8/24/11

1975 Formula 1: (rear tire) = (front tire x 1.33)

The Content Acquisition Force dropped this Car and Driver from 1975 on my desk this morning, and upon flipping through it I immediately handed these pages to the Images and Scanning Them Dept for scanning. They went up while they were still warm. Fresh squozen goodness from the teat of an Oak Park antique store. We also got a super cool shriner fez.
The article is a report on the early season of F1. I recognize famous names like Emerson Fittipaldi, but I don't know the history and lore like SOME people I could mention... CRAIGF!

But just like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, I do know this: Formula 1 cars looked really really really cool in 1975. In the sixties, they looked cool because they were all flattened metal sausages with wheels poking out. In the seventies, they were just beginning to understand ground effects, so wings, spoilers, and the like were standard equipment, but they hadn't yet gone the way of the Darth Vader's Head look. Nope, you could still see the sausage shape - it just had a few wings stuck on it. More importantly, you could see the giant balooney rear tires and the weensy little front ones.

As a kid (in the seventies) I spent lots of time drawing race cars. Even in my single-digit-old years, I could have told you about the importance of having huge rear tires. There were a few experimental drawings testing the boundaries of this principal. Cars with silly little roller skate fonts wheels and nine-foot rears, but these looked stupid, and were discarded. The proportion of front-to-rear size was a bell curve. The size differential had an optimal relative proportion they became ugly at either end of the curve. You had to get it right. I understood this as an eight year old. I just couldn't have explained it in such fancy terms.

So, here are some great F1 cars from 1975. I'll identify the cars if possible, from the context of the article. Also, some of them are presented here in Rude Finger Graphic Gift form. So, get ready to do the right click rumba a few times. The PNGs are posted at the usual sizes of 1000px and 200px wide, but this time I didn't include flipped versions. All those sponsor decals would have been hell to correct on the flipped versions, and I've got an empire to run.

P.A.G. is proud to add these racing car PNGs to our growing multicar pile-up of graphic gifts.








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