Phoenix wrote:ibsey wrote:
Also I wonder just how wary Ken Tyrell still was of French state owned engine manufactures after being forced to use the Matra V12 engines in 1970.
Actually, Tyrrell set up his own team with Jackie Stewart just so they would be able to keep running the Ford Cosworth engines in 1970, which they believed were superior to the Matras. Matra used their own engines, but Tyrrell was a completely separate entity from that year onwards, running March chassis before designing their own with Derek Gardner. They kept the Elf backing though, but the chassis were paid by Ford.
That is correct - Tyrrell did carry out some tests with the Matra V12 but found it to be distinctly lacking in mid range power (Stewart's comments about Matra's V12 were, I believe, "The exhaust note was fantastic - mainly because that's where all the power went"), not to mention thirstier and with higher cooling demands than the DFV. In some ways, though, that isn't entirely surprising - the Matra V12 was, IIRC, a slightly under developed version of BRM's V12 engine (BRM and Matra were co-developing a V12 engine until their sponsors drove them apart, so the final designs that they came up with did share a number of features), and the packaging of the ancillaries was much better suited to sports cars (which the engine was originally developed for) than Formula 1.
That said, Tyrrell found that the design of their chassis was a lot better - the first in house chassis that Tyrrell designed, the 001, did share a number of design features with Ducarouge's MS80, some of which were carried on in turn to the 003. So, even though Matra had cut their links with Tyrrell a number of years earlier, Matra's designers did still indirectly contribute to the competitiveness of Tyrrell in the early 1970's.
ibsey wrote:mario wrote:Accepting Renault's offer would have meant Tyrrell would have had to write off the 1977 season as an experimental year, with no guarantees that Renault could overcome the technical challenges facing them at the time. All things considered, it would have been a major gamble for Tyrrell with no guarantees of long term success and a lot of potential short term pain, so you can see why he would have preferred to stick with the tried and tested Cosworth DFV.
Just to add to this, perhaps the 6 wheel car was already quite a gamble for Tyrell. So they were even less inclined to choose the 'riskier' turbo option, than they would have been had they been running a more conventional 4 wheel car.
Also I wonder just how wary Ken Tyrell still was of French state owned engine manufactures after being forced to use the Matra V12 engines in 1970.
Finally I believe Ken Tyrell was generally against the idea's of turbo's & for instance the massive increase costs that might be assicoated with running them. Although whether this was his feelings before he got 'stung' by not running turbos from 1977 - 1984, or not is difficult to say.
The cost question is interesting - the implication is that Elf would have initially paid for, or at least subsidised, Renault's engine program: Tyrrell would have had the initial tranche of engines paid for them, but there was no guarantee that Elf would have continued paying for them over an extended period of time.
The possibility of having to partially bear the cost of future development work - and a lot of development work needed to be carried out before the EF1 could be competitive - might well have worried Tyrrell. It cost Elf around 500,000 Francs just to develop and test two engines, which was not an inconsiderable amount of money at the time, and Tyrrell were never an especially wealthy team even with backing from Elf. By comparison, the DFV was quite widely available at the time, and as a result was, relatively speaking, dirt cheap - it cost a fraction of what the turbo engines cost for engines, including maintenance by Cosworth, so there is a certain financial logic in Tyrrell's decision too.
