How a Car Works · Go deeper5 min read

1968: the first wings

The first Formula 1 wings stood on tall, slender struts bolted straight to the suspension, pressing downforce directly onto the tyres. It worked beautifully — until the struts started snapping. Two enormous crashes in one Barcelona weekend ended the high-wing era and produced Formula 1's first aerodynamic regulations.

Wings on stilts

When Formula 1 discovered in 1968 that an upside-down aircraft wing could press a car into the road, the obvious question was where to put it. The cleverest-looking answer was also the most dangerous: mount the wing high above the car on slim struts, in clean air, and bolt those struts directly to the suspension uprights. That way the downforce bypassed the car's springs entirely and pushed straight down on the tyres — every newton went into grip, none into compressing the suspension. Aerodynamically and mechanically it was the purest possible arrangement. Structurally, it was a trap.

The 1968–69 high wing: metres above the car in clean air, on struts bolted to the rear uprights so the load pressed straight onto the tyres.

Load grows with the square of speed

The trap is in the arithmetic of aerodynamic load. Double the speed and the wing pushes fourtimes harder; triple it and the load is nine times higher. A strut that felt rigid in testing at 200 km/h was quietly approaching its limit at 270 — and the era's engineers were discovering aerodynamic loads by trial, without wind tunnels big enough or computers at all. Each month the wings grew larger and the struts taller, and the margin nobody could calculate shrank.

Bumps multiply everything

Steady speed wasn't even the killer. Because the struts stood on the unsprung suspension, every kerb strike and crest whipped them directly — no springs in between to soften the blow. A hard bump doesn't add a little load; it can momentarily double it, a spike on top of a force already growing with speed squared. The struts died at the peaks, exactly the loads nobody had measured. At Barcelona's Montjuïc circuit in 1969 — fast, bumpy, lined with barriers — both works Lotus 49Bs suffered wing failures within laps of each other, and both crashed heavily.

The lesson written into the rulebook

The ban brought wings down onto the sprung bodywork, limited their height and width, and established the principle that has governed racing aerodynamics ever since: aero loads are structural loads, and the rulebook — not just the stopwatch — gets a say in how they are carried. Every wing regulation since, from deflection tests to load-rated mountings, descends from that single weekend. The wings stayed; the stilts never came back.

Go deeper: the v² law and the gust factorfor engineers

Aerodynamic force scales with dynamic pressure — the square of speed:

F = \tfrac{1}{2}\,\rho\, v^{2}\, S\, C_L

Going from 200 to 270 km/h multiplies $v^2$ by 1.8 — nearly double the load with no visible warning. Add a bump: a kerb strike that briefly pitches the wing a few degrees nose-up raises $C_L$ at the same instant the strut is reacting the impact, and the combined peak can exceed twice the steady load. Design for the average and the peaks find you — at Montjuïc, they did.