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| The Peter Whitehead/Ian Stewart Jaguar C-Type finished 4th at LeMans in 1953. |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmclYtEbKo0
This is a 13-minute BBC color print of LeMans in 1953. While it features British marques, particularly Jaguar (which won), it also has some fine footage of the American Cunninghams, Ferraris, and others--even a fleeting view of the rare Alfa Romeo Disco Volante.
It was clear even in 1953 that Jaguar's winning edge was fade-resistant disc brakes--the first application in a racing car. But the next generation of Formula 1 cars, then on the drawing boards, used drum brakes. With benefit of hindsight, it's surprising that disc brakes were not more quickly adopted for racing. 1959 was the first year they were on all the cars in the fields of major sports car and Formula 1 races.
One possible explanation is that LeMans was seen as "different" because it was an endurance race. The advantage of discs in a sprint race was not seen as clear-cut. But the Mille Miglia, Targa Florio, and 1000 km sports car races were long too.
Another explanation is that Dunlop held patents for reliable caliper-type disc brakes--the ones used on the Jaguar C-Type. Girling (another British firm) held patents on a different type of caliper. So it is not surprising that disc brakes found their way onto British racing and production cars first. The first non-British production car to use (front) disc brakes was the 1961 Mercedes-Benz 220 SE. They were--unusually for Mercedes--made by Girling, not in-house. Around the same time, Porsche tried to develop its own disc brake, used for about a year, before concluding that it was simpler, cheaper, and easier to just pay the licensing fees.
1 comment:
I am greatly interested in this topic. To be more exact - how much exactly disc brakes were superior in early and mid 50s.
I think it must be a combination of reasons. I think almost certainly there was patents and knowledge reasons. Besides that drum brakes kept on getting better, better cooling and better shoe linings. I think particularly in F1 drum brakes were not that much inferior, I guess mostly because the cars were open wheelers, thus drums were exposed better to direct air stream, another very important reason being lower mass of the cars comparing to big endurance cars. Also, not sure, but almost certainly F1 cars did have more aerodynamic drag, which also is a little help in decelerating. Perhaps tracks in average also were less intense in terms of braking energy use. Possibly they could also corner faster, so they would need to slow down little less, just a guess.
From what I have read so far, Vanwall used disc brakes in F1 since their debut in 1954, but only started seriously turning heads in 1957. Maserati then had great state of the art drum brakes, which were great as long as they didn't fade.
I also think that Brits might simply not have been that great in F1 then, so other teams had more other superior details that compensated little worse braking, which might not even been worse as long as they managed avoiding significant fade.
Besides much greater fade resistance, disc brakes should have been serious goal for many constructors for lower unsprung mass (and obviously overall mass) and better performance when wet. They are also smaller, thus less drag induced.
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