Formula One Features — February 1996

The number of automotive designers who have designed successful Grand Prix cars, and been able to turn their hands and minds to the creation of vehicles for road use can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Max Welti is tall and lean and has a habit of slicking back his black hair. In the black team clothing worn by the Red Bull Sauber Ford team he looks decidedly menacing - like Darth Vader from Star Wars and a strange Eastern European vampire. In fact, the 43-year-old Swiss is one of the more civilized people one can meet in the F1 paddock.

The recent announcement that the Ford Motor Company is to supply engines to the completely new Stewart Grand Prix team in 1997 was greeted with incredulity in Formula 1 circles.

All we ever hear about Melbourne in the newspapers is that there is controversy. The track site is constantly being invaded and protesters are being arrested. We have not heard a lot about what the race is actually doing for Melbourne and why the city went out of its way to snatch the race from Adelaide.

Seasonal Preview 1996

As the 1996 new cars arrive and we see that they all look very similar because of the laws of physics and the way the regulations are phrased, one is left to wonder the kind of cars which Formula 1 engineers might be building today if the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile allowed them more freedom.

In the year 2010 Formula 1 will be a very different spectacle to the sport we watch today. Technology moves on so fast that the sport will have to undergo some fundamental changes in order to survive.

Formula 1 cars are extraordinarily safe vehicles. Years of bitter experience and deaths have led the sport to produce cars which can hit walls at high speeds without the drivers being injured. So successful were the safety measures that between the death of Elio de Angelis in testing at Paul Ricard in May 1986 no-one died in an F1 car until eight years later.