From Parnell to Clark: Goodwood’s first F1 race vs. its last | Frankel’s Insight

The outstanding performance of the day unquestionably belonged to a lad who’d celebrated his 19^th birthday the previous day. In event five for 500cc cars, and despite starting well down the order (grid places were awarded by ballot), he overtook everyone and was leading by 24 seconds when the flag fell precisely six minutes later — he dropped the field by four seconds a lap, despite his father frantically waving at him to slow down. His name was Stirling Moss.

Even so, what the crowd of nearly 15,000 had really come to see was the last race of the day, for cars of the newly named ‘Formula One’ category, even if in the somewhat straitened circumstances of the post-war era, there was only one genuine F1 car in the race, the Maserati 4CLT/48 of Reg Parnell, which duly won at an average speed of 84.18mph. The inaugural lap record (set by Bob Gerard’s second placed ERA) was left standing at 1:43.6.

So, I thought it would be interesting to compare this first Goodwood F1 car to the very last to win there at the Easter Meeting on 19^th April 1965. Event three that day was the Sunday Mirror International Trophy Race for Formula One cars, held over a rather more meaningful 42 laps and won by Jim Clark in his Lotus 25 at an average speed of 105.07mph. He shared the fastest lap with Jackie Stewart’s BRM, a time of 1:20.4 which would stand in perpetuity for contemporary racing cars at Goodwood.

Parnell’s Maserati was pretty much state of the art for 1948, the 4CLT being new that year and boasting a new tubular chassis frame that was both lighter and stiffer than the ladder frame used by its predecessor, the 4CL. Indeed the ‘T’ in the name stands for ‘tubolare’.

Moreover, the new front suspension dispensed with the old torsion bar springing medium in favour of newfangled coils. Meanwhile its 1.5-litre engine boasted not one but two superchargers capable of developing up to 274PS (201kW) at 7,000rpm. It was light, too, with a dry weight of just 630kg.

Even so, it doesn’t take long in the company of the spec sheet of a Lotus 25 to see where the progress had gone over the intervening 17 years, Or more properly, 14 years, as the 25 made its race debut in 1962 and was already an elderly machine by the time the 1965 season came along.

In one area it was clearly deficient compared to the Maserati: brute power. For while the Lotus’ Coventry Climax V8 displaced the same 1.5-litres and came with twice as many cylinders, of superchargers there was no sign. While outputs varied from engine to engine and season to season, Clark probably had around 203PS (149kW) under his right foot, despite the ability to rev the thing past 10,000rpm. BRM’s V8 went even higher, to 11,000rpm at least.

But in all other regards it’s like comparing a jet fighter to a biplane. Most notable is the repositioning of the engine immediately behind the driver, saving weight, improving aerodynamics and massively increasing grip and agility by centralising the main mass of the car.

But there was more; much more. The 4CLT’s tubular chassis may have been bang up to date in 1948, but it was very much old school compared to the 25’s monocoque chassis, the very first in F1.

The monocoque didn’t just improve torsional rigidity compared to the flimsy spaceframe, it transformed it. I’ve read (but cannot corroborate) that compared to the Lotus 24, the 25’s chassis was 200 per cent stiffer. It was lighter, more space efficient and therefore more aerodynamic, too.

The Lotus was infinitely more slippery and while at the back of the Maserati lay a live rear axle — in concept no different to those that had been used since the birth of the car — the Lotus used a complex, fully independent system of wishbones and radius arms. It had disc brakes, too, rather than the inefficient drums of the Maserati and if you think the 4CLT sounds light, it was a bit of a bloater compared to the skinny Lotus, whose dry weight was little more than 450kg.

Then there was the way the car would have been set up. By 1965, a factory F1 team was a very serious outfit indeed. I can remember Stewart telling they’d gear the BRM for whichever way the wind was blowing down the Lavant Straight, while Reg’s Maserati was privately owned and would have received nothing like the same level of preparation before the race.

All of which explains the 23.2seconds reduction in lap time between 1948 and 1965. Except that it doesn’t. For there is one more detail I have so far omitted to mention.

From 1948 to 1951 there was no chicane at Goodwood, and the inclusion of ‘Paddock Bend’ thereafter was reckoned to add ten per cent to the overall lap time. Make that around a true 25 seconds around a circuit less than 2.5 miles in length in either configuration, so call it better than ten seconds per mile.

Five years later and, in testing at least, even the 1:20.4 of Clark and Stewart was looking slow. Big banger Can-Am cars equipped with huge motors, vast rear wings and ever wider tyres brought times even closer to the minute mark. One wonders just how fast a properly set up modern F1 car might go today…

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