Vandervell had been on the Board of British Racing Motors, which designed and raced a V-16 Formula 1 car in the early 1950's. BRM was backed by a consortium of British motor industry manufacturers. The idea was to bring a World Championship to Britain. The BRM was very complex and owed a lot, conceptually, to pre-war Mercedes GP cars. But the car was not properly developed and the racing team was poorly managed. Already late to the starting grids in 1949, the Type 15 BRM never finished a Grand Prix by the time a rules change made it obsolete at the end of 1951.
Vandervell was disgusted with BRM and went off to develop a Formula 1 car of his own. Laid down in 1956, it was considerably refined by Colin Chapman and Frank Costin for 1957 and "perfected" in its championship year, 1958. A historical footnote: the Vanwall put a period to the end of Colin Chapman's driving career. An enthusiastic and sometimes winning club racer, he was allowed to practice for the French GP at Rouen in a Vanwall in 1957. He had to use an escape road and damaged the car against a concrete post. So his race entry was a DNS; he turned his attention to designing race cars full time, and never got behind the wheel in competition again.
Vandervell's star drivers in 1958 were Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks.
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| Moss's Vanwall at the Casablanca GP, 1958. The car's driveshaft ran between the driver's legs instead of being offset to the side like the Maserati 250 F's and the Ferrari Dino 246's, resulting in a higher cockpit and center of gravity. |
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| Brooks reunited with the Vanwall at the Goodwood Revival 50 years after his most successful season, 1958. He won at Spa, the Nurburgring, and Monza. But it was a win-or-bust season, and Moss was Vanwall's designated Number One driver. Moss and Brooks won the Manufacturer's Championship for Tony Vandervell, though, fulfilling his ambition to "beat those bloody red cars." In 1958 Vanwall adopted "wobbly web" alloy wheels. But as the season progressed they reverted to wire wheels up front to improve handling (presumably by adding understeer). Brooks writes that the Vanwall was hard to corner in the style he preferred, the four wheel drift with all four wheels sliding and the car's attitude controlled by the throttle. So he often cornered the car "geometrically," like a modern car on racing slicks. |
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| Tony Vandervell "went the other way" to beat Ferrari, emphasizing state-of-the-art technology. Colin Chapman did a space frame which Frank Costin enclosed in a wind tunnel-tested body. The Vanwall pioneered the use of disc brakes in Formula 1. Instead of a short stroke, multi-cylinder engine, Vandervell went with a long stroke four. This gave the car excellent torque off slow corners. To rival Ferrari's power, Vandervell "borrowed" Norton motorcycle cylinder head design and mechanical fuel injection from Mercedes. To this he added equal-length exhaust tubes tuned for extractor effect. This anticipated the "bundle of snakes" exhausts used on Coventry-Climax and Ford V-8's in the early 1960's. The Vanwall engine was a conceptual home run but it was plagued with strong vibration which shook loose ancillary parts like throttle linkage, fuel injector pipes, pumps, and the exhaust system. |
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| The Vanwall was famous for its "tool room finish." Fed up with his experience with the casually managed BRM team, Tony Vandervell hired the best to design and race his car, and insisted on meticulous preparation. In addition to Colin Chapman and Frank Costin to design the car, he hired David Yorke to run the team and the best British drivers he could get. Vanwall was very much a nationalistic effort to show that Britain could beat the best Italy had to offer. |
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