How a Car Works · Go deeper5 min read

The car so good it was banned

By the 1990s a Formula 1 car's downforce depended exquisitely on its exact height and angle over the road — and every bump, brake and corner disturbed it. The Williams FW14B replaced its springs with computer-controlled hydraulic rams that repositioned the car fifty times a second. It won the 1992 championship by round eleven, and the technology was outlawed within two years.

The platform problem

A modern racing car's wings and floor are tuned for one precise attitude: a particular ride height, a particular rake, held steady over the road. But an ordinary suspension exists to let the car move — it rolls in corners, dives under braking, squats under power, and rides bumps by design. Every one of those motions drags the aerodynamic platform away from its sweet spot, so the car has the least downforce exactly when the driver is asking the most of it. Through the 1980s teams fought this with ever-stiffer springs, trading the tyres' grip on bumps for the floor's grip in clean air. The FW14B stopped trading and deleted the compromise.

Hydraulic rams at each corner replace the springs — sensors read the body's height, roll and pitch, and actuators hold the platform where the aerodynamicists want it.

The suspension becomes software

In place of springs and dampers, each corner of the FW14B carried a hydraulic ram. Sensors read the car's ride height, roll and pitch hundreds of times a second; a computer compared the measurements with the aerodynamic map's ideal attitude; and the rams pushed each wheel to hold the body exactly there, correcting roughly fifty times a second. Grip stopped depending on spring rates chosen on Friday and started depending on code. The car could even lean into corners or trim its rake down the straights — attitudes no passive suspension could ever hold.

Downforce that never takes a lap off

The payoff compounds around the whole lap. A passive car bleeds downforce every time it moves: roll lifts one floor edge in corners, dive stalls the front wing's sweet spot under braking. Held flat, the FW14B kept essentially all of its downforce all of the time — worth around two seconds a lap, an eternity in Formula 1. Nigel Mansell won the 1992 title by round eleven of sixteen; the car took ten wins and fifteen pole positions from as many races.

So effective it had to go

The FIA banned active suspension — together with traction control and the other driver aids — for 1994, partly on cost, partly on the fear that driver skill was being automated away. It remains one of the clearest cases in engineering of a technology outlawed for working too well. The idea, as ever, escaped the rulebook: every adaptive damper on a modern road car, reading the road and re-tuning itself in milliseconds, is the FW14B's descendant in civilian clothes.

Go deeper: why holding the platform is worth secondsfor engineers

Downforce depends steeply on ride height and rake — near the ground, a few millimetres of movement can change the floor's contribution by several percent. Cornering grip scales with total vertical load, so if roll and pitch cost the platform ~10% of its downforce exactly at mid-corner, the car gives up ~10% of its aerodynamic grip at the one moment it is grip-limited. Hold the platform still and that entire loss returns — every corner, every lap. Two seconds a lap wasn't one big trick; it was a hundred small ones, all named “the floor stayed where it works”.