Spirit 101B

Spirit 101B

Spirit 101B in its original version
Constructor:	Spirit
Designer:	Gordon Coppuck
Predecessor:	Spirit 201C
Successor:	Spirit 101D
Technical specifications
Chassis:	Monocoque
Engine:	Hard turbo
Wheelbase:	2718 mm
Weight:	550-565 kg
Tires:	Pirelli
Petrol:	Eleven
statistics
Driver:	Mauro Baldi Huub Rothengatter
First start:	1984 Brazilian Grand Prix
Last start:	1984 Portuguese Grand Prix
Starts Victories Poles SR 12 - - -
World Cup points:	-
Podiums:	-
Leadership laps:	-
Status: end of season 1984

The Spirit 101B was a race car of the British motorsport teams Spirit Racing , the 1984 at the Formula 1 World Championship took part. It was equipped with a Hart turbo engine. A temporarily used version with a Cosworth naturally aspirated engine was called the Spirit 101C .

background

Spirit Racing was founded in 1981 by John Wickham, former manager of the Formula 2 works team at March Engineering , and former McLaren designer Gordon Coppuck. Spirit appeared in 1982 with Honda engines in the Formula 2 European Championship . A year later, the team debuted in Formula 1 together with the Spirit 201C and with Honda's newly developed turbo engine. In the summer of 1983, Honda signed a long-term contract with the top team Williams F1 . The Spirit management initially hoped to be able to use Honda engines again as a junior team in 1984, and with this engine in mind, developed a new car for 1984, the Spirit 101. Hope was not fulfilled, however, as Williams' Team boss Frank Williams insisted on an exclusive delivery. Spirit therefore lost the Honda engine for 1984 and switched to Hart turbo engines. The Spirit 101B was the further development of the 101 tailored to the Hart engine, which was never completed in the originally planned version.

Spirit was financially supported by Honda in 1984. This could be seen, among other things, in advertising stickers from Honda that were attached to the flanks of the 101B. Regardless of this, the team, which had a total of only 15 employees, was considered the smallest and financially weakest of the 1984 Formula 1 season.

The Spirit 101B was further developed into the model 101D for the 1985 season .

construction

The Spirit 101B was one of the most compact cars of the 1984 season. Two copies (101B1 and 101B2) were built. The car had a monocoque that was partly made of plastic. Some parts were made of aluminum. The monocoque was created by the British specialist John Thompson. Since Brian Hart's turbo engine as an inline four-cylinder was less wide than Honda's V-engine , the rear of the Spirit 101B was significantly narrower than that of its predecessor. In the first version of the 101B, which was tested at Brands Hatch in January 1984 , the side pods were still similar to those of the 201C. The versions of the 101B used in the world championship races, however, no longer had conventional side pods. The radiators were arranged at an angle in front of the rear wheels, level with the engine. The cockpit and the tank were fully clad, the engine, however, was usually open. The suspension was carried over from the 201C. Coppuck had developed a newly developed thrust strut construction; for financial reasons, however, it was not implemented for either the B1 or the B2. Overall, the 101B was lighter than its predecessor, although the hard four-cylinder in and of itself was heavier than Honda's V6 engine.

The Spirit 101B was powered by a supercharged in-line four-cylinder Hart 415 engine. The British teams Toleman and RAM Racing used comparable engines . Toleman, which started with Ayrton Senna , was Hart's preferred customer, because his boss Ted Toleman had largely financed the development of the Hart turbo engine. The motors delivered to Toleman were further developed and therefore more powerful and more stable than the motors for RAM and Spirit. The Toleman engines had electronic fuel injection, while the engines for RAM and Spirit were only equipped with mechanical injection. The Toleman drivers also had a boost pressure between 3.2 and - in qualifying - 4.0 bar; the pilots of Spirit and RAM, however, were limited to 3.0 bar. In this customer version, the hard engine was considered the weakest turbo engine, whose output was only 30 to 50 hp above that of a Cosworth DFV.

A five-speed transmission from Hewland served as the power transmission .

Races

The Italian Mauro Baldi drove for Spirit in the first six races of the year. The team had initially tried to get a commitment from Fulvio Ballabio , who had undertaken some tests with the 101B before the season; Ballabio, however, did not receive a super license . At the Canadian Grand Prix, the Dutch debutant Huub Rothengatter took over the cockpit, who stayed with the team for the following seven races. Baldi returned once more for the Grand Prix of Europe and Portugal at the end of the season.

With the exception of the Monaco Grand Prix in 1984 , the 101B qualified regularly. Even if none of the Spirit pilots managed to get past 20th on the grid in the course of the season, they qualified in half of all races ahead of the drivers of the financially better equipped RAM team, which used a comparable engine. During the races, Coppuck lowered the boost pressure of the Hart engines many times below 3.0 bar in order to increase their durability. Baldi and Rothengatter crossed the finish line five times among the top 10 drivers; the best result was four eighth places. RAM, on the other hand, only achieved four ninth places.

