1. The Tyrrell P34s from 1976 came first and second in the Swedish GP. ìBovvered,î I hear you say. But these cars were a bit different; they had SIX wheels! Four tiny ones at the front and two big ones at the back. Mental.
2. This strange looking F1 car is the Ligier JS5. The car came 5th in the 1976 Formula One Championship and took three podiums. However, all three of these came after they removed the rather crazy air intake you see above.
3. The 1978 Swedish GP is remembered for one thing only, the Brabham BT46B ‘Fan Car’. It had rubber skirts all round and a massive fan in the middle that literally sucked the car to the floor, giving it amazing grip. It wiped the floor with the opposition, but the FIA banned it after just one race. Boo.
4. In the 1971 Italian GP, Lotus entered a car with 4WD that was powered by a gas turbine. It was awesome in the wet, but wasn’t that good in the dry, so they gave up on the idea.
5. Subaru actually built a Formula One engine, but it was a bit shit. The hugely un-successful Coloni team (82 races, five finishes, no points) were the official Subaru F1 team in 1990, powered by a Subaru flat-12 engine pushing out just 500bhp, making it by far the slowest car on the grid.
6. The P34 wasn’t the only six-wheeled F1 car though – Ferrari, March, and Williams all built prototype six-wheeled F1 cars in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but they never made it into an actual race.
7. In the early ’80s, BMW used the production block from the E30 316 and 318 BMWs to build the mental turbo F1 engines that produced up to 1,500bhp from a mere 1.5ltrs!
8. Despite having a name like a cheap porno, Coventry Climax built many F1-winning engines for Lotus over the years. Although a big part of their business was actually building fork-lift trucks!
9. In the ’60s, BRM built a 16-cylinder engine – the 3.0ltr H16, which was basically two V8s sitting on top of each other sharing a common crank. Complicated yes, but it worked.
10. The last ever supercharged F1 engine was a 1951 BRM 1.5ltr 16-cylinder engine. Pushing out an insane 72psi boost, it achieved 600bhp at 12,000rpm. As you would expect, at 72psi boost it wasn’t the most reliable car on the grid!
