Lotus 79 construction report – part 1

And again I’ve no time for going on building my car due to my studies. So I’m going to amuse you with a construction report of another car I’ve built in 2010. It’s the Lotus 79 chassis R2 from Ronnie Peterson. I’ve built the chassis in the specification of the 1978 Austrian GP – Ronnie won that GP. I’m an Austrian and of course I’ve to built that car, which raced 76km(47,3 miles) away from my home on the today’s Red Bull Ring and former Österreichring and A1 Ring. I can’t tell you all the differences to the former spec’s any more – it’s too long ago that I’ve built that car.

The 79 was the dominating car of the season, winning six races out of  eleven. The first five ones were driven by the old type 78 winning two of them. Driven by Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson, Lotus got 1st and 2nd in the Championship. Poorly Ronnie Peterson died after his horrible crash in his Type 78/3 spare car in Monza after he damaged his Type 79 in free practice. Created by a design team, lead by Colin Chapman, of three great F1 engineers, Peter Wright, Tony Rudd and Martin Ogilvie, that car defines the appereance of F1 cars new. It was, after it’s predecessor the type 78 the first real Wing Car of Formula 1.

I began with the work on this car somewhere in December 2009 by reading John Tiplers Lotus 78 and 79 The Ground-Effect cars. After reading that book, I generated a few drawings of the car. Later I got a few additional original drawings of Classic Team Lotus from a modelling colleague. For sure I’ve to say, that I’ve never had that much and that excellent material and information for building a car. But my increased engineering and building expirience let the Red Bull getting better although I hadn’t far away from that much and good material than at the 79 . Anyway, the Lotus 79 was much more better than everything I’ve done before that time. In the first part of the report I’ll show you my self generated drawings. I will not share the original drawings of Classic Team Lotus again for preventing copyright problems.

The full car, drawn by myself in January 2010 in 1:20 scale.

The monocoque drawing is a, for my requirement modified, original drawing. But the whole drawing is also generated by myself. I mainly added a few meassurements and cross sections.

A drawing of the very important side pods, drawn with help of an original drawing.

The first page of the specification of chassis 79R2. After Petersons dead, Carlos Reutemann raced this chassis in 1979 for five GPs.

The second page of the specification of chassis R2.