If this is old, I apologize, but I had never seen it. The
California company that did the transaxle for the F1 (or at least the six prototypes) has some interested anecdotes and information that was new to me:
Quote:
—The Driving Ambition book about the making of the Supercar shows pictures of damaged transaxles. All of those failures were of the transaxles made by our competitors attempts at improving our initial transaxle! We had ZERO failures with our prototype transaxles!
—Quoting Gordon, "As far as I'm concerned the XP cars with the prototype gearboxes were great until bits got updated and changed for later spec. The last remaining prototype gearbox still had the best (gear) change of them all, until it too got modified and updated."
—And last but not least, on page 194 is pictured a "beautiful original hand drawing" of the GTR gearbox made in 1995. It states "Very few of the original F* programme drawings were computed generated..."
Those few were all of our original Supercar transaxle drawings!
They were mouse and keyboard drawn on computer. The final original printed computer layout drawing of the transaxle is now hanging in the office of Jay Leno, and was drawn in 1992, a full 3 years before the hand drawing was drawn by our competitor's engineer. The drawing even copies the exact layout we made including how we dimensioned it!
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it's also funny that some (but not all) references to
McLaren or
F1 have asterisks, as if they were requested to be removed by McLaren. Who is the "competitor" transmission builder they keep referring to?
This pic is slightly different from the ones in
DA.
01-10-2009, 06:49 PM
