Thanks to McLaren’s Zak Brown, he made that available to me and it looks like I’m going to have a couple more sessions at COTA this weekend.”Īndretti drives the Ruoff Mortgage Ind圜ar “Two-Seater” – a program that gives VIP and other paying customers high-speed rides around race courses on the Ind圜ar schedule. “It’s a modern enough car to get me to have the real feel of what the current car feels like in so many ways. “It was purely something I was looking forward to, as you can imagine,” Andretti told me.

I had an exclusive interview with the racing legend earlier this week just after he returned from Monterey, California and before he left for Austin, Texas for this week’s round on the Formula One World Championship. Tameo Kits has produced the model of this fabulous single-seater (WCT 78 in the World Champion series) and Ricardo Moura has assembled it with great skill.Andretti’s F1 ride was arranged by McLaren CEO Zak Brown during a private event that featured a number of classic McLarens. Progressively, starting from 1979, all the F1 cars adopted the ground effect, with side skirts and profiled bottom, until in 1983 the Federation intervened to change the regulations and limit the use of these aerodynamic devices that had caused a sudden and generalized increase in performance, making the cars very dangerous. The car did school, even if all the other Formula 1 teams took at least a year to discover the reason that benefited the Lotus 79. A new term was then used to define these cars: with a ground effect.Īt the debut the Lotus 79 proved immediately faster than all the competitors and only withdrawals due to mechanical failures prevented it from winning all the races on the calendar. Designed by Martin Ogilvie and Peter Wright, he carried the aerodynamics research accomplished in great secrecy by Lotus in those years and partly already expressed in the previous model, the Lotus 78.

The Lotus 79 was a truly revolutionary car for its era. Nicknamed “Black Beauty” due to its proportioned shapes and the black livery of the sponsor “John Player Special”, it is considered by some to be the most technically significant single-seater in the history of F1. With its pilots Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson he won 6 Grand Prix that allowed the Italian-American to become World Champion and to the team to win the constructors title. The Lotus 79 is a Formula 1 car that competed in the 1978 World Championship.

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