crucial at Indy, and a difficult thing to keep right throughout the month. Often in the early days of testing building up to qualifying week, you’d find some teams and drivers starting with very quick times but slowing down as the track rubbered in and the weather warmed up.

      There were so many variables. So many different things to try on the car that I’d come up with a list of the key things and then attempt to work through them each day. But despite the track being open from 10am to 6pm, productivity in testing was frustratingly slow. For example:

      10.00: First run of the day. Installation run, go out, do two warm-up laps, engine cover off, check for oil leaks, etc.

      10.20: First proper run of four timed laps on new tyres. Come in. Bobby complaining of poor car balance. Check the all-important stagger (difference in diameter of the rear tyres), find it is wrong and adjust it.

      11.00:

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