The Spirit 101C

For the Grand Prix of Detroit Spirit received no motors of hard. In the literature, this is usually attributed to a delivery bottleneck at Hart. Triggered by a strike by German metal workers, Hart's supplier Mahle was unable to produce enough pistons, so that Hart was unable to provide race-ready engines for all customer teams. Other sources speculate that Spirit fell behind in paying for the Hart engines and that Hart then withheld his four-cylinder.

Spirit responded to the lack of Hart engines with a temporary change to Cosworth naturally aspirated engines. In the week between the Canadian Grand Prix and the Detroit Grand Prix, Coppuck and the Spirit mechanics rebuilt the first of the two 101Bs enough to accommodate a Cosworth DFV engine. This was associated with the use of conventional side boxes, as they had already been used on the prototype of the 101B and on its predecessor, the 201C. The naturally aspirated engine variant was called Spirit 101C. Spirit only used the 101C for the Detroit Grand Prix. At the subsequent race in Dallas , the team reappeared with the 101B2 with a Hart engine. The 101C was converted back to the 101B in the summer of 1984 and served the team as a replacement vehicle until the end of the season.

Huub Rothengatter drove the Cosworth-101C on the Detroit Street Circuit . Next to him, only the two Tyrrell drivers and one of the Arrows pilots were using naturally aspirated engines. In qualification training, the team suffered from considerable technical and organizational difficulties. Initially, participation in the training was delayed by a self-activating fire extinguisher, then the transmission linkage jammed. Rothengatter drove by far the slowest qualifying time, with his Cosworth engine suffering from defects and only running on four cylinders at the end of the training session. Rothengatter's best practice time was 9 seconds longer than Nelson Piquet ( Brabham - BMW ), who occupied pole position, and 3.5 seconds longer than Marc Surer's at Arrows-Cosworth. As the 27th of the qualification training, Rothengatter missed the qualification.

Results

Spirit 101B hard

driver	No.	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	10	11	12	13	14th	15th	16	Points	rank
Formula 1 World Championship 1984																		0	-
M. Baldi	21st	DNF	8th	DNF	8th	DNF	DNQ									8th	15th
H. Rothengatter								NC		DNF	NC	9	NC	DNF	8th

Spirit 101C Cosworth

driver	No.	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	10	11	12	13	14th	15th	16	Points	rank
Formula 1 World Championship 1984																		0	-
H. Rothengatter	21st								DNQ

Legend
colour	abbreviation	meaning
gold	-	victory
silver	-	2nd place
bronze	-	3rd place
green	-	Placement in the points
blue	-	Classified outside the point ranks
violet	DNF	Race not finished (did not finish)
	NC	not classified
red	DNQ	did not qualify
	DNPQ	failed in pre-qualification (did not pre-qualify)
black	DSQ	disqualified
White	DNS	not at the start (did not start)
	WD	withdrawn
Light Blue	PO	only participated in the training (practiced only)
	TD	Friday test driver
without	DNP	did not participate in the training (did not practice)
	INJ	injured or sick
	EX	excluded
	DNA	did not arrive
	C.	Race canceled
		no participation in the World Cup
other	P / bold	Pole position
	SR / italic	Fastest race lap
	*	not at the finish, but counted due to the distance covered
	()	Streak results
	underlined	Leader in the overall standings

literature

• Ian Bamsey: The 1000 bhp Grand Prix Cars , 1988 (GT Foulis & Co. Ltd), ISBN 978-0854296170 (English)
• Adriano Cimarosti: The century of racing , Motorbuch Verlag Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9
• David Hodges: A – Z of Grand Prix Cars 1906–2001 , 2001 (Crowood Press), ISBN 1-86126-339-2 (English)
• David Hodges: Racing Cars from A – Z after 1945 , Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-613-01477-7
• Pierre Ménard: La Grande Encyclopédie de la Formule 1 , 2nd edition, St. Sulpice, 2000, ISBN 2-940125-45-7 (French)
• Doug Nye: The Big Book of Formula 1 Racing Cars. The three-liter formula from 1966 . Publishing house Rudolf Müller, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-481-29851-X .

Web links

Commons : Spirit 101B  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} David Hodges: A – Z of Grand Prix Cars 1906–2001 , 2001 (Crowood Press), ISBN 1-86126-339-2 , p. 212.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ian Bamsey: The 1000 bhp Grand Prix Cars , 1988 (GT Foulis & Co. Ltd), ISBN 978-0854296170 , p. 98.
3. ↑ Adriano Cimarosti: The century of racing , motor book publisher Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9 , S. 340th
4. ↑ ^{a b} David Hodges: Racing Cars from A – Z after 1945 , Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-613-01477-7 , p. 235 f.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Ian Bamsey: The 1000 bhp Grand Prix Cars , 1988 (GT Foulis & Co. Ltd.), ISBN 978-0854296170 , S. 107th
6. ↑ Ian Bamsey: The 1000 bhp Grand Prix Cars , 1988 (GT Foulis & Co. Ltd.), ISBN 978-0854296170 , p 94th
7. ↑ Adriano Cimarosti: The century of racing , motor book publisher Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9 , S. 342nd
8. ↑ Adriano Cimarosti: The century of racing , motor book publisher Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9 , S. 347